With Majority in Hand, Liberals Get to Work Pushing Warrantless Wiretapping

Following one of the least surprising outcomes of an election, warrantless wiretapping is apparently back on the menu for the Liberals.

The Liberal party has scored a majority government. That is the results of the three by-elections that occurred the other day. Two of those elections were Liberal strongholds while the Terrebonne was potentially going to be a toss-up between the Bloc and the Liberals. Thanks to the floor crossings almost exclusively coming from the Conservative party members trying to abandon the sinking ship, the Liberals really only needed to win one of those seats. It was a really boring contest where only one outcome was going to happen: the Liberals were going to win a majority government.

While the Terrebonne riding was a bit of a question mark, the ultimate results was that the Liberal party swept all three seats, securing the best possible outcome. From a political standpoint, the good news for the Liberal party just kept coming. The next bit of excellent news for the Liberal party was that Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre said that he is not going anywhere following questions about his abysmal leadership at the helm. From CTV:

Despite being dealt double-digit defeats in the three federal byelections that handed Prime Minister Mark Carney his majority, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre says he has no plans to resign.

“Canadians might be discouraged right now because of the current political situation, but let us say this, Canadians should not give up,” he said in the House of Commons on Tuesday, vowing to continue fighting for Canadians.

“And I will continue to lead that fight in this House, across this country, and in the next election.”

The Conservatives’ vote share shrunk by more than 10 per cent in all three ridings compared to the 2025 federal vote, seeing Poilievre’s candidate in the downtown Toronto race drop to third place.

You can practically head the Liberal party popping the champagne at Poilievres reaction to the election results. After all, Poilievre’s claim to fame since taking over as leader of the Conservative party was to blow a 20 point lead in the polls, lose the election, lose his own seat (necessitating him becoming a flyover politician by borrowing a seat from a Conservative stronghold), lose four members of his own political party to the Liberal party (including a far right wing member on top of it all), and now lose a metric tonne of support in the process. The Aristocrats! Really, the announcement that Poilievre isn’t done losing and intends on proverbially punching himself in the face moving forward was just the cherry on top for the Liberal party’s string of successes.

With a clear road ahead moving forward for the rest of this government, it seems that the Liberal party is continuing to move forward with bad internet legislation. Already, the Liberal party delegates are pushing mass government surveillance and censorship through age verification via the two passed resolutions that were based on a mountain of lies as justification. The hope is that it was just support on paper for this terrible policy because the Liberal party isn’t under any obligation to move forward with such policies, but the momentum on that front is certainly a point of concern.

While it is still a toss-up on whether the Liberals will move forward on that front, what isn’t a toss-up is warrantless wiretapping. This is otherwise known as Lawful Access. This is a debate that really should’ve died decades ago after being defeated with both Liberals and Conservatives at the helm. Yet, for really stupid reasons, the Liberals are pushing it thanks, in part, to the Trump administration wanting Canada to implement mass surveillance. Elbows down, indeed.

Michael Geist is noting that debate for Bill C-22 (the current iteration of this bad bill) has moved forward and politicians are recycling decades old talking points of how this is just administrative meta-data, so nothing to see here citizen. From Michael Geist:

The core concerns have been well documented (my posts on access to subscriber information, mandatory metadata retention, international production orders, and systemic vulnerabilities). Bill C-22’s metadata retention requirements would compel service providers to store data on all their users for up to a year, regardless of whether any user is suspected of anything. That is the architecture of a national surveillance database that would enable law enforcement to reach back in time and reconstruct the digital movements of virtually any Canadian with a connected device. Meanwhile, the bill would also require providers to permanently embed surveillance capabilities into Canadian networks through secret ministerial orders, an approach the international experience has shown doesn’t just threaten privacy, but actively makes communications infrastructure less secure for everyone. Both provisions raise serious constitutional questions, but neither received much attention on the floor of the House.

Justice Minister Sean Fraser spent most of his time on Part 1’s subscriber information regime, which is the bill’s biggest improvement over the earlier Bill C-2. The troubling metadata retention provision in Part 2 received just one paragraph as Fraser described it as focused on “large-scale networks” to understand “what messages may have been sent at what time.” Framing transmission data as a minor administrative matter rather than a comprehensive record of communications behaviour is dangerously misleading. Indeed, Fraser did not mention that the European Court of Justice struck down the EU Data Retention Directive in 2014 precisely because blanket retention of all users’ metadata is a disproportionate interference with fundamental rights. Perhaps the government’s Charter statement on the bill will address the issue, but it still hasn’t been released.

The surveillance architecture fared no better. One Conservative MP asked Fraser directly whether the bill creates a back door into encrypted communications. Fraser said no, citing Governor-in-Council regulations, ministerial orders, and the Intelligence Commissioner’s oversight as safeguards. That is a process answer, not a technical one. The concern is not simply about oversight and procedural safeguards. It is that requiring providers to build and permanently maintain intercept infrastructure risks creating systemic vulnerabilities in Canadian communications networks. Those vulnerabilities do not disappear because there have been some approvals along the way.

The Bloc identified an interesting issue: the government is expanding the powers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies while simultaneously cutting the budget of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency by 15%, eliminating roughly eight positions, including lawyers, analysts, and investigators. NSIRA is the primary oversight body for intelligence activities in Canada and the main mechanism for retrospective review of how those powers are used. Cutting its capacity while creating new secret order-issuing authority leaves a significant gap in accountability.

The Conservatives focused on the constitutional concerns, but the lawful access concerns run deeper. The constitutionality of the law is basic table stakes. The opposition must also focus on what the law actually does, including the creation of a surveillance database covering virtually all Canadians and the risk of introducing systemic vulnerabilities that make everyone who uses a Canadian communications network less secure. Being tough on crime while preserving privacy and security are not competing objectives.

Warrantless wiretapping is one of those things where the deeper you look into it, the worse it looks. The silver lining here is that we don’t have to look far to find out how terrible these legislative ideas really are. The US has a long history of dealing with the perils of warrantless wiretapping. While this has often been a system subject of widespread abuse, things really came to a head in 2024 when AT&T’s entire wiretap system meant for only the “good guys” was hacked by a Chinese hacking group. Even worse, that happened over a period of “months or longer”, meaning that not only was the hack successful, but it went undetected for an unknown long period of time.

This is precisely the kind of security vulnerability that the Canadian government is pushing for. Every carrier gets a wiretapping system along with a nice delicious database full of private personal information on everyone. The fact that the government is contemplating building such databases and surveillance systems is excellent news for black hat hackers and state actors looking to undermine Canadian sovereignty. The lesson learned in that incident was that such surveillance systems and data collecting should not be happening at the carrier level, yet it is a lesson that the Canadian government seems hell bent on ignoring.

The worst part about this is the fact that the Liberals have a majority government now. This means that it’s going to make it far more difficult to push back against this massive intrusion on our civil rights. While we have been here before and such an effort ultimately died on the orderpaper, it’s not going to be any easier fighting this one this time around.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Bluesky and Facebook.