With major tech companies threatening to leave Canada and US lawmakers weighing in, the government is signalling it will amend the bill. But the constitutional questions won’t end there.
Opposition to Bill C-22 , the lawful access bill currently in second reading before Parliament, has intensified sharply in recent days.
More than a dozen major companies — Apple, Meta, Signal, and several VPN providers among them — have raised concerns about key provisions, with some threatening to withdraw services from the Canadian market if the bill passes as drafted.
Two members of the US Congress have written to the Public Safety Minister warning that certain powers could compromise the privacy of American citizens and national security.
Civil liberties groups and privacy experts have published open letters and op-eds , and the dissent on social media has been equally loud.
Meanwhile, the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have been on a media blitz bemoaning Canada’s lack of a lawful access regime and making the case for why the bill needs to pass.
The proposed legislation covers a range of new lawful access powers, but the two provisions drawing the strongest response are those dealing with encryption and bulk metadata preservation. Critics fear the bill would permit secret ministerial orders compelling companies to introduce vulnerabilities into their systems, and mandate the retention of metadata that would capture nearly every Canadian’s movements for up to a year, without any individualized suspicion.
I teach and write on section 8 of the Charter, which protects against unreasonable search or seizure, and the concerns about encryption and metadata raise serious constitutional questions.
Before getting to those, it’s worth taking stock of where the bill stands politically and what changes are likely before it reaches third reading.
May 19, 2026
The Bank of Canada offers a helpful snapshot of AI adoption, job losses, and early productivity gains
In Ottawa last week, the Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, Michelle Alexopoulos, offered an illuminating snapshot of how AI is affecting employment and productivity across industries in Canada.
I posted a few details about her speech on LinkedIn on Friday, but there are a few other points here that I think will be of interest to readers.
Alexopoulus poses a big-picture question about AI at the outset. Will it prove to be a general-purpose technology, like the steam engine or the computer, that “reshaped entire economies and societies”? Or will it remain for many of us in the short to medium term limited to certain purposes, with a marginal impact on the workplace as a whole?
The early data on the uptake of AI in Canada points in the direction of a more pervasive transformation, but one that may unfold gradually. While some 12% of companies were using AI last year, up from 3% in 2022, they’re adopting it unevenly, with only 1.5% of businesses in accommodation and food services using AI, but more than 30% of finance and insurance firms doing so.
The Deputy Governor anticipates that “some jobs will be replaced by AI. New jobs will emerge, and others will be transformed,” offering this helpful analogy:
… when computers were first introduced into offices, some jobs vanished, like office typists and switchboard operators. New jobs were created, like entire IT departments. And other jobs changed — analog tasks were digitalized, and workers learned to use computers.
Alexopoulos makes three more specific observations about what the data tell us about how AI is currently affecting the workforce.
May 14, 2026
Most of our closest allies do not force telecos to retain everyone’s metadata for up to a year without oversight
Last week, when I appeared before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on Bill C-22, a question kept coming up from members on both sides of the table: how do other countries handle this? Do our closest allies require electronic service providers to retain the metadata of nearly everyone in the country for a lengthy period, without grounds or individualized suspicion, as the government is proposing to do here?
With one exception, no, the Five Eyes partners have not gone where Bill C-22 proposes to go.
The European experiment
For context, the European Union passed a similar law in 2006 and the European Court of Justice struck it down in 2014. In the Digital Rights Ireland case, the Court acknowledged the general interest in making sure that data is preserved to help investigate and prosecute serious crime, including terrorism. But it held the impact of bulk metadata retention on privacy to be “wide-ranging,” “serious,” and disproportionate. The data retained under the law was not limited to investigating “serious crime.” Police could access it without a warrant. And the periods of data retention bore no connection to the possible usefulness of the data for investigations.
May 12, 2026
Probably not, for reasons that point to the limits of what Canada can do here
Recently, governments in Manitoba and Ontario have signalled their support for a ban on social media for children under 16 years of age, and last month, the federal Liberals passed a resolution to this effect at a party convention. Manitoba’s premier Wab Kinew and the national Liberal Party are also keen to ban youth access to “all AI chatbots and other potentially harmful forms of AI interaction.”
Passing a complete ban would entail Canada following Australia’s lead, which, in late 2025, banned social media for everyone under 16. Governments in Europe have taken a less stringent approach by imposing age-verification and parental consent rules around social media access.
It remains to be seen whether Ottawa will choose the European or Australian path. But for reasons I sketch out here briefly, the European path seems more likely — and we may see the Carney government take this path when it soon re-tables the Online Harms Act.
Many commentators have been critical of the idea of Canada imposing a ban on social media or AI for young people due, among other reasons, to the fact that we have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that guarantees everyone a right to free expression.
If a ban on social media or AI would infringe this right, could it still be legal? Yes it could, because no right in the Charter is absolute. All of our rights under the Charter are subject to reasonable limits — as decided by the courts — under section 1. (And of course, in the case of limits to free expression, we the people have the final say under section 33.)
So if a ban on access to social media or AI from those under 16 would violate section 2(b) of the Charter, would it be a reasonable limit on that right? No, it probably wouldn’t.
The thrust of this post is to briefly show what a challenge would look like and why access with parental consent or other guardrails is likely the furthest Canada can go in restricting youth from their favourite platform or chatbot.
May 7, 2026
The government is playing down key concerns, but they haven’t gone away
On Tuesday, Bill C-22 came before the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security. The Ministers of Justice and Public Safety were there to defend the bill in response to strong concerns raised about it by MPs who had clearly done their homework.
Ministers Fraser and Anandasangaree defended the bill largely in line with the government’s Charter Statement on C-22 tabled in the House on April 24th. This is a document intended to set out why the government thinks potentially contentious elements of the bill are Charter compliant.
The Ministers’ appearance before the Committee followed comments by officials from the Department of Justice and the RCMP that were also largely consistent with the framing of the bill in the Charter Statement.
Because the Statement sets out the playbook of the bill’s main advocates, this post looks briefly at what it gets right and what it gets wrong or leaves out.