The petition to withdraw and amend the bill was presented to the House of Commons today [1]. People whining about how there's nothing they can do basically don't engage in democracy and thats how you end up in a US situation..
I emailed 9 senators and heard back from one. Emailed the other 8 today. Even when you engage, there's little positive feedback. The older I get, the more I believe this is a feature of the system and not a bug.
I feel most of us have been conditioned to prefer only the mildest and most inoffensive ways of protesting as valid and consider the rest impossible. In my view, governments today ignore protests because they don't actually threaten anything. A protest with teeth might be mass absenteeism from work, refusing to pay taxes, something that actually hurts.. although in this case it's probably a bit much, when the threat of real protest is completely gone you end up with authoritarian governments.
The fact is this political system of ours is heavily balanced in favor of those with the endless budgets and resources to spend engaging in "democratic" avenues of influence.
Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.
For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.
You won't be able to convince representatives with facts and logic. So many people want their attention that they can't pay enough attention to your arguments to be convinced. Contacting them is about showing that you care about it.
If they receive 100 calls of people saying they're strongly against a bill and no for they might reconsider their position.
Also calling is a better signal of showing you care then emailing.
Haha. You don't email them, you cut off their funding and smear their public image. This is how you make them move, not with emails. It takes some work though.
I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy. If this is true and POSIWID, then mass democracy only ever nullifies any real extent of democracy. As I see it, the only real solution is to replace power. I don't know how to do that. Do you?
This sounds like an interesting argument, but it's damn hard to parse. I think you're saying that real democracy needs political (in the widest sense) engagement, which can't be got from the majority of people, so letting everyone participate without regard to such engagement gets in the way of real democracy, and therefore you suggest to "replace" (redistribute) power?
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
LBO maybe. Optimal governance would fix all bad mechanisms e.g. incentive traps, shooting self in the foot stuff, obvious inefficiencies, etc. - so it would result in a better future with more growth and wealth.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better.
It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.
> I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy.
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
I'm not saying you shouldn't sign petitions, but no law has ever been changed or stopped because of a petition. Look at the most popular petitions to amend laws. They ignored all of them, from firearms to electoral reform. Petitions give the government a good excuse to do something they want to do anyway, but won't change their mind about something they're set on.
The only thing that will change their minds is taking their seat, but without electoral reform you can be quite certain that only those loyal to Liberal, NDP and CPC will get elected. And PQ, but they're just Quebec NDP.
The general public of Canada is more concerned with Trump than what any Canadian politician is up to, so good luck.
There are lots of laws in Canada that are not enforced. Ap owners/controllers will wait to see how the government wants to handle this. If the government starts making demands then they will pull out, but I doubt the bill itself will trigger anything immediate.
Signal, NordVPN, Psiphon VPN, Tailscale, Windscribe, and DuckDuckGo have already confirmed that they will stop offering their services in Canada, and not route any of their European services through Canadian proiders.
We have a version of this law in India which is even worse and has been used extensively by the govt to crack down on dissent and to do wholesale censoring of content that the establishment doesn't like.
All of this is done with ZERO due process - even the minimal due process that has been built into these draconian laws.
You're not wrong, the unelected senate generally chooses to defer to the elected lower chamber and only truly contentious legislation have been "killed" (as in dropped dead) at the Senate (think abortion and climate change).
Generally the Canadian Senate will propose amendments to the bill after its study (around a quarter of the time if I recall, not always), but the lower chamber has no obligation to agree, so it has some sway in that consultative sense. And the Senate has been more active in proposing amendments to legislation after independent senators became a thing.
At this point, I think the soft landing that privacy advocates can hope for are amendments that curtail the worst aspects of this legislation.
Dear Merica
We decided to get it over with and HELP pull the roof down on our heads, the simple fact is that there is a direct linear relationship between how advanced our technology gets and how poor our overall experience of it becomes.
> also expand the sharing of Canadians’ personal data with foreign law enforcement, including the United States. Canada has been negotiating a cross-border data-sharing agreement with the U.S. that would allow American police to get information about Canadian internet users without any Canadian court oversight.
This is actually even more amazing to me that with all the talk of data sovereignty, the EU and Canada are still negotiating reciprocal Cloud Act treaties that will give the US government warrantless access to basically all digital services and communications. The UK and Australia have already codified these agreements with the US.
Trump's loud mouth brought these issues to the forefront, but really it seems like everyone is just waiting for it to blow over when he's gone in 2 years and then it's back to usual.
I wonder why the Canadian government would share citizens data with the u.s. while all this 51st state talk and terrif stuff is going on, does Canada get access to Americans data in return?
> does Canada get access to Americans data in return?
