OTTAWA — In this episode with Jason James, I break down my criticisms of the raft of public-safety and surveillance laws Mark Carney’s manufactured-majority government is attempting to push through Canada’s Parliament before the summer break — a legislative push now drawing serious concern from privacy experts, media lawyers, civil-liberties advocates, and technology leaders including Shopify founder Tobi Lütke.
I also reiterate my analysis that Canada’s failed trade dealings with the Trump Administration are now foreseeably snagged on Carney’s Chinese EV import deal. The Liberal government, I argue, is trying to have its cake and eat it too: securing the deeper trade flows with China that the party’s Beijing trade lobby has pushed for since Pierre Trudeau, while also trying to secure a favorable deal with Washington.
I tell Jason, as I have before, that this is a non-starter for Washington. The United States will not be gaslit into accepting Chinese spy platforms and forced-labour trade goods dumped into North American trade — goods and platforms that undermine North American workers and security, among many other threats.
But Carney persists in attempting to assuage his business backers, as Trudeau did before him, I tell Jason.
Focusing on Bill C-22, the so-called Lawful Access Act, I start with an unavoidable observation: Ottawa is again confusing mass expansion of state power over ordinary Canadians with the targeted legal tools actually needed to confront Canada’s most serious threat actors.
As a subject-matter reporter on Chinese Triad networks, Mexican cartel platforms, hostile-state proxies, fentanyl supply chains, underground banking, and foreign-interference structures in Canada, I argue that the problem is not that law enforcement lacks ways to collect more data from forty million Canadians. The problem is that the senior criminal actors driving these networks are already identifiable, already known to investigators, and often uncomfortably well-connected in Canadian political, business, and diaspora power structures.
Bill C-22, I argue, does little to fix the real architecture of impunity: disclosure and trial-delay barriers that have helped collapse major organized-crime prosecutions; weak racketeering tools; limited financial-intelligence-to-prosecution pathways; and a failure to build deeper Five Eyes and DEA-style cooperation against the Chinese-Mexican-Canadian criminal ecosystem now running fentanyl, laundering, and encryption platforms through Canadian cities.
Instead, the Carney government is advancing a surveillance framework that has alarmed Signal, Apple, Meta, Windscribe, NordVPN, the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, U.S. lawmakers, and Canadian tech leaders. Critics warn the bill could damage privacy, journalism, encryption, Canadian tech viability, and even U.S. national security interests.
The central argument: Canada does not need a blanket metadata and lawful-access regime aimed at everyone with a phone. It needs precise, aggressive tools to target the few thousand individuals and networks actually threatening national security — the cartel brokers, Triad financiers, hostile-state proxies, fentanyl logisticians, underground bankers, and United Front-linked intermediaries who have turned Canada into a platform for continental narco-finance.
Bill C-22 gets the problem backwards. And in doing so, it risks handing Beijing and other hostile actors exactly the structural vulnerabilities they have been waiting to exploit.
