NDP Calls Bill C-22 the “most invasive piece of legislation”

It seems that the NDP is coming out against Bill C-22 which is certainly a nice change compared to the last several years.

From a general political sense, the NDP, as a concept, is more or less the default political party that represents the average persons interests here in Canada. The Liberals represent the wealthiest one percent Bay Street corporations while the Conservatives represents the big oil corporations. Really, Liberals and Conservatives represent two different flavours of how the average person can get screwed over in a system meant to coddle the ultra wealthy.

The problem is the fact that the NDP has severely abandoned their basic principles to basically be an off brand Liberal party. This was especially true under the leadership of Jagmeet Singh where the NDP just largely did whatever the Liberal party wanted. Normally, the NDP would question things like warrantless wiretapping, age verification, the Online Streaming Act, and several other bad internet bills. I know this because I lived through years where they were a bit more true to their principles.

The last time I saw the classic style of the NDP was back in 2021 when once incredible politician, Charlie Angus, called Bill C-10 a “dumpster fire“. To me, this represented the last time I saw the actual true NDP in their natural form. That is standing up to power and trying to represent the interests of the average person in the political setting. It ultimately proved to be the last glimpse of what the NDP was about because after that, it was nothing but dead silence from the party.

So, it was of no surprise that the party got completely devastated in the following election. If you, as a party, aren’t going to stand up for your own principles, how are you going to expect people to vote for you? That, to me, was one of the big reasons why they got pummelled during the election. The mainstream media has long spun this as a rejection of the principles for what the NDP stood for, but that is not actually the reason for this.

Still, the good news in all of this is Singh is gone. He’s not around to cause any more damage to the party. Since then, Avi Lewis took over. The question that has been around since then is what direction Lewis is going to take the party. This has been difficult to answer given the mainstream media has taken a sort of “Fight Club” approach when covering political news. The first rule of covering the NDP is that you don’t cover the NDP. After all, the last thing the media types want are people actually supporting the NDP and by not talking about them, they help suppress the knowledge of what the NDP is doing. Standard political bias from the mainstream media more than anything else.

Recently, however, I caught a glimpse of what the NDP is looking like these days and it is a promising sign. An NDP MP has come out against Bill C-22 and basically called a spade a spade. From Yahoo! News:

Jenny Kwan, NDP MP for Vancouver-East, says we shouldn’t be fooled by the bill’s promises on the surface. She agrees that in this modern age, because of changes in technology, we need to modernize our lawful access approaches so that the policies in intelligence agencies can do their work.

“But effective policing and intelligence work can and should operate within a robust legal framework that preserves judicial oversight and limits data collection to what is strictly necessary,” she tells me from her constituency office. “This bill fails: It lowers the threshold for access to personal information. It expands executive authority over digital infrastructure. It mandates and enables large-scale data retention, and increases systematic exposure of private communications.”

Kwan says the problem is that the Liberals haven’t struck the right balance in trying to address the need to modernize legal access while protecting civil liberties and privacy.

Last week federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis posted to his social media channels his own concerns over Bill C-22. “If passed, the legislation would allow police to pull information on who we talk to, when and where, all without a warrant.”

Even though the bill was just introduced months ago and is being tabled this week, it isn’t really new, Kwan says — something she adds is part of the issue.

“The Liberal Carney government, right out of the floodgates after the election, introduced Bill C-2. Bill C-2 was a sweeping set of legislation that combined a variety of different areas including the provisions in this bill, and some immigration components,” Kwan explains.

This is the NDP of the past that I knew before Singh took over as leader. They looked at the merits of various bills and pointed out the flaws in them. You have no idea what a welcome sight this truly is. Hopefully, we’ll see more of this in the future because digital rights advocates desperately need voices within the halls of parliament. We aren’t likely to get this from the Conservatives or the Liberals and if we do, it is a partisan issue that conveniently favours our position more than anything else.

So, a positive development at the very least. These days, we’ll take what we can get.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.