It probably is reciprocal, but in reality Canadian companies sell very little (if any) digital services to Americans. There isn't much they can even access. It's why the arrangement is so lopsided.
>> everyone is just waiting for it to blow over when he's gone in 2 years and then it's back to usual.
Trump is the symptom, not the disease. It will not go back to normal. US politics has changed. The US people have changed. There won't be a Trump 2.0 but there will be other equally horrible leaders. Maybe not the next president, but likely the one after that. Canada must adapt to the new realty rather than deny and wait.
Canadians acting like the consequences will never be the same because of one man, when you can walk over the French-German border today with a passport instead of a rifle.
Raise awareness about the legislation and what it means for the average person (bans on iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, VPNs, etc...) You need to also start emailing and calling members of the Senate, telling them to reject the bill.
there is literally nothing people can do. the party in charge has a majority government and a media biased enough to sell this bill as a positive thing.
the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp, and instagram all blocked canadians from using those services. the liberal party and the media would still find a way to blame trump for it, and the pm's popularity would increase.
> the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp
That is literally what is going to happen if this legislation is allowed to pass. WhatsApp will block Canada, and Apple will remove any impacted service from Canada, like iMessage.
The public would rather be safe than be free. We see that time and time again with how people are tough on crime, how they want government to step in if they are ever defrauded or stolen from. Politicians are simply mirroring the people's wishes.
You say that, but mass surveillance was never on any ballot I recall seeing. All these laws always seem to get quietly pushed without consulting anybody other than the security services.
I'm not sure what more to do then to annoy my friends and family and speak with my MP (done), who had already voted against it. Canada's political system seems healthy compared to the USA, but it doesn't feel healthy objectively.
People keep thinking “healthy” politics is a lack of dissent. I hear this all the time from people.
When I lived in Singapore I heard how lucky they were to live in a country where there wasn’t much disagreement (the truth is it had been squeezed out of the population)
It has the same problem that the US has, which is it is stuck in a two party duopoly, with both major parties sharing fundamentally the same political economic outlook. Just with different takes on culture wars stuff.
The only significant opposition to this bill has been coming from the NDP, which was decimated to a small number of seats by people piling into the Liberals because of nationalism and by its previous pathetic fealty to the Liberals in the last two parliaments.
The only reference to membership I see from the Commissioner for Lobbying states [1]:
> Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has two classes of members: ordinary members and voting members. Membership in CCLA shall be available to persons interested in furthering the Corporation's purposes and who have applied for and been accepted into membership in the Corporation by resolution of the board or in such other manner as may be determined by the board, in accordance with any membership criteria set by the board. Voting members are members who have been accepted as voting members by the board. A voting membership expires 12 months after the date of board acceptance, unless renewed by the board.
I don't see anything to this effect on the website, like a membership application form.
This is in contrast to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association which just published the decision this week to have a flat $5 open membership.
Unfortunately Signal has threatened to leave the Canadian market should this bill go through, as have NordVPN, Windscribe, DuckDuckGo's VPN, Psiphon VPN, and Proton VPN. I imagine more may follow suit.
One of the main lobbyists behind Bill C-22, The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has been trying to target Tor's funding for years now. So unfortunately it would be unsurprising to see them convince the Liberals to try and target Tor.
Don’t use Canadian or 14 eyes products. Keep your cell on an airplane mode most or all times. Use cash as much as possible. That however is a technical response to a political one, which usually won’t last long or it will be ineffective or even illegal, a proper political response is the right way.
Oh yeah totally, you'll 100% beat surveillance with a chinese phone and a Russian email service. No way anyone at all will spy on you that way.
The best privacy tech comes from people who live in these 5 and 14 eyes countries. Try a little bit of threat modeling instead of thinking about the problem emotionally.
I'm Canadian, and this matters a lot to me, but people don't care
The culture here is so mired in political apathy that it feels futile to even bother. People just do not care at all
I'm not a huge activist but I have been involved in a number of things when they matter a lot to me over the past twenty years or so, starting in college, but not a single one of them has ever gone my way
I'm unemployed now and worried I'm going to have an incredibly hard time ever finding work in software again, and AI is taking over, and here I am. Defeated again
I don't have it in me to fight this stuff anymore. The machine has won against me at least
I'm Canadian, too. I think most Canadians are just not informed. Most Canadians still get their news from state funded media which of course spin for the state because 'follow the money'.
We have a very complacent population, which explains the lack of innovation coming out of the country. People's idea of "business' right now is simply renting out their basement.
Most go to work, accept whatever policy the government decides is good for them, and don't push back as their living conditions decline. Given that, is it surprising that we don't see much activism?
