They promise not to abuse all the ridiculous new powers, but the law will have officially and perhaps irrevocably moved to enable an approach that can only be seen as a totalitarian nightmare if some future government is less completely scrupulous than the saintly Liberals of the present no doubt will be, when it comes to carefully constraining their use of the legal tools they’ll inherit.

Worst of all, I’ll have to find a non-Canadian VPN service to use. It’s not like I’m doing anything top-secret, but just on principle. Canadian electronic services will no longer be trustworthy. Only those which can credibly promise to abandon Canada before giving in to a secret order to spy on their users will be safe, and those are uncommon. But they’re not non-existent. At least for the time being we will still have Signal, Delta Chat, Mullvad, and so on. Maybe the “warrant canary” will be the big feature everyone looks for in years to come.