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OTTAWA — The federal Liberals are taking another shot at easing police and security agencies’ authority to intercept digital communications, proposing a new law on “lawful access” that’s narrower than one they gave up on in 2025.
The previous attempt, part of a much broader security bill, angered civil libertarians and privacy advocates. Cybersecurity leaders warned it would drive tech entrepreneurs away from Canada. In the fall, the Liberals introduced a new version of the omnibus bill, with the digital-search section cut.
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On Thursday, with the new Bill C-22, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree tried again.
What police want: To investigate digital communications, Canadian authorities largely rely on laws written to allow police to tap telephone calls—when that meant putting alligator clips on copper wires and there was just one phone company whose wires mattered. The proliferation of telecom providers, forms of digital messaging and types of encryption can bog down and even block legitimate criminal investigations.
“Technology has moved forward. Our laws are stuck in another century,” Anandasangaree said Thursday, surrounded by senior officers from multiple police forces as he announced the bill in Ottawa.
What Bill C-22 allows: If the legislation passes as written, phone and internet providers will be required to tell police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) whether a particular person is a customer. The idea is for authorities to home in on their subjects faster and seek warrants from judges for more invasive access to communications, location data and other records.
The law also requires service providers to have systems that enable them to respond to those legal demands. The government will be empowered to require them to install particular hardware or software for that purpose if they don’t already have it.
The law includes language allowing co-operation between Canadian authorities and foreign ones, and allows Canadian police to seek information from foreign providers.
How it’s different from the last try: Both sets of powers are hemmed in more tightly. Only telecom providers—not anybody offering any kind of electronic service, as was previously the case—will have to say whether a person is a subscriber, though the police need only ask. The government emphasizes that it’s a yes or no question—anything beyond that would take a judge’s authorization.
Politicians alone wouldn’t have the authority to order service providers to install digital tapping systems. The new bill says the federal intelligence commissioner has to agree first. Currently, the job’s main function is approving or rejecting exceptional operations by CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment. The commissioner has to be a retired judge—longtime Federal Court justice Simon Noël, currently.
Immediate reaction: The new bill “falls short of protecting Canadians from weakened encryption and unauthorized spying,” said Josh Tabish of the left-leaning pro-technology lobby group Chamber of Progress, which called the revisions “largely cosmetic.” Backdoors in tech security are backdoors even if their installation is better supervised, the group’s statement said.
Open-internet advocacy group OpenMedia sees the same problem. The new bill is better than the last, executive director Matt Hatfield said in a statement, but hackers and foreign intelligence agencies will still be able to exploit any security vulnerabilities installed in commercial systems to enable police access.
“Our government has not done the work to make Bill C-22 safe for Canadians,” Hatfield said.
