More than 25 leading rights and privacy organizations and experts call for full withdrawal of the Lawful Access Act, warning it would be “the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history.”

Today, a group of 14 civil liberties, refugee rights, academic, and digital rights organizations — joined by 15 of Canada’s most prominent privacy scholars and legal experts — delivered an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney and every Member of Parliament, calling for the full withdrawal of Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act. Bill C-22 updates and reintroduces controversial law enforcement powers first proposed in last year’s Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act. On April 20, C-22 was referred to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) for detailed study. During the 2nd Reading debate, several MPs from across the political spectrum raised concerns about the bill’s impact on privacy and civil liberties.

Today’s letter sounds the alarm on sweeping new powers in Bill C-22 that would let the government force any digital service — telecoms, messaging apps, cloud services, AI tools, even “smart” devices — to record and retain up to a full year of detailed metadata on every person in Canada and abroad, including physical location data and who they interact with online.

The group warns that Part 2 of Bill C-22 remains, at its core, a mass surveillance capability regime. It would compel an enormous and poorly defined set of “electronic service providers” to build surveillance backdoors into their products. Backdoors significantly weaken everyone’s digital safety, and their use cannot be limited to Canadian law enforcement alone. Hostile states, cyber criminals and anyone equipped by increasingly capable AI hacking capabilities will use the same backdoors. The 2024 Salt Typhoon attack on U.S. telecommunications networks — declared a “national defence crisis” — succeeded by targeting exactly the kind of government-mandated backdoors Bill C-22 would now require.

The letter acknowledges narrow improvements over the bill’s predecessor, Bill C-2, but concludes they do not address Bill C-22’s fundamental flaws, while also introducing new threats to privacy. The signatories are calling on all MPs to reject Bill C-22, and on the government to commit to meaningful, evidence-based public consultation before bringing forward future lawful access proposals.

Letter signatories include the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Canadian Muslim Public Affairs Council (CMPAC), the Canadian Council for Refugees, Centre for Free Expression, Clinique pour la justice migrante, the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, la Ligue des droits et libertés, Migrant Workers’ Alliance for Change, OCASI, OpenMedia, and individual experts including Ron Deibert (Director, Citizen Lab), Teresa Scassa (Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy), and Michael Karanicolas (Dalhousie University).

Press quotes

“This legislation presents one of the greatest threats to privacy in Canada of the past two decades. Its provisions will weaken the rules governing police access to personal information, all while facilitating a vast expansion of government surveillance. This is another clear case of the decades-long trend of governments using national security as an excuse to erode civil liberties and human rights, just as we saw throughout the so-called ‘war on terror.’ We are encouraging all members of parliament to oppose these new powers,” said Tim McSorley, national coordinator of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a Canadian coalition devoted to defending civil liberties in the context of anti-terrorism and national security.

“Bill C-22 is even more dangerous than the bill it replaces. The government has quietly added a requirement for hundreds of digital services to build a year-long record of where you go, who you talk to, and when you do it — on millions of people who aren’t suspected of anything. Canadians were never asked about this, and they deserve much better than having it slipped in under the radar.” – Matt Hatfield, Executive Director of OpenMedia, Canada’s grassroots advocacy community that fights for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet.

The full letter and list of signatories is available in: [ENGLISH] [FRANÇAIS]

The post Civil Society to Parliament: Kill Bill C-22 appeared first on International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.