Is Canada building a surveillance state?

Prime Minister Mark Carney attended the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, this week, pushing Canada's priorities of critical minerals supply chains, macroeconomic imbalances driven by Chinese industrial overcapacity, and foreign aid reform. He and the French President Emmanuel Macron announced a new defence and industrial cooperation agreement, which would advance collaboration in aerospace and quantum science. Carney left without a formal bilateral meeting with Donald Trump, though Carney did say that Canadian and U.S. officials held detailed, technical talks on trade issues.

Over the past four months, the Carney government has introduced four distinct bills addressing Canada’s digital policy. Each is framed as a well-intentioned effort to tackle a specific problem: protecting children, catching criminals, modernizing privacy law, securing critical infrastructure. Taken individually, each is debatable on its merits. Taken together, they construct something Canadians have never voted for and barely debated: the legal architecture for a country where a single Cabinet-appointed body holds sweeping power over what you can say, see, and do online — while the government holds the tools to secretly monitor your activity.

That would be worrying enough on civil liberties grounds alone. But this is also a government that has made building a homegrown digital economy a central plank of its agenda. These two projects are in direct tension, and so far nobody in Ottawa seems to have noticed.

These are the four bills in question:

• Bill C-22 mandates every telecom and internet company to retain metadata on Canadians for up to six months. It also lets the Public Safety Minister issue secret orders compelling companies to build interception tools — while legally barring those companies from ever telling their users.

• Bill C-34 restricts social media access for children under 16, with Cabinet deciding which services the ban applies to. Enforcement requires age verification of every Canadian user — in practice, likely government ID or AI face-scanning, the same tools deployed in Australia and the UK. The bill also creates a new “Digital Safety Commission,” a Cabinet-appointed regulator with powers to investigate complaints, issue compliance orders, and levy fines of up to $10 million or 3% of global revenue.

• Bill C-36 claims to enshrine privacy as a fundamental right, then strips the Privacy Commissioner, who is an independent Agent of Parliament, of all authority over private-sector privacy law, handing it to the Digital Safety Commission created under C-34. The Commission gets new powers to issue legally binding compliance orders and adjudicate violations directly, without court referral.

• Bill C-8, the cybersecurity bill, is the furthest along, having cleared the House in March and is before the Senate. It gives the Industry Minister broad power to issue binding and secret directives to telecoms, banks, energy companies, and other critical infrastructure operators.

Other countries have tried versions of these measures. Australia introduced its social media ban in December 2025. Six months later, its own eSafety Commissioner called it a “blunt force approach” drafted too quickly; 70% of young Australians reported it had little effect on their usage. What it did produce was a surge in VPN use, pushing young people onto darker, less-monitored platforms. The UK’s age verification drove VPN downloads to record highs for the same reason.

Protecting children online commands broad public support, while law enforcement has sought lawful-access powers for decades. Privacy law written before smartphones existed does need updating. Cybersecurity is a genuine and growing threat.

But good intentions don’t justify sweeping new powers over Canadians’ personal and digital freedom, especially when the architecture has almost no safeguards against future misuse.

When the government controls the regulator that defines “harmful content” and sidelines the independent privacy watchdog, it gains influence over the boundaries of public debate while removing one of the few institutions capable of challenging it. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s a straightforward description of how regulatory capture works, and it is one of the most well-documented failures in public administration.

It is the cumulative nature of these four bills that is the issue. Individually, each might survive scrutiny. Together, they give a single Cabinet-appointed body a surveillance infrastructure, authority over content regulation, the power over privacy enforcement, and control over critical-infrastructure, with limited independent oversight of any of it.

This “trust us we’re the government” approach is a longstanding feature of Canadian governance, but there is a second problem here, and it bears on one of the most pressing issues facing Canada today: our ability to grow, nurture, and hang on to our companies.

The Carney government has made attracting digital talent and building a homegrown technology sector a central plank of its economic agenda. These four bills send the opposite message. Mandatory metadata retention, secret ministerial orders, sweeping content regulation, and a powerful new Commission with global-revenue fines do not make Canada an easier or more attractive place to build a digital company. They make it harder and riskier, at the precise moment when we can least afford to do so. A government cannot credibly tell entrepreneurs to build here while simultaneously constructing the regulatory architecture of a surveillance state. It needs to choose which Canada it’s building.

What is needed is genuinely independent oversight, narrowly defined and judicially reviewable powers, and limits strong enough to bind every future government, not just this one. Four major bills introduced in rapid succession, reshaping the relationship between Canadians and their digital lives, deserve nothing less.

June 20: First day of summer! Get thee to a barbecue.

June 22: The Quebec Act received Royal Assent on this day in 1774. It revoked the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which had aimed to assimilate the French-Canadian population under English rule. It stands as one of the most significant pieces of legislation in the history of British North America, shaping the future of what would become Canada and contributing to the tensions that sparked the American Revolution.

June 23: On this day in 1985, a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 en route from Toronto to London, killing all 329 people aboard, most of them Canadians. To this day, the Air India bombing is still the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history. June 23 is now the National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Terrorism in Canada.

June 24: On this day in 1497, John Cabot made landfall in North America, possibly at Cape Breton, establishing the claim to territory that would eventually become Canada.

June 24: O Canada, later to become our national anthem, was performed for the first time on this day in 1880.

June 26: On this day in 1959, Queen Elizabeth II and President Eisenhower formally opened the St. Lawrence Seaway — the culmination of decades of engineering and binational co-operation.

This 1958 documentary narrated by Pierre Berton follows the Trans-Canada Highway from east to west, revealing the people, the resources and the geography of Canada while looking at the engineering feats accomplished in the building of the highway.

Canada won its first ever match at a men’s FIFA World Cup on Thursday, destroying Qatar 6-0 before a delirious crowd at B.C. Place Stadium in Vancouver. Striker Jonathan David had a hat trick for Canada, tying him with Argentina’s Lionel Messi for the scoring lead in the tournament so far.

Canadian joy was muted after the game, thanks to a a gruesome injury to midfielder Ismaël Koné, who suffered a broken tibia after a hard tackle from a Qatar player. Koné was taken straight to the Vancouver General hospital, where he was operated on by surgeons who had seen the injury live on television and rushed to the hospital to help.

Koné’s replacement was Nathan Saliba, who promptly scored on a free kick and held up his teammate’s jersey in tribute.

• Be Giant has a lengthy profile of Swish Goswami, a 29-year-old entrepreneur from Calgary who co-founded two companies, but is pivoting away from the hustle-culture, build-everything-at-once approach that characterized his early career. Goswami reaffirms his commitment to staying and building here despite the harder capital environment.

• Is his SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte canvasses candidates for the Great Canadian Novel.

• “Turning Complexity into Capability” is a useful new report from the Office of the Procurement Ombud explaining the defence procurement system in depth.

• The UK’s Government Office for Science has published a report outlining three possible scenarios for the future of AI in order to “promote consistency and coherence in long-term planning”.

• A new study from the MEI looks at the extent to which supply management drives up prices for Canadians, with low-income households the hardest hit.

• After nearly a century-long run, the CBC will no longer broadcast Hockey Night in Canada.

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