The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.
> then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses...
That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.
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).
Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
> 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.
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.
Sure foreign players do play a role, yet it still has the 4th largest VC dealflow [0] in the world ($9.3B) at 2x the size of Canada's entire market which highlights a significantly larger market. And unlike Canadian startups, most Indian startups IPO domestically [1] thus building a self-sustaining capital market
Tough as in a lot of competition. A lot of market segments dominated by Chinese manufactures have a relentless stream of Indian Startups nipping at their heels, is what I understand.
Chinese players don't compete with Indian companies as both China and India have blocked access to either's market. For example, Chinese digital exports remained banned in India and even Chinese players in India like SAIC and Xiaomi have been de facto Indianized via forced ownership changes, similar to what China used to do when it was in India's shoes in the 2000s when competing against the US.
When people on HN talk about the difficulty in the Indian startup scene, it about whether to raise in India or raise in the US and then operate in India.
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.
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.
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.
>> But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings,
Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.
If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.
Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.
Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.
As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.
I have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values
They kept selling residential property to foreign money launderers. In the US that activity is confined to major metros where it impacts the more distributed population density less significantly.
Don't worry, we have our own domestic money launderers as well. And whenever the gov't tries to close loopholes they riot. (Also half the gov't MPs are landlords, so ...)
Even if real estate were to implode, Canada has a pretty much permanent sickness on account of being a "rip n' ship" resource exporter over everything else. Since confederation.
It lends itself to a rentier capitalist model, and to oligarchies, and to a stagnant conservative investment class that just wants to coast off their proximity to resources.
Real estate coasting is arguably even worse, but not by much.
Notably the United States is actually trying to make this worse with their tariffs on us. Alberta oil and gas is tariff free while our value added manufacturing sectors are highly tariffed.
It makes no sense to try to kill Quebec's aluminum sector since it's the most logical place to smelt aluminum on the whole continent, but they're trying to, anyways.
Canada definitely has a "first buyer problem" which makes it hard to get liftoff. A great many Canadian startups end up going to the US to get funding to get around this issue.
> it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes
Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.
The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.
More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.
> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me
Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).
There will be a SECU Committee meeting on C-22 later today, where the committee will be performing a clause by clause review of Bill C-22, and voting on amendments. It may be the final meeting. You can watch it live by clicking the "Watch on ParlVu" button on the meeting notice page: https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/SECU/meetin...
After bill C-22 leaves the SECU Committee, it will be sent to the House of Commons for the third reading and a final vote before being sent to the Senate.
If you are a Canadian citizen, you can also use the following tools to message your MP:
You can also email Gary Anandasangaree ([email protected]), Marc Carney ([email protected]), and Sean Fraser ([email protected]), and tell them that any weakening of encryption or suspicionless retention of metadata is unacceptable.
The last time I remember feeling that I had representation, as a Western Canadian was 3 Prim Ministers ago. I didn't even vote for Harper, but the others simply ignored the gulf between Regina and the Okanagan. It doesn't get better once you move to Ontario. You then realize that your MPs also don't represent you, but at least they're in government now.
I get that Quebec and Ontario have 65% of the population, but why do they have 100% of the seats on a committee that shoves surveillance and gun bans down everyone else’s throats?
Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also over-represented.
BC, Alberta, and Ontario are under-represented. Ontario, for example, is about 39% of the population of the provinces, but only 36% or so of the seats.
The allocation is an imperfect formula, to be sure. I doubt it makes much of a difference in practice, except as propaganda fuel for foreign influence operations driving Alberta separatism. The degree to which most provinces are under- or over-represented is less than 1%.
There is not enough noise about this bill. It's horrific.
If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real opposition?!
Sadly spying on citizens is pretty bipartisan for most governments around the world. It seems hard to actually stop this kind of stuff. I've signed this petition which I'm sure will do absolutely nothing, but it feels like there isn't much else I can do. I didn't even get a confirmation email with the link I need to click after signing this petition, so I guess my signature is null and void. I've lost faith in our government doing anything to benefit the people.
Good to know, as past ones I've signed only have taken a couple minutes. Worst case I'm keeping the petition opened and will sign up again tonight. I'll probably also throw a little message together as well to send to my MP tonight. I feel like that's about all I can do to make my voice heard about these matters.