I wish it was different but I don't know what to do. Perhaps Canadians should steal a page from the French?
hey bud, right there with you. these are the hardest times we've faced in a very long time, but humans are nothing if not adaptable. we're fucked today but we'll see about tomorrow. wishing you the best.
Sounds like you’re just as apathetic as those you despise.
Watching our provinces fall one by one to corrupt/kleptocratic “conservative” governments has certainly done a number on me, but it’s only made me more vocal and more involved in local advocacy.
All that apathy out there is an opportunity to awaken care and turn the tide.
Well, I'm American, and I watched my peers lose this fight 10+ years ago.
I was in school when the Snowden leaks came around, and asked dozens of students and teachers what they thought about it. The majority of them had no idea what had happened, some even outright rejecting it as a foreign smear campaign. A handful of people showed interest, but lost interest when there was no connection to aliens or the Bermuda triangle. My freedom-loving cohort was too preoccupied with YouTube, Twitter and Instagram for it to matter.
Fast forward to today, you're probably running USA-designed spyware on whatever computer and phone you import from America. Canada already belongs to FIVE EYES, your mobile handset market is almost entirely captured by pushover US corporations that backdoor Push Notifications and rename lakes apropos of nothing.
No matter what happens with this bill, the threat of surveillance will loom long over Canadians. Political motivation is important, but trusting the United States is an albatross on the neck.
I’m also Canadian and I don’t share your pessimism at all.
The people I know are not apathetic and I’m sorry that things don’t go your way politically, but that’s life. For example, the recent Vancouver election didn’t go my way - big whoop.
But the Vancouver elections are a microcosm of left-leaning Canadians across the country. There's no hope for the foreseeable future while boomer power remains.
I read it a few weeks ago. Something that really bothers me is that parts are written like big tech ToS that are designed to make it sound like they’re doing something for you, but they’re not.
The restrictions on powers are one example. There’s almost nothing there, but they say something like “are not allowed to compel service providers to retain data that will identify the content of your communications.”
That’s bullshit weasel words. Everyone is keeping that stuff and nothing restricts the “written sometime in the future” rules from compelling service providers to produce all of the data they’ve collected. There’s also no restriction on compelling real time wire taps.
If that was a real restriction it would say something like “retain, capture, or produce.”
There are also gag orders falling out of the sky like it’s raining and no mechanism to eventually force transparency when they’re used. They also have broad latitude to define and redefine a ton of rules that haven’t even been written yet.
I know of some places that do conferences and I don’t know what they’ll do if classified as a service provider. Imagine KYC on a couple hundred people trying to participate in a 2 hour conference.
Edit: And I think it’s a big win for organized crime. The police will only know how to use the easy tooling to catch the lowest level, dumbest criminals. The higher up criminals will (or probably already do) use private servers for communication.
Does anyone think organized crime is relying on WhatsApp or Snapchat? That’s what the low level suckers will be using (and getting caught by) so everyone can pretend the police are doing their job.
I remember a few people who opposed this bill, including a Canadian professor of law/lawyer Michael <something>, who wanted to oppose this. What happened to that? HN had blog posts about it I believe.
Pretty much every group in Canada is opposed to this bill, except for law enforcement, the Brampton city mayor, and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P).
michael geist. yes pretty much everybody knowledgeable about this bill, regardless of political stripes are against this bill. except for the party in power.
the media spends almost all of their time attacking the opposition leader instead of the current pm (who has a majority gov), so people are unfortunately quite under informed on c22 and other things the gov is doing.
Unfortunately, our state funded media have no interest in pushing back on that because they're state funded by the state pushing the bill. And, in my experience, if you're not on X, you just don't know about these things. That's most Canadians. We're doomed until boomer power fades.
The bill is going to pass, there is quite literally nothing I can do to stop it.
And when I say literally nothing, I mean literally nothing. My MP (the man I voted for) crossing the floor to join the current ruling party showed me exactly how much political power I have: absolutely fuck all.
Fun fact: the government is already talking to companies who have customers to prep the infrastructure needed to handover any data requested, as in, they are almost guaranteed it will pass.
the largest voting block in canada (seniors) aren't really capable of understanding this issue let alone prioritizing it. in fact, for liberal voters the only thing they care about is opposing and antagonizing trump, or at least the appearance of doing so. keeping housing unaffordable is a distant second priority.
so bills like this will continue to go through since the liberals have a majority and the PMs popularity counterintuitively goes up as things go from bad to worse. im finding it hard to have any motivation to oppose this bill since resistance seems to be futile.
the dark liberal decade gets longer and darker in canada.
> in fact, for liberal voters the only thing they care about is opposing and antagonizing trump, or at least the appearance of doing so. keeping housing unaffordable is a distant second priority.
