Petition to Withdraw Canada's Bill C-22 (opens in new tab)

> Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).

That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.

Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.

A lot of the Indian tech industry is really just the tech industry from other countries being outsourced to there.

One thing I have been thinking about is digital tariffs.

The US is perfectly willing to slam billions into ventures that lose money for years. EU for example doesn’t work that way. Consequence: US can develop faster, unconstrained by profitability, and capture the entire market before EU. This seems as US being more “innovative”, but realistically they are just running a perhaps similar engine way hotter at the cost of American QoL being way worse for the less fortunate. Similar thing can be said with Chinas subsidies on electric vehicles potentially flooding the EU with cheaper alternatives.

America is our ally, so we let this happen. For the most part this has served in this case EU and perhaps Canada well, albeit at the mercy of the US tech sector. Perhaps we shouldn’t anymore though, and consider tariffing American services to protect and incentivize local, sustainable alternatives. Meta, microsoft, etc. are clearly starting to rent seek now that they have us by the balls, I say fuck em?

I’m no expert in economics so I bet there are great arguments against this, lets see.

The premise seems wrong here. As someone who worked my whole career in Canadian tech I assure you it exists.

Because US has far better opportunities and more money.

My personal experience in doing business in Canada: each industry is monopolized by two or three companies, you need to get their “blessing” before you can do anything in that sector. Government contracts aren’t much, but even with that, it’s nepotism based, you will get a contract knowing someone who will indirectly get benefits from you, for example you will hire people they know, so kinda laundering the money. Lengthy regulations, you might wait months to get an SFOC for example (in drones, where you might need a special flight operation certificate) to do a simple operation, only to repeat that for another test. Securing clients, a combination of low on money and usually clients prefer US based companies, your best bet is securing a big client that will be your backbone, so back to point one where you need a blessing from a big company. And Im talking here about a business where there’s an opportunity to scale up, so food truck business and the local plumbing work aren’t part of that.

> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

I was told that we should never invest pension fund on local, because you salary is basically based on local industry. One need diversified investment.

Not sure how true this is, but that's what I have been listening for years.

(disclaimer: not canandian, not american

> Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.

But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.

> Heck, China, Israel, and India all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements.

It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.

Oh cool, we should set up stricter free speech restrictions in order to encourage our nascent tech sector. Sure thing champ.

Canadian tech is nonexistent because we continue to see ourselves as a colony instead of a country, a resource-extraction post-national economic state instead of a people.

the biggest reason is that canadians speak English

we could much more easily get a Quebecois tech industry than canadian

And why, pray tell, is that the case? Because the Liberal government has created a terrible environment for Canadian businesses over the last 11 years, ballooning the size of the public service and the amount of regulations and bureaucratic oversight, as well as trying to pick winners by handing out subsidies to all the wrong companies in service of their ideological agenda. They would rather companies fail than succeed without their "help". That, and they've done everything in their power to keep the housing bubble juiced instead of allowing an RE correction. But hey, running the country into the ground while trying to blame everything on the orange man gets you elected, so I don't expect any course correction.

Canadian tech was thriving 10-20 years ago, there is a reason it was called Silicon Valley North. RIM, Nortel, Celestica, QNX... I can't explain what exactly happened. A simple explanation would be Liberals prioritized real estate growth, unlimited immigration to artificially boost GDP but I suspect the problem is more complex.

The collection of metadata is almost certainly bad for people even if they do nothing wrong. It can (and will) be sold if regulations and enforcement are not airtight. It will almost certainly be leaked as a result of incompetence, negligence, or outright criminality. The only way to prevent your metadata from getting out into the great unknown is to ensure it isn't collected in the first place.

If you don't see what the big deal is, I suggest you consider the recent leak of voter data in Alberta. For those unfamiliar, a list of eligible voters is routinely shared with political parties for the purposes of running their election campaigns. One of those parties, the "Republican Party of Alberta", shared their copy of the list with separatists, who made it freely available to any of their pals. What's the big deal you ask? Who cares if their address is public knowledge? Isn't this the sort of thing that used to be in phonebooks? Just for one example, anyone who has moved away from an abusive ex now has to worry about their address, phone number, etc. being made available to that abusive ex. Privacy isn't just important for people who like wearing pants.

C-22 is supposed to protect Canadians but, instead, it endangers them. This is a bad bill.

How is it possible to make encrypted communication impossible? It’s (for us) trivial to encrypt and sign a message with GPG for instance. Does this allow the government to come to my house if I trade these messages with friends?

> It's online and easy to read

That's not true. Most people are not legal experts with extensive expertise in technology, knowledge of how Canadian courts will interpret the legislation, and knowledge of how governments around the world are trying to attack encryption (ex: they do their best to hide and not to explicitly say it in the legislation).

> And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.

