The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.
> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses...
That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.
Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.
Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.
One thing I have been thinking about is digital tariffs.
The US is perfectly willing to slam billions into ventures that lose money for years. EU for example doesn’t work that way. Consequence: US can develop faster, unconstrained by profitability, and capture the entire market before EU. This seems as US being more “innovative”, but realistically they are just running a perhaps similar engine way hotter at the cost of American QoL being way worse for the less fortunate. Similar thing can be said with Chinas subsidies on electric vehicles potentially flooding the EU with cheaper alternatives.
America is our ally, so we let this happen. For the most part this has served in this case EU and perhaps Canada well, albeit at the mercy of the US tech sector. Perhaps we shouldn’t anymore though, and consider tariffing American services to protect and incentivize local, sustainable alternatives. Meta, microsoft, etc. are clearly starting to rent seek now that they have us by the balls, I say fuck em?
I’m no expert in economics so I bet there are great arguments against this, lets see.
Because US has far better opportunities and more money.
My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.
> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
I was told that we should never invest pension fund on local, because you salary is basically based on local industry. One need diversified investment.
Not sure how true this is, but that's what I have been listening for years.
> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.
But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.
Oh cool, we should set up stricter free speech restrictions in order to encourage our nascent tech sector. Sure thing champ.
Canadian tech is nonexistent because we continue to see ourselves as a colony instead of a country, a resource-extraction post-national economic state instead of a people.
And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.
Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago, there is a reason it was called Silicon Valley North. RIM, Nortel, Celestica, QNX...
I can't explain what exactly happened. A simple explanation would be Liberals prioritized real estate growth, unlimited immigration to artificially boost GDP but I suspect the problem is more complex.
There will be a SECU Committee meeting on C-22 later today, where the committee will be performing a clause by clause review of Bill C-22, and voting on amendments. It may be the final meeting. You can watch it live by clicking the "Watch on ParlVu" button on the meeting notice page: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/SECU/meetin...
After bill C-22 leaves the SECU Committee, it will be sent to the House of Commons for the third reading and a final vote before being sent to the Senate.
If you are a Canadian citizen, you can also use the following tools to message your MP:
You can also email Gary Anandasangaree (gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), Marc Carney (mark.carney@parl.gc.ca), and Sean Fraser (sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca), and tell them that any weakening of encryption or suspicionless retention of metadata is unacceptable.
There is not enough noise about this bill. It's horrific.
If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real opposition?!
Sadly spying on citizens is pretty bipartisan for most governments around the world. It seems hard to actually stop this kind of stuff. I've signed this petition which I'm sure will do absolutely nothing, but it feels like there isn't much else I can do. I didn't even get a confirmation email with the link I need to click after signing this petition, so I guess my signature is null and void. I've lost faith in our government doing anything to benefit the people.
I mean Canada is a part of the 'Five eyes' surveillance alliance since the 1950's. This is nothing new but it does keep escalating.
It was Terrance McKenna who said that the worst government is usually the one that is in charge, that is because they rarely tend to go back on what was put down before them. One could argue that in the US Trump is tearing down previous government work but also isn't doing it in a constructive fashion at all.
I pushed back on all these kinds of Bills and laws here in Australia and every time it was usually just met with the same boiler plate response of "We are enacting this at the advice of insert agency/person here."
I still do it but it sort of just feels like leaving a note to future generations that we at least tried to stop it.
The Liberals have been elected 4 times in a row. They don't even hide the fact they're hostile to the needs and cares of Canadian citizens since we're the idiots who keep electing them. CBC pushes some propaganda about how this'll protect the kids, some brain-dead liberals will keep repeating it, Canada will just continue its path to irrelevancy...
The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.
If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...
> near yearly race riots often instigated by foreign actors over social media
You're right that it's foreign actors starting that trouble, but rather than the ones on Twitter, I'd blame the ones who have been showing up in person, raping girls and knifing people in the face.
> even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
Actually, you can yell "fire" if there is a fire.
Note that the "can't yell fire" quote comes from a decision involving folks who were distributing pamphlets opposing the WWI draft. It was written by Holmes, who also wrote "three generations of idiots are enough" to justify a eugenics law, in a case that didn't involve any idiots.
