Author: Alexandra Lyn

By: Alexandra Lyn, Joel Reardon, and Michael Nesbitt

Legislation Commented On: Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access, 1st Sess, 45th Parl, 2026 (as passed by the House of Commons 18 June 2026)

PDF Version: Decrypting Bill C-22, Part III: Backdoors by Another Name: The Limits of C-22’s Systemic Vulnerability Safeguard

Status: As of this writing, Bill C-22 has passed the House of Commons and remains at second reading in the Senate, where debate most recently resumed on 8 October 2026 (LEGISinfo, Bill C-22 (45-1)).

 This is the third post in our four-part series translating the ongoing debate on Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access, for non-technical and non-legal readers. By way of reminder, lawful access refers to law enforcement’s legal powers to conduct searches and seizures of private spaces and information—think searches of your home (spaces) or your computer or browsing history (information)—for investigative purposes. Bill C-22 is the government’s controversial attempt to update Canada’s lawful access regime by granting police broad new powers of search and seizure.

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By: Alexandra Lyn, Joel Reardon, and Michael Nesbitt

Legislation Commented On: Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access, 1st Sess, 45th Parl, 2026 (as passed by the House of Commons 18 June 2026)

PDF Version: Decrypting Bill C-22, Part 2: Keeping Tabs: C-22 and the Year (Now Half-Year) of Metadata Retention

This is the second post in our four-part series that translates the ongoing debate over Bill C-22 for non-technical and non-legal readers. The first post introduced Bill C-22 and provided background information to help understand the justifications and criticisms of the Bill, including a brief primer on the legal concept of “lawful access” and search and seizure law under section 8 of the Charter, which readers may wish to review as it forms a backdrop to this blog post. Part I can be found here. In that post, we promised three subsequent blog posts on three core criticisms of Bill C-22. This installment tackles one of the most far-reaching of those three core criticisms of Bill C-22: the Bill’s mandatory metadata retention provisions.

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By: Alexandra Lyn, Joel Reardon, and Michael Nesbitt

Legislation Commented On: Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access (1^st Sess, 45^th Parl, 2026)

PDF Version: Decrypting Bill C-22, Part I: Why Canada Needs a Lawful Access Regime

Bill C-22, An Act respecting lawful access (1^st Sess, 45^th Parl, 2026) is the federal government’s long-overdue and contentious attempt to address the intractable issue of lawful access. C-22 has cleared the House and is awaiting Senate study beginning on September 21, 2026, having been fast-tracked through third reading despite ongoing privacy, encryption, and overbreadth objections.  The Bill has two parts. Part 1, Timely Access to Data and Information, governs law enforcement access to personal information held by communication service providers (think Bell, Rogers, Telus) and other tech companies and services like Signal, Gmail, and WhatsApp, by amending the Criminal Code and several related statutes. Part 2 enacts the Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act (SAAIA), which establishes a framework that requires electronic service providers to facilitate lawful access requests under the Criminal Code or the CSIS Act. Framed by the government as a response to criminal activity increasingly enabled by the digital environment, the Bill expands the state’s powers of search and seizure by conscripting private providers into its investigative apparatus — for example by requiring them, among other things, to retain user metadata that may not otherwise be preserved, and to develop technical capabilities that would otherwise not exist, so that law enforcement can access the data these providers hold. These expanded powers lie in tension with civil liberties and the privacy interests Canadians hold in their digital lives, interests protected by section 8 of the Charter. Bill C-22 asks Canadians to decide a question that has become increasingly pressing in a digital world: in the pursuit of public safety, how much of our privacy are we prepared to relinquish, to whom, and at what cost?

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