[1] https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Peti...
But they're too stupid to realize that
The retirees have greater disposable income than the young people (read, most people in the labour market)
And of course the number of retirees is going up every day
I’m a Boomer with twelve years of post-secondary modern science education. My spouse, also a Boomer has spent her entire life in the academy. Your claim is false.
> They’re religious nutters due to memory of their neurological makeup
I’m an atheist Boomer. I haven’t a religious bone in my body. Your claim is false.
I’m sure there are other venues that will accept your ageist, angry and patently false generalizations as truth; but by and large this is not one of them.
Good start. Calls are also excellent. Then get your neighbors to do the same.
For controversial stuff, you want tens to hundreds of outreach events recorded. It doesn’t take all that much for electeds to spell a festering primary threat.
i know i voted against the referendum question last week to consider moving to a US inspired elected senate system. i dont think we need that pageantry
I'm familiar with American and Swiss elections. In both, the principal threat to an incumbent is from an own-party challenger to their seat.
For an incumbent, particularly one in a comfortable seat, an opposition candidate is usually not an issue. But someone from inside the camp is annoying and requires rhetorical contorting and lots of spending, spending that can then leave one vulnerable to an otherwise-benign opposition candidate. (Also, motivated activists are annoying in the best way.)
A smart elected–in these systems–will thus take a call to defuse anger before it develops into organized activism.
It does technically have power, but it's like the King's power to veto UK legislation - he can do it precisely once and then he'll be stripped of the power.
Canadian MPs are electeds. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the Canadian Senate being referred to as an elected body—it’s irrelevant to the above.
Parties select their representatives who run in the election.
The system basically guarantees that insiders cannot be removed.
It's the property of a candidate being affiliated with a party - an indirect part of the election - that is run by the parties rules that are generally less than entirely democratic in nature.
Liberals NDP and Greens would never form a government with the Conservatives so the liberals are effectively always in power.
Which means insiders in the liberal party are in charge and voting is partly irrelevant unless you're voting for the conservatives, but they would need an actual straight majority.
Th Bloc has 21 seats, and has had as many as 54. They would certainly ally with the conservatives. (Not the modern maple maga variety, but old school PC).
Paula Simons has also been actively listening to Canadians on this subject. https://sencanada.ca/en/senators/simons-paula/
Marty Deacon (Ontario) Committee chair 613-943-3429 Tony Ince (Nova Scotia) Deputy chair 343-991-5540 Andrew Cardozo (Ontario) Committee member 613-996-9545 Katherine Hay (Ontario) Committee member 343-991-5536 Rebecca Patterson (Ontario) Committee member 613-995-2185 Hassan Yussuff (Ontario) Committee member 613-944-1108 Kim Pate (Ontario) Committee member 613-995-9220 John M. McNair (New Brunswick) Committee member 613-995-5060 Victor Boudreau (New Brunswick) Committee member 613-947-4110 Judy A. White (Newfoundland and Labrador) Committee member 613-996-2433
If they receive 100 calls of people saying they're strongly against a bill and no for they might reconsider their position.
Also calling is a better signal of showing you care then emailing.
That's politics 101. Read up Mark Twain's Running For Governor.
Dial #lever and say “cut off”.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
On what basis does someone make this claim? Authoritarianism is a broad stroke. Most of the time, they eliminate voting, not make it compulsory.
Classically, an authoritarian power only care about voting to initially take hold of power. Every attempt to coerce voting (one way or the other) after that is performative, not instrumental.
No, that is totally not true.
Even North Korea doesn't eliminate voting. People there still vote, just very controllable by the government. Compulsory voting is one of the instruments that makes voting more controllable for the government. Voting in North Korea is mandatory.
Like what?
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
The only thing that will change their minds is taking their seat, but without electoral reform you can be quite certain that only those loyal to Liberal, NDP and CPC will get elected. And PQ, but they're just Quebec NDP.
The general public of Canada is more concerned with Trump than what any Canadian politician is up to, so good luck.
Since when a backdoor hasn't been a systemic insecurity?
All of this is done with ZERO due process - even the minimal due process that has been built into these draconian laws.
Please cease this kind of behavior immediately. We're supposed to be the only dumbshits around here.
Yours truly,
'Merica
Caniba
Generally the Canadian Senate will propose amendments to the bill after its study (around a quarter of the time if I recall, not always), but the lower chamber has no obligation to agree, so it has some sway in that consultative sense. And the Senate has been more active in proposing amendments to legislation after independent senators became a thing.
