Signal to Ottawa: We’ll Leave Canada Before We Help You Spy on Users

Signal is drawing a hard line on the federal government’s proposed surveillance legislation: comply with Bill C-22 or leave the country. The secure messaging app says it would rather ditch the Canadian market than be forced to weaken the privacy protections it has built its reputation on.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Signal’s vice-president of strategy and global affairs Udbhav Tiwari said the company “would rather pull out of the country than be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users.”

Bill C-22 is Ottawa’s proposed lawful access legislation, designed to give police and CSIS broader surveillance powers to go after criminal activity. The concern from Signal and other tech companies is that the bill would effectively require them to engineer backdoors into their software. Tiwari was blunt about why that’s a problem: “End-to-end encryption is incompatible with exceptional access, no matter how creative the route taken to achieve it.”

The risks aren’t just about government overreach, either. Signal warned that deliberately engineered vulnerabilities don’t stay exclusive to the people they’re built for. “Bill C-22 could potentially allow hackers to exploit these very vulnerabilities engineered into electronic systems, with private messaging services serving as an ideal target for foreign adversaries,” Tiwari said.

The stakes are real for a lot of Canadians, as Signal is used by journalists, politicians, and government agencies specifically because it doesn’t store user chats or contact lists. Tiwari called provisions that force vulnerabilities into that kind of infrastructure “a grave threat to privacy everywhere.”

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree has called the bill “encryption-neutral,” but Signal isn’t the only company pushing back. Apple and Meta have both criticized the proposed rules, with Meta testifying that the legislation could turn private companies into an arm of the government’s surveillance apparatus.

We’ve seen tech companies remove features before to comply with Ottawa’s legislation. Case in point is Meta removing the ability to share news links within Facebook and Instagram, to comply with the Online News Act, instead of being forced to pay millions to news publishers (which Google agreed to do).