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.
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.
electeds? primary threat? i think that might backfire in the canadian senate
i know i voted against the referendum question last week to consider moving to a US inspired elected senate system. i dont think we need that pageantry
I'm familiar with American and Swiss elections. In both, the principal threat to an incumbent is from an own-party challenger to their seat.
For an incumbent, particularly one in a comfortable seat, an opposition candidate is usually not an issue. But someone from inside the camp is annoying and requires rhetorical contorting and lots of spending, spending that can then leave one vulnerable to an otherwise-benign opposition candidate. (Also, motivated activists are annoying in the best way.)
A smart elected–in these systems–will thus take a call to defuse anger before it develops into organized activism.
Ah, to clarify, Canada's upper house is basically a house of lords equivalent that we expect to be full of puffed up nobodies that get paid a too generous stipend to sit there and keep their mouths shut. Canada has one elected congress body (the one we all talk about) and then this vestigial senate which is generally expected to sit there and silently approve everything that passes through it.
It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.
Yeah, I think it'd be excellent if we could just disband our upper house and while it's worth pushing them to act on this bill I loathe the senate's continued existence and would rather be in a position where this emergency call happened prior to it passing the house.
That actually sounds crazy to me. At least for the House of Commons. I'm amenable to upper chambers of bicameral legislatures being indirectly elected. That's how the US Senate used to be before the constitution was amended.
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.
Paula Simons is almost certainly against Bill C-22, so it probably won't be of any use to contact her about rejecting it. I would focus efforts on other Senators.
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.
Careful there, too much of this kind of thinking and the MPs are going to find child porn on your phone, you sick criminal thief trying to overthrow the government.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
We have a Canadian Constitution and the Charter of rights and freedoms, section 8 covers search and privacy, it even looks like a warrant is needed for messages just laying around a server https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2013/2013scc16/2013scc1... but this bill aims to put a harpoon through our charter rights!
Canada is relatively unique among the common wealth countries as its founders were smart enough to remove parliamentary supremacy and have real judicial review.
I just wish that they would have also included a constitutional review council that reviews legislation before it comes law like France did (Constitutional Council), because a massive amount of damage can be done while waiting for the Canadian Supreme Court to rule on something.
You should probably educate yourself about the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has so far held up far better than the Amendments. Its language is far more specific and precise, and the document itself provides justification and context for its requirements... Unlike the amendments, which have largely been re-interpreted and gutted by partisan judges into absurdity.
Do the 13th, or the 14th, or the 4th amendment mean anything these days?
Examples of what? An insurrectionist assuming the office of president? SCOTUS approving gerrymandering aimed at suppressing minority votes? Armed, masked thugs with a license to kill asking for your papers when you walk the street? Trump running for a third term in office? Immigrants arrested, held without trial, and deported without due process or access to a lawyer?
We have lots of examples of that. Are there lots of examples in Canada of basic charter rights being violated in such a manner? Or do you dispute that the text of the charter is unclear?
> Are there lots of examples in Canada of basic charter rights being violated in such a manner?
Plenty, it's just usually against unpopular targets. The most notable recent one being the trucker protest[1]. And what were the consequences for those in charge for this charter violation? I believe the answer is "nothing".
So what we have in Canada is a charter that theoretically protects citizens, but in practice can be violated by the government with impunity.
I don't understand a bit of your complaint. As you yourself described, the system worked exactly as intended. The government does something illegal, the courts mull over it, and decide that it was, in fact, illegal. The government's currently not doing it.
Surely you can see a difference between an one-off that after the fact was found to be illegal, and hasn't been repeated, versus a pattern of the courts making batshit insane rulings?
Since you think that the truckers had to right to do what they did... If the courts ruled against them, would you have taken that as evidence for the quality of the charter, and the legal system that stands behind it? Or is this a tails I win, heads you lose situation?
No piece of paper can ever prevent a government from doing something illegal, or from passing an illegal law. The courts are only ever an after-the-fact remedy.
In the US, meanwhile, that remedy doesn't even work.
>> 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.
I wouldn't except a liberal MP to vote against this, it's their own plan. I wouldn't expect a conservative MP to vote against this, they believe in neoliberalism and entrenching gov and corporate power the same way the liberals do (see bill C-39, supported by both the liberals and conservatives).
