That's not why an indigenous Canadian tech industry is non-existent.

Heck, China, Israel, India, South Korea, and Taiwan all have larger tech industries than Canada and have much stricter internet speech requirements (and in Israel and Taiwan's case are much smaller than Canada population wise).

Canadian tech is nonexistent because every Canadian pension fund, family office, and bank prefers to invest in American equities over Canadian equities.

That's actually not true for most of those countries. None of those countries other than maybe China have laws requiring encryption backdoors.

Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.

Off-topic but I suspect it's also that oil and gas and real estate are the "easy" money in Canada and that's where investment goes. Canadian investors are risk adverse because they can be. That and there's a colonial-descended cultural bias towards credentials and established players.

But yeah, I'm furiously writing code for a product living off my savings, and would love to get investment to build a startup off of it, but every time I sniff around the Canadian "investor" scene it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me.

All while our largest trading partner explicitly and openly tries to harm us.

And who gives a flying fuck about the Stanley cup. What a weird thing to cite.

You understand governments are large things with many departments and focuses, right? This "whataboutism" angle is always spectacularly boring horseshit, and usually is plied by partisans that just want to piss and moan about everything Not Their Team does.

This bill is deeply imperfect, and I hope it dies. Your comment is just noisy partisan bluster.

It will not hurt American FDI nor VC within in the Canadian tech industry, which represents the bulk of capital within the Canadian tech scene. We are fine operating in China, Israel, India, Brazil, the UK, SK, Taiwan, and Japan who have similarly onerous requirements.

> There is not enough noise about this bill...

The Freedom Convoy which was fueled by COVID disinfo, as well as active foreign interference in Canadian elections [0] highlights the need for Canada to protect itself.

Look at how the UK has devolved into near yearly race riots often instigated by foreign actors over social media [1]. Canada has the same weaknesses and a hard state response is required.

Canada doesn't have free speech laws like we do in the US, but even in the US you "cannot yet fire in a crowded theatre".

Edit: can't reply

> Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here

I agree.

And thus, how can you identify where hate speech is originating when platforms will not cooperate with law enforcement without C22?

Hate speech laws are useless if you cannot identify where said hate speech is originating from.

[0] - https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corpo...

[1] - https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/comme...

Its legislation that attempts to weaken and break encryption so that law enforcement and others can access encrypted communications. It also seeks to require mandatory suspicionless metadata for all online services.

The legislation was explicitly written to target both telecom companies and every online service.

Citizen Lab has a good writeup on the legislation here: https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-proposed-surveill...

https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/45-1/bill/C-22/first-r...

The parts that are garnering a lot of negative feedback is

1) requiring core providers (a list as yet undefined), and any others if specifically directed to, to maintain a rolling year of metadata that the government can request on a targeted individual with a warrant. This is obviously at odds with "no log" VPNs in particular. And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.

2) "the development, implementation, assessment, testing and maintenance of operational and technical capabilities, including capabilities related to extracting and organizing information that is authorized to be accessed and to providing access to such information to authorized persons;"

The #2 could potentially imply secondary decryption keys and the like, though the bill explicitly says the requirement cannot impose a systematic vulnerability, and the government has pointed to that and said they want no such thing.

So VPN providers are saying "we don't want to log", and encryption providers are saying "be much clearer in what you mean by systematic vulnerability. Define this explicitly".

It's almost like all three of those involve absolutely enormous captive markets, including for their defence/espionage purposes.

Partially. The money made in ONG and Construction is then re-invested in American equities. And even provincial pension like Ontario Teachers and La Caisse funds prefer investing in American equities instead because their only incentive is pension solvency.

The issue is Canada is simply a tiny country with an extremely loose confederation in a world that is returning to a "winner takes all" mindset dependent on hard unification.

More tactically, using a Yozma-style approach to subsidize Canadian VC would help sow the seeds for a truly self sustaining ecosystem.

> it becomes clear to me that they'd have no time for somebody like me

Because they don't and never will. Anyone who has potential gets frustrated and leaves (ofc I've poached a couple as well).

Actually, you can yell "fire" if there is a fire.

