Pierre Poilievre Says Conservatives Won’t Support Warrantless Wiretapping Bill

Conservative Party leader says he won’t support Bill C-2 – the bill that smuggles in warrantless wiretapping.

It would appear as though history is repeating itself. In a minority government, the Liberal party pushed Canada’s warrantless wiretapping bill also known as lawful access. The Conservative party opposed it, saying that, among other things, it is a violation of people’s privacy. Delays in the bills passage happened and, eventually, the bill died on the orderpaper when an election was called. This may sound like I’m getting ahead of myself a little in talking about Bill C-2, but what I’m actually describing is what happened clear back in 2005. The Liberal party leader was Paul Martin and the Conservative leader was Stephen Harper. The bill? Bill C-74.

Fast forward a whopping 20 years later and I find myself witnessing history in the process of repeating itself. Earlier this year, the Liberals tabled Lawful Access through Bill C-2. The legislation was buried in a so-called “border security” bill which, in and of itself is seemingly an acknowledgement of how ridiculously unpopular lawful access is in the first place. At least in 2005, the Liberals pushed the law out in the open and not trying to smuggle the bill through another piece of legislation.

Like in 2005, the lawful access bill is an unconstitutional mess in the many ways it violates the rights of Canadians guarding against unreasonable search and seizure.

Perhaps the cherry on top is the recycling of 20 year old talking points used to sell Canadians on the idea of giving up their privacy rights. Those include the greatest hits of “police are bogged down in paperwork”, “the warrant process is too slow”, and the ever famous “it’s not really that much information that’s being asked for”. It didn’t work back then and, hopefully, it’ll prove to be talking points that don’t work today.

While there was some speculation that the Conservative party would oppose it, that speculation ended up proving to be true. Poilievre has said that his party won’t be supporting the legislation on the grounds that it violates people’s privacy rights. From the CBC:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says the federal Liberals must either heavily amend their border bill or introduce a new piece of proposed legislation if they want support to pass it into law.

“We’ve told Liberals that their current Bill C-2 will not pass unless they remove the violations of Canadians’ individual freedoms and privacy,” Poilievre said in an interview with CBC News.

“We don’t think that law-abiding Canadians should lose their liberty to pay for the failures of the Liberals on borders and immigration.”

The Conservatives had previously expressed concerns about “snooping provisions” in the bill, and on Friday, Poilievre confirmed his party will not support the existing bill and called on the Liberals to introduce a new piece of legislation.

“We’ve said to them that there’s no way they’re going to be able to pass their current bill, C-2, which attacks the freedoms and the privacy of Canadians,” he said.

“They should reintroduce a new bill that focuses on law breakers, on restoring order at the border, on kicking out fraudulent refugees, while at the same time allowing people to send mail, use the internet or do legitimate lawful cash transactions.”

This is one of those rare moments where I can say that Poilievre is absolutely correct in his assessment of the bill (the other times I can recall were on the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act). Bill C-2 is absolutely an invasion of people’s privacy and shouldn’t be allowed to pass.

One question some might have is why the Liberals are even pushing this terrible law in the first place. After all, there was the committee back in 2017 that recommended against reviving the debate. Well, there were efforts to try and implement Lawful Access through the back door that skirted the parliamentary process. There was the attempt to get it into law through the CLOUD Act in 2022 and, in 2023, an attempt to get it through a Supreme Court case. In 2024, the Supreme Court of Canada shut that down and said that an IP address is, in fact, personal information. The Lawful Access attempt through the courts, thankfully, failed. So, it appears that all options to try and sneak in Lawful Access failed, putting the ball back into the federal governments court to invade people’s privacy. Since the Liberals know how insanely unpopular Lawful Access is, they attempted to just smuggle it through another bill which is where we are today.

For those who are curious about what happened all those years ago, eventually, the Harper Conservatives took power and, in their infinite wisdom, copied and pasted the Liberal party’s Lawful Access bill and began pushing that bill as part of the so-called “tough on crime” push. They did a lot of nasty things to sell Bill C-30. It was a bill that the Liberal party… vehemently opposed at the time. I wish I was joking, but the debate really did become that silly back in the day.

Still, with the Conservative party opposing this recent iteration of the bill, it means that there is the potential for delays. That is actually a good thing for Canadians, really. So, as weird as this whole political process has been over the last 20 years, it’s hard to disagree with the resistance.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.