This is a conservative talking point. I'm a liberal voter, and I know lots of people who voted for the liberal party. None of them want to oppose and antagonize Trump for just for the sake of it. Most Canadians and liberal voters just want Trump to follow his own agreement in regards to trade, to stop with the 51st state rhetoric and his unnecessary antagonism of Canada.
Most Canadians I know have friends and family in America and don't want a rift between our countries. It's that Trump has seemingly gone after Canada for made up reasons just to cause problems that has made Canadians angry.
it's not a conservative talking point. i know many people who voted liberal to "stick it to trump" (their words). all they do is talk about trump. they have no idea what is happening in their own country, it's just trump vs canada and carney is the hero. it's ridiculous. and the media fuels it constantly.
as a liberal voter how do you feel about this bill?
It does not and it's quite confusing. You'll often see people use the term LPC or Liberal and avoid lower-case liberal due to the confusion of that word. In Canada the Liberal party is a fiscally centrist/corporate & socially liberal(ish) (aka it's similar to the traditional British definition of Liberal). The Conservatives are a large right wing reactionary block that seems to be perpetually in the minority but with a large loyal voting block while the actual opposition mostly comes from three parties that rotate in and out of relevance as a left-wing voice BQ (Bloq-quebecois), NDP (New Democratic Party - fading since the death of Jack Layton), and the Greens (Environmental sorta, but also weirdly anti-science sometimes). And that's on the national level - at the provincial level it gets even weirder with the BCLiberals (recently named BCUP) being socially and fiscally conservative and opposed by the BC NDP and other minor parties.
Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.
it's a bit of a misnomer imo. if we're talking about classical liberalism, the conservatives fit that label better. if we're talking about "liberals" i.e. the left, the NDP would fit that label better. the modern Liberals are more like neoliberal technocrats, who favour top-down state interventionism and who are the ones driving surveillance bills and attacking privacy.
This govts to attitude to the dignity of its citizens is demoralizing. I have more hope in the outcome of a US annexation than I do for any significant positive policy direction. it’s done. Bureaucracy has triumphed and there’s nothing to save.
The meta analysis on this is is quite interesting
HN tends to have a positive opinion on modern Canada.
They then find it difficult to understand why it moves towards a tech dystopia.
How will these HNers square the circle of their cognitive dissonance.
how is it cognitive dissonance when canada is mostly in the right about a lot of issues that america is in the wrong about? just because you disagree with some dickhead politican's point of view doesn't mean you disagree with the country. there's plenty of shitty bills like this being thrust upon americans against their will. what a weird argument.
The petition to withdraw and amend the bill was presented to the House of Commons today [1]. People whining about how there's nothing they can do basically don't engage in democracy and thats how you end up in a US situation..
[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Peti...
I emailed 9 senators and heard back from one. Emailed the other 8 today. Even when you engage, there's little positive feedback. The older I get, the more I believe this is a feature of the system and not a bug.
I feel most of us have been conditioned to prefer only the mildest and most inoffensive ways of protesting as valid and consider the rest impossible. In my view, governments today ignore protests because they don't actually threaten anything. A protest with teeth might be mass absenteeism from work, refusing to pay taxes, something that actually hurts.. although in this case it's probably a bit much, when the threat of real protest is completely gone you end up with authoritarian governments.
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The fact is this political system of ours is heavily balanced in favor of those with the endless budgets and resources to spend engaging in "democratic" avenues of influence.
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> emailed 9 senators and heard back from one
Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.
For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.
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Colin Deacon seems to care: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7519403...
Paula Simons has also been actively listening to Canadians on this subject. https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/simons-paula/
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You won't be able to convince representatives with facts and logic. So many people want their attention that they can't pay enough attention to your arguments to be convinced. Contacting them is about showing that you care about it.
If they receive 100 calls of people saying they're strongly against a bill and no for they might reconsider their position.
Also calling is a better signal of showing you care then emailing.
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Haha. You don't email them, you cut off their funding and smear their public image. This is how you make them move, not with emails. It takes some work though.
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I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy. If this is true and POSIWID, then mass democracy only ever nullifies any real extent of democracy. As I see it, the only real solution is to replace power. I don't know how to do that. Do you?
This sounds like an interesting argument, but it's damn hard to parse. I think you're saying that real democracy needs political (in the widest sense) engagement, which can't be got from the majority of people, so letting everyone participate without regard to such engagement gets in the way of real democracy, and therefore you suggest to "replace" (redistribute) power?
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
LBO maybe. Optimal governance would fix all bad mechanisms e.g. incentive traps, shooting self in the foot stuff, obvious inefficiencies, etc. - so it would result in a better future with more growth and wealth.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.
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> do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy
They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
> I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy.
