GoKawiilCanada's Bill C-22 surveillance law advances to Senate as groups push back
Canada's Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, has passed the House of Commons and is now before the Senate. The bill would let the Minister of Public Safety compel telecoms and messaging apps to build law-enforcement backdoors, require retention of user metadata for up to a year, and potentially expand cross-border data sharing with U.S. police without Canadian court oversight. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association and Citizen Lab have published an analysis calling for Part 2 of the bill to be withdrawn entirely, and are circulating a petition urging senators to reject it.
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If passed, the bill could weaken encryption broadly, not just for targeted suspects, since mandated backdoors are difficult to limit to specific users according to security researchers. The metadata retention and foreign data-sharing provisions could expose ordinary Canadians' communications patterns to domestic and foreign authorities without judicial review, raising questions CCLA says go beyond fixable technical tweaks. Senate pushback suggests the bill's fate is still uncertain, making this a pivotal moment for digital privacy policy in Canada.
- Bill C-22 has cleared Canada's House of Commons and now awaits Senate review.
- The bill would mandate encryption backdoors and up to a year of metadata retention by digital services.
- CCLA and Citizen Lab are campaigning for the Senate to strike Part 2 of the bill entirely.
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Published there as: “Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22”
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