The Liberals have been elected 4 times in a row. They don't even hide the fact they're hostile to the needs and cares of Canadian citizens since we're the idiots who keep electing them. CBC pushes some propaganda about how this'll protect the kids, some brain-dead liberals will keep repeating it, Canada will just continue its path to irrelevancy...
Fair enough, this was not the case when I looked last week. They were "concerned" but had not posted anything in opposition.
And when I looked this morning all I found was they'd asked it to be split into two bills. Implying they want to support some but not all. Which is worrisome.
EDIT: wait, the thing linked here by you only says they want to amend it. That's a far cry from killing the bill. So, no, they're not opposed. The want to split and amend it.
> The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry...
It will not hurt American FDI nor VC within in the Canadian tech industry, which represents the bulk of capital within the Canadian tech scene. We are fine operating in China, Israel, India, Brazil, the UK, SK, Taiwan, and Japan who have similarly onerous requirements.
> There is not enough noise about this bill...
The Freedom Convoy which was fueled by COVID disinfo, as well as active foreign interference in Canadian elections [0] highlights the need for Canada to protect itself.
Look at how the UK has devolved into near yearly race riots often instigated by foreign actors over social media [1]. Canada has the same weaknesses and a hard state response is required.
Canada doesn't have free speech laws like we do in the US, but even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
Edit: can't reply
> Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here
I agree.
And thus, how can you identify where hate speech is originating when platforms will not cooperate with law enforcement without C22?
Hate speech laws are useless if you cannot identify where said hate speech is originating from.
"Misinformed" is a strange word for what was clearly an attempt at a coup, with massive amounts of foreign money involved?
The RCMP and other agencies and the province were not doing their job. I was not a fan of Trudeau, but I don't really know what they could have done to resolve the situation.
(And that is in fact one of the reasons I'm suspicious and critical of this bill. I don't think giving law enforcement agencies additional powers will resolve anything, as when push comes to shove they are often full of people on the same side as the malevolent forces that sibling / parent commenter is referring to)
A coup attempt with no weapons and no violence. How does that work exactly? The foreign money angle has been debunked by none other than the RCMP and CSIS. Nice CBC talking point though.
The freedom convoy has absolutely correct that the jab mandates and lockdowns were far beyond their sell by date, as the issue had been heavily politicized for the sake of Trudeau trying to secure a majority.
There were both weapons and violence. They had stashes weapons at two US border crossings and got away with it. There were violence and vandalism on the streets of Ottawa.
Look, I'm not going to argue with it and re-prosecute this. You're over in some echo chamber blathering about the CBC and "jabs", which to me is just bonkers.
They made life hell for the people of Ottawa for weeks, and the shit they were protesting about was barely even the business of the federal government. They should have knocked on Doug Ford's door, not walked around blaring horns for weeks and the only outcome they really wanted was to get the government to step down. The leadership were professional far right agitators that had led protests on entirely different issues before ("yellow vests" lol).
BTW aren't I supposed to have dropped dead from a blood clot at this point? Or been infertile or something? Keep waiting for that to happen.
Whatever, I hated Trudeau ... until all you guys started letting him live rent free in your heads while you smoked the weed he legalized for you. Now I'm glad he's getting some with Katy Perry, it's kinda cute.
It was clearly communicated by their leaders that they weren't leaving the streets until the government resigned (or "all pandemic measures dropped", which the fed gov't had no power to do as the majority were either provincial mandates or were forced on us by the US gov't)
Also the exact same set of people (and I mean, literally, look up the names of the leaders) tried almost exactly the same thing a few years earlier around carbon tax and environmental issues. But the government was stronger then and Canadians more united.
And yes, they had massive and well documented funding from American conservative lobby groups, in both instances.
That's not a coup. That's an illegal protest. They were all a bunch of self-centred idiots, but let's not give them credit for something that it wasn't.
A coup d'état is when you forcibly overthrow a government AND install someone else illegally (usually yourselves). Asking the current government to resign isn't a coup by any definition.
> even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
Actually, you can yell "fire" if there is a fire.
