Lawful Access & Surveillance Act
C-2's surveillance powers relaunched with secret ministerial orders, mandatory backdoor capabilities, and year-long metadata retention
"The Unlawful Access to Your Information Act Bill"
What This Means for You
Your phone carrier could be forced to silently store and hand over a year of your location and activity data. No warrant, notification, or transparency required.
Introduced
March 2026
Sponsor
Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Public Safety
Parliament
45th Parliament, 1st Session
Official Title
Lawful Access Act
What It Does
After C-2 was split into two under massive public pressure, the immigration provisions became C-12 (now law), and the surveillance provisions were repackaged as C-22. That distinction means little for those affected, as C-22 still violates the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, most directly Section 8 (unreasonable search and seizure). The government dropped a few of the most flagrant information violations, i.e., police can no longer demand full subscriber details without a warrant, and cash payment restrictions were removed, but the core surveillance architecture is still well preserved. Telecoms and service providers are still forced to build and maintain "technical capabilities for extracting and organising information" to assist law enforcement and CSIS on demand. The Minister of Public Safety can issue secret surveillance orders, approved only by the Intelligence Commissioner (not a judge), potentially turning any electronic device into a listening device. Service providers must also retain metadata, including transmission data enabling device tracking, for up to one year.
Primary Concerns
- Mandatory technical capability requirements force all telecoms to build permanent extraction infrastructure, a backdoor by another name
- Secret ministerial orders bypass judicial oversight entirely; only the Intelligence Commissioner (not a court) reviews them
- Year-long metadata retention enables persistent tracking of device location and online activity for every Canadian
- "Systemic vulnerability" exemption (the encryption backdoor loophole) remains in the bill and can be silently redefined by regulation
- In 2025, the UK government secretly ordered Apple to break its own encryption; the Canadian Constitution Foundation warns C-22 creates the same legal mechanism here
- Presented as a moderated version of C-2, but the surveillance infrastructure that drew opposition from 300+ organizations is still intact
- Gag orders remain: service providers can still be prohibited from telling customers their data was accessed
Who's Opposing It
The Canadian Constitution Foundation published a detailed explainer identifying the core surveillance powers that survived from C-2. Privacy experts and the same civil society coalition that opposed C-2 continue to monitor the bill's passage.
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