Note that the "can't yell fire" quote comes from a decision involving folks who were distributing pamphlets opposing the WWI draft. It was written by Holmes, who also wrote "three generations of idiots are enough" to justify a eugenics law, in a case that didn't involve any idiots.

Moreover, the "fire" decision was overturned by Brandenberg v Ohio.

Suspicionless bulk metadata retention is also illegal in the EU, and no such law existing in many of those other democracies you listed.

And when Harper was in power they were trying to push something similar?

And that the petition linked here is an NDP petition?

Partisan grandstanding won't fix the issue. A mobilized public will.

* Jean-Yves Duclos: jean-yves.duclos@parl.gc.ca

* Sima Acan: sima.acan@parl.gc.ca

* Marianne Dandurand: marianne.dandurand@parl.gc.ca

* Anthony Housefather: anthony.housefather@parl.gc.ca

* Marcus Powlowski: marcus.powlowski@parl.gc.ca

* Jacques Ramsay: jacques.ramsay@parl.gc.ca

* Amandeep Sodhi: amandeep.sodhi@parl.gc.ca

That's not new true. Most people are not legal experts with extensive expertise in technology, knowledge of how Canadian courts will interpret the legislation, and knowledge of how governments around the world are trying to attack encryption (ex: they do their best to hide and not to explicitly say it in the legislation).

> And let's be real: 99% of the industry already logs everything.

That's your opinion. That's not a real scientific claim, and yet you are using it to justify an unprecedented attack on privacy rights.

Suspicionless metadata retention has been illegal in the European Union since 2014, and it violates the Charter. There is no world in which it is acceptable.

An RCMP witness speaking about the bill during a recent committee meeting literally said the legislation will help them "solve the problem of encryption": https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/05/rcmp-confirms-bill-c-22-...

are they just going to ban specific vpn providers then ? this is absurd!

[0] - https://dealroom.co/guides/global

[1] - https://internationalbanker.com/finance/india-is-undergoing-...

That is not true at all.

https://www.conservative.ca/cpc/stop-online-government-surve...

Yep. And that is a very good thing. Hate speech is illegal here.

The RCMP and other agencies and the province were not doing their job. I was not a fan of Trudeau, but I don't really know what they could have done to resolve the situation.

(And that is in fact one of the reasons I'm suspicious and critical of this bill. I don't think giving law enforcement agencies additional powers will resolve anything, as when push comes to shove they are often full of people on the same side as the malevolent forces that sibling / parent commenter is referring to)

That you're right about "Freedom" Convoy (and "Alberta" seppies) etc.

And that this a bad and harmful bill.

Given CSIS has plenty of powers already and hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups, I don't see why I would trust them with my or my family's chat histories or why I should have to live without Signal or ProtonMail, etc. as product offerings in my country.

There are arguments for all sides, and I do think the narrative gets monopolized by the hysterical. On the one side I like torrenting without concern, but on the other it would be nice if services didn't provide cover for people to send death threats, bomb threats to schools because they fly a pride flag, VoIP swatting, and so on. Though ultimately limiting just VPNs directly operating in Canada just offshores the problem so the solution doesn't really achieve anything.

> hasn't done anything to deal with the actions far right American (and domestic) groups...

They don't. They are one of the weaker intel agencies amongst the five eyes (NZ is weakest) due to overlapping responsibilities and jurisdictions with the RCMP and Provincial law enforcement. And there are active issues with certain provincial LE agencies and foreign interference.

Ontario and Quebec together are like 65% of Canadians. I'm in BC and have made my peace with that. I would imagine people in PEI feel a similar way.

Probably people living in Hope or Quesnel also feel similar about being steamrolled by Metro Vancouver and Victoria.

Also the exact same set of people (and I mean, literally, look up the names of the leaders) tried almost exactly the same thing a few years earlier around carbon tax and environmental issues. But the government was stronger then and Canadians more united.

And yes, they had massive and well documented funding from American conservative lobby groups, in both instances.

BC, Alberta, and Ontario are under-represented. Ontario, for example, is about 39% of the population of the provinces, but only 36% or so of the seats.

The allocation is an imperfect formula, to be sure. I doubt it makes much of a difference in practice, except as propaganda fuel for foreign influence operations driving Alberta separatism.