At this point, I think the soft landing that privacy advocates can hope for are amendments that curtail the worst aspects of this legislation.
This is actually even more amazing to me that with all the talk of data sovereignty, the EU and Canada are still negotiating reciprocal Cloud Act treaties that will give the US government warrantless access to basically all digital services and communications. The UK and Australia have already codified these agreements with the US.
Trump's loud mouth brought these issues to the forefront, but really it seems like everyone is just waiting for it to blow over when he's gone in 2 years and then it's back to usual.
It probably is reciprocal, but in reality Canadian companies sell very little (if any) digital services to Americans. There isn't much they can even access. It's why the arrangement is so lopsided.
Well, they might have their own Fourth Amendment if they chose to fight against the British instead of with them during the American revolution!
History aside, now they have what they have.
I just wish that they would have also included a constitutional review council that reviews legislation before it comes law like France did (Constitutional Council), because a massive amount of damage can be done while waiting for the Canadian Supreme Court to rule on something.
Do the 13th, or the 14th, or the 4th amendment mean anything these days?
We have lots of examples of that. Are there lots of examples in Canada of basic charter rights being violated in such a manner? Or do you dispute that the text of the charter is unclear?
If it's the latter, you're free to read it for yourself. Is there a lot in https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html#h-44 that you find unclear?
Plenty, it's just usually against unpopular targets. The most notable recent one being the trucker protest[1]. And what were the consequences for those in charge for this charter violation? I believe the answer is "nothing".
So what we have in Canada is a charter that theoretically protects citizens, but in practice can be violated by the government with impunity.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/emergencies-act-federal-cou...
Surely you can see a difference between an one-off that after the fact was found to be illegal, and hasn't been repeated, versus a pattern of the courts making batshit insane rulings?
Since you think that the truckers had to right to do what they did... If the courts ruled against them, would you have taken that as evidence for the quality of the charter, and the legal system that stands behind it? Or is this a tails I win, heads you lose situation?
No piece of paper can ever prevent a government from doing something illegal, or from passing an illegal law. The courts are only ever an after-the-fact remedy.
In the US, meanwhile, that remedy doesn't even work.
The charter is meaningless weasel words and is used just as often to curtail the rights of Canadians as it is to protect them.
The situation is exactly "tails I win, heads you lose" but in favour of whoever has the majority of MPs. They can take illegal action to thwart political opponents and face no consequences. Just as how police officers should be punished when they break the law (but often aren't), those who hold political office should be punished when they step outside their bounds.
So, just to clarify, do you believe the executive responsible should go to prison as soon as one of their decisions is found to be illegal?
Or is there a higher bar that needs to be crossed? Where, roughly, would you put this bar?
That's a fair point. Though the truckers are just an example.
I just don't think the charter offers guarantees anywhere as strong as the US constitution. For example, Canada's hate speech laws have taken a big chunk out of both the right to free speech and now the freedom of religion[1] set out in the charter.
[1] https://www.cccb.ca/media-release/proposed-restrictions-on-r...
Trump is the symptom, not the disease. It will not go back to normal. US politics has changed. The US people have changed. There won't be a Trump 2.0 but there will be other equally horrible leaders. Maybe not the next president, but likely the one after that. Canada must adapt to the new realty rather than deny and wait.
https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/30/turns-out-br...
Luckily we don't have a two party system in canada.
And i’m quite sure we’ll be seeing a green party or ndp with official party status again - two parties just isn’t as entrenched systemically as it is in the states.
I think this bill is absolutely horrible.
What do you want me to do?
the only thing that could make a difference is if apple, whatsapp, and instagram all blocked canadians from using those services. the liberal party and the media would still find a way to blame trump for it, and the pm's popularity would increase.
That is literally what is going to happen if this legislation is allowed to pass. WhatsApp will block Canada, and Apple will remove any impacted service from Canada, like iMessage.
But I don't think that's true. They will comply. They always comply.
The Liberals will not be able to quickly reverse the legislation when that happens, and they may even be stupid/evil enough to double down on it. It can also take a year or more for the Supreme Court to strike down the legislation.
> But I don't think that's true. They will comply. They always comply.
It is true. Apple for example removes impacted services when a country targets it, like ADP in the UK. So iMessage will no longer work for Canadians.
WhatsApp will not compromise their global security and value of their brand for a tiny market like Canada.
nevermind half the population doesn't even pay attention to traditional "the media" these days
the bulk of "the media" in Canada is US owned, not "state funded" (which is only the CBC) and I haven't gotten any particular pro-vibes around this bill from them
But I have spent/wasted enough time online to know that Conservatives do truly believe that the CBC is very biased against them and thus should be defunded (or, alternatively, they often suggest giving the same amount of money to Rebel News).