Moreover, the "fire" decision was overturned by Brandenberg v Ohio.
That you're right about "Freedom" Convoy (and "Alberta" seppies) etc.
And that this a bad and harmful bill.
Given CSIS has plenty of powers already and hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups, I don't see why I would trust them with my or my family's chat histories or why I should have to live without Signal or ProtonMail, etc. as product offerings in my country.
Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.
The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.
The collection of metadata is almost certainly bad for people even if they do nothing wrong. It can (and will) be sold if regulations and enforcement are not airtight. It will almost certainly be leaked as a result of incompetence, negligence, or outright criminality. The only way to prevent your metadata from getting out into the great unknown is to ensure it isn't collected in the first place.
If you don't see what the big deal is, I suggest you consider the recent leak of voter data in Alberta. For those unfamiliar, a list of eligible voters is routinely shared with political parties for the purposes of running their election campaigns. One of those parties, the "Republican Party of Alberta", shared their copy of the list with separatists, who made it freely available to any of their pals. What's the big deal you ask? Who cares if their address is public knowledge? Isn't this the sort of thing that used to be in phonebooks? Just for one example, anyone who has moved away from an abusive ex now has to worry about their address, phone number, etc. being made available to that abusive ex. Privacy isn't just important for people who like wearing pants.
C-22 is supposed to protect Canadians but, instead, it endangers them. This is a bad bill.
Basically the same idiocy that the British gov't has also tried to enact around making actually encrypted communication impossible, and giving them the rights to access metadata on the public's communications without warrant, etc.
How is it possible to make encrypted communication impossible? It’s (for us) trivial to encrypt and sign a message with GPG for instance. Does this allow the government to come to my house if I trade these messages with friends?
It's online and easy to read, and is a modernizing of laws around online systems. It is a deeply imperfect bill -- personally I think it is basically DOA and will not receive assent -- but a lot of the reaction to it are classic partisan hysterics (you can already see a bunch of those people throughout this discussion).
The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is
1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"
The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.
So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".
That's not true. Most people are not legal experts with extensive expertise in technology, knowledge of how Canadian courts will interpret the legislation, and knowledge of how governments around the world are trying to attack encryption (ex: they do their best to hide and not to explicitly say it in the legislation).
> And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
That's your opinion. That's not a real scientific claim, and yet you are using it to justify an unprecedented attack on privacy rights.
Suspicionless metadata retention has been illegal in the European Union since 2014, and it violates the Charter. There is no world in which it is acceptable.
the odd thing about it to me is that other than passports, all regular identity documents in Canada are issued by the provinces under specific mandates and regulations, which means that the provinces could choose not to endorse the usage of their IDs for age verification to foreign providers.
Other than passports, the government of canada does not have an identity card to base any kind of sweeping electronic age verification regime on. Sure there are some tech players looking to bring products to market that leverage banks and payment networks, but I suspect even they haven't figured out who owns the assertion of the persons attributes.
Maybe they've done the regs legwork and some scumbag backdoor account policy changes in the banks, but the PHIPA legislation that governs PII collection, use, and disclosure in the provinces would need to align with it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were challenges to the law based on a lack of federal mandate for provincial identity repositories, no accountability or ownership for the accuracy of the age assertion, WTO and trade agreement challenges against subsidized providers, to speculate about a few.
The spirit of the law is contemptible, and is being pushed through by a farcically illegitimate, corrupt, and demonstrably foreign influenced majority that has made a mockery of our processes, and is expressly against the interests of Canadians.
The good news is that if you are a 13yr old who can jailbreak a foundation model, we are in a new golden age of hacking. The cryptography behind any of these systems of oppression won't last a month.
Bill C-22 is the Canadian government's attempt to require encryption backdoors and mandatory data retention, for all online services.
The invasive mandatory age verification requires are part of bill C-34, which was just tabled yesterday. Its obviously an unacceptable violate of privacy, but the Liberals are far closer to passing C-22 at the moment.
my error, i actually thought it was an omnibus. it doesn't change my view, but toward the specific encryption concern, indeed, less relevant. thank you.
in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.
