In January, I wrote about Canada’s Bill C-22 — a repackaged version of Bill C-2, the surveillance bill that failed after public backlash in 2025. Same architecture, new docket number. I called it the cover version.

The cover version is about to ship. And the government is making sure nobody reads the lyric sheet.

On June 16, 2026, Canada’s federal government blocked committee debate on Part 2 of Bill C-22 — the part that lets the Minister of Public Safety secretly order any messaging app, cloud service, or email provider with Canadian users to build government access directly into their infrastructure. The orders come with permanent gag rules. The company that receives one can never tell anyone. No meaningful judicial oversight. No public review.

The government blocked debate on the gag orders by gagging debate.

Part 2 is titled the “Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act.” The name is doing work. What the bill authorizes: the Minister issues a secret order. The company complies or faces consequences. The company cannot disclose the order’s existence. The user never knows. There is no judge between the Minister and the backdoor. There is no sunset clause. There is no public accounting.

On May 27, Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree described the bill as “encryption-neutral.” A ministry spokesperson said the government is “not legislating to require [providers] to install capabilities to enable surveillance.”

The next day, Apple testified before the Standing Committee on Public Safety: “This Bill Allows the Government of Canada to Force Companies to Break Encryption by Inserting Backdoors into their Products.”

“Encryption-neutral” is not a description. It’s a gag on the bill’s own plain text.

The responses arrived in sequence. Signal said it would leave Canada rather than comply. Windscribe began preparing to relocate its headquarters. NordVPN warned it might follow. The Citizen Lab and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association concluded that “most elements are unsalvageable.” The Canadian Chamber of Commerce warned the bill could “make it easier for criminals to penetrate Canadian systems.” Over 10,000 Canadians contacted their MPs through OpenMedia’s campaign.

On June 18, twenty-one organizations signed a joint statement denouncing the government’s decision to end debate. Tim McSorley of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group called it “one of the greatest threats to privacy in Canada of the past two decades.” Dominique Peschard of the Ligue des droits et libertés called the handling “an affront to democracy.”

The government’s response to all of this was to end debate faster.

This is not unfamiliar architecture. The UK’s Investigatory Powers Act contains the same mechanism — secret orders to build access capabilities, with gag clauses prohibiting disclosure. When the UK tried to use it against Apple, Apple didn’t comply. It pulled Advanced Data Protection from the UK entirely. British users lost end-to-end encryption for iCloud — not because the encryption was broken, but because the government’s secret order made offering it legally impossible. The encryption wasn’t cracked. It was withdrawn. The outcome was the same.

And there is the proof that was already on the table when I wrote Signal 035: Salt Typhoon. Chinese state-sponsored hackers walked through the CALEA backdoors that US law enforcement built into American telecom infrastructure. Not a theoretical risk. Not a hypothetical. An actual breach, compromising the communications of over a million Americans. The backdoor designed for lawful access was used for unlawful access by a foreign intelligence service. The United States government — the country that built CALEA — warned Canada not to repeat the mistake.

Canada is repeating the mistake. And it is doing so by silencing the people who are saying so.

The structure is worth naming plainly. The bill contains secret orders that companies cannot disclose. The government blocked debate about those secret orders. The Minister calls the bill “encryption-neutral” while the bill text permits — and does not prohibit — mandatory decryption. Every layer is a gag. The bill gags the company. The procedure gags the parliament. The language gags the public understanding of what the bill does.

Matt Hatfield of OpenMedia said it directly: “They are using that power not to build something, but to gag debate on the most reckless surveillance powers Canada has seen in a generation.”

A bill that mandates permanent secrecy was moved through committee by silencing the committee. The mechanism described the mechanism. The process performed the product.

// NEON BLOOD

Sources: EFF, OpenMedia, Michael Geist, Globe and Mail, Citizen Lab, Canadian Chamber of Commerce, CCLA, TechRadar