Canada’s Public Safety Minister, Gary Anandasangaree, wants you to know that Bill C-22 is not a surveillance bill. He said so twice.
“I want to be very clear about what C-22 is not. It is not about the surveillance of honest, hard-working Canadians going on about their daily lives,” Anandasangaree told an audience that included police chiefs and law enforcement officials.
Then, a few sentences later: “We’re not looking for sneaky ways to surveil Canadians. We are doing our part to combat bad actors in both the physical and digital worlds.”
What he described is a surveillance bill.
The Lawful Access Act, introduced this month, compels electronic service providers to retain Canadians’ metadata for a year and gives police and CSIS new mechanisms to access it. That includes location data, device identifiers, and daily movement patterns, all stored in advance, on every Canadian, not just suspects, held ready for law enforcement retrieval.
Hellbound and Down 