Liberals Are Pushing Canada’s Spy Bill Through by June 19 Despite Massive Backlash

Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree wants Bill C-22 passed before Parliament breaks for the summer, and he’s not being subtle about it.

“My expectation is to get it done before we rise. I want this as law before we rise,” Anandasangaree told the National Post on Wednesday. The House of Commons is set to rise for summer break on June 19, giving him a tight window to push the bill through both committee and the Senate.

The minister acknowledged the pressure but shrugged it off. “I’m known as an optimist,” he told the Post, adding that police and intelligence agencies have told him they needed the changes in Bill C-22 “yesterday.”

He also promised amendments to address growing privacy concerns, specifically around the idea that the bill could force tech companies to build a backdoor into their systems. “I think we’re going to clarify that there is no backdoor, no attempts to breach encryption,” he said. He also pushed back on warnings from companies like Signal and NordVPN that they might leave Canada if the bill passes, calling those threats “overstated.” “Essentially, every major democratic jurisdiction has a similar framework,” he said.

Opposition parties aren’t buying the rushed timeline. The Conservatives tabled a motion to extend the committee study by another eight hours, and both Conservative MP Frank Caputo and Bloc MP Claude DeBellefeuille accused the Liberals of trying to “ram” the legislation through without giving MPs enough time to properly study it.

Bill C-22 would make it easier for police and CSIS to intercept private communications and access personal data during investigations. It would also require telecom companies to store client data for up to a year and make it available to law enforcement with a warrant.

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist called out the minister on Thursday for claiming Canada’s metadata collection rules are in line with G7 and Five Eyes allies, noting that’s just not true. The U.S. has no federal mandatory metadata retention law, and European courts have repeatedly struck down similar rules. Geist also flagged that the government’s strict five o’clock deadline for amendments effectively killed key privacy safeguards proposed by the Privacy Commissioner before they could even be considered.

Earlier this week, both Apple and Google appeared before a federal committee to warn that Bill C-22 goes too far. Apple’s privacy engineering chief Erik Neuenschwander told Parliament the bill could force companies to break encryption by inserting backdoors into their products, and warned that the bill’s secrecy provisions could prevent companies from even telling users what data the government is making them hand over. Google made a similar argument saying it “never built a backdoor or other mechanism to circumvent end-to-end encryption” and won’t start now. Both companies called on the government to rewrite the bill’s encryption language before it moves forward.

The pushback by both tech giants resulted in Anandasangaree saying amendments would be made, but now it seems despite that, the Liberal government wants to push Bill C-22 through as soon as possible.