Note that the "can't yell fire" quote comes from a decision involving folks who were distributing pamphlets opposing the WWI draft. It was written by Holmes, who also wrote "three generations of idiots are enough" to justify a eugenics law, in a case that didn't involve any idiots.
Moreover, the "fire" decision was overturned by Brandenberg v Ohio.
That you're right about "Freedom" Convoy (and "Alberta" seppies) etc.
And that this a bad and harmful bill.
Given CSIS has plenty of powers already and hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups, I don't see why I would trust them with my or my family's chat histories or why I should have to live without Signal or ProtonMail, etc. as product offerings in my country.
> hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups...
They don't. They are one of the weaker intel agencies amongst the five eyes (NZ is weakest) due to overlapping responsibilities and jurisdictions with the RCMP and Provincial law enforcement. And there are active issues with certain provincial LE agencies and foreign interference.
Oh. I see. Now I regret engaging with you at all on the other comment.
My SIN begins with a 6 and my whole family is still there, and you're wrong as hell, and the majority of Albertans agree with me and Smith would never have been elected if she'd run on this.
The country has just slipped into a recession (only one in g20 btw), food bank usage is at record highs, it's young adults are ranked 71st in the world in happiness (boomers in the top 10 tho), housing is out of reach for many, youth unemployment is at ~15%, outside investments are non-existent, government debt is at record levels, haven't won the Stanley cup in decades, in a trade war with the USA, nobody is starting businesses here, educated people are leaving, etc.
Liberal party: We need to spy on people on the internet!
Foreign investments just hit an 18 year high. Employment numbers just went positive (at about 5x the per capita rate of the US). The country is recovering nicely from being addicted to mass immigration/housing. Export markets are rapidly diversifying, and Canada has made a number of new strategic partnerships.
All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.
And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.
This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.
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.
Ah, the imbecile method of retort. Always a winner.
Their comment was directly, overtly partisan. Further, it plies the rhetoric of a partisan -- literally, every talking point directly from conservative Canada-land -- and then does the cliche "whataboutism" that is a signature.
This whataboutism is a fun one for idiots because it's universally usable. Anything the government of the day does, whatabout this other things. It is spectacularly stupid, and is an immediate example that the speaker has nothing of value to add to anything, ever.
And the "Bounces off me" tactic is so boorish. I don't like this bill. I don't like a lot of the things this government has done. But the "OMG EVERYTHING HAS FALLEN TO SHIT" is so laughably perverse.
Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.
The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.
It's online and easy to read, and is a modernizing of laws around online systems. It is a deeply imperfect bill -- personally I think it is basically DOA and will not receive assent -- but a lot of the reaction to it are classic partisan hysterics (you can already see a bunch of those people throughout this discussion).
The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is
1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"
The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.
So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".
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.
Well that's the crux of it and why some VPN providers have pushed back. If the law passed, and if those VPNs got added as core providers, they would either need to log the metadata or stop operating in Canada, and several have said they would stop operating in Canada.
There are arguments for all sides, and I do think the narrative gets monopolized by the hysterical. On the one side I like torrenting without concern, but on the other it would be nice if services didn't provide cover for people to send death threats, bomb threats to schools because they fly a pride flag, VoIP swatting, and so on. Though ultimately limiting just VPNs directly operating in Canada just offshores the problem so the solution doesn't really achieve anything.
Basically the same idiocy that the British gov't has also tried to enact around making actually encrypted communication impossible, and giving them the rights to access metadata on the public's communications without warrant, etc.
On top of this will be C-34 which is just full no privacy anymore territory https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/06/everything-all-at-once-b...
The gov do all this and then will act surprised as Canada's tech sector finds it even harder to create any consumer facing businesses leaving all the value being captured by the Americans. Surprised pikachus all round.
That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.
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).
Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.
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.
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.
[0] - https://dealroom.co/guides/global
[1] - https://internationalbanker.com/finance/india-is-undergoing-...
When people on HN talk about the difficulty in the Indian startup scene, it about whether to raise in India or raise in the US and then operate in India.
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.
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.
Probably not relevant to thus thread, and hopefully redundant to you, but writing the code is the easy part.
If you have not already done so figure out your market and start marketing to them. Get deposits, build a mailing list of interested parties, build a presence where your customers hang out.