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
Voting for every little thing is compulsory in Australia and it’s honestly really annoying.
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Indeed. I've also sent several emails to my MP. Sadly I've received no response. :-/
Hmm that's odd, it was presented by my MP but wasn't aware of a chance to sign it
I'm getting an error loading the page.
I'm not saying you shouldn't sign petitions, but no law has ever been changed or stopped because of a petition. Look at the most popular petitions to amend laws. They ignored all of them, from firearms to electoral reform. Petitions give the government a good excuse to do something they want to do anyway, but won't change their mind about something they're set on.
The only thing that will change their minds is taking their seat, but without electoral reform you can be quite certain that only those loyal to Liberal, NDP and CPC will get elected. And PQ, but they're just Quebec NDP.
The general public of Canada is more concerned with Trump than what any Canadian politician is up to, so good luck.
If the bill isn't dramatically changed or killed, all the major messaging services along with tons of other services will end up blocking Canada.
There are lots of laws in Canada that are not enforced. Ap owners/controllers will wait to see how the government wants to handle this. If the government starts making demands then they will pull out, but I doubt the bill itself will trigger anything immediate.
Signal, NordVPN, Psiphon VPN, Tailscale, Windscribe, and DuckDuckGo have already confirmed that they will stop offering their services in Canada, and not route any of their European services through Canadian proiders.
Hopefully it doesn’t get CRA (tax) enforcement where the little guy is relentlessly pursued while the rich are too much trouble to go after.
Canadian law enforcement have publicly stated that they intend to target encrypted messaging apps as soon as possible if the legislation become law.
Or some will bend their knees and things will continue as normal.
Important services have already said they won't. It will be a disaster.
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We have a version of this law in India which is even worse and has been used extensively by the govt to crack down on dissent and to do wholesale censoring of content that the establishment doesn't like.
All of this is done with ZERO due process - even the minimal due process that has been built into these draconian laws.
It's very rare for the senate to kill a bill. I would say that we alreadt ran out of time.
You're not wrong, the unelected senate generally chooses to defer to the elected lower chamber and only truly contentious legislation have been "killed" (as in dropped dead) at the Senate (think abortion and climate change).
Generally the Canadian Senate will propose amendments to the bill after its study (around a quarter of the time if I recall, not always), but the lower chamber has no obligation to agree, so it has some sway in that consultative sense. And the Senate has been more active in proposing amendments to legislation after independent senators became a thing.
At this point, I think the soft landing that privacy advocates can hope for are amendments that curtail the worst aspects of this legislation.
Dear Canada,
Please cease this kind of behavior immediately. We're supposed to be the only dumbshits around here.
Yours truly,
'Merica
The truth is this can happen in any country, but the rich people who are causing it go after the most lucrative governments first.
Dear Merica We decided to get it over with and HELP pull the roof down on our heads, the simple fact is that there is a direct linear relationship between how advanced our technology gets and how poor our overall experience of it becomes.
Caniba
Most of the world has become the dumbshits emulating Trumpism. Source: am French citizen..
Is your president emulating Trump? Is he one of the smartshits?
> also expand the sharing of Canadians’ personal data with foreign law enforcement, including the United States. Canada has been negotiating a cross-border data-sharing agreement with the U.S. that would allow American police to get information about Canadian internet users without any Canadian court oversight.
This is actually even more amazing to me that with all the talk of data sovereignty, the EU and Canada are still negotiating reciprocal Cloud Act treaties that will give the US government warrantless access to basically all digital services and communications. The UK and Australia have already codified these agreements with the US.
Trump's loud mouth brought these issues to the forefront, but really it seems like everyone is just waiting for it to blow over when he's gone in 2 years and then it's back to usual.
I wonder why the Canadian government would share citizens data with the u.s. while all this 51st state talk and terrif stuff is going on, does Canada get access to Americans data in return?
> does Canada get access to Americans data in return?
It probably is reciprocal, but in reality Canadian companies sell very little (if any) digital services to Americans. There isn't much they can even access. It's why the arrangement is so lopsided.
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>> everyone is just waiting for it to blow over when he's gone in 2 years and then it's back to usual.
Trump is the symptom, not the disease. It will not go back to normal. US politics has changed. The US people have changed. There won't be a Trump 2.0 but there will be other equally horrible leaders. Maybe not the next president, but likely the one after that. Canada must adapt to the new realty rather than deny and wait.
Exactly. If it’s happened once, it will happen again.
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Canadians acting like the consequences will never be the same because of one man, when you can walk over the French-German border today with a passport instead of a rifle.
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[dead]
Be the change you want to see in the world! If you disagree with this bill don’t sit idle!
I too receive auto-replies from my MP.
