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Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood attends Five Country Ministerial 2025 - Day One (54774023380).jpg, UK Home Office, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

The Lawful Access Two-Headed Surveillance Monster: How Bill C-22 Went Off the Rails

The government’s plans for lawful access have gone off the rails. In recent days, Signal has warned it would pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with Bill C-22. Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered VPN provider, has said it would relocate its headquarters out of Canada and NordVPN has warned it would consider following suit. Apple and Meta have both raised public concerns about the bill’s effect on encryption and cybersecurity. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, civil liberties groups, and a long line of legal and security experts have all called for changes. The chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees have written to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that the bill threatens U.S. national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows. Even the bill’s own oversight body, the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, has told the SECU committee it does not have the access it needs for effective oversight. If the government thought it could push through the bill largely unnoticed, it has been proven painfully wrong as there are now trade frictions with the U.S., the prospect of leading companies exiting the Canadian market, and weaker cybersecurity protections for ordinary users.

How did Canada’s lawful access plan go awry so quickly?

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May 16, 2026 — 1 comment — News
DATA.TRON by Jonathan Poh https://flic.kr/p/fAi3fJ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

How Much Further Will Lawful Access Go?: Police Chief Tells Bill C-22 Hearing That Three Years of Metadata Retention Would Be “Ideal”

Metadata retention has emerged as one of the biggest lawful access concerns, with requirements that providers retain metadata for all subscribers for up to one year. As I argued before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security last week, when retained at scale, the retention becomes a comprehensive surveillance map of virtually every Canadian with information on where and when they go and who they interact with. Under Bill C-22, this data would apply to every subscriber regardless of suspicion. The government’s Charter Statement remarkably fails to address the regime, despite the fact that bulk retention frameworks of this kind have been struck down by the European Court of Justice in Digital Rights Ireland and Tele2 Sverige, and by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.

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May 15, 2026 — 1 comment — News
Messaging apps by Open Rights Group https://flic.kr/p/2jZw3Fo CC BY-SA 2.0

Bill C-22’s Groundhog Day: Why the Government’s Dismissal of Signal, Apple and the U.S. Congress Concerns Runs Back the Disastrous Online News Act Playbook

Secure messaging service Signal yesterday became the latest company to warn that Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, could force it to leave the Canadian market rather than comply with provisions it says would compromise its end-to-end encryption and create new cybersecurity risks. Signal vice-president Udbhav Tiwari told the Globe and Mail that the company “would rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.” The comments are part of a steady stream of similar warnings from Apple, Meta, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Cybersecurity Advisors Network, and the chairs of the U.S. House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees. Despite growing concern, the government’s response has been to launch a misleading social media campaign and repeatedly insist that the experts and companies are mistaken.

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May 14, 2026 — 6 comments — News
Five Country Ministerial (DHS photo by Tia Dufour) https://flic.kr/p/2rsD2us United States government work

Slick Videos Won’t Save Lawful Access: Why The Government’s Bill C-22 Defence Avoids the Charter, Privacy and Security Concerns Raised By Critics

With opposition to Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, mounting, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has turned to social media with a video defending the bill as one that “respects Canadian privacy and Charter rights.” The video signals that the government has noticed the growing public concern. But the case against the bill, which I argued in committee testimony last week and in a series of earlier posts, raises at least four issues on which the government has not engaged: mandated metadata retention (which is ignored in its Charter Statement), a lower threshold for access to subscriber information that hurts privacy, security risks now alarming Canada’s closest allies, and an oversight architecture the oversight body itself says is incomplete.

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May 12, 2026 — 3 comments — News
MORAL PANIC TODAY by Esperluette CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/2hWWbi9

The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 268: Sara Grimes on the Moral Panic Behind Banning Kids from Social Media and AI Chatbots

The question of children’s social media and AI chatbot ban has emerged as one of the most talked-about digital policy issues in recent memory. Premiers, the Liberal convention, and the media have all jumped on board. But has the debate been driven by misinformation, leading to a moral panic? Dr. Sara Grimes has been working on children’s rights and digital policy for over twenty years. As the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and a Full Professor in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, she brings a unique perspective to the issue, having applied a children’s rights lens to areas such as social media regulation and age verification technologies. She joins the Law Bytes podcast to discuss her work and perspectives on the hot digital issue of the moment.

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May 11, 2026 — 1 comment — Podcasts
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