Marketing is the hard part. Get that done first before writing code. Most ideas fail not because of bad product but because there's no market, it's too hard to reach the market, or you're solving a problem no one will spend money on.
Before depleting all your savings, learn from all the threads in the "ask" section. Code counts for nothing without hod marketing. And marketing is the hard part, the code part is easy.
As an aside, the startup which has a market and marketing sorted out is a lot more attractive to investors.
It lends itself to a rentier capitalist model, and to oligarchies, and to a stagnant conservative investment class that just wants to coast off their proximity to resources.
Real estate coasting is arguably even worse, but not by much.
Notably the United States is actually trying to make this worse with their tariffs on us. Alberta oil and gas is tariff free while our value added manufacturing sectors are highly tariffed.
It makes no sense to try to kill Quebec's aluminum sector since it's the most logical place to smelt aluminum on the whole continent, but they're trying to, anyways.
Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.
The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.
More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.
> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me
Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).
It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.
Direct link to the upcoming live ParlVu video: https://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrows...
After bill C-22 leaves the SECU Committee, it will be sent to the House of Commons for the third reading and a final vote before being sent to the Senate.
If you are a Canadian citizen, you can also use the following tools to message your MP:
* The Internet Society's tool: https://www.internetsociety.org/our-work/internet-policy/kee...
* OpenMedia's messaging tool: https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1
* ICLM's messaging tool: https://iclmg.ca/stop-c-22/
You can also email Gary Anandasangaree ([email protected]), Marc Carney ([email protected]), and Sean Fraser ([email protected]), and tell them that any weakening of encryption or suspicionless retention of metadata is unacceptable.
* Jean-Yves Duclos: [email protected]
* Sima Acan: [email protected]
* Marianne Dandurand: [email protected]
* Anthony Housefather: [email protected]
* Marcus Powlowski: [email protected]
* Jacques Ramsay: [email protected]
* Amandeep Sodhi: [email protected]
Ontario and Quebec together are like 65% of Canadians. I'm in BC and have made my peace with that. I would imagine people in PEI feel a similar way.
Probably people living in Hope or Quesnel also feel similar about being steamrolled by Metro Vancouver and Victoria.
BC, Alberta, and Ontario are under-represented. Ontario, for example, is about 39% of the population of the provinces, but only 36% or so of the seats.
The allocation is an imperfect formula, to be sure. I doubt it makes much of a difference in practice, except as propaganda fuel for foreign influence operations driving Alberta separatism. The degree to which most provinces are under- or over-represented is less than 1%.
Liberal, Tory, same old story.
If you're Canadian, call your MP and raise a stink. The Liberals need to be shown quite explicitly by people in our profession how this will harm our industry, in addition to harming the privacy rights of our citizens; and it seems like conservatives are not planning on opposing this bill (just want it split in half) and the NDP is the only party raising real opposition?!
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.
That is not true at all.
https://www.conservative.ca/cpc/stop-online-government-surve...
And when I looked this morning all I found was they'd asked it to be split into two bills. Implying they want to support some but not all. Which is worrisome.
EDIT: wait, the thing linked here by you only says they want to amend it. That's a far cry from killing the bill. So, no, they're not opposed. The want to split and amend it.
It will not hurt American FDI nor VC within in the Canadian tech industry, which represents the bulk of capital within the Canadian tech scene. We are fine operating in China, Israel, India, Brazil, the UK, SK, Taiwan, and Japan who have similarly onerous requirements.
> There is not enough noise about this bill...
The Freedom Convoy which was fueled by COVID disinfo, as well as active foreign interference in Canadian elections [0] highlights the need for Canada to protect itself.
Look at how the UK has devolved into near yearly race riots often instigated by foreign actors over social media [1]. Canada has the same weaknesses and a hard state response is required.
Canada doesn't have free speech laws like we do in the US, but even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".
Edit: can't reply
> Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here
I agree.
And thus, how can you identify where hate speech is originating when platforms will not cooperate with law enforcement without C22?
Hate speech laws are useless if you cannot identify where said hate speech is originating from.
[0] - https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corpo...
[1] - https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...
