Aletho News

Inside Bill C-22, Canada’s Patriot Act.

By Justin K.P. | The Dissident | October 15, 2026  

Canada’s Bill C-22, has passed the Canadian House of Commons and is currently being debated in the Canadian Senate, and Civil Liberties Organizations are raising the alarm bells over the unprecedented surveillance powers the bill gives to the Canadian security state.

The bill, as Kate Robertson, senior research associate at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, noted, “would empower the government to require surveillance capabilities be built into any communications technology in Canada that could be accessed by law enforcement, and to force the stockpiling of all Canadians’ sensitive metadata,” adding that “The law would apply to everything from smartphones to smartwatches, banking to health apps, video game platforms, and public WiFi or CCTV networks.”

The bill similarly “includes mandating that companies store user data for at least a year – even if the data isn’t something they would otherwise be keeping on hand for the purposes of their business”, “including location and transmission data”.

President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, John Carpay, noted that the bill not only forces these companies to gather mass data on Canadian civilians, but lowers the standard of proof needed to obtain them, noting that the bill “lowers the threshold for obtaining judicial approval for law enforcement to demand users’ subscriber information (name, address, email, IP address, account details, etc.) from ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ to ‘reasonable grounds to suspect.’”

The bill may even give the Canadian government the ability to turn on Microphones and Cameras in order to surveil citizens.

Leah West, an expert in national security law based at Carleton University, told a meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security that “C-22 would order companies to ‘provide the capabilities to turn on a remote microphone,’” adding that “So you could potentially have an order that would require that capability, and as long as it didn’t create a system vulnerability, then yes it could be implemented”.

Unsurprisingly, the bill has raised major alarm bells with Canadian civil liberties organizations.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Organization called the bill “the broadest expansion of government surveillance powers in recent Canadian history” and Matt Hatfield, Executive Director at OpenMedia, called it “the most invasive surveillance regime of any comparable democracy”.

Some of the alarm bells rung by the Canadian Civil Liberties Organization included the possibilities that the bill would:

– Pave the way for expanded information-sharing with the United States and numerous other governments including those with a history of abuse. Expansion of information-sharing with foreign governments in the absence of effective safeguards is particularly reckless at a time when cross-border persecution of diaspora communities—including through abuse of cross-border police cooperation tools—is on the rise.

– Give the government the power to force any electronic mechanism to build new surveillance tools and embed these at the core of their service, potentially transforming anything with a digital component into spyware. The mandated surveillance capability need not have anything to do with the actual functionality of the service in question. Backdoors like these also cannot be effectively limited to law enforcement access—Cybercriminals and foreign adversaries have repeatedly and successfully targeted the mass surveillance capabilities created by similar regimes. Overall, the proposal creates untenable privacy and cybersecurity risks.

– Lower the threshold for sensitive subscriber data, allowing government agencies to cast a wide net when conducting investigations; and

– the government the power to force any digital entity to keep highly sensitive information on every single person in Canada or abroad for up to one year. Information could include every single person’s location at any time over the course of the year, a complete record of everyone you interacted with online, and more. Bill C-22 includes no mechanism to place limits on who can access these data troves or for what purpose, making it potentially fair game for any and all criminal and civil investigations as well as for commercial exploitation by the private company being compelled to retain the data.

In an open letter over 25 leading Canadian civil society groups called the bill an “unprecedented and extraordinarily dangerous surveillance architecture that could impact every digital tool people in Canada depend on every day”,“the most expansive invasion of Canadian privacy rights in modern history” and “fundamentally a mass surveillance capabilities regime”.

It warned that under part 2 of the bill “the government could force the creation and installation of privacy-compromising surveillance tools and backdoors in an enormous and ill-defined set of ‘electronic service providers’, including telecom providers, social media and cloud service providers, AI tools, and any ‘smart’ device” adding that “The law could even be used to force Canadian companies to build backdoors into their products before they export them abroad” and that “The result creates an untenable threat to privacy and cybersecurity” even noting that it “far exceeds powers available to police and security agencies in the United States.”

It also noted that, “Part 2 of Bill C-22 will now also empower the government to require any digital service provider to record and retain detailed metadata on every single person in Canada or abroad, damaging the privacy of millions who are not suspected of committing any crime or posing any security threat,” adding that “companies will be forced to develop the capacity to track information that was never before available to them and is not necessary for their business purposes, then to collect and retain that information for up to one year.”

October 16, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Canada, Human rights, United States