Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree and the government presumably hoped that pushing Bill C-22 through a House of Commons committee past midnight without debate or a recorded vote would put an end to the lawful access controversy. A new letter from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee that holds jurisdiction over trade, suggests the opposite. The letter, released last week, calls on the U.S. administration to treat Canada’s lawful access plans as a counterintelligence threat, to use the CLOUD Act negotiations as leverage, and to take regulatory steps to insulate American officials from surveillance demands directed at U.S. companies. Coming just weeks after House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan and House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Brian Mast warned that the bill harms U.S. national security and economic interests, the letter confirms that Bill C-22 has become a bilateral irritant with the potential to emerge as a full-blown trade issue. Given the latest threats of new tariffs, lawful access could add yet another complication in the increasingly fraught trade relationship.

The letter frames Bill C-22 as a law that would “weaponize American technology infrastructure” by enabling secret Canadian orders to companies such as Apple and Google, pointing to the U.K. experience, where a secret demand that Apple weaken its encrypted iCloud backups prompted a letter from then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, responding to an inquiry from Wyden, that described such mandates as “a clear and egregious violation of American citizens’ privacy and civil liberties,” along with pressure from President Trump and Vice President Vance that ultimately led the U.K. to scale back its demands. The letter identifies five scenarios involving secret technical mandates against American targets, ranging from forced local data storage to ghost decryption keys to spyware delivered through compromised software updates, and asks whether Bill C-22 would permit them.

While elements of the letter may overstate the risks, the most serious concerns survived the committee amendments. For example, as Robert Diab has noted, the rewritten definition of systemic vulnerability now excludes risks that relate only to persons subject to a warrant or other lawful authority, which leaves open the prospect of secret orders requiring a provider to disable end-to-end encryption for specific targets on a forward-looking basis. The new decryption provision borrows language from U.S. law, but its application to prospectively switching off encryption, rather than decrypting existing data, is at best uncertain. That is precisely the scenario that alarmed U.S. officials in the U.K. case, and the Canadian government has never explained how the two provisions are meant to fit together. It might have provided insight into its thinking had the committee conducted an actual debate and discussion over the amendments, but it cut those off without the chance to do so.

That is what makes the rush to pass Bill C-22 look increasingly like a serious miscalculation. Simply put, there was no reason for it. The bill was introduced in March, the committee heard weeks of testimony raising the same encryption and extraterritoriality concerns, and the government’s response was to shut down the study and dismiss critics as wearing “tinfoil hats”. The tinfoil hat wearers now apparently includes a U.S. Senator and the chairs of two House committees.

With Canada seeking a CLOUD Act agreement that would streamline cross-border data access for Canadian law enforcement, the government has handed the U.S. both a grievance and the leverage to act on it. The Canadian Senate will conduct its own study of Bill C-22 in the fall, but it now does so with the bill under mounting pressure, as many concerns about encryption, security vulnerabilities, and mandatory metadata retention remain very much alive. The amendments in June made some improvements, but there was no reason to rush the legislation, and now Canada faces the possibility of a political, business, and trade backlash that could have been avoided.