I have an MP i can reliably count on to vote against bullshit like this, which means i have nobody who is accountable to me to write emails to.
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I am Canadian.
I think this bill is absolutely horrible.
What do you want me to do?
Raise awareness about the legislation and what it means for the average person (bans on iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal, VPNs, etc...) You need to also start emailing and calling members of the Senate, telling them to reject the bill.
Drive to Ottawa and take over the downtown core.
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This is a coordination problem, so people can't do anything.
It’s over. If it got this far, they wanted this.
there is literally nothing people can do. the party in charge has a majority government and a media biased enough to sell this bill as a positive thing.
the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp, and instagram all blocked canadians from using those services. the liberal party and the media would still find a way to blame trump for it, and the pm's popularity would increase.
> the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp
That is literally what is going to happen if this legislation is allowed to pass. WhatsApp will block Canada, and Apple will remove any impacted service from Canada, like iMessage.
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Remember that media bias comes from being state funded media. Of course they're going to massage the narrative towards the party giving them funding.
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Don't blow it, Canada. You think Rogers is bad now....
The public would rather be safe than be free. We see that time and time again with how people are tough on crime, how they want government to step in if they are ever defrauded or stolen from. Politicians are simply mirroring the people's wishes.
You say that, but mass surveillance was never on any ballot I recall seeing. All these laws always seem to get quietly pushed without consulting anybody other than the security services.
I don't think that's true. Even the privacy hating general public of the UK is against mass surveillance of private messaging.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/30/turns-out-br...
Crime limits regular citizens free. Scared to go out at night, open their door or go to certain parts of town. Safety allows freedom.
I'm not sure what more to do then to annoy my friends and family and speak with my MP (done), who had already voted against it. Canada's political system seems healthy compared to the USA, but it doesn't feel healthy objectively.
Thank you for speaking with your MP!
Call/contact senators is my next step, because the Senators are the next-to-last step for this bill.
People keep thinking “healthy” politics is a lack of dissent. I hear this all the time from people.
When I lived in Singapore I heard how lucky they were to live in a country where there wasn’t much disagreement (the truth is it had been squeezed out of the population)
it's not healthy, even compared to the states. it's just not crazy like the states.
US politics might be "crazy" but definitely healthier than the managed decline we're seeing in Canada.
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It has the same problem that the US has, which is it is stuck in a two party duopoly, with both major parties sharing fundamentally the same political economic outlook. Just with different takes on culture wars stuff.
The only significant opposition to this bill has been coming from the NDP, which was decimated to a small number of seats by people piling into the Liberals because of nationalism and by its previous pathetic fealty to the Liberals in the last two parliaments.
Also if Canadian, join the CCLA. They are the ones fighting for these rights.
https://ccla.org/
How does one join the CCLA?
The only reference to membership I see from the Commissioner for Lobbying states [1]:
> Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has two classes of members: ordinary members and voting members. Membership in CCLA shall be available to persons interested in furthering the Corporation's purposes and who have applied for and been accepted into membership in the Corporation by resolution of the board or in such other manner as may be determined by the board, in accordance with any membership criteria set by the board. Voting members are members who have been accepted as voting members by the board. A voting membership expires 12 months after the date of board acceptance, unless renewed by the board.
I don't see anything to this effect on the website, like a membership application form.
This is in contrast to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association which just published the decision this week to have a flat $5 open membership.
[1]: https://lobbycanada.gc.ca/app/secure/ocl/lrs/do/vwRg?cno=376...
They don't fight for these rights.
So let's assume it goes forward, what are my options to maintain privacy?
GrapheneOS for phone
Signal for messaging
Ente Photos
NotesNook for notes
A good VPN: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
If you need other replacements lmk.
Unfortunately Signal has threatened to leave the Canadian market should this bill go through, as have NordVPN, Windscribe, DuckDuckGo's VPN, Psiphon VPN, and Proton VPN. I imagine more may follow suit.
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Will TOR be blocked?
One of the main lobbyists behind Bill C-22, The Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P) has been trying to target Tor's funding for years now. So unfortunately it would be unsurprising to see them convince the Liberals to try and target Tor.
any serious answer to that question would need more context, and will have to wait until after the bill passes to see how companies/services react.
Don’t use Canadian or 14 eyes products. Keep your cell on an airplane mode most or all times. Use cash as much as possible. That however is a technical response to a political one, which usually won’t last long or it will be ineffective or even illegal, a proper political response is the right way.
Oh yeah totally, you'll 100% beat surveillance with a chinese phone and a Russian email service. No way anyone at all will spy on you that way.
The best privacy tech comes from people who live in these 5 and 14 eyes countries. Try a little bit of threat modeling instead of thinking about the problem emotionally.
https://bitchat.free/ is one, if you can convince any of your friends to use it.