There is always the Australian system. Mandatory voting, preferential votes, majority rule.
The Preferential part is the most important, it means you can vote for who you want but also have the second preference get a vote if the first fails to get a wide enough margin. That first vote however will get additional resources based on vote tally with the next election cycle. If either of the last two majority parties fail to get the necessary votes to hold control and you have a hung parliament, they then have to negotiate with other parties to gain their preference.
Its not perfect but it looks like the best case system I have seen.
Oh wait.. canadians there’s more on the way lol, Mark Carney just posted on X for ID identification for social platforms:
Today, our government introduced new legislation to protect our kids online. Canada's Safe Social Media Act will hold social media and AI platforms accountable, make them safer, and restrict access to social media for children under 16.
The country has just slipped into a recession (only one in g20 btw), food bank usage is at record highs, it's young adults are ranked 71st in the world in happiness (boomers in the top 10 tho), housing is out of reach for many, youth unemployment is at ~15%, outside investments are non-existent, government debt is at record levels, haven't won the Stanley cup in decades, in a trade war with the USA, nobody is starting businesses here, educated people are leaving, etc.
Liberal party: We need to spy on people on the internet!
I'm skeptical of central bankers trying to sugarcoat the fact that we are in a "technical" recession. If you look at per-capita GDP it's lower than it was four years ago and if you talk to regular Canadians you'll come away feeling like we've been in a recession for years. I would say per-capita is a better metric because it better reflects what individuals are experiencing, whereas Canada's overall GDP has been bolstered by high immigration targets for years. Regardless, it meets the definition of a recession and matches with the experiences of many Canadians. I'm sure the beureocrats and central bankers aren't feeling that pain though.
Foreign investments just hit an 18 year high. Employment numbers just went positive (at about 5x the per capita rate of the US). The country is recovering nicely from being addicted to mass immigration/housing. Export markets are rapidly diversifying, and Canada has made a number of new strategic partnerships. Two straight months of growing trade surpluses.
All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.
And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.
This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.
The comment you've replied to is clearly not "partisan bluster". While it may be a tad hyperbolic, with the Stanley Cup line, it's driving a valid point that while Canada is facing a number of very real challenges, the government in power is spending its time on internet censorship bills.
These bills are of almost no benefit to the average Canadian, and the point is that the government should focus more on things that matter to citizens. Instead of playing into people's fear and exposing them to potential government overreach, privacy violations, data breaches, etc., Canada's leadership should focus back on the economy.
Your comment actually seems to be the bluster, considering the ranting and swearing.
> And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
If I was PM I would prioritise tax cuts to athletes playing for Canadian teams, repurpose the new Major Projects Office to be the Athletic Performance Office to provide funding and support to Canadian teams, and install a tax on Canadian players on American teams. I'm also joking, lighten up :P
I did misspeak about the foreign investments, what I was referring to is that we are seeing much more investments leaving the country than what are coming in, and of the investments in Canada, it's not just the sheer volume and direction that matters - foreign firms buying out Canadian businesses to later move them out of the country isn't a good thing long-term.
I have no doubt that Carney will be better for the economy than the last 10 years under Trudeau, and I hope they spend more time focusing on that then spending billions on useless gun buybacks, surveillance bills, banning social media, etc. We saw a sharp drop in entrepreneurship in Q1, hopefully they can do something to reverse that. I doubt it though.
This is basically just shilling. Average Canadians cannot point to many things that have improved or gotten cheaper in how many years? You are acting like we are a day away from being a debt free hyper economy that everyone is knocking on the door to get involved with.
Am I the only one who sees this as the only viable solution to shutting down foreign interference through social media ? We certainly can't rely on the companies themselves doing it. Fifth column warfare is a thing and we are a ripe target.
While deeply unlikely to change anything it really is important as much noise is made about this as possible.
On top of this will be C-34 which is just full no privacy anymore territory https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/everything-all-at-once-b...
The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.
> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses...
That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.
Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).
That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.
Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.
1 reply →
A lot of the Indian tech industry is really just the tech industry from other countries being outsourced to there.
