The Carney Liberals' proposed Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act, arrives wrapped in the tired language of crisis.
We are told, once again, that sophisticated criminals and predators have outpaced the ability of police to gather evidence, and that only new, exceptional powers can close the gap. The legislation, with its deliberately vague references to “systemic vulnerabilities” and encryption, would empower the Minister of Public Safety to demand tech giants build backdoors into their products.
It is a breathtaking ask. And in the months since its introduction, the Liberal government has not once demonstrated why such authority is necessary.
a failure that should alone doom the bill.
Canada already possesses a robust legal framework for digital investigations. Police and intelligence agencies regularly obtain judicial warrants to search devices, intercept communications, and compel the production of subscriber information.
When a crime is serious enough, and the evidence sufficiently meets the threshold, a judge signs a warrant. Officers arrive with that paper in hand, and the search proceeds. That is how a free society balances security with the right of law-abiding citizens to be left alone.
Bill C-22 short-circuits this balance by demanding a master key to every encrypted conversation, every cloud backup, and every locked phone—a key that, once forged, will open doors for every hostile actor clever enough to seize it.
Proponents of the bill notably decline to engage with these objections. The Liberal response to the most basic forms of criticism has been to ignore the experts instead issue moral commands: support this bill, or you want children to be hurt. The argument is as intellectually lazy as it is dishonest.
No reasonable Canadian wishes to shield predators from justice, and refusing to hollow out the country's digital security infrastructure is not the same as enabling crime. It is, rather, the recognition that the mathematics of encryption do not negotiate. A backdoor for the "good guys" is a backdoor, full stop, and the cybersecurity community has spent decades explaining why such vulnerabilities inevitably migrate into the hands of criminals and hostile states.
We should be especially suspicious when a government that has routinely failed to exercise its existing powers responsibly now demands more. The Canadian governments recent record on data and surveillance is a catalogue of overreach and sloppiness. During the pandemic, the federal government's ArriveCAN application became a privacy shambles, with sensitive traveller information mishandled and the entire program eventually rebuked by the Auditor General.
In 2022, the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of protesters without any individual judicial scrutiny. While the subsequent public inquiry deemed the invocation appropriate, the Federal Court later ruled it unreasonable, finding the situation did not meet the legal definition of a national emergency. CSIS has been repeatedly caught retaining data on Canadians that it had no lawful right to hold. Provincial police forces are currently using cellphone surveillance devices without transparent policy.
In case after case, all levels of government in Canada have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted with the keys they already possess.
Now the same political class asks us to hand them the architectural plans to every digital lock in the nation, on a promise that this time will be different. It is not cynicism to balk at that request; it is the most basic form of institutional memory. If we have learned anything from the last decade, it is that the governments appetite for surveillance expands precisely in proportion to the tools it is granted. Those tools are rarely surrendered once the emergency that justified them has passed.
At stake is a principle that predates the internet: the inside of a citizen's private life is not the property of the Crown. Section 8 of the Charter protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure. When the law wishes to enter a home and rummage through a filing cabinet, it must present a warrant to an independent judge.
That same standard must apply to the modern equivalents—the smartphone in a pocket, the encrypted chat with a spouse, the photo library stored in the cloud. These are the everyday possessions of a law-abiding populace that has every right to expect that the government will keep its nose out of their affairs unless it can demonstrate, to a magistrate and on oath, a specific reason to look.
A bill that forces companies to compromise the security of their products will not hobble the truly sophisticated criminal, who will simply shift to non-commercial encryption tools the state cannot regulate. It will, however, expose millions of ordinary Canadians—the couple discussing their finances, the small business transferring payroll, the whistleblower exposing corruption—to data breaches, identity theft, and unlawful surveillance.
What Bill C-22 ultimately betrays is the absence of a foundational document that the digital age desperately demands: a Canadian digital bill of rights. Such a charter would codify, among other things, that the government may not compel the weakening of encryption, that a judicial warrant is the only acceptable gateway to private data, and that no citizen shall be presumed to have surrendered their privacy merely by connecting to the internet. The introduction of C-22 should be the occasion for that national conversation, not for a panicked lurch toward a surveillance state.
The Carney Liberals have not made their case. They have provided no evidence that the current paper warrant system is broken, no rationale for why encryption must be undermined rather than targeted policing improved, and no assurance that these powers would not be abused the moment the political winds shift.
As such, this bill deserves the simplest and most direct response Parliament can offer: it should be voted down, and the government told, in no uncertain terms, that a law-abiding citizen's phone is none of its business. Unless an officer arrives at the door with a signed warrant in hand, the government has no right to our digital lives.
This piece was written and published by The Provincial Times Editorial Board and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times. Read our Content Policy here.
