Canada’s Bill C-22 Tech Exodus Grows with ExpressVPN

More and more companies are either saying they won’t comply or leaving Canada altogether. ExpressVPN has joined the outcry.

Bill C-22, Canada’s warrantless wiretapping legislation (AKA “Lawful Access”) is an absolute privacy nightmare that should’ve died in 2017, but sadly, the Canadian government absolutely insists on stepping on this rake as if it is some kind of moral obligation to get smacked in the face with a large wooden handle.

Unsurprisingly, the consequences that keep cropping up over this intrusion of your daily lives keeps appearing. The bill is unconstitutional, unworkable, and deeply offensive to name a few. In a bid to fully repeat history, the Canadian government recycled decades old talking points to defend the legislation. Those talking points include how ‘technology is changing and the law needs to keep up with that’, ‘police can’t be burdened with the paperwork of getting a warrant before wiretapping someone’, and the biggest greatest hit of debunked talking points, ‘it’s just like looking someone up in the phone book’. None of these talking points stand up to scrutiny by any means, but the government is using these anyway because, apparently, we need to have another round of carrying out the definition of insanity where the government tries the same thing over and over again and expect a different results.

Experts and scholars have, unsurprisingly, pushed back against this bill, pointing to the many many problems with this. That includes the retention of data for a year regardless of suspicion, the easily abused lower threshold of ‘reason to believe’ to obtain said information, and more. Sadly, the government is seemingly trying to ignore all of these valid criticisms and argue that people who are critical of the bill are just “misunderstanding” the bill and insisting that the bill strikes the right balance with the extremely convincing reasoning of “because I said so”. This sadly repeats the history of previous bad bills like the Online Streaming Act and Online News Act where the government ignores all the experts and push the bill anyway only to see the long warned about consequences come to fruition. It’s infuriating to watch to say the least.

At any rate, the consequences of this legislation are already appearing. As I reported earlier this month, companies are increasingly saying that they are either not going to comply with the legislation or leave the country altogether. Those companies include NordVPN, Signal, and Windscribe. To the surprise of no one, the demand that every web service keep detailed logs of who visits their services and for what reason isn’t sitting too well with VPN services – many of whom don’t retain logs for reasons that should be extremely obvious (they are selling a privacy service after all).

Well, another VPN service has spoken out against Bill C-22. That just so happens to be ExpressVPN. They are arguing that retaining logs and breaking their encryption are “non-negotiable”. From Tech Radar:

The privacy industry’s backlash against Canada’s controversial Bill C-22 continues to grow. Virtual private network giant ExpressVPN has formally criticized the proposed legislation, stating that its no-logs architecture and encryption remain strictly “non-negotiable.”

In a statement shared with TechRadar, ExpressVPN said to be “carefully reviewing” Canada’s Bill C-22, particularly the provisions on access to user data and the requirement to build technical capabilities supporting government access to encrypted user communications.

For millions who rely on VPN services, the proposal threatens the core mechanisms of online privacy. Under a strict no-logs policy, a VPN provider like ExpressVPN technically promises to never track or store what its users do online. This means that if a government demands user logs, a secure provider simply has nothing to hand over — a fundamental privacy guarantee that Bill C-22 threatens to disrupt.

There is little doubt that things are quickly spiralling out of control with Bill C-22. Companies are crying foul and others are saying that they are leaving the country altogether. As more and more companies tell the Canadian government “we’re out”, the hope is that the Canadian government would finally come to their senses about all of this. It’s going to be difficult, but the pressure on the Canadian government must continue to ramp up if there is any hope at all that this terrible bill can finally get shelved.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.