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Bill C-22 reveals a troubling trend with the Carney government
Carney’s Liberals have left a lot to be defined through the undemocratic regulatory process. The plan is to be vague when shoving it down our throats via Parliament.
CALGARY—The data scandal the Alberta separatists have constructed is nothing compared to what Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals have in store for us.
Behind the bright lights of separation lies the nefariousness of Bill C-22, An Act Respecting Lawful Access. Its abominable creation came from the failure of Bill C-2, a bill about which I wrote in The Guardian last year. This iteration is no better than its predecessor. The bill is currently at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) where they are studying its potential effects.
What this legislation does is force electronic service providers to build and maintain systems that store the metadata of the providers’ customers for up to one year, regardless of whether that person is under investigation. According to the CBC, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree likened these new requirements to accessing an office cabinet: “like a filing cabinet, where certain types of information would be available with legal authorization.” The legislation would provide the legal authorization, which requires very little evidence and little judicial oversight. This is circular reasoning.
Let’s be clear on what metadata is and how accessing it without your knowledge is problematic. Metadata is information about your data. For example, when you take a video, the metadata that is stored is information about that video: location, time, type of camera used, duration, file size, etc. While this is tantalizing information, the real grandaddy of internet tracking is the internet protocol address, or the IP address, which is a unique numerical identifier assigned to every device that is connected to a network. Not only does it identify the device, it identifies the location of the device. As the digital rights advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, clarified: “Metadata can reveal a lot about who you communicate with, where you go, and when you do so.” It can also reveal online behaviour. For example, frequent visits to a women’s health centre in under a year for a woman under the age of 40 could indicate a pregnancy; transgender people could be tracked for accessing gender care. This is putting vulnerable people at risk, in addition to the public at large.
Saving metadata on all internet users in the country introduces a system vulnerability by introducing new access points between the user and the network. As the Internet Society noted in its brief to SECU: “There is no way to provide backdoor access to encrypted data and communications without compromising the privacy and security of millions of law-abiding citizens.” There are new artificial intelligence systems that can scan for these vulnerabilities. A breach is inevitable, and it will make the Elections Alberta data breach look like an autocorrect mistake. Knowing this, the Carney government’s solution is to redefine what a system vulnerability is, rather than dealing with the vulnerability as is. And while the government tells us it’s protecting Canadians with this legislation, it could expose the public to foreign interference, particularly Sikh Canadians, Iranian Canadians, and Chinese Canadians.
Carney’s Liberals have left a lot to be defined through the undemocratic regulatory process. The plan is to be vague when shoving it down our throats via Parliament, while solidifying the parameters and details through the governor-in-council, which is an appointed position. Sounds like a clever way to get around that pesky thing called democracy and public accountability. There were no public consultations conducted. There were private consultations, however, led by Murray Rankin, British Columbia’s former minister of Indigenous relations and reconciliation, which Anandasangaree has refused to share with the SECU when asked to do so. I have reached out to the chair and vice-chair, MPs Jean-Yves Duclos and Frank Caputo, respectively, as to why they are not calling civil organizations to testify at committee, however they have failed to respond by the time of writing.
Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects a reasonable expectation of privacy and the right of freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Currently, as stated by Robert Diab, professor of law at Thompson Rivers University: “At the moment police obtain the name and street address of someone linked to an online account by obtaining a warrant … on probable grounds to believe an offence has been committed.” In R. v Bykovets (2024), the Supreme Court of Canada decided that “IP addresses attract a reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus a request by the police for an IP address is a search under section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Charter) requiring prior judicial authorization.” It is a higher standard for search and seizure than what appears in the Department of Justice’s Charter statement for Bill C-22. The statement lays out the threshold for searches as “reasonable grounds to suspect,” claiming that the “subscriber information sought does not by itself constitute particularly sensitive information, since it is limited to information that identifies clients and services, and does not include the contents of communications.” Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who co-sponsored the legislation, obviously is not bothered about erring on the side of, well, justice. He and his department also know that by the time a challenge is seen by the Supreme Court, the apparatus would’ve been built and paid for, and Pandora’s Box would’ve been gaping open for some time.
The Ministerial Orders section of C-22 is the least democratic, and gives us insight into the authoritative brush with which the Carney government paints legislation and jurisprudence. Under Section 7, “the Minister may make an order with respect to an electronic service provider … whether or not the provider is a core provider.” The digital rights advocacy network OpenMedia raises the alarm on these secret orders: “Section 15 prohibits the provider—and any person acting on its behalf—from disclosing the existence of the order, the information it contains, the information the Minister relied on, or the fact that the provider is subject to it.” Secret orders? With this bill, we’re no better than Russia.
In addition, the minister of public safety can circumvent the judiciary and make a request for this information where the only check on that power is the intelligence commissioner. Carney’s government will tell us that the intelligence officer would be a retired federal judge who could reject the order; however, what they won’t advertise is the intelligence officer is appointed by the prime minister.
Metadata capture is mass surveillance. Signal, an encryption app, is threatening to leave Canada if this bill is passed, and that will severely negatively impact journalists and activists, but that’s the point of mass surveillance. We won’t know whether some of these investigations would be political in nature, target specific groups, or expose diasporic communities because these investigative powers will be delivered in secret without proper judicial oversight. In addition, foreign governments can also make requests and access this surveillance apparatus.
This bill is so bad, the Americans hate it, even though they are the ones who pushed for this in the first place. The Globe and Mail reported that “his [Anandasangaree’s] department’s lawful-access bill could weaken both countries’ collective defences against hackers, harm U.S. national security and ‘fracture cybersecurity norms.’” C-22 has become an embarrassment for this government, and reveals a troubling trend with Carney’s government: they will happily crush our civil rights to consolidate their power. You never know a government until it has majority powers.
The Hill Times
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