7 replies →
One thing I have been thinking about is digital tariffs.
The US is perfectly willing to slam billions into ventures that lose money for years. EU for example doesn’t work that way. Consequence: US can develop faster, unconstrained by profitability, and capture the entire market before EU. This seems as US being more “innovative”, but realistically they are just running a perhaps similar engine way hotter at the cost of American QoL being way worse for the less fortunate. Similar thing can be said with Chinas subsidies on electric vehicles potentially flooding the EU with cheaper alternatives.
America is our ally, so we let this happen. For the most part this has served in this case EU and perhaps Canada well, albeit at the mercy of the US tech sector. Perhaps we shouldn’t anymore though, and consider tariffing American services to protect and incentivize local, sustainable alternatives. Meta, microsoft, etc. are clearly starting to rent seek now that they have us by the balls, I say fuck em?
I’m no expert in economics so I bet there are great arguments against this, lets see.
3 replies →
Because US has far better opportunities and more money.
My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.
7 replies →
The premise seems wrong here. As someone who worked my whole career in Canadian tech I assure you it exists.
1 reply →
> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
I was told that we should never invest pension fund on local, because you salary is basically based on local industry. One need diversified investment.
Not sure how true this is, but that's what I have been listening for years.
(disclaimer: not canandian, not american
> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.
But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.
14 replies →
> Heck, China, Israel, and India all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements.
It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.
Oh cool, we should set up stricter free speech restrictions in order to encourage our nascent tech sector. Sure thing champ.
Canadian tech is nonexistent because we continue to see ourselves as a colony instead of a country, a resource-extraction post-national economic state instead of a people.
the biggest reason is that canadians speak English
we could much more easily get a Quebecois tech industry than canadian
3 replies →
And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.
2 replies →
Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago, there is a reason it was called Silicon Valley North. RIM, Nortel, Celestica, QNX... I can't explain what exactly happened. A simple explanation would be Liberals prioritized real estate growth, unlimited immigration to artificially boost GDP but I suspect the problem is more complex.
2 replies →
There will be a SECU Committee meeting on C-22 later today, where the committee will be performing a clause by clause review of Bill C-22, and voting on amendments. It may be the final meeting. You can watch it live by clicking the "Watch on ParlVu" button on the meeting notice page: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/SECU/meetin...
Direct link to the upcoming live ParlVu video: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows...
After bill C-22 leaves the SECU Committee, it will be sent to the House of Commons for the third reading and a final vote before being sent to the Senate.
If you are a Canadian citizen, you can also use the following tools to message your MP:
* The Internet Society's tool: https://www.internetsociety.org/our-work/internet-policy/kee...
* OpenMedia's messaging tool: https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1
* ICLM's messaging tool: https://iclmg.ca/stop-c-22/
You can also email Gary Anandasangaree (gary.anand@parl.gc.ca), Marc Carney (mark.carney@parl.gc.ca), and Sean Fraser (sean.fraser@parl.gc.ca), and tell them that any weakening of encryption or suspicionless retention of metadata is unacceptable.
The SECU Committee meeting is now live, and is set to go until 11:59 p.m. ET.
The livestream of the meeting is available here: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows...
Well, the meeting ended early today after a member who supports the bill basically rage quit. Everyone else was trying not to laugh.
It seems possible that C-22 could be delayed in committee long enough to stop it from being passed before the summer recess deadline of June 18.
The Liberal party members of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) are:
* Jean-Yves Duclos: jean-yves.duclos@parl.gc.ca
* Sima Acan: sima.acan@parl.gc.ca
* Marianne Dandurand: marianne.dandurand@parl.gc.ca
* Anthony Housefather: anthony.housefather@parl.gc.ca
* Marcus Powlowski: marcus.powlowski@parl.gc.ca
* Jacques Ramsay: jacques.ramsay@parl.gc.ca
* Amandeep Sodhi: amandeep.sodhi@parl.gc.ca
3 from Ontario and 4 from Quebec. As a western Canada resident it has been real old that we have been steamrolled by the east for the past decade.
