On June 2nd, 2026, ICLMG’s coordinator Tim McSorley testified at the Public Safety (SECU) committee against Bill C-22, the “Lawful Access” Act, on behalf of the Centre for Free Expression, where he serves as a senior fellow. Tim appeared alongside several other privacy and civil liberties organizations that echoed and added to our concerns: OpenMedia, the Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Signal. In his testimony, Tim spoke to how legislation that undermines privacy is also an attack on free expression.

He also took the opportunity, along with several others, to denounce the proceedings being rushed, exemplified by the fact that several of the briefs submitted, some weeks ago, hadn’t yet been distributed to the committee members. This was despite the deadline for committee members to submit amendments having been June 1st (the day before our testimony…). This problem was also denounced by a few committee members.

Read his testimony below (or watch it above), watch the full meeting here, read our full brief to the SECU committee, and please click the button to take action:

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TRANSCRIPT

On behalf of the Centre for Free Expression, I want to thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

Bill C-22 poses a serious and unacceptable threat to the privacy rights of Canadians – both as an individual right and as a social right essential to participate meaningfully in democratic discourse.

The Centre for Free Expression’s work is premised on understanding that democracy is a regime founded on ongoing public discourse as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate in society — a discourse which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end, a discourse in which all have a right to participate and to be informed.

Privacy is fundamental for freedom of expression and democratic discourse; specifically, what Neil Richards has termed “intellectual privacy” which is protection from surveillance or interference when we are engaged in the process of generating ideas – thinking, reading, discussing with those close to us –  before our ideas are ready for public consumption.[1] In our evolving digital world, much of our reading, thinking, and private communications are mediated by electronic technologies that make possible unprecedented forms of surveillance by the state, digital platforms, marketers, and those in our social networks.

The right to privacy is recognized as a human right in international law that Canada has signed and ratified. It is also enshrined in the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Canada supported and endorsed.[2] While Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not mention privacy specifically, our courts have made clear that s. 8  protects privacy.

In R. v. Spencer[3], Cromwell J wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court that:

“This Court has long emphasized the need for a purposive approach to s. 8 that emphasizes the protection of privacy as a prerequisite to individual security, self-fulfilment and autonomy as well as to the maintenance of a thriving democratic society.” (at 15).

“The nature of the privacy interest does not depend on whether, in the particular case, privacy shelters legal or illegal activity. The analysis turns on the privacy of the area or the thing being searched and the impact of the search on its target, not the legal or illegal nature of the items sought.” (at 36).

“There is also a third conception of informational privacy …  the understanding of privacy as anonymity. In my view, the concept of privacy potentially protected by s. 8 must include this understanding of privacy.” (at 41).

In R. v. Marakah[4], McLachlin CJ discusses the privacy implications of modern electronic communications:

“Preservation of a “zone of privacy” in which personal information is safe from state intrusion is the very purpose of s. 8 of the Charter… this zone of privacy extends beyond one’s own mobile device; it can include the electronic conversations in which one shares private information with others. It is reasonable to expect these private interactions — and not just the contents of a particular cell phone at a particular point in time — to remain private.” (at 37).[5]

Bill C-22 is the latest of a long string of proposals[6] to undermine Canadians’ right to privacy in the name of fighting crime and protecting national security. While all rights are weighed by our courts in light of competing demands and priorities, the proponents of Bill C-22 have lost sight of the priority our Charter and our courts have given to protecting expressive freedom and hence to the privacy rights that help make political expression and democratic discourse possible.

Bill C-22 will also supercharge state surveillance by:

• Establishing a new low threshold production order under the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, so foreign entities may submit a request to the Minister of Justice for the production of transmission data or subscriber data that is in the possession or control of a person in Canada. To be granted, the request must only meet the low bar of “reasonable grounds to suspect. There is no dual criminality requirement—meaning the foreign offence need not also be an offence in Canada.
• Creating the framework for Canada to ratify the Second Additional Protocol to the Budapest Convention, a multilateral data-sharing treaty that attempts to expedite the speed and volume of data sharing between foreign law enforcement agencies — at the expense of human rights.
• Making possible a Canada-U.S. cross-border data-sharing agreement, which Canada is currently negotiating with the United States under the US CLOUD ACT. As the Citizen Lab’s Kate Robertson has written, this will mean “US surveillance activities covered by the agreement would no longer require oversight from Canadian authorities or judges, thus relinquishing a core element of Canada’s sovereignty under international law.”[7]
• Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act (SAAIA) which, through both public regulations and secret orders would allow the government to require the broadly defined category of “electronic service providers” (ESPs) to make wide-ranging and drastic modifications to their systems to facilitate access from law enforcement, threatening encryption. It will also require all ESPs to retain sensitive personal data about users for up to a year, without adequate safeguards to protect against security vulnerabilities that such orders will create. The new regime would also lack adequate accountability or transparency provisions.

Footnotes:

[1] Neil Richards, Intellectual Privacy: Rethinking Civil Liberties in the Digital Age. Oxford University Press, 2015.

[2] Article 12: No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. https://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/universal-declaration/translations/english

[3]  R. v. Spencer, 2014 SCC 43, [2014] 2 S.C.R. 212 https://canlii.ca/t/g7dzn

[4] R. v. Marakah, 2017 SCC 59, [2017] 2 S.C.R.  https://canlii.ca/t/hp63v

[5] McLachlin CJ further makes clear that privacy rights are not lost because messages sent could be disclosed by the recipient: “To accept the risk that a co-conversationalist could disclose an electronic conversation is not to accept the risk of a different order that the state will intrude upon an electronic conversation absent such disclosure. “[T]he regulation of electronic surveillance protects us from a risk of a different order, i.e., not the risk that someone will repeat our words but the much more insidious danger inherent in allowing the state, in its unfettered discretion, to record and transmit our words”: Duarte, at p. 44. Therefore, the risk that a recipient could disclose an electronic conversation does not negate a reasonable expectation of privacy in an electronic conversation.” At 40

[6] Bill C-30, proposals in the 2016 National Security Green Paper consultation, the 2023 Consultation on the Proceeds of Crime (Money Laundering) and Terrorist Financing Act (PCMLTFA), and Bill C-2

[7] Kate Robertson, “Trump Wants to Tap Your Phone. Ottawa Might Let Him,” The Walrus, May 25, 2026. https://thewalrus.ca/trump-wants-to-tap-your-phone-ottawa-might-let-him/

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