Canadian Government Gears Up to Pretend to Care About Privacy

Reports are surfacing saying that privacy reform is going to be tabled soon. We’ve been through this song and dance before.

Let’s just get this out of the way right off the top: the Canadian government doesn’t give a damn about privacy for Canadians. If grandpa had his information stolen and is constantly being barraged with scam calls or if a mother of three had her information leaked and now is dealing with trying to get the money that was cleaned out of her bank back, those scenarios may get lip service from the government, but those sorts of things are generally going to get an uncaring shrug from politicians.

How do I know this? Just look at the track record of both privacy reform as well as other pieces of legislation. In 2022, the Canadian government was unable to delay privacy reform any longer and tabled Bill C-27. The tabling rightfully angered privacy experts because the bill was largely a carbon copy of the previous bill complete with all of the problems that came with it. Experts waited years before the bill finally got tabled and the number one question was “what the heck were they working on all this time if the bill is basically identical with only minor clerical changes to the wording?”

To make matters worse, the government spent the months since then slow walking privacy reform and regularly hitting the snooze button whenever a massive data breach hit the news. The intended affect was achieved with the legislation dying on the orderpaper when an election was called.

Any progress to make privacy laws stronger is simply not a priority for the government as the bill barely made any progress at all in the legislative process.

Conversely, legislation that does the opposite tends to fly through the legislative process. Legislation to make it easier for political parties to pillage people’s personal information? Passed. Legislation to make political parties immune to provincial privacy laws? Passed. Surveillance legislation that would break encryption and wrap Canadians up in dragnet warrantless surveillance regardless of suspicion? Tabled and being fast tracked. Legislation that would compel users to fork over personal information for identification purposes just to use things like social media? Tabled and set to be fast tracked. Anything that breaks up Canadian privacy is a top priority, but privacy reform legislation? Ain’t no one got no time for dat!

Just to punctuate just how long this has been going on, the concept of privacy reform was met with mostly shrugs during the 2025 election. However, in elections in the past, that was a different story. In the 2021 election, the concept of privacy reform was unanimously supported by all political parties. That was a repeat from the 2019 election where the concept of privacy reform was universally agreed upon as a priority. So, basically, Canadian’s have been waiting for about a decade for politicians to finally clean up the privacy mess that was left behind from years of neglect.

Today, I recently found out that privacy reform is apparently expected to be tabled soon… again. While previous efforts have long been met with relief that the Canadian government was finally going to do something right in the world of technology, that optimism is not being reflected this time around. From Michael Geist:

The government is set to introduce its long-promised privacy reform legislation early this week, with the recognition of a fundamental right to privacy expected to serve as a foundational element of the bill. Establishing privacy as a fundamental right would be a welcome and long-overdue development, one that many have called for and that was set to be added to Bill C-27, the prior attempt at privacy reform. Yet the framing is difficult to square with the government’s actual record on privacy, which over the past year has involved a steady stream of privacy-invasive measures that leave the fundamental rights rhetoric feeling more like virtue signalling than a genuine commitment. Simply put, the government cannot credibly claim to treat privacy as a fundamental right while actively undermining that right through a series of other bills and efforts to sideline the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Geist is absolutely right to be skeptical about these efforts. While some might dismiss this skepticism as mere cynicism, that skepticism, as I highlighted above, is highly warranted. The Canadian government has a very bad attitude towards the privacy of Canadians and it is really obvious:

The government’s underlying attitude toward privacy may be the most telling of all. Bill C-25 moved to shut down meaningful study, restricting the committee’s examination to three days in what appears to be a calculated bet that few Canadians would pay attention to a set of embarrassingly weak privacy rules. And on Bill C-22, when Conservative MP Jacob Mantle pressed the privacy implications of the bill during clause-by-clause, Liberal MP Sima Acan this week responded that the bill “has nothing to do with the privacy of people and their information,” a statement that, after months of hearings on mandatory metadata retention, weakened encryption, and warrantless access to personal information, is difficult to describe as anything other than ill-informed and suggests a government that does not conceive of privacy the way most Canadians do.

Geist is absolutely right. As far as I’m concerned, the Canadian government views privacy as an obstacle rather than a fundamental right. Privacy reform that even does the bare minimum to protect people’s privacy is likely seen by politicians as counter-productive to their objectives. The only reason to even table this bill in the first place is because privacy reform is a massively popular concept among people who are sick and tired of having no real protections at all. So, politicians advance a half measures privacy reform bill as a cynical ploy to grab some votes. Pretend to care about privacy reform, get some support, then slow walk privacy reform to death afterwards. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What’s more, Geist is also correct on this point as well:

The new privacy bill deserves to be evaluated on its merits and if the forthcoming bill delivers a genuine fundamental right to privacy backed by meaningful enforcement, that will be welcome. But legislation does not arise in a vacuum and adding language proclaiming a “fundamental right to privacy” while actively undermining that privacy can’t be ignored. The government may talk the talk on privacy, but it is time for it to walk the walk as well.

I’m OK with judging the bill based on its merits, but I’m very skeptical as well on how meaningful this bill is even going to be. If anything, I fully expect it to be the same old half measures that lawmakers have zero intention of passing. If it makes it to the senate committee hearings with actual meaningful reforms, I would be very impressed. At the moment, though, I find that scenario to be exceedingly unlikely.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.