Together, the Online Streaming Act, the Online News Act, the Cybersecurity Act, the Combatting Hate Act, the Lawful Access Act, and the Safe Social Media Act form the foundation of Canada’s emerging surveillance state. Once this web of laws is fully in place, the federal government will have an intimate knowledge of how and when we use social media, AI, and the internet generally. The government will have the power to know the location, monitor the movement, and track the communications of every Canadian.The first building block of Canada’s surveillance state was the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11), which expanded the power of the CRTC beyond radio and television to include the internet as well. The CRTC now forces major streaming and social media platforms to manipulate their algorithms to push what the CRTC determines to be “Canadian” content. YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok must now tweak their automated recommendation engines to highlight CRTC-designated “Canadian” content, thereby shifting what Canadians see when they log in.The Online News Act (Bill C-18) has stopped us from sharing news on Facebook and Instagram. Further, Google is now forced to pay $100 million towards subsidizing the federal government’s favourite media outlets.The Cybersecurity Act (Bill C-8) has given federal cabinet ministers the power to kick individual Canadians off the internet through secret orders, without judicial oversight. Bill C-8 now empowers the federal government to secretly order telecom providers “to do anything or refrain from doing anything.” Orders can last indefinitely with extremely heavy penalties for non-compliance. Ordinary citizens might never see the evidence against them. Like those whose bank accounts were suddenly frozen in 2022, they cannot defend themselves. Bill C-8 empowers warrantless searches, collection of sensitive data without judicial authorization, and directives that compromise encryption standards that millions of Canadians rely on..The Combatting Hate Act (Bill C-9) has placed further restrictions on the free speech of Canadians. Orthodox rabbis, Catholic priests, and evangelical pastors, along with religious leaders and adherents of many faiths, can now face criminal charges for publicly teaching what their sacred scriptures say about homosexuality, sex, and transgenderism.The Lawful Access Act (Bill C-22) empowers the government to require electronic service providers to install surveillance capacity and retain user metadata for six months. It allows mandates to intercept encrypted communications. Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, has stated it would rather pull out of Canada entirely than be compelled to compromise its privacy promise of end-to-end encryption. Several Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers are also considering leaving to avoid backdoors and data retention rules.The latest bill to turn Canada into a surveillance state is C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. Citing the laudable goal of protecting children from social media and from pornography, Bill C-34 moves Canada closer towards centralized government-issued digital ID.In December 2025, Australia passed a similar law to ban under-16 teens from using social media. By March 2026, the government had admitted that over two-thirds of under-16 teens had continued to access it anyway, using false birthdates, fake accounts, accounts borrowed from parents and older siblings, etc. The law’s failure takes us to the frightening conclusion that protecting teens requires age verification for everyone, leading to facial scans, biometrics, and possibly government-issued ID. In other words, Bill C-34 can quickly take us to the nightmare presented by George Orwell in his book 1984..If passed into law, Bill C-34 will also create a new, massive Digital Safety Commission with vast powers to regulate social media and the internet. It gives cabinet broad powers to create regulations, without Parliamentary input. Rules will be enforced with fines up to $10 million or 3% of a company’s gross global revenues.Canadian children and adults are already protected by the Criminal Code, which prohibits online child pornography, advocacy for violence, and numerous other online crimes. Rather than creating a new, powerful and largely unaccountable Digital Safety Commission through Bill C-34, Canadians should demand that existing laws be enforced more effectively.Canadians today still enjoy enough freedom to oppose and reverse this web of surveillance laws. The same might not be true in the future.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