Luckily we don't have a two party system in canada.
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.
Canada has problems - a state media that barks the party line isn't one of them. One political party would love you to believe that and it's aligned with the party south of the border that's trying to destroy media credibility across the board, but that's a political effort because transparency is an impediment to their agenda.
This isn't to say there aren't biases in media - there always is, everyone is biased in their own way - but the presence of that bias can be understood and having a robust pipeline for news is more important that trying to futilely eliminate all bias.
Just recently there was a large number of anti-encryption and anti-private messaging news reports/articles in Canada. They all came from a single shitty article from The Canadian Press News that was written by Nono Shen.
Major Canadian news outlets like CTV News were blindly following that article, and saying "something has to be done" about encrypted messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLHkcOmcZOA
CTV news anchor Carolyn Jarvis was continuously pushing for AI-powered mass surveillance of all private messages in Canada throughout the news segment. And CTV News also falsely labeled Liz Repking as a "cybersecurity expert" and let her promote her anti-privacy views: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2026/10/07/they-have-a-shared-r...
Other articles on the subject had various anti-privacy/anti-encryption dog whistles like "going dark" included in them.
All of this can be true without stupidly calling it "state sponsored."
The US mainstream media is equally stupid -- "liberal" or "conservative" -- CNN or Fox both make me want to gouge my eyes out.
Those of us on the (real) left have been pointing out the problem with the broadcast media for decades. Concentration of ownership and private interests are the problem, and frankly the CBC is the least worst of the bunch here in the country.
Canada is currently under a mass nationalist fervour under which the Carney gov't is getting away with a lot. The thing is the stuff he is getting away with... is exactly the stuff the Conservatives also wanted to do anyways. So people on the right frothing at the mouth about the liberals just baffles me. He is literally implementing the full CPC platform from the last election.
Canada has a free press, and many of its largest media outlets (the Sun, the National Post, the Globe, etc.) are strongly right-leaning and had no problems tarring Trudeau's Liberals night and day when he was in power. This is a problem you've invented, not the actual issue here.
what are you even on about, this is complete nonsense
nevermind half the population doesn't even pay attention to traditional "the media" these days
the bulk of "the media" in Canada is US owned, not "state funded" (which is only the CBC) and I haven't gotten any particular pro-vibes around this bill from them
I've never gotten such vibes either (that being said the alignment of the CBC isn't exactly neutral either, their french counterpart seems more neutral).
But I have spent/wasted enough time online to know that Conservatives do truly believe that the CBC is very biased against them and thus should be defunded (or, alternatively, they often suggest giving the same amount of money to Rebel News).
Is the worldwide liberal conspiracy in the room with us right now? Because all I see all over the place are various reactionary movements gaining power, ruining everything, and continuing to blame liberals for the failings of their quarter-brained policies.
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.
As someone who’s met countless Canadians who are thankful and grateful to be in the US and not in a perpetual decline that’s been the case in Canada for year now, I beg to differ.
Do you think that perhaps a sample of Canadians that emigrated to the US might not be representative of all Canadians?
Also, if you're in a tech sphere then there's even a notable bias of folks in SF that are happy to have left whatever other part of the US they used to reside in.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I'm also in Canada no its not this is a stupid take both Liberals and Conservatives push the same neo-libral crap. The only difference is the Cons want to push a culture war on us. Go back to Russia bot
You could say the same thing about the social agenda of the Liberal party. They will expand the Temp Foreign Workers program undermining wage growth for the poorest while pushing controversial social issues front and center.
[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Peti...
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.
i know i voted against the referendum question last week to consider moving to a US inspired elected senate system. i dont think we need that pageantry
I'm familiar with American and Swiss elections. In both, the principal threat to an incumbent is from an own-party challenger to their seat.
For an incumbent, particularly one in a comfortable seat, an opposition candidate is usually not an issue. But someone from inside the camp is annoying and requires rhetorical contorting and lots of spending, spending that can then leave one vulnerable to an otherwise-benign opposition candidate. (Also, motivated activists are annoying in the best way.)
A smart elected–in these systems–will thus take a call to defuse anger before it develops into organized activism.
It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.
Parties select their representatives who run in the election.
The system basically guarantees that insiders cannot be removed.
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.