12 replies →
I made my petition in April 2025. I was genuinely surprised that my riding was fooled by Liberal lies, but I'm not surprised about the result.
Liberal, Tory, same old story.
There is not enough noise about this bill. It's horrific.
If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real opposition?!
Sadly spying on citizens is pretty bipartisan for most governments around the world. It seems hard to actually stop this kind of stuff. I've signed this petition which I'm sure will do absolutely nothing, but it feels like there isn't much else I can do. I didn't even get a confirmation email with the link I need to click after signing this petition, so I guess my signature is null and void. I've lost faith in our government doing anything to benefit the people.
The confirmation email takes a few minutes.
4 replies →
I mean Canada is a part of the 'Five eyes' surveillance alliance since the 1950's. This is nothing new but it does keep escalating.
It was Terrance McKenna who said that the worst government is usually the one that is in charge, that is because they rarely tend to go back on what was put down before them. One could argue that in the US Trump is tearing down previous government work but also isn't doing it in a constructive fashion at all.
I pushed back on all these kinds of Bills and laws here in Australia and every time it was usually just met with the same boiler plate response of "We are enacting this at the advice of insert agency/person here."
I still do it but it sort of just feels like leaving a note to future generations that we at least tried to stop it.
The Liberals have been elected 4 times in a row. They don't even hide the fact they're hostile to the needs and cares of Canadian citizens since we're the idiots who keep electing them. CBC pushes some propaganda about how this'll protect the kids, some brain-dead liberals will keep repeating it, Canada will just continue its path to irrelevancy...
The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.
If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...
You know the conservatives are supporting this bill as well... right?
And when Harper was in power they were trying to push something similar?
And that the petition linked here is an NDP petition?
Partisan grandstanding won't fix the issue. A mobilized public will.
8 replies →
[flagged]
You cannot be serious. The Freedom convoy may have been misinformed but the government response was an absolute disaster and the courts have agreed.
12 replies →
> near yearly race riots often instigated by foreign actors over social media
You're right that it's foreign actors starting that trouble, but rather than the ones on Twitter, I'd blame the ones who have been showing up in person, raping girls and knifing people in the face.
That is a lie. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.
Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.
> even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
Actually, you can yell "fire" if there is a fire.
Note that the "can't yell fire" quote comes from a decision involving folks who were distributing pamphlets opposing the WWI draft. It was written by Holmes, who also wrote "three generations of idiots are enough" to justify a eugenics law, in a case that didn't involve any idiots.
Moreover, the "fire" decision was overturned by Brandenberg v Ohio.
> but even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
You should look up the origin of that phrase...
Two things can be true at the same time.
That you're right about "Freedom" Convoy (and "Alberta" seppies) etc.
And that this a bad and harmful bill.
Given CSIS has plenty of powers already and hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups, I don't see why I would trust them with my or my family's chat histories or why I should have to live without Signal or ProtonMail, etc. as product offerings in my country.
3 replies →
"Canada doesn't have the free speech laws like we do in the US..."
Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here.
Is ourcommons.ca an official House of Commons website? It says so but how do I verify before I submit the petition with my information?
it really should be .gc.ca for us to be sure.
Here's a chain of trust you can follow:
https://parl.gc.ca -> https://parl.ca
https://www.parl.ca/Committees/en/LANG/Contact?parl=37&sessi... -> ourcommons.ca
It is yes - in situations like that, your best bet is to view the SSL cert details. Of course, only if you trust the issuer. ;)
Yeah, this is so bad - I struggled with this as well, why did they make it hard?
Signed, thanks for sharing.
what is bill c 22 in a nutshell for non canadians like me ? is this like the patriot act in usa ?
Its far worse than the Patriot Act.
Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.
The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.
Citizen Lab has a good writeup on the legislation here: https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-proposed-surveill...
The collection of metadata is almost certainly bad for people even if they do nothing wrong. It can (and will) be sold if regulations and enforcement are not airtight. It will almost certainly be leaked as a result of incompetence, negligence, or outright criminality. The only way to prevent your metadata from getting out into the great unknown is to ensure it isn't collected in the first place.
