Bill C-22 Surveils Ordinary Canadians While Leaving Cartel Networks Untouched

SubscribeSign in

Bill C-22 Surveils Ordinary Canadians While Leaving Cartel Networks Untouched<br>Op-Ed: Canada Needs Racketeering Laws and Precise Cyber Tools — Not Blanket Surveillance.<br>May 18, 2026

199

32<br>58

Share

OTTAWA — When The Bureau published its analysis of Bill C-2 last fall, the diagnosis was unsparing.<br>Ottawa had confused expansion of state power over ordinary Canadians with the enforcement tools Canada actually needs to confront the Chinese Triads, Mexican cartels, and hostile-state networks that have turned Canadian cities into operational platforms for the hemisphere’s most dangerous criminal organizations. The government has now repackaged that same flawed instinct under a new number. Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act, deserves the same verdict.<br>The critics arriving at that conclusion now span an extraordinary coalition. Signal, the secure messaging service used by millions of Canadians — including journalists and dissidents seeking to avoid scrutiny from hostile state spies — has warned it would rather withdraw from Canada than compromise the privacy promises it has made to its users.<br>Tobi Lütke, founder and chief executive of Shopify, Canada’s most important technology company, has called Bill C-22 “a huge mistake” that “may well end up dealing a death blow to Canadian tech viability,” and has publicly urged Ottawa’s Public Safety Minister to study expert opinion on the bill’s fatal flaws.<br>Windscribe, the Toronto-headquartered virtual private network provider, has threatened to relocate its headquarters out of Canada if the legislation passes. NordVPN has warned it could follow suit, saying there is no scenario in which it would compromise its no-logs architecture or encryption protections.<br>Apple and Meta have raised formal objections.<br>The Canadian Chamber of Commerce has called for changes. And in a development that should stop the Carney government cold, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast wrote to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree warning that Bill C-22 would “drastically expand Canada’s surveillance and data access powers in ways that create significant cross-border risks to the security and data privacy of Americans.”<br>That last point is not a partisan complaint. It is a warning from Canada’s most important security partner that Ottawa is about to create vulnerabilities that hostile states — the very states The Bureau has spent three years documenting as active threats on Canadian soil — will be positioned to exploit.<br>Signal’s vice-president of strategy, Udbhav Tiwari, explains the vulnerability plainly: Bill C-22 could allow hackers to exploit vulnerabilities engineered into electronic systems, with private messaging services serving as an ideal target for foreign adversaries.<br>That is not a hypothetical.<br>The Bureau‘s cyber and law enforcement sources, including experts from agencies including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, have explained that Beijing is patiently positioning itself — collecting encrypted messaging data from Western users while its universities and state-linked hackers advance quantum computing technologies powerful enough to break into private Western communications.<br>Without entering complex legal territory, it is fair to say that enough credible experts have made the case that Ottawa would be opening the door and handing Beijing the keys to exploit exactly these kinds of structural weaknesses. In passing Bill C-22 as written, Canada would be legislating a gift to the adversary.<br>Meanwhile — and this is the central failure that Bill C-22 shares with its predecessor — the legislation does nothing to address the actual legal architecture that has allowed transnational criminal networks to operate in Canada with near impunity for decades.<br>The Bureau identified the core problems last fall.<br>Former RCMP investigator Calvin Chrustie testified before British Columbia’s Cullen Commission that, as a result of judicial blockages arising from Charter of Rights rulings, by 2015 it had become effectively impossible to obtain wiretaps on Sinaloa Cartel figures in Vancouver.<br>Two Supreme Court rulings — Stinchcombe and Jordan — have become the most reliable legal shields for alleged cartel actors in Canada, among them figures like former Winter Olympian Ryan Wedding, whose narcotics networks have proven unprosecutable on Canadian soil, with numerous investigations falling apart under Stinchcombe specifically.<br>That ruling requires exhaustive disclosure of sensitive intelligence, often incompatible with Five Eyes investigations that depend on classified cooperation between Canada and the United States, Australia, and other partners. Jordan imposes strict trial ceilings that expire while Stinchcombe disclosure battles drag on. The result is a grim catalogue: Project E-Pirate, E-Nationalize,...