That's your opinion. That's not a real scientific claim, and yet you are using it to justify an unprecedented attack on privacy rights.

Suspicionless metadata retention has been illegal in the European Union since 2014, and it violates the Charter. There is no world in which it is acceptable.

An RCMP witness speaking about the bill during a recent committee meeting literally said the legislation will help them "solve the problem of encryption": https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/rcmp-confirms-bill-c-22-...

how would they force vpns like mullvad to turn over the log when there isn't any?

are they just going to ban specific vpn providers then ? this is absurd!

I'm skeptical of central bankers trying to sugarcoat the fact that we are in a "technical" recession. If you look at per-capita GDP it's lower than it was four years ago and if you talk to regular Canadians you'll come away feeling like we've been in a recession for years. I would say per-capita is a better metric because it better reflects what individuals are experiencing, whereas Canada's overall GDP has been bolstered by high immigration targets for years. Regardless, it meets the definition of a recession and matches with the experiences of many Canadians. I'm sure the beureocrats and central bankers aren't feeling that pain though.

The comment you've replied to is clearly not "partisan bluster". While it may be a tad hyperbolic, with the Stanley Cup line, it's driving a valid point that while Canada is facing a number of very real challenges, the government in power is spending its time on internet censorship bills.

These bills are of almost no benefit to the average Canadian, and the point is that the government should focus more on things that matter to citizens. Instead of playing into people's fear and exposing them to potential government overreach, privacy violations, data breaches, etc., Canada's leadership should focus back on the economy.

Your comment actually seems to be the bluster, considering the ranting and swearing.

> And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.

If I was PM I would prioritise tax cuts to athletes playing for Canadian teams, repurpose the new Major Projects Office to be the Athletic Performance Office to provide funding and support to Canadian teams, and install a tax on Canadian players on American teams. I'm also joking, lighten up :P

I did misspeak about the foreign investments, what I was referring to is that we are seeing much more investments leaving the country than what are coming in, and of the investments in Canada, it's not just the sheer volume and direction that matters - foreign firms buying out Canadian businesses to later move them out of the country isn't a good thing long-term.

I have no doubt that Carney will be better for the economy than the last 10 years under Trudeau, and I hope they spend more time focusing on that then spending billions on useless gun buybacks, surveillance bills, banning social media, etc. We saw a sharp drop in entrepreneurship in Q1, hopefully they can do something to reverse that. I doubt it though.

This is basically just shilling. Average Canadians cannot point to many things that have improved or gotten cheaper in how many years? You are acting like we are a day away from being a debt free hyper economy that everyone is knocking on the door to get involved with.

It's partisan to deny your country is falling to shit just because you voted for the parties that made it fall to shit.

The confirmation email takes a few minutes.

I mean Canada is a part of the 'Five eyes' surveillance alliance since the 1950's. This is nothing new but it does keep escalating.

It was Terrance McKenna who said that the worst government is usually the one that is in charge, that is because they rarely tend to go back on what was put down before them. One could argue that in the US Trump is tearing down previous government work but also isn't doing it in a constructive fashion at all.

I pushed back on all these kinds of Bills and laws here in Australia and every time it was usually just met with the same boiler plate response of "We are enacting this at the advice of insert agency/person here."

I still do it but it sort of just feels like leaving a note to future generations that we at least tried to stop it.

The system is pretty fucked. You have the liberals (who are conservatives), the conservatives (who are increasingly taking inspiration from America but have always been even further right than the liberals), and the NDP who are unfortunately now rather irrelevant and also have a tendency to focus too much on identity politics.

If Trudeau had actually pushed for election reform like he'd promised to, maybe we'd be in a better place. But people forgave him for that because he made weed legal...

You know the conservatives are supporting this bill as well... right?

And when Harper was in power they were trying to push something similar?

And that the petition linked here is an NDP petition?

Partisan grandstanding won't fix the issue. A mobilized public will.

Well, the meeting ended early today after a member who supports the bill basically rage quit. Everyone else was trying not to laugh.

It seems possible that C-22 could be delayed in committee long enough to stop it from being passed before the summer recess deadline of June 18.

3 from Ontario and 4 from Quebec. As a western Canada resident it has been real old that we have been steamrolled by the east for the past decade.

There is always the Australian system. Mandatory voting, preferential votes, majority rule.

The Preferential part is the most important, it means you can vote for who you want but also have the second preference get a vote if the first fails to get a wide enough margin. That first vote however will get additional resources based on vote tally with the next election cycle. If either of the last two majority parties fail to get the necessary votes to hold control and you have a hung parliament, they then have to negotiate with other parties to gain their preference.

Its not perfect but it looks like the best case system I have seen.

my error, i actually thought it was an omnibus. it doesn't change my view, but toward the specific encryption concern, indeed, less relevant. thank you.