I'm Canadian, and this matters a lot to me, but people don't care
The culture here is so mired in political apathy that it feels futile to even bother. People just do not care at all
I'm not a huge activist but I have been involved in a number of things when they matter a lot to me over the past twenty years or so, starting in college, but not a single one of them has ever gone my way
I'm unemployed now and worried I'm going to have an incredibly hard time ever finding work in software again, and AI is taking over, and here I am. Defeated again
I don't have it in me to fight this stuff anymore. The machine has won against me at least
I'm Canadian, too. I think most Canadians are just not informed. Most Canadians still get their news from state funded media which of course spin for the state because 'follow the money'.
We have a very complacent population, which explains the lack of innovation coming out of the country. People's idea of "business' right now is simply renting out their basement.
Most go to work, accept whatever policy the government decides is good for them, and don't push back as their living conditions decline. Given that, is it surprising that we don't see much activism?
I wish it was different but I don't know what to do. Perhaps Canadians should steal a page from the French?
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hey bud, right there with you. these are the hardest times we've faced in a very long time, but humans are nothing if not adaptable. we're fucked today but we'll see about tomorrow. wishing you the best.
Thanks dude, back at you.
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Sounds like you’re just as apathetic as those you despise.
Watching our provinces fall one by one to corrupt/kleptocratic “conservative” governments has certainly done a number on me, but it’s only made me more vocal and more involved in local advocacy.
All that apathy out there is an opportunity to awaken care and turn the tide.
Get off your ass and help.
Well, I'm American, and I watched my peers lose this fight 10+ years ago.
I was in school when the Snowden leaks came around, and asked dozens of students and teachers what they thought about it. The majority of them had no idea what had happened, some even outright rejecting it as a foreign smear campaign. A handful of people showed interest, but lost interest when there was no connection to aliens or the Bermuda triangle. My freedom-loving cohort was too preoccupied with YouTube, Twitter and Instagram for it to matter.
Fast forward to today, you're probably running USA-designed spyware on whatever computer and phone you import from America. Canada already belongs to FIVE EYES, your mobile handset market is almost entirely captured by pushover US corporations that backdoor Push Notifications and rename lakes apropos of nothing.
No matter what happens with this bill, the threat of surveillance will loom long over Canadians. Political motivation is important, but trusting the United States is an albatross on the neck.
I’m also Canadian and I don’t share your pessimism at all.
The people I know are not apathetic and I’m sorry that things don’t go your way politically, but that’s life. For example, the recent Vancouver election didn’t go my way - big whoop.
But the Vancouver elections are a microcosm of left-leaning Canadians across the country. There's no hope for the foreseeable future while boomer power remains.
I read it a few weeks ago. Something that really bothers me is that parts are written like big tech ToS that are designed to make it sound like they’re doing something for you, but they’re not.
The restrictions on powers are one example. There’s almost nothing there, but they say something like “are not allowed to compel service providers to retain data that will identify the content of your communications.”
That’s bullshit weasel words. Everyone is keeping that stuff and nothing restricts the “written sometime in the future” rules from compelling service providers to produce all of the data they’ve collected. There’s also no restriction on compelling real time wire taps.
If that was a real restriction it would say something like “retain, capture, or produce.”
There are also gag orders falling out of the sky like it’s raining and no mechanism to eventually force transparency when they’re used. They also have broad latitude to define and redefine a ton of rules that haven’t even been written yet.
I know of some places that do conferences and I don’t know what they’ll do if classified as a service provider. Imagine KYC on a couple hundred people trying to participate in a 2 hour conference.
Edit: And I think it’s a big win for organized crime. The police will only know how to use the easy tooling to catch the lowest level, dumbest criminals. The higher up criminals will (or probably already do) use private servers for communication.
Does anyone think organized crime is relying on WhatsApp or Snapchat? That’s what the low level suckers will be using (and getting caught by) so everyone can pretend the police are doing their job.
I remember a few people who opposed this bill, including a Canadian professor of law/lawyer Michael <something>, who wanted to oppose this. What happened to that? HN had blog posts about it I believe.
Pretty much every group in Canada is opposed to this bill, except for law enforcement, the Brampton city mayor, and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P).
michael geist. yes pretty much everybody knowledgeable about this bill, regardless of political stripes are against this bill. except for the party in power.
the media spends almost all of their time attacking the opposition leader instead of the current pm (who has a majority gov), so people are unfortunately quite under informed on c22 and other things the gov is doing.
CPC should take down the punching bag if they're tired of it being used.
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> except for the party in power.
The votes for this bill seem to indicate that nearly all MPs regardless of party voted in favour, and none of them voted against.