The RCMP and other agencies and the province were not doing their job. I was not a fan of Trudeau, but I don't really know what they could have done to resolve the situation.
(And that is in fact one of the reasons I'm suspicious and critical of this bill. I don't think giving law enforcement agencies additional powers will resolve anything, as when push comes to shove they are often full of people on the same side as the malevolent forces that sibling / parent commenter is referring to)
A coup attempt with no weapons and no violence. How does that work exactly? The foreign money angle has been debunked by none other than the RCMP and CSIS. Nice CBC talking point though.
The freedom convoy has absolutely correct that the jab mandates and lockdowns were far beyond their sell by date, as the issue had been heavily politicized for the sake of Trudeau trying to secure a majority.
Look, I'm not going to argue with it and re-prosecute this. You're over in some echo chamber blathering about the CBC and "jabs", which to me is just bonkers.
They made life hell for the people of Ottawa for weeks, and the shit they were protesting about was barely even the business of the federal government. They should have knocked on Doug Ford's door, not walked around blaring horns for weeks and the only outcome they really wanted was to get the government to step down. The leadership were professional far right agitators that had led protests on entirely different issues before ("yellow vests" lol).
BTW aren't I supposed to have dropped dead from a blood clot at this point? Or been infertile or something? Keep waiting for that to happen.
Whatever, I hated Trudeau ... until all you guys started letting him live rent free in your heads while you smoked the weed he legalized for you. Now I'm glad he's getting some with Katy Perry, it's kinda cute.
Also the exact same set of people (and I mean, literally, look up the names of the leaders) tried almost exactly the same thing a few years earlier around carbon tax and environmental issues. But the government was stronger then and Canadians more united.
And yes, they had massive and well documented funding from American conservative lobby groups, in both instances.
Maybe not technically a coup if there's an election held right after, fair. Let's just agree to call it "tried to overthrow the government."
Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.
Actually, you can yell "fire" if there is a fire.
Note that the "can't yell fire" quote comes from a decision involving folks who were distributing pamphlets opposing the WWI draft. It was written by Holmes, who also wrote "three generations of idiots are enough" to justify a eugenics law, in a case that didn't involve any idiots.
Moreover, the "fire" decision was overturned by Brandenberg v Ohio.
That you're right about "Freedom" Convoy (and "Alberta" seppies) etc.
And that this a bad and harmful bill.
Given CSIS has plenty of powers already and hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups, I don't see why I would trust them with my or my family's chat histories or why I should have to live without Signal or ProtonMail, etc. as product offerings in my country.
> hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups...
They don't. They are one of the weaker intel agencies amongst the five eyes (NZ is weakest) due to overlapping responsibilities and jurisdictions with the RCMP and Provincial law enforcement. And there are active issues with certain provincial LE agencies and foreign interference.
My SIN begins with a 6 and my whole family is still there, and you're wrong as hell, and the majority of Albertans agree with me and Smith would never have been elected if she'd run on this.
Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here.
Liberal party: We need to spy on people on the internet!
All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.
And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.
You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.
This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.
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.
Their comment was directly, overtly partisan. Further, it plies the rhetoric of a partisan -- literally, every talking point directly from conservative Canada-land -- and then does the cliche "whataboutism" that is a signature.
This whataboutism is a fun one for idiots because it's universally usable. Anything the government of the day does, whatabout this other things. It is spectacularly stupid, and is an immediate example that the speaker has nothing of value to add to anything, ever.
And the "Bounces off me" tactic is so boorish. I don't like this bill. I don't like a lot of the things this government has done. But the "OMG EVERYTHING HAS FALLEN TO SHIT" is so laughably perverse.
Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.
The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.
Citizen Lab has a good writeup on the legislation here: https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-proposed-surveill...
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...
The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is
1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.
2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"
The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.
So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".
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-...
are they just going to ban specific vpn providers then ? this is absurd!
There are arguments for all sides, and I do think the narrative gets monopolized by the hysterical. On the one side I like torrenting without concern, but on the other it would be nice if services didn't provide cover for people to send death threats, bomb threats to schools because they fly a pride flag, VoIP swatting, and so on. Though ultimately limiting just VPNs directly operating in Canada just offshores the problem so the solution doesn't really achieve anything.