Before anyone starts to panic…this will never pass. They can keep trying until the cows come home, and reintroduce this type of legislation in every possible variation…and it will still never pass.
Canada follows a legal review process for all proposed legislation. If the legislation violates any condition in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then the legislation must be revised, or it will simply be struck down the 1st time it goes in front of a judge.
This is why they keep “trying” with these kinds of laws. Because there really is no way to directly apply them, without violating your Charter Rights. So, they keep revising the legislation before running it through the process again, to see if the latest changes pass the review stage. And they never do. They will have to change the Charter itself, before any law like this becomes properly enforceable.
What I’d like is a list of all the people who have signed their names to these bills. Because intent to violate the Charter in my book means they should never hold public office again.
You might find this interesting, then. If you scroll down, there is a whole transcript of legislators debating the pros and cons of this legislation. You can get a feel for who is in favor of implementing these kinds of laws and who isn’t. It’s really fascinating stuff.
As I said though, at the end of the day, it is highly unlikely that this will ever pass.
unlikely means there is still a non zero chance. and based on the transcripts of how these MPs speak about it, it seems that all parties and all MPs want some version of this bill to pass. giving the government and its enforcers more rights over our privacy. hypervigilance and an aggressive stance against this and those that proposed it should remain at the front of everyones minds. ive written my MP twice over these bills. both times i got a generic response from the office, not the MP, the office of the MP, and both times it was basically “thats nice. we’ll bring it up” and based on the transcripts, not one of my points against this bill were brought to light. and it was some pretty simple, blatantly obvious issues that anyone else would have, so its not like it got lost in the sauce or anything. the POS continues to advocate for the bill.
if this passes then MP data will be available by request as well, and its only a matter of time before some wiz kid figures out the right AI prompt to fake a request for data, with all the correct credentials, and gets all the information on these people that they need, for whatever ends they wish to meet.
they simply dont fucking think about how it will effect them and their families in the long run, just the immediate gains from lobbyists, and promises of more power. but i guarantee if it passes, a foreign or domestic bad actor is going to figure out a way to track these people, or blackmail them with this new loop hole. and something bad will happen as a result. and this will be used as an excuse to take even MORE rights away from people. even MORE surveillance, and even more violence against the common man. and it goes far beyond just MPs, this can be used against ANY canadian citizen. it makes all of us more vulnerable, not just to our own government, but literally anyone with access to even a half decent AI model.
this is is some 1984, thought crime bullshit. and for their own sakes, they shouldnt try to emulate it.
we should be publicly shaming everyone who even considers such a bill, and in fact we should be pressuring our MPs to increase privacy protections for canadians. forcing corporations to delete all of our data at our request, amongst a laundry list of other protections. the right to be forgotten or exempt from marketing and tracking data should be a human right.
I encourage everyone to actually invest some time in following what some of their local politicians and most supported, favourite parties actually do and say. Yes, it’s often boring and tedious, it’s not nice to do and you don’t have to do it always, but I would suggest maybe every time there is a new candidate elected in your riding at least, or you’re considering one, do some research to investigate these politicians and how they… politic. It’s important to realize that this is not a completely inscrutable process, and you can tell an awful lot about whether these people are in fact trustworthy and have your best interests at heart.
I’m not going to spoil it for you when I tell you most of them don’t, but I think it really helps to actually see it for yourself. Sometimes they are clever about it, but so few people even bother paying attention to what they say anymore that sometimes they are outright ghoulish. By witnessing it, you might be motivated to tell people about what they’re doing from a position of actual authority on the subject. You being more convincing may help change someone else’s mind, and in the end, you may be able to spread enough awareness that some measure of accountability may be implemented. Be the butterfly that flaps its wings to cause a hurricane in a future election. It’s a small chance, perhaps, but it’s a chance worth striving for.
Is there a future risk of the court becoming politicised like the US and deciding to ignore the charter?
It’s possible. But, in that case they would have to all ignore the Charter, from bottom to top.
Even the US legal system isn’t that fucked up yet. There are still plenty of federal judges down there that still rule in favor of the Constitution.
I want to believe
Doesnt matter what rules are in place. Email your MPs. Thats their damn job is to listen to their constituents. Its better they hear no on top of the charter versus crickets which might give them ideas.
Email your MPs. Speak out. Not later not im busy. Web search your mp and send the email. It takes 5 minutes to say no to this bullshit bill.
Why, I don’t even know what this is. Facebook is just talking about the protests today in UK and Windsor
Just saw another comment saying it’ll never pass. So we’re good. Don’t need to do anything
I already did days ago, and donated some money.
Nothing much online is that private even before this bill.
