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

Op-Ed: Canada Needs Racketeering Laws and Precise Cyber Tools — Not Blanket Surveillance.

OTTAWA — When The Bureau published its analysis of Bill C-2 last fall, the diagnosis was unsparing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Apple and Meta have raised formal objections.

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.”

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.

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.

That is not a hypothetical.

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.

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.

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.

The Bureau identified the core problems last fall.

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.

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.

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, Syndicato, Cobra, Brisa, and Endgame — major investigations that collapsed before trial while the Chinese, Mexican and Italian criminal networks they targeted continued to operate.

Bill C-22 does not touch any of this. It does not reform disclosure. It does not address the Stinchcombe and Jordan blockages that, as The Bureau reported, have led senior DEA and State Department officials to tell American investigators that Canada lacks the capacity to confront the cartels and Triad alliances running fentanyl, money-laundering, and encryption platforms out of British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta and Quebec.

Derek Maltz, former chief of the DEA under President Donald Trump, described this problem with precision: “antiquated and archaic” laws and a fundamental failure of information-sharing with American partners.

The threat The Bureau has documented for two years is now arriving in Senate testimony. DEA Administrator Terrance Cole told lawmakers in Washington last week that chemicals used to make fentanyl are streaming into the Port of Vancouver en route to Mexican cartel-run drug labs on Canadian soil.

The chemicals come from China.

Cole said American law enforcement is "very conscious" of fentanyl being manufactured in Canada for export across the northern border, citing "significant seizures" over the past two months. Ottawa knows this. The question was never intelligence. It is acknowledgement and action.

What Canada needs is what The Bureau has argued consistently. A targeted racketeering-style interception regime, modeled on the legal architecture that allowed American prosecutors to dismantle Italian mafias; empowerment of Fintrac — Canada’s financial intelligence unit — to move directly from financial intelligence to prosecution; and reform of the disclosure rules that have turned complex transnational crime prosecutions into exercises in institutional surrender.

What Canada does not need is a mass metadata retention regime that blankets every Canadian with surveillance obligations designed for the few thousand individuals running the fentanyl platforms, underground banks, and Beijing-tied United Front brokerage houses that The Bureau has been documenting for years — and that law enforcement already knows by name.

And it must be said: few journalistic platforms in North America are positioned as The Bureau is to understand that the Chinese proxies of such concern to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and certain police investigators — the individuals who command Western hemisphere money-laundering and synthetic drug supply networks — are uncomfortably well-connected in Canadian cities. This is the elephant, or rather the dragon, in the room that Bill C-22 does not address. Canada’s weakness in targeting the senior criminal actors threatening this nation may have far more to do with political sensitivities than any lack of technical tools.

The solution is not complicated. Racketeering and foreign interference laws must give Canadian intelligence and law enforcement the powers to precisely target known foreign racketeers and transnational criminal networks, rather than throw a punitive surveillance blanket over every Canadian. These networks can be wound down by targeting the top and working downward — not by targeting forty million people with no clear promise or plan to take down the kingpins.

The congressional letter to Anandasangaree warned that American companies would face a difficult choice if the bill passes: compromising the security of their entire user base — including American citizens — or risking exclusion from the Canadian market. “Either outcome,” the letter stated, “harms U.S. national security and economic interests by undermining trust in American technology and inviting reciprocal demands from other nations.”

This is the precise opposite of the direction Canada should be moving.

At a moment when rebuilding trust with Washington is a strategic imperative — and when the case for a joint DEA Special Operations Division-style intelligence sharing hub for targeting the Chinese-Mexican-Canadian criminal architecture has never been stronger — the Carney government is introducing legislation that the United States Congress has put on record as a threat to American national security and data integrity.

Bill C-22 gets the problem backwards. The cartels, Triads, and hostile-state proxies that have made Canada a platform for continental narco-finance are not hiding. They are identifiable, documented, and in many cases well known to law enforcement on both sides of the border. The legal tools to reach them — targeted interception, financial intelligence empowerment, disclosure reform, Five Eyes cooperation free from the Stinchcombe barrier — are knowable and achievable. Those are the reforms Ottawa should be pursuing.

Instead, it is building a surveillance architecture aimed at every Canadian with a phone, while telling its most important security partners that it cannot be trusted to protect the integrity of their citizens’ data.

Beijing could not have hoped for a more convenient outcome.