Paula Simons has also been actively listening to Canadians on this subject. https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/simons-paula/
That's politics 101. Read up Mark Twain's Running For Governor.
Dial #lever and say “cut off”.
They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
Please cease this kind of behavior immediately. We're supposed to be the only dumbshits around here.
Yours truly,
'Merica
Caniba
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.
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.
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.
Well, they might have their own Fourth Amendment if they chose to fight against the British instead of with them during the American revolution!
History aside, now they have what they have.
I just wish that they would have also included a constitutional review council that reviews legislation before it comes law like France did (Constitutional Council), because a massive amount of damage can be done while waiting for the Canadian Supreme Court to rule on something.
Do the 13th, or the 14th, or the 4th amendment mean anything these days?
We have lots of examples of that. Are there lots of examples in Canada of basic charter rights being violated in such a manner? Or do you dispute that the text of the charter is unclear?
If it's the latter, you're free to read it for yourself. Is there a lot in https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html#h-44 that you find unclear?
Plenty, it's just usually against unpopular targets. The most notable recent one being the trucker protest[1]. And what were the consequences for those in charge for this charter violation? I believe the answer is "nothing".
So what we have in Canada is a charter that theoretically protects citizens, but in practice can be violated by the government with impunity.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-federal-cou...
Surely you can see a difference between an one-off that after the fact was found to be illegal, and hasn't been repeated, versus a pattern of the courts making batshit insane rulings?
Since you think that the truckers had to right to do what they did... If the courts ruled against them, would you have taken that as evidence for the quality of the charter, and the legal system that stands behind it? Or is this a tails I win, heads you lose situation?
No piece of paper can ever prevent a government from doing something illegal, or from passing an illegal law. The courts are only ever an after-the-fact remedy.
In the US, meanwhile, that remedy doesn't even work.
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.
Luckily we don't have a two party system in canada.
I think this bill is absolutely horrible.
What do you want me to do?
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.
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.
This isn't to say there aren't biases in media - there always is, everyone is biased in their own way - but the presence of that bias can be understood and having a robust pipeline for news is more important that trying to futilely eliminate all bias.
* https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/national/tumbler-ridge-c...
Major Canadian news outlets like CTV News were blindly following that article, and saying "something has to be done" about encrypted messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLHkcOmcZOA
CTV news anchor Carolyn Jarvis was continuously pushing for AI-powered mass surveillance of all private messages in Canada throughout the news segment. And CTV News also falsely labeled Liz Repking as a "cybersecurity expert" and let her promote her anti-privacy views: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2026/10/07/they-have-a-shared-r...
Other articles on the subject had various anti-privacy/anti-encryption dog whistles like "going dark" included in them.
The US mainstream media is equally stupid -- "liberal" or "conservative" -- CNN or Fox both make me want to gouge my eyes out.
Those of us on the (real) left have been pointing out the problem with the broadcast media for decades. Concentration of ownership and private interests are the problem, and frankly the CBC is the least worst of the bunch here in the country.
Canada is currently under a mass nationalist fervour under which the Carney gov't is getting away with a lot. The thing is the stuff he is getting away with... is exactly the stuff the Conservatives also wanted to do anyways. So people on the right frothing at the mouth about the liberals just baffles me. He is literally implementing the full CPC platform from the last election.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-two-prom...
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/cbc-news-media-bias
nevermind half the population doesn't even pay attention to traditional "the media" these days
the bulk of "the media" in Canada is US owned, not "state funded" (which is only the CBC) and I haven't gotten any particular pro-vibes around this bill from them
But I have spent/wasted enough time online to know that Conservatives do truly believe that the CBC is very biased against them and thus should be defunded (or, alternatively, they often suggest giving the same amount of money to Rebel News).
https://liberal.ca
Also, if you're in a tech sphere then there's even a notable bias of folks in SF that are happy to have left whatever other part of the US they used to reside in.
https://www.bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-th...
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.
Signal for messaging
Ente Photos
NotesNook for notes
A good VPN: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
If you need other replacements lmk.
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.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/30/turns-out-br...
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The votes for this bill seem to indicate that nearly all MPs regardless of party voted in favour, and none of them voted against.
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.
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.
Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.
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.
You could say the same thing about the social agenda of the Liberal party. They will expand the Temp Foreign Workers program undermining wage growth for the poorest while pushing controversial social issues front and center.