Paywalled
Canadians primarily use Windows. Windows is an American subscription service “operating system” that sends heaps of data back to Microsoft. Microsoft is an American company and provides tons of information to the US Government. Canadians primarily have Google and Microsoft email accounts. Google and Microsoft are American companies that send tons of data to the US government. Canadians primarily have Google and Apple phones. Google and Apple phones track and record tons of information about usage and movements. Google and Apple are American companies, and, again, provide tons of information to the US Government. The Canadian government hosts a ton of its stuff in American Cloud Service Provider (CSP) ecosystems. The government has admitted that data in foreign CSPs are impossible to have sovereignty over. Tons of our governments information, including health records and regulated financial industries, are accessible to the US Government. What privacy are we giving up again?
Honestly, the vast majority of Canadians already don’t have online privacy. The bill has issues, sure, but pretending like we had privacy is a farce in itself. One way to read the bill, is that the Canadian government wants to have the legal ability to get a tiny fraction of the data available via American companies to the US Government. They want to clarify that they have a legal right to demand Google reveal who the faceless-influencers are encouraging separatism, and want to have any company involved be compelled to name names – and to prevent those sorts of companies from saying “We didn’t keep the logs” or “We don’t keep logs in Canada, so no!”.
But you can have online privacy in Canada right now. Proton + one-off email, a reputable VPN, Linux + GrapheneOS, Vivaldi browser, containerization/VMs, Signal, etc.
I do most of those things, personally, but I’m stuck using Microsoft 365 and Google for work. I’m getting the Click Communicator as a work phone, so I can finally rip Microsoft and Google out of my personal phone. Completely eliminating my Google and Hotmail email accounts will be challenging, with decades of legacy accounts and thousands of contacts over the years, but I use them for less and less.
Regardless, Bill C22 is bad legislation. It makes us less secure/more vulnerable and tramples over human rights (Charter).
Idk. The faceless influencers impact on Alberta separatism and the ability for foreign agents to hide using those same privacy tools makes me think that there are limits required. Blindly championing ‘privacy’ over all else is the sort of mantra I hear from bitcoin techbros bragging about the speed / ease of doing international transactions with… sanctioned / terrorist countries… because there’s no legislation / regulations preventing those actions.
Putting in requirements for companies/online services to have log files, and allowing the government to access those log files via court orders, doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. I’ve literally encountered IT people who support things like fintechs, who say shit like “If you don’t keep log files, there’s no evidence if you get hacked, so you can just deny it was you that leaked peoples profiles/payment data”. Keep in mind too, that the legislation excludes things like a need for them to record the content of your messages etc – it’s pretty restricted to just meta data. So they can see you went to pornhub, but can’t pull up all your smutty secrets.
And beating the drum of charter rights is also weird to me. Charter Rights are highly subjective, and often have their meanings twisted by the courts. Like Section 15(1) which talks about how “every individual is equal before and under the law, and has the right to equal protection and benefit of the law without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability”… gets interpreted by the courts as First Nations people get special considerations / unequal treatment for murdering white people based on racial lenses that are required by the system. In terms of “privacy”, there’s no mention of privacy directly in the charter of rights, just mentions of things like protections against unreasonable search/seizure etc, that often gets translated by people into “I have a right to privacy!” – nah, not really, especially not with the courts being able to interpret things to mean the opposite anyhow.
The latest version of the bill clips a bunch of the warrant-less shit. The main thing it allows is for cops to verify if so and so uses a service – big whoop, they can more easily identify which tech co is hiding which perp and get an appropriate warrant for the real data. Makes things more efficient, and is in line with the constitution’s “Peace, Order and Good Governance”. The other big change is requiring more logs/meta data retention (which is why “log less” companies are saying they’ll pull out) – but as noted above, keeping those logs is also arguably part of trying to improve companies’ control and accountability for how they handle our data.
There’s nothing in the legislation saying you can’t self-host, so your VMs and containers are safe. Linux won’t go away. Proton already keeps logs/data, they’ve released such data to law enforcement in the past. If a large number of pedophiles and criminals are using log-less VPNs for committing crimes like kiddie porn, it’s “reasonable” for there to be more restrictions / regulations put in place. If you just want to watch shows in some other jurisdiction, it’s pretty easy to get a private VPC running a self-hosted VPN tunnel to do it – it just limits a business from providing that service to a bunch of faceless people. Similar with Signal – you could get a Nextcloud server self-hosted and have all your friends chatting / sharing files through that without c-22 impact. But once you start charging for it as a business, and offering that service to the public, you’d have to start recording some details about who’s using it… so the technical bar changes a bit, but you still have options for privacy. Idk, I don’t really see the problem with the general intention of the legislation, and the changes they’ve made address many of the initial concerns from the previous iteration.
