Liberals: We Are Demanding Warrantless Wiretapping Because Fentanyl

The Liberal party wants law enforcement to spy on everything you do without pesky oversight? Why? Because Fentanyl.

Earlier, I wrote about the stunning re-introduction of Lawful Access (warrantless wiretapping) to the legislative agenda – a debate long thought dead until this month. It’s stunning because Canadian’s have sent the message loudly and clearly for over 20 years that such measures were unnecessary and a violation of their rights. It was a loud message because it helped to defeat both the Liberal party and Conservative party governments in the past. The reason why it has been a debate long thought dead because a committee, back in 2017, recommended against trying to push this law again.

Yet, fast forward all of these years later, and the dead warrantless wiretapping legislation has been resurrected from the grave… yet again. To say this is a massive disappointment is an understatement. After all, how many times do Canadians have to keep protesting this garbage in order to make it clear that Canadian’s have no desire for such government overreach?

Probably one burning question in all of this is this: why is the government pushing such an overwhelmingly unpopular idea in the first place? Apparently, the reason (or, at least a big part of the reason) is fentanyl. I mean, the government might as well have said “migratory birds” because that makes just as much sense, but apparently, that is part of the official explanation. For those of you who think I’m now hitting the crack pipe in explaining this, you can read the official government explanation yourself:

The Bill will strengthen our laws and keep Canadians safe by ensuring law enforcement has the right tools to keep our borders secure, combat transnational organized crime, stop the flow of illegal fentanyl, and crack down on money laundering. It will bolster our response to increasingly sophisticated criminal networks, and enhance the integrity and fairness of our immigration system while protecting Canadians’ privacy and Charter rights.

Now, there is no question that fentanyl is a major problem. It is killing, well, lots of people every day (the numbers do update on that front). That part is obvious. Being in British Columbia, I know this all too well. Heck, I even got to partake in a mandated training course on how to administer Naloxone because the problem is just that severe. Thankfully, I don’t personally know anyone who has ever overdosed on fentanyl and I do live in an area where it felt a little out of place to be getting such a course, but still, I understood why the course was being offered in the first place.

So, what does this have to do with warrantless wiretapping? I honestly have no clue. After all, the bill mandates that police can demand subscriber information if a police officer thinks an offence is being, or might be, committed (can be any offence committed against any Act of parliament – the bills language, not mine). So, if police think an assault could happen, is there a connection between that and fentanyl? At best, that is questionable because there’s not enough information.

Let’s just go to the heart of the issue here. How does the government think spying on all communications is going to somehow solve the problem of fentanyl? Has anyone even made the case that warrantless wiretapping is going to be the silver bullet that solves the fentanyl crisis? If so, I have yet to hear that. As someone who is neck deep in digital rights issues, I think it would be surprising if I missed something like that. So, if anything, the bill proposes a solution and now the backwards process can begin where the government searches for justification for why their solution somehow works. It’s backwards because the search for a solution should begin with looking for data on why a proposed solution should work first before legislation gets tabled, not the other way around.

Now, some out there might be looking at the government definition and saying, “But Drew, fentanyl isn’t the only reason for justifying the tabling of the legislation that would allow Canada to take steps towards being a police state.” Yes, that is true. The government listed two other reason for mass government mandated surveillance of ordinary citizens and wiping their collective anuses on the Canadian Charter.

One of the other two reasons is border security. While things like increasing funding and resources to border security would seemingly be relevant to the debate, I, once again, have a hard time finding justification for mass warrantless wiretapping like this. After all, Bill C-2 targets providers who provide internet connectivity to Canadian users. So, let’s really stretch things out to the limits to find a scenario where this might come close to applying. A criminal coming across the border into Canada. Chances are, they are using a provider in the United States instead of Canada. In this case, the bill, uh, doesn’t really apply because in order to get that information that the authorities are asking for, they would have to go after, say, an American provider. In that case, tools outside of this legislation would be needed to get that information. Yes, chances are, things like Canadian cell towers would be used, but who would ultimately hold that information that authorities are seeking? Yup, the foreign provider.

Even as I try to contort reality to try and fit with the possible scenario that could be envisioned in this bill, I really struggle to find a connection or justification for warrantless wiretapping here.