This isn't to say there aren't biases in media - there always is, everyone is biased in their own way - but the presence of that bias can be understood and having a robust pipeline for news is more important that trying to futilely eliminate all bias.
* https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/national/tumbler-ridge-c...
Major Canadian news outlets like CTV News were blindly following that article, and saying "something has to be done" about encrypted messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLHkcOmcZOA
CTV news anchor Carolyn Jarvis was continuously pushing for AI-powered mass surveillance of all private messages in Canada throughout the news segment. And CTV News also falsely labeled Liz Repking as a "cybersecurity expert" and let her promote her anti-privacy views: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2026/10/07/they-have-a-shared-r...
Other articles on the subject had various anti-privacy/anti-encryption dog whistles like "going dark" included in them.
The US mainstream media is equally stupid -- "liberal" or "conservative" -- CNN or Fox both make me want to gouge my eyes out.
Those of us on the (real) left have been pointing out the problem with the broadcast media for decades. Concentration of ownership and private interests are the problem, and frankly the CBC is the least worst of the bunch here in the country.
Canada is currently under a mass nationalist fervour under which the Carney gov't is getting away with a lot. The thing is the stuff he is getting away with... is exactly the stuff the Conservatives also wanted to do anyways. So people on the right frothing at the mouth about the liberals just baffles me. He is literally implementing the full CPC platform from the last election.
https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/goldstein-two-prom...
Call/contact senators is my next step, because the Senators are the next-to-last step for this bill.
When I lived in Singapore I heard how lucky they were to live in a country where there wasn’t much disagreement (the truth is it had been squeezed out of the population)
Also, if you're in a tech sphere then there's even a notable bias of folks in SF that are happy to have left whatever other part of the US they used to reside in.
https://www.bcbc.com/insight/oecd-predicts-canada-will-be-th...
The only significant opposition to this bill has been coming from the NDP, which was decimated to a small number of seats by people piling into the Liberals because of nationalism and by its previous pathetic fealty to the Liberals in the last two parliaments.
The restrictions on powers are one example. There’s almost nothing there, but they say something like “are not allowed to compel service providers to retain data that will identify the content of your communications.”
That’s bullshit weasel words. Everyone is keeping that stuff and nothing restricts the “written sometime in the future” rules from compelling service providers to produce all of the data they’ve collected. There’s also no restriction on compelling real time wire taps.
If that was a real restriction it would say something like “retain, capture, or produce.”
There are also gag orders falling out of the sky like it’s raining and no mechanism to eventually force transparency when they’re used. They also have broad latitude to define and redefine a ton of rules that haven’t even been written yet.
I know of some places that do conferences and I don’t know what they’ll do if classified as a service provider. Imagine KYC on a couple hundred people trying to participate in a 2 hour conference.
Edit: And I think it’s a big win for organized crime. The police will only know how to use the easy tooling to catch the lowest level, dumbest criminals. The higher up criminals will (or probably already do) use private servers for communication.
Does anyone think organized crime is relying on WhatsApp or Snapchat? That’s what the low level suckers will be using (and getting caught by) so everyone can pretend the police are doing their job.
Signal for messaging
Ente Photos
NotesNook for notes
A good VPN: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/
If you need other replacements lmk.
The best privacy tech comes from people who live in these 5 and 14 eyes countries. Try a little bit of threat modeling instead of thinking about the problem emotionally.
The only reference to membership I see from the Commissioner for Lobbying states [1]:
> Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) has two classes of members: ordinary members and voting members. Membership in CCLA shall be available to persons interested in furthering the Corporation's purposes and who have applied for and been accepted into membership in the Corporation by resolution of the board or in such other manner as may be determined by the board, in accordance with any membership criteria set by the board. Voting members are members who have been accepted as voting members by the board. A voting membership expires 12 months after the date of board acceptance, unless renewed by the board.
I don't see anything to this effect on the website, like a membership application form.
This is in contrast to the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association which just published the decision this week to have a flat $5 open membership.
[1]: https://lobbycanada.gc.ca/app/secure/ocl/lrs/do/vwRg?cno=376...
