Like many expansions of government power, Bill C-22 (dubbed the Lawful Access Act) arrives dressed in reassuring bureaucratic language. It speaks soothingly about “facilitating access” to “basic information” and “modernizing” certain provisions respecting the timely gathering of data. In reality, this legislation represents a significant step toward building the machinery of a surveillance state in Canada.
The bill would require major telecom companies such as Bell, Rogers, and Telus to retain detailed metadata on every customer’s communications for up to one year. This includes the date, time, duration, type of communication, device identifiers, and location data from cell towers and other signals. Authorities could use this information to reconstruct a person’s movements, associations, and daily activities over extended periods.
University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist has called mandatory metadata retention “one of the most privacy invasive tools a government can deploy.” Thompson Rivers University law professor Robert Diab warns that the bill gives the government “a new power to order our cellphone companies to preserve the metadata attaching to all of our calls, emails, and texts for up to a year,” including precisely where and when we used our phones and with whom we were in touch.
Unlike existing Criminal Code provisions that allow targeted preservation orders only when police have reasonable grounds to suspect an offence, Bill C-22 imposes blanket retention on all users, innocent or otherwise. Germany and the United States, among other countries, have rejected this approach in favour of targeted metadata preservation in the context of a specific investigation based on probable grounds of criminal wrongdoing, like the law Canada already has currently.
Professor Geist further notes that the bill lowers the threshold for certain production orders for subscriber information — basic identifying details such as name, address, and account number — from “reasonable grounds to believe” to the weaker “reasonable grounds to suspect.” It also enacts a brand new Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act that compels electronic service providers to “facilitate” government access to personal data, often through secret orders, and with reduced judicial oversight. The proposed legislation extends assistance to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and notably contains no meaningful role for the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to provide independent oversight.
Politicians never take away our rights and freedoms without offering a nice-sounding pretext. Fighting crime, national security, and protecting children from online harms are the familiar justifications used to usher in greater surveillance powers. Yet history shows how quickly such tools can be, and will be, turned against law-abiding citizens.
Just four years ago, the federal government directed financial institutions to freeze the bank accounts of Canadians who had donated to a peaceful protest. These individuals had not been charged with any crime and were given no due process or opportunity to defend themselves. That episode revealed how easily the state can weaponize access to private information when it chooses to do so.
Surveillance abuses human dignity. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Why would governments, once empowered with massive quantities of private and personal information about Canadians, not abuse this power to control us?
Privacy is the shield of a free people. Bill C-22 would replace that shield with a looking glass through which officials can observe the movements and associations of ordinary Canadians with ease.
The onus should be on the government to demonstrate with compelling evidence, and not merely to assert, that current laws are inadequate for fighting crime. When it comes to Bill C-22, the federal government has failed to make that case. Instead, it quietly constructs the infrastructure for ongoing digital surveillance while presenting it as mere administrative modernization.
Canadians should strongly oppose any legislation that treats every citizen as a potential subject of continuous digital monitoring. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was designed to place firm limits on state power, not to facilitate its steady expansion into private life. Parliament must reject Bill C-22 and preserve the privacy rights that are essential to a free society.
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
