Liberals Admit That Bill C-22 is Just the First Surveillance Step

Mass government surveillance is something the Liberals are pushing in Bill C-22, but it apparently isn’t where it’s going to be left.

The other day, I wrote about how the Liberals are seemingly taking advantage of their new found majority government and using it to push warrantless wiretapping through Bill C-22. The effort envisions massive databases on people regardless of whether or not they are under suspicion. This by collecting vast troves of “metadata” to keep track of where and when you visited any website or contacted individuals among other things.

At the time of writing that article, I framed the legislation as warrantless wiretapping and a massive surveillance program of ordinary citizens. This despite the Liberals insistence that this is merely about “updating” the law to keep up to modern times (it is not). The talking points also include the retro hits of this debate. One of them being how police are overwhelmed with paperwork and by skipping that pesky annoying little thing called “judicial oversight”, only then can the police go after the bad guys. Another retro talking point is how this is all about just looking up information in the phone book and all of this is just no big deal. Regardless, this is a massive government surveillance program being cooked up once again.

Some people might look at this and say that this sounds alarmist. They might argue that a massive information dragnet program hoovering up metadata is perfectly acceptable because the contents of the messages isn’t being snapped up like everything else. If you are one of the naive people who believe it, well, I’ve got bad news for you. That perspective just got completely obliterated by a member of the Liberal party. This came courtesy of Ruby Sahota who admitted publicly that Bill C-22 is merely the beginning of the massive surveillance program. From Michael Geist:

The admission came when Conservative MP Glen Motz, himself a former police officer, asked Sahota whether law enforcement had communicated whether there are things they want that are not yet in this bill. Sahota acknowledged that law enforcement would likely support an even broader scope, described Bill C-22 as a first step, and said the government needs to get the bill passed to take further steps. In case her position wasn’t clear, she added that she would be open to going further. That framing should concern anyone who thinks the bill already goes too far. As I have argued, Bill C-22’s metadata retention requirements would compel service providers to store data for all their users for up to a year, and the surveillance-capability provisions would require permanent intercept infrastructure embedded in Canadian networks through secret ministerial orders. Both raise serious constitutional and security questions. Yet the government’s position is apparently that these provisions represent not the outer boundary of what it wants but merely a starting point. For a bill that the government has been at pains to characterize as balanced and carefully circumscribed, telling Parliament you plan to go further is a chilling admission.

Conservative MP Dane Lloyd raised a second question that has received too little attention: who bears the cost of compliance? Bill C-22 comes with significant costs and Lloyd asked whether the government planned any compensation schemes. Anandasangaree’s answer was blunt: the government expects compliance and is not contemplating compensation, framing the obligation as part of the CRTC’s licensing regime. Yet the problem with that answer is that Bill C-22’s obligations extend well beyond CRTC-licensed telecommunications carriers. Indeed, elements of the bill apply to anyone providing a service in Canada. Framing the compliance obligation as a condition of CRTC licensing mischaracterizes the scope of the bill’s own requirements. Building and maintaining intercept-capable infrastructure and responding to law enforcement demands requires ongoing investment in hardware, software, staffing, and security. Smaller providers, who compete against incumbents with far greater resources, will be disproportionately affected. Moreover, fees have a disciplining effect on requests. If there is no cost, law enforcement is likely to aggressively demand more access. Even modest fees may prompt them to reconsider whether the request for user information is strictly necessary. In short, zero cost is likely to mean more surveillance.

The Bloc Québécois’ Claude DeBellefeuille pressed Sahota on what may be the most important legal question in Part 1 of the bill: why did the government choose to reduce the standard for subscriber information production orders from “reasonable grounds to believe” to the lower “reasonable grounds to suspect”. I have written on the difference and the concern that the lower standard will harm user privacy. Sahota defended the lower threshold by arguing that subscriber information requests occur at the earliest stages of an investigation, where requiring reasonable grounds to believe would be too burdensome. Yet reasonable grounds to believe has been in place for over a decade for precisely this kind of information. Further, the Supreme Court’s Spencer and Bykovets decisions emphasized the sensitivity of the information at stake and the constitutional weight of the privacy interests involved. Choosing the lower standard for precisely the type of information the Court has flagged as constitutionally sensitive invites Charter scrutiny. As noted earlier this week, the government has still not released the Charter statement for Bill C-22.

Geist rightfully points out that things have gone from bad to worse. Indeed, the lower threshold has long been a point of concern with these debates. Specifically, the lowering standard from “reasonable grounds to believe” to “reasonable grounds to suspect” is almost giving me PTSD from the debates of old. It’s basically a way to help hoover up pretty much everything.

The fact that the government expects the carriers to just foot the bill in all of this seems likely to trigger a response from the carriers who are going to be reluctant to go along with such a plan. If some of them have a history of questioning the idea that they will foot the bill over copyright infringement notices, they are going to see an exponentially larger cost to comply with the “collect it all” approach of this dragnet surveillance program. The last thing the carriers want is the government dipping into their CEO yearly private yacht fund.

Then there is the obvious comments about this being only the beginning. Some might caution against talking about a slippery slope in this debate given how much this program already pulls so much information, but here we have a sitting government MP flatly admitting that the slippery slope is built in by design. They know that the even nastier provisions couldn’t be shoved into this bill because it would cause too much public outrage, so the idea is to just gradually phase in the police state over a series of bills instead of doing it all in one shot. The open admission that this is the plan is absolutely wild to see.

Still, Canadians have every reason to be against this legislation. With the government majority in hand, however, it’s going to make opposing this obviously unconstitutional bill much more difficult – at least on the legislative front. Can Canadians get another miracle and see this bill die on the orderpaper once again? Only time will tell on that one.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.