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Liberalism is all about government control. Many here seem to think you can have one without the other, and it's just not possible.
"liberalism" isn't really a word that refers to any coherent concept. It can mean whatever you need it to mean.
Unfortunately, our state funded media have no interest in pushing back on that because they're state funded by the state pushing the bill. And, in my experience, if you're not on X, you just don't know about these things. That's most Canadians. We're doomed until boomer power fades.
The bill is going to pass, there is quite literally nothing I can do to stop it.
And when I say literally nothing, I mean literally nothing. My MP (the man I voted for) crossing the floor to join the current ruling party showed me exactly how much political power I have: absolutely fuck all.
Fun fact: the government is already talking to companies who have customers to prep the infrastructure needed to handover any data requested, as in, they are almost guaranteed it will pass.
Do you have a source for that?
the largest voting block in canada (seniors) aren't really capable of understanding this issue let alone prioritizing it. in fact, for liberal voters the only thing they care about is opposing and antagonizing trump, or at least the appearance of doing so. keeping housing unaffordable is a distant second priority.
so bills like this will continue to go through since the liberals have a majority and the PMs popularity counterintuitively goes up as things go from bad to worse. im finding it hard to have any motivation to oppose this bill since resistance seems to be futile.
the dark liberal decade gets longer and darker in canada.
> in fact, for liberal voters the only thing they care about is opposing and antagonizing trump, or at least the appearance of doing so. keeping housing unaffordable is a distant second priority.
This is a conservative talking point. I'm a liberal voter, and I know lots of people who voted for the liberal party. None of them want to oppose and antagonize Trump for just for the sake of it. Most Canadians and liberal voters just want Trump to follow his own agreement in regards to trade, to stop with the 51st state rhetoric and his unnecessary antagonism of Canada.
Most Canadians I know have friends and family in America and don't want a rift between our countries. It's that Trump has seemingly gone after Canada for made up reasons just to cause problems that has made Canadians angry.
it's not a conservative talking point. i know many people who voted liberal to "stick it to trump" (their words). all they do is talk about trump. they have no idea what is happening in their own country, it's just trump vs canada and carney is the hero. it's ridiculous. and the media fuels it constantly.
as a liberal voter how do you feel about this bill?
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Does "liberal" mean the same thing it does in the USA?
You can think of them as the equivalent of the DNC-preferred wing of the democrats
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada
In Canada, it just refers to the Power Corporation
It does not and it's quite confusing. You'll often see people use the term LPC or Liberal and avoid lower-case liberal due to the confusion of that word. In Canada the Liberal party is a fiscally centrist/corporate & socially liberal(ish) (aka it's similar to the traditional British definition of Liberal). The Conservatives are a large right wing reactionary block that seems to be perpetually in the minority but with a large loyal voting block while the actual opposition mostly comes from three parties that rotate in and out of relevance as a left-wing voice BQ (Bloq-quebecois), NDP (New Democratic Party - fading since the death of Jack Layton), and the Greens (Environmental sorta, but also weirdly anti-science sometimes). And that's on the national level - at the provincial level it gets even weirder with the BCLiberals (recently named BCUP) being socially and fiscally conservative and opposed by the BC NDP and other minor parties.
Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.
No, I probably should have used "Liberal" to indicate I'm talking about the Liberal Party of Canada.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada
it's a bit of a misnomer imo. if we're talking about classical liberalism, the conservatives fit that label better. if we're talking about "liberals" i.e. the left, the NDP would fit that label better. the modern Liberals are more like neoliberal technocrats, who favour top-down state interventionism and who are the ones driving surveillance bills and attacking privacy.
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This is Canada, he's spot on. It's insane here.
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Love this. Looking forward to a private keys being `4` because the govt needs it that way.
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FYI /pol/ is up again
Frankly surprised that username didn't get some kind of auto flag on its own
This govts to attitude to the dignity of its citizens is demoralizing. I have more hope in the outcome of a US annexation than I do for any significant positive policy direction. it’s done. Bureaucracy has triumphed and there’s nothing to save.
Same here. We've disqualified our own sovereignty.
Traitor.
traitor to what? what does our country even stand for?
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The meta analysis on this is is quite interesting HN tends to have a positive opinion on modern Canada. They then find it difficult to understand why it moves towards a tech dystopia.
How will these HNers square the circle of their cognitive dissonance.
Read the above to find out!
how is it cognitive dissonance when canada is mostly in the right about a lot of issues that america is in the wrong about? just because you disagree with some dickhead politican's point of view doesn't mean you disagree with the country. there's plenty of shitty bills like this being thrust upon americans against their will. what a weird argument.
When did I mention america?
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surely the government is only wrong about privacy. they're right about everything else.