If you don't see what the big deal is, I suggest you consider the recent leak of voter data in Alberta. For those unfamiliar, a list of eligible voters is routinely shared with political parties for the purposes of running their election campaigns. One of those parties, the "Republican Party of Alberta", shared their copy of the list with separatists, who made it freely available to any of their pals. What's the big deal you ask? Who cares if their address is public knowledge? Isn't this the sort of thing that used to be in phonebooks? Just for one example, anyone who has moved away from an abusive ex now has to worry about their address, phone number, etc. being made available to that abusive ex. Privacy isn't just important for people who like wearing pants.
C-22 is supposed to protect Canadians but, instead, it endangers them. This is a bad bill.
[flagged]
Basically the same idiocy that the British gov't has also tried to enact around making actually encrypted communication impossible, and giving them the rights to access metadata on the public's communications without warrant, etc.
How is it possible to make encrypted communication impossible? It’s (for us) trivial to encrypt and sign a message with GPG for instance. Does this allow the government to come to my house if I trade these messages with friends?
2 replies →
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...
It's online and easy to read, and is a modernizing of laws around online systems. It is a deeply imperfect bill -- personally I think it is basically DOA and will not receive assent -- but a lot of the reaction to it are classic partisan hysterics (you can already see a bunch of those people throughout this discussion).
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...
The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is
1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"
The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.
So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".
> It's online and easy to read
That's not true. Most people are not legal experts with extensive expertise in technology, knowledge of how Canadian courts will interpret the legislation, and knowledge of how governments around the world are trying to attack encryption (ex: they do their best to hide and not to explicitly say it in the legislation).
> And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
That's your opinion. That's not a real scientific claim, and yet you are using it to justify an unprecedented attack on privacy rights.
Suspicionless metadata retention has been illegal in the European Union since 2014, and it violates the Charter. There is no world in which it is acceptable.
An RCMP witness speaking about the bill during a recent committee meeting literally said the legislation will help them "solve the problem of encryption": https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/rcmp-confirms-bill-c-22-...
how would they force vpns like mullvad to turn over the log when there isn't any?
are they just going to ban specific vpn providers then ? this is absurd!
3 replies →
the odd thing about it to me is that other than passports, all regular identity documents in Canada are issued by the provinces under specific mandates and regulations, which means that the provinces could choose not to endorse the usage of their IDs for age verification to foreign providers.
Other than passports, the government of canada does not have an identity card to base any kind of sweeping electronic age verification regime on. Sure there are some tech players looking to bring products to market that leverage banks and payment networks, but I suspect even they haven't figured out who owns the assertion of the persons attributes.
Maybe they've done the regs legwork and some scumbag backdoor account policy changes in the banks, but the PHIPA legislation that governs PII collection, use, and disclosure in the provinces would need to align with it.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were challenges to the law based on a lack of federal mandate for provincial identity repositories, no accountability or ownership for the accuracy of the age assertion, WTO and trade agreement challenges against subsidized providers, to speculate about a few.
The spirit of the law is contemptible, and is being pushed through by a farcically illegitimate, corrupt, and demonstrably foreign influenced majority that has made a mockery of our processes, and is expressly against the interests of Canadians.
The good news is that if you are a 13yr old who can jailbreak a foundation model, we are in a new golden age of hacking. The cryptography behind any of these systems of oppression won't last a month.
Bill C-22 is the Canadian government's attempt to require encryption backdoors and mandatory data retention, for all online services.
The invasive mandatory age verification requires are part of bill C-34, which was just tabled yesterday. Its obviously an unacceptable violate of privacy, but the Liberals are far closer to passing C-22 at the moment.
my error, i actually thought it was an omnibus. it doesn't change my view, but toward the specific encryption concern, indeed, less relevant. thank you.
I guess canadians get what they voted for... :)
in a three-party system, there's provably no optimal voting system. Most people who would normally vote NDP voted strategically in the last election to prevent a conservative majority. While it's true in the literal sense that we got what we voted for -- I mean, that's tautological; whoever wins an election is "voted" for -- it's not really the whole picture.
There is always the Australian system. Mandatory voting, preferential votes, majority rule.
