Liberals are dismissing the privacy concerns surrounding the government’s lawful access bill as “tinfoil hat” and “paranoid” conspiracy theories, even after amending the controversial legislation to address some of those issues.
The House of Commons passed Bill C-22 on Thursday before breaking for the summer, a day after approving a motion to fast-track the bill and end debate at the public safety committee, which was then forced to approve it just before midnight without debating dozens of outstanding amendments.
The amended bill will now head to the Senate.
The legislation would give law enforcement the ability to get access to digital information more quickly and easily for investigations under a judicial warrant.
Yet provisions in the bill that would allow the public safety minister to secretly order electronic service providers to retain user metadata and create access capabilities for their systems have sparked alarm from privacy advocates, academics, tech companies and opposition parties.
At a press conference outside the House of Commons on Thursday, Government House leader Steven MacKinnon accused Conservatives of “obstruction” during the committee’s debate while defending the decision to fast-track the bill.
“It used to be that Conservatives were the law and order party,” he told reporters. “This is a very real set of reforms in terms of criminal justice. What it has met from the Conservatives is this wall of conspiracy theory, frankly paranoia, that I know many other Conservatives bristle at.
“I hope that the conspiracies and the tinfoil hats are something that will fade away over time, but we can now safely say that it is the Liberal Party that’s the party that’s most clearly for law and order in the country.”
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association pushed back on MacKinnon’s comments, noting it carefully assessed the legislation and compared it to other Five Eyes allies’ lawful access regimes in its recent analysis with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on how the bill poses significant privacy concerns.
“We did our homework,” Tamir Israel, the CCLA’s director on privacy and surveillance issues, said in an interview.
“Some of the ways that they’re minimizing the privacy concerns that some of these proposals raise actually undermine confidence that, when this regime does come into effect and gets applied in secret, that the right type of balancing is going to be happening.”
Earlier this week, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said it was “time to choose” to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime in passing C-22 as it faced delays in committee.
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Those comments echoed his Conservative predecessor Vic Toews, who said in 2012 as the Harper government pushed its own lawful access legislation that critics — including Liberals — “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
Amendments address metadata retention, encryption
The bill was passed Thursday with government amendments that would shorten the maximum amount of time for metadata retention from one year to six months.
The amended bill also makes clear that nothing in the bill should be seen as “compelling an electronic service provider to decrypt” any encrypted user information. Companies like Apple and Google had warned the bill could weaken encryption.
Another amendment says those orders would need to be reviewed by the independent National Security and Intelligence Review Agency within 30 days of being issued.
Israel said that, while the amendments appear to add “surface improvements” to the bill, “the fundamental flaws in this legislation are still intact.”
“The ability to impose these requirements onto service providers without public scrutiny, and without broad scrutiny from the technical community, means that this framework is just not equipped to push back against the types of problems that we’re going to see,” he said, including potential “really broad security vulnerabilities.”
That potential has prompted a swath of companies, from Signal and NordVPN to DuckDuckGo, to say they may limit services or leave Canada altogether if C-22 passes as written.
“It’s irresponsible to put a framework in place like this that we know is going to be used for decades on technologies that we can’t even envision at this moment, but it’s broad enough to embrace them without having the right oversight and infrastructure in place,” Israel added.
The bill was fast-tracked after the public safety committee only managed to scrutinize and pass roughly a dozen amendments in 25 hours of clause-by-clause debate alongside government, RCMP and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service officials.
Liberals had argued that it could take until the end of 2028 to pass the remaining amendments at that pace, while police and CSIS were saying the powers granted by the bill are desperately needed to modernize their criminal investigation methods.
“Every day matters in this place and a legislative achievement matters,” MacKinnon told reporters Thursday.
“The Senate can now take this up as soon as they return.”
Conservative MP Frank Caputo, a vice-chair of the committee, lamented the move to shut down debate during the final meeting on the bill late Wednesday night.
“Make no mistake, a court will consider the words that we pass on paper here someday, and they will decide the constitutionality of those words,” he said. “And we are expected to pass those words without debate.
“To me, that is unconscionable.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan, who represented her party during the committee’s study, also criticized the process and said the amended bill “did not fix the central problem: Canadians are still being asked to trust broad surveillance powers, secret orders, and future regulations that Parliament itself has never fully examined.”
“Canadians deserve legislation that protects both public safety and fundamental rights,” Kwan said in a statement Thursday.
“Instead, the government chose to curtail committee debate while dozens of amendments remained under consideration. The centralizing approach of the Carney government continues.”
There’s that unifying energy of the Liberal.
Ignoring the testimony of field experts by calling it ‘tinfoil hatting’. Absolutely insane. Can’t wait to have to give them my SIN to access literally anything.
Why not give money to Indians from India.More money to bring more Indians here.Justin Trudeau very good man but should have brought more Indians here
O goodie, Canada now has our own “Fidel Castro” along with all his laws and rules to. I think the next step is for the Liberal party to add the capital C for Communist Canada, same as Communist China and Communist Cuba. See, we will all match.
Liberals want to censor any speech that is critical of their authoritarian regime.
How quickly the Liberal Party goes back to their arrogant demeaning ways . Shows their true nature’s doesn’t it.
i hope future generation just cut boomers’ welfare and abandon them.
Imagine leaving China only to end back in China
The only one’s wearing tinfoil hats are the LPC. The folks speaking loudest against this bill are constitutional experts, not the CPC.
Remove the Liberal dictatorship by any means necessary. Keep your guns, you’re going to need them.
This sounds very much like a situation where everything will be ok for years and years and then one tech at CSIS will get the idea to go a little to far with it and then it will cost the taxpayers millions in court charges and payouts.
Well, they can be dealt with when they are overthrown.
Enough woth stup8d inviting evil into our homes.
“The legislation would give law enforcement the ability to get access to digital information more quickly and easily for investigations under a judicial warrant.”
In other words, f*ck Canadians. Your privacy means squat to the Liberals. better hope no crime happens near you or your home, if it does, they will be able to come into your house without a warrant and take your computers, phones and camera footage without you being able to do a damned thing. The brute squat is being formed.
Did Liberals freeze the bank accounts of peaceful protestors and also by calling an iillegal EA biolate the charter rights of millions of Canadains. Please govern for the benefit of themselves, not Canadians.
Alberta shouldn’t separate. Alberta should stay in Canada. What could go wrong?
This government needs to be stopped. Does anyone actually approve of what Carney is doing? He has so much power that he doesn’t answer questions and has missed over 100 question periods. He’s bankrupting this country like he did the British central bank
So tell us Citizen,are you a friend of the Liberal Party, or perhaps you are an enemy ? You know, we have been watching you for quite some time.
More gaslighting from the Liberals – there are known and obvious security concerns with the bill… Will never make it past the senate in the current form
MacKinnon is so arrogant and condescending.
If the Liberals were law and order, then why are they doing something that is clearly illegal? – I guess a court will have to explain to them that it is not paranoia, or tin foil hat, but respect for our rights and the constitution.
“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ George Orwell. You will be identified if you diverge from the Liberal government line and targeted under this bill c-22.
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” George Orwell.
When will Canadians wake up?
NO confidence
NONE
I guess they didnt learn from JTs condescending attitute and comments.
Typical libs. Deflect, insult, and name call.
Then ignore everything when the tin foil hat crowd turns out to be 100% correct.
So they are behaving like toddlers again hoping that their insults will distract from their incompetence
Problem is that although their ase might buy it the people who have concerns won’t