The Feds Are Rushing Their Spy Bill Through Parliament This Week. Apple and Google Are Not Happy

The federal government is moving to shut down committee hearings on Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, and fast-track it through the House of Commons by the end of the week (as planned), according to University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.

The government has placed a motion on the Order Paper that would limit today’s committee meeting to just 30 minutes for clause-by-clause review, after which all further debate on amendments would be cancelled. Any remaining amendments would be put to a vote with no discussion, no questions to officials, and crucially, without even being made public first.

Geist says the move is a significant problem given what’s at stake. Opposition parties had submitted numerous amendments based on testimony from the Privacy Commissioner, bar associations, security companies, and privacy experts. Those amendments covered issues like mandatory metadata retention, risks to encryption and cybersecurity, and privacy safeguards. None of them will be debated or even disclosed publicly before the vote.

The rushed timeline is particularly notable given that Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree had previously committed to amendments during the lawful access hearings. That promise now appears to apply only to secret government amendments that won’t be made public during the hearing process.

Geist didn’t hold back in his assessment, calling it “weeks of hearings and public concern tossed aside by the government in a rush to shut down debate and consideration of amendments to a deeply flawed, risky legislative plan.”

Apple and Google previously showed up at a federal committee to formally warn that the bill’s language could force companies to break end-to-end encryption by building backdoors into their systems. Tech executives also flagged that the bill’s secrecy provisions could legally prevent companies from ever telling users what data the government forced them to hand over.

That’s on top of earlier warnings from Signal and NordVPN, both of which threatened to pull out of the Canadian market entirely if the bill passes as written. The government has tried to downplay those threats, but the chorus of opposition is getting harder to dismiss.

On the political side, Conservatives and Bloc Québécois MPs accused the Liberals of trying to ram the bill through, pointing to a sudden five o’clock deadline that effectively killed key privacy safeguards recommended by the Privacy Commissioner.

The move comes just one day after the government introduced separate privacy reforms that Geist says would push the Privacy Commissioner out of private sector privacy regulation entirely, handing that role to a new Digital Safety Commission.