Liberals are dismissing the privacy concerns surrounding the government’s lawful access bill as “tinfoil hat” and “paranoid” conspiracy theories, even after amending the controversial legislation to address some of those issues.
The House of Commons passed Bill C-22 on Thursday before breaking for the summer, a day after approving a motion to fast-track the bill and end debate at the public safety committee, which was then forced to approve it just before midnight without debating dozens of outstanding amendments.
The amended bill will now head to the Senate.
The legislation would give law enforcement the ability to get access to digital information more quickly and easily for investigations under a judicial warrant.
Yet provisions in the bill that would allow the public safety minister to secretly order electronic service providers to retain user metadata and create access capabilities for their systems have sparked alarm from privacy advocates, academics, tech companies and opposition parties.
At a press conference outside the House of Commons on Thursday, Government House leader Steven MacKinnon accused Conservatives of “obstruction” during the committee’s debate while defending the decision to fast-track the bill.
“It used to be that Conservatives were the law and order party,” he told reporters. “This is a very real set of reforms in terms of criminal justice. What it has met from the Conservatives is this wall of conspiracy theory, frankly paranoia, that I know many other Conservatives bristle at.
“I hope that the conspiracies and the tinfoil hats are something that will fade away over time, but we can now safely say that it is the Liberal Party that’s the party that’s most clearly for law and order in the country.”
The Canadian Civil Liberties Association pushed back on MacKinnon’s comments, noting it carefully assessed the legislation and compared it to other Five Eyes allies’ lawful access regimes in its recent analysis with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on how the bill poses significant privacy concerns.
“We did our homework,” Tamir Israel, the CCLA’s director on privacy and surveillance issues, said in an interview.
“Some of the ways that they’re minimizing the privacy concerns that some of these proposals raise actually undermine confidence that, when this regime does come into effect and gets applied in secret, that the right type of balancing is going to be happening.”
Earlier this week, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said it was “time to choose” to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime in passing C-22 as it faced delays in committee.
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Those comments echoed his Conservative predecessor Vic Toews, who said in 2012 as the Harper government pushed its own lawful access legislation that critics — including Liberals — “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers.”
The bill was passed Thursday with government amendments that would shorten the maximum amount of time for metadata retention from one year to six months.
The amended bill also makes clear that nothing in the bill should be seen as “compelling an electronic service provider to decrypt” any encrypted user information. Companies like Apple and Google had warned the bill could weaken encryption.
Another amendment says those orders would need to be reviewed by the independent National Security and Intelligence Review Agency within 30 days of being issued.
Israel said that, while the amendments appear to add “surface improvements” to the bill, “the fundamental flaws in this legislation are still intact.”
“The ability to impose these requirements onto service providers without public scrutiny, and without broad scrutiny from the technical community, means that this framework is just not equipped to push back against the types of problems that we’re going to see,” he said, including potential “really broad security vulnerabilities.”
That potential has prompted a swath of companies, from Signal and NordVPN to DuckDuckGo, to say they may limit services or leave Canada altogether if C-22 passes as written.
“It’s irresponsible to put a framework in place like this that we know is going to be used for decades on technologies that we can’t even envision at this moment, but it’s broad enough to embrace them without having the right oversight and infrastructure in place,” Israel added.
The bill was fast-tracked after the public safety committee only managed to scrutinize and pass roughly a dozen amendments in 25 hours of clause-by-clause debate alongside government, RCMP and Canadian Security and Intelligence Service officials.
Liberals had argued that it could take until the end of 2028 to pass the remaining amendments at that pace, while police and CSIS were saying the powers granted by the bill are desperately needed to modernize their criminal investigation methods.
“Every day matters in this place and a legislative achievement matters,” MacKinnon told reporters Thursday.
“The Senate can now take this up as soon as they return.”
Conservative MP Frank Caputo, a vice-chair of the committee, lamented the move to shut down debate during the final meeting on the bill late Wednesday night.
“Make no mistake, a court will consider the words that we pass on paper here someday, and they will decide the constitutionality of those words,” he said. “And we are expected to pass those words without debate.
“To me, that is unconscionable.”
NDP MP Jenny Kwan, who represented her party during the committee’s study, also criticized the process and said the amended bill “did not fix the central problem: Canadians are still being asked to trust broad surveillance powers, secret orders, and future regulations that Parliament itself has never fully examined.”
“Canadians deserve legislation that protects both public safety and fundamental rights,” Kwan said in a statement Thursday.
“Instead, the government chose to curtail committee debate while dozens of amendments remained under consideration. The centralizing approach of the Carney government continues.”
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