The last remaining justification mentioned is battling transnational organized crime. At this point, I’m giving a huge sigh while rolling my eyes. The reason for this is because this has long been a tired and worn argument from the previous rounds we’ve had this debate in years past. It’s a riff off of the standard “crime is out of control and this is the solution”.

One of the reasons why this argument failed so spectacular is because people can look up actual crime rate statistics and find that crime rates have been on the decline in Canada since 1991. Feel free to look at the data here, it’s based off of statistics Canada. While some advocates for mass surveillance were arguing that crime has been spiralling out of control, the actual hard data provided a very VERY different picture. It made advocates for mass surveillance look like they were trying to invent a crisis to try and violate people’s rights after.

The other reason is, of course, constitutional. The Canadian Charter is pretty clear on this whole matter, saying this:

8 Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

Warrantless wiretapping easily violates this right. While some might look at me with skepticism, one can look at how the Canadian court system has ruled on privacy issues. Last year, police were trying to obtain an IP address to conduct a search on someone. Defence argued that an IP address alone also constitutes personal information and that police needed to come back with a warrant first in order to obtain such information. The case made it all the way to the Canadian Supreme Court and the court ruled that, yes, an IP address is, in fact, personal information. So, if police want to seek subscriber information – even if it was merely an IP address – they need to have a warrant first which means, yes, court oversight. I don’t know about you, but I think that is a pretty clear example that courts are pretty hesitant to just let police hoover up subscriber information willy nilly.

So, the real question here is how the courts will react to Bill C-2 when you have caselaw like that on the books already. It’s a very obvious court challenge and a challenge that would see the government face an uphill battle, at best, in their quest to defend it.

Either way, neither the law, nor the statistics, are on the government’s side here. If anything, it is less on their side today than it was in the past.

Finally, there is the underlying issue known as the Trump factor. Trump has, earlier this year, argued that fentanyl is out of control in Canada and used that as an excuse to slap these tariffs on Canada in the first place. This has been a cover story that has been completely flattened many times over. As Canadian officials have been pointing out repeatedly, a tiny fraction of fentanyl flowing into the United States comes from Canada. Overwhelmingly, the fentanyl flowing into the US comes from Mexico. If you are looking for sources of fentanyl flowing into the US, Canada isn’t it. Here’s a source for that information if you are asking for it:

Almost all (98%) was intercepted at the southwest border with Mexico. Less than 1% was seized across the northern US border with Canada. The remainder was from sea routes or other US checkpoints.

What’s more, Trump’s tariffs have more to do with bad economic theories rather than border security. Border security has long been nothing more than a legal fig leaf to justify these tariffs. The reality is that Trump has long argued that trade deficits are bad and that if the US has a trade deficit with another country, then that other country is somehow “ripping off” the US. Obviously, that is senile insane ramblings that have no grounding in reality, but that is the stupid economic theories being employed here.

Trump slaps tariffs on countries on a whim. In fact, Trump doubled existing steel and aluminum tariffs based on the clearly wrong hypothesis that this will somehow bring about a new flow of cash into the United States (spoiler alert: it won’t). The border security theory was generally nowhere to be found from what I saw.

So, ratcheting up border security in Canada is very likely going to solve somewhere between Jack and squat on this issue. Trump has long shown that nothing Canada can do on border security is going to change his quest to beat the living daylights out of the US economy with stupid bridge burning tariffs. So, this whole bill is based on highly questionable justifications from the start.

This, of course, isn’t even going into warrantless wiretapping specifically. At what point did Trump say that Canada needed to impose warrantless wiretapping in order to avoid the tariffs? I, for one, never saw that anywhere.

All this circles back to the big question: why is Prime Minister Mark Carney doing this? What actually justifies warrantless wiretapping. It has long been clear the Canadian public doesn’t want this, the justifications presented by the government have little to nothing to do with warrantless wiretapping, the crime statistics don’t justify pushing this now, I’m not aware of Trump ever arguing that warrantless wiretapping is needed in the first place, it’s highly questionable if this bill, in general, will even make a difference in Trump’s insane quest to tariff everyone into bankruptcy (including the US), and the government is likely going to have a hard time even having such a thing on the law books thanks to recent court precedent. So, why even have this as part of this legislation in the first place? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and the Liberal government would be best served to scrap this section at minimum.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.