The Preferential part is the most important, it means you can vote for who you want but also have the second preference get a vote if the first fails to get a wide enough margin. That first vote however will get additional resources based on vote tally with the next election cycle. If either of the last two majority parties fail to get the necessary votes to hold control and you have a hung parliament, they then have to negotiate with other parties to gain their preference.
Its not perfect but it looks like the best case system I have seen.
1 reply →
Oh wait.. canadians there’s more on the way lol, Mark Carney just posted on X for ID identification for social platforms:
Today, our government introduced new legislation to protect our kids online. Canada's Safe Social Media Act will hold social media and AI platforms accountable, make them safer, and restrict access to social media for children under 16.
https://x.com/markjcarney/status/2064846939691139082?s=46
Under first-last-the-post, we actually don't :P
[dead]
[flagged]
The country has just slipped into a recession (only one in g20 btw), food bank usage is at record highs, it's young adults are ranked 71st in the world in happiness (boomers in the top 10 tho), housing is out of reach for many, youth unemployment is at ~15%, outside investments are non-existent, government debt is at record levels, haven't won the Stanley cup in decades, in a trade war with the USA, nobody is starting businesses here, educated people are leaving, etc.
Liberal party: We need to spy on people on the internet!
According to the central bank, the country is "not clearly in a recession"[0].
[0] https://globalnews.ca/news/11897931/bank-of-canada-rate-anno...
I'm skeptical of central bankers trying to sugarcoat the fact that we are in a "technical" recession. If you look at per-capita GDP it's lower than it was four years ago and if you talk to regular Canadians you'll come away feeling like we've been in a recession for years. I would say per-capita is a better metric because it better reflects what individuals are experiencing, whereas Canada's overall GDP has been bolstered by high immigration targets for years. Regardless, it meets the definition of a recession and matches with the experiences of many Canadians. I'm sure the beureocrats and central bankers aren't feeling that pain though.
5 replies →
[dead]
Foreign investments just hit an 18 year high. Employment numbers just went positive (at about 5x the per capita rate of the US). The country is recovering nicely from being addicted to mass immigration/housing. Export markets are rapidly diversifying, and Canada has made a number of new strategic partnerships. Two straight months of growing trade surpluses.
All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.
And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.
This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.
The comment you've replied to is clearly not "partisan bluster". While it may be a tad hyperbolic, with the Stanley Cup line, it's driving a valid point that while Canada is facing a number of very real challenges, the government in power is spending its time on internet censorship bills.
These bills are of almost no benefit to the average Canadian, and the point is that the government should focus more on things that matter to citizens. Instead of playing into people's fear and exposing them to potential government overreach, privacy violations, data breaches, etc., Canada's leadership should focus back on the economy.
Your comment actually seems to be the bluster, considering the ranting and swearing.
2 replies →
> And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
If I was PM I would prioritise tax cuts to athletes playing for Canadian teams, repurpose the new Major Projects Office to be the Athletic Performance Office to provide funding and support to Canadian teams, and install a tax on Canadian players on American teams. I'm also joking, lighten up :P
I did misspeak about the foreign investments, what I was referring to is that we are seeing much more investments leaving the country than what are coming in, and of the investments in Canada, it's not just the sheer volume and direction that matters - foreign firms buying out Canadian businesses to later move them out of the country isn't a good thing long-term.
I have no doubt that Carney will be better for the economy than the last 10 years under Trudeau, and I hope they spend more time focusing on that then spending billions on useless gun buybacks, surveillance bills, banning social media, etc. We saw a sharp drop in entrepreneurship in Q1, hopefully they can do something to reverse that. I doubt it though.
This is basically just shilling. Average Canadians cannot point to many things that have improved or gotten cheaper in how many years? You are acting like we are a day away from being a debt free hyper economy that everyone is knocking on the door to get involved with.
1 reply →
It's partisan to deny your country is falling to shit just because you voted for the parties that made it fall to shit.
2 replies →
[flagged]
Am I the only one who sees this as the only viable solution to shutting down foreign interference through social media ? We certainly can't rely on the companies themselves doing it. Fifth column warfare is a thing and we are a ripe target.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]