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Face Jewish Hate by Office of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, public domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Face_Jewish_Hate.jpg

Acting on Antisemitism: If This Was Always Possible, Why Didn’t It Happen Sooner?

Earlier this month, I appeared on CBC’s The Current to discuss the escalation of antisemitic violence in Canada following my Globe op-ed and PROC committee appearance. The host asked me whether something like the Bondi Beach massacre, the December 2025 attack that killed 15 people at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, could happen here. I replied that it was a certainty. He was taken aback and pressed me on it. I clarified that I didn’t mean a massacre was certain, but that with the relentless escalation of antisemitic violence in Canada, people would die. It was not a matter of if, but when.

That exchange has stayed with me, not because I said something provocative, but because his surprise was so revealing. What felt to me (and I believe many in the Jewish community) like an obvious, even understated observation given the inevitable endpoint of a trajectory visible to anyone who has been paying attention, registered to him as an alarming claim requiring justification. That gap between what the Jewish community experiences and what everyone else appears willing to acknowledge has been a defining feature of the post-October 7th world.

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March 25, 2026 — 8 comments — News
P20251007DT-0511 by the White House (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok) https://flic.kr/p/2rAG6k5 United States government work

The Online Streaming Act in Jeopardy: U.S. Takes Aim at the CUSMA Cultural Exemption With Threats of Bill C-11 Retaliation

From the moment it was first introduced as Bill C-10 in the fall of 2020, it was readily apparent that mandated payments by foreign streaming services to support Canadian content would face a trade backlash with the U.S., with the real prospect of trade retaliation. In fact, I wrote about the issue days after the bill was tabled, warning that an uneven playing field for benefits – foreign companies required to contribute but banned from benefiting – was a risky approach. Those warnings were dismissed by the government, cultural lobby groups, and supporters of the bill who assured critics that Canada’s cultural exemption under CUSMA provided a shield against U.S. retaliation.

It took years for Bill C-10 – later Bill C-11 – to become law as the Online Streaming Act, but now the bill has come due. Weeks after the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) specifically identified Canadian digital laws as a target in CUSMA renegotiations, House Republicans introduced the Protecting American Streaming and Innovation Act, a bill that would mandate an investigation into the Canadian law and open the door not only to trade retaliation but also to a change in how the cultural exemption is applied.

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March 20, 2026 — 10 comments — News
evidence of organized light by Jared Tarbell https://flic.kr/p/6cepaM CC BY 2.0

The Hidden Lawful Access Tradeoff: How Bill C-22 Lowers the Evidentiary Standards for Police Access to Subscriber Information

The return of lawful access in Bill C-22 has unsurprisingly focused on the government’s significant shift on warrantless access to subscriber information, which was the headline concern with Bill C-2, the previous lawful access proposal. As noted in my initial summary of the bill, Bill C-22 establishes court oversight for subscriber information with the warrantless access piece limited to requiring telecom companies to confirm whether they provide service to a given individual. That is a positive step, but there is a tradeoff, namely that the evidentiary standard needed to obtain an order for access to subscriber information is actually being lowered.

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March 19, 2026 — 4 comments — News
Metadata by gabitogol CC BY 2.0 https://flic.kr/p/b3bxSv

The Lawful Access Privacy Risks: Unpacking Bill C-22’s Expansive Metadata Retention Requirements

Much of the discussion around the new lawful access bill (Bill C-22) has focused on provisions that improved upon Bill C-2, notably the decision to scrap the warrantless information demand power by requiring judicial oversight for access to subscriber information. Yet despite that improvement, there remain serious privacy concerns with the government’s latest iteration of lawful access. Buried in the second half of Bill C-22 is a provision granting the government the power to require “core providers” to retain categories of metadata, including transmission data, for up to one year. This is mandatory metadata retention that would require telecom and electronic service providers to store information about the communications of all their users, regardless of whether those users are suspected of anything. It is one of the most privacy invasive tools a government can deploy and the international experience suggests that there are major privacy risks.

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March 17, 2026 — 24 comments — News
privacy-is-dead by td-london https://flic.kr/p/62afS1 CC BY-NC 2.0

Government Enacts Political Party Anti-Privacy Rules With Bill C-4 Royal Assent Sprint

I’ve written extensively about Bill C-4 and the government’s effort to bury political party privacy rules that largely eliminate privacy obligations for federal political parties and apply the new rules retroactively to May 2000. This past week’s Law Bytes podcast featured Senate hearings on the bill, which ultimately resulted in an amendment to require the government to establish actual privacy obligations within three years. The government yesterday rejected the amendment and the bill received royal assent in a lightning-fast process.

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March 13, 2026 — 4 comments — News
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