The culture here is so mired in political apathy that it feels futile to even bother. People just do not care at all
I'm not a huge activist but I have been involved in a number of things when they matter a lot to me over the past twenty years or so, starting in college, but not a single one of them has ever gone my way
I'm unemployed now and worried I'm going to have an incredibly hard time ever finding work in software again, and AI is taking over, and here I am. Defeated again
I don't have it in me to fight this stuff anymore. The machine has won against me at least
Most go to work, accept whatever policy the government decides is good for them, and don't push back as their living conditions decline. Given that, is it surprising that we don't see much activism?
I wish it was different but I don't know what to do. Perhaps Canadians should steal a page from the French?
Watching our provinces fall one by one to corrupt/kleptocratic “conservative” governments has certainly done a number on me, but it’s only made me more vocal and more involved in local advocacy.
All that apathy out there is an opportunity to awaken care and turn the tide.
Get off your ass and help.
I was in school when the Snowden leaks came around, and asked dozens of students and teachers what they thought about it. The majority of them had no idea what had happened, some even outright rejecting it as a foreign smear campaign. A handful of people showed interest, but lost interest when there was no connection to aliens or the Bermuda triangle. My freedom-loving cohort was too preoccupied with YouTube, Twitter and Instagram for it to matter.
Fast forward to today, you're probably running USA-designed spyware on whatever computer and phone you import from America. Canada already belongs to FIVE EYES, your mobile handset market is almost entirely captured by pushover US corporations that backdoor Push Notifications and rename lakes apropos of nothing.
No matter what happens with this bill, the threat of surveillance will loom long over Canadians. Political motivation is important, but trusting the United States is an albatross on the neck.
The people I know are not apathetic and I’m sorry that things don’t go your way politically, but that’s life. For example, the recent Vancouver election didn’t go my way - big whoop.
the media spends almost all of their time attacking the opposition leader instead of the current pm (who has a majority gov), so people are unfortunately quite under informed on c22 and other things the gov is doing.
The votes for this bill seem to indicate that nearly all MPs regardless of party voted in favour, and none of them voted against.
Where did you see that? Every non Liberal MP voted against C-22.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/members/en/votes/45/1/172?view=par...
https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/votes/44/1/190?view=par...
I didn't even read the text or look at the date... Reading what that C-22 was actually about I'm glad that one got a near unanimous yes vote.
And seeing the actual results makes me more hopeful that the senate may not allow it through.
i do not have much faith in the senate but i would be pleasantly surprised. the fact 100 of them were appointed by the previous liberal government does not have me optimistic however.
And when I say literally nothing, I mean literally nothing. My MP (the man I voted for) crossing the floor to join the current ruling party showed me exactly how much political power I have: absolutely fuck all.
so bills like this will continue to go through since the liberals have a majority and the PMs popularity counterintuitively goes up as things go from bad to worse. im finding it hard to have any motivation to oppose this bill since resistance seems to be futile.
the dark liberal decade gets longer and darker in canada.
This is a conservative talking point. I'm a liberal voter, and I know lots of people who voted for the liberal party. None of them want to oppose and antagonize Trump for just for the sake of it. Most Canadians and liberal voters just want Trump to follow his own agreement in regards to trade, to stop with the 51st state rhetoric and his unnecessary antagonism of Canada.
Most Canadians I know have friends and family in America and don't want a rift between our countries. It's that Trump has seemingly gone after Canada for made up reasons just to cause problems that has made Canadians angry.
as a liberal voter how do you feel about this bill?
The liberal voters I talk to are very rational, normal people. I also disagree the media fuels it constantly. Trump does a lot of exceptional things that make it into the news and so its difficult not to speak about his actions. It's not difficult for Carney to appear hero-like when compared with Trump. All Carney has to do is appear to be the rational foil to Trump's insanity.
> as a liberal voter how do you feel about this bill?
To be honest, I have not done a ton of research into it, but on the face of it, it looks like its a terrible and unnecessary bill. While I voted liberal and in general support Carney, I don't worship him, or feel that he can do no wrong. I disagree with him and the liberal party on several things, this being one of them.
Liberal doesn't mean the same as it does in the US because it barely has a consistent meaning up here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_of_Canada
it's a bit of a misnomer imo. if we're talking about classical liberalism, the conservatives fit that label better. if we're talking about "liberals" i.e. the left, the NDP would fit that label better. the modern Liberals are more like neoliberal technocrats, who favour top-down state interventionism and who are the ones driving surveillance bills and attacking privacy.
You could say the same thing about the social agenda of the Liberal party. They will expand the Temp Foreign Workers program undermining wage growth for the poorest while pushing controversial social issues front and center.
How will these HNers square the circle of their cognitive dissonance.
Read the above to find out!