Apple and Google push for judicial oversight of Canada's lawful-access bill

At a glance:

• Apple and Google have lobbied Canadian officials to add judicial oversight to Bill C-22, which would allow ministers to secretly compel encryption changes for surveillance purposes.
• The legislation mandates one-year metadata retention and lowers police access thresholds to subscriber data.
• Signal has warned it may exit the Canadian market rather than comply with the bill in its current form.

Corporate pushback on encryption legislation

Apple and Google have formally pushed for amendments to Bill C-22, the Canadian government's lawful-access legislation now working its way through the House of Commons. Both companies argue that the bill as drafted creates a potential for secret orders to compel changes to the encryption underpinning their software and devices.

The two tech giants want judicial oversight built into the process before relevant ministers can issue orders requiring technical capabilities for surveillance. The Reuters report describing the lobbying ran on Tuesday.

Legislative background and scope

The bill replaces an earlier, more sweeping lawful-access regime that had been buried inside Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act introduced in June 2025. Civil-liberties groups, the legal community and opposition parties forced the government to pull the surveillance provisions out and reintroduce them as a standalone bill. C-22 is the result.

It mandates metadata retention for up to one year, lowers the threshold for police access to subscriber data, and grants ministerial power to compel electronic service providers to build technical capabilities for surveillance.

Technical-capability provision under fire

Apple and Google's objection is to the technical-capability provision. As currently drafted, the relevant minister can issue an order requiring a service provider to design its systems so that government investigators can access specified data; the order can be issued in secret and is not subject to prior judicial review.

Apple's formal submission, reported by CBC earlier this month, argued that the provision puts user data at risk and could in practice require the company to weaken its encryption stack for all users in order to provide targeted access for Canadian authorities. Google's submission makes a parallel argument.

Neither company is asking Parliament to drop the bill outright. Both are asking for the technical-capability orders to require court approval before they can be issued, and for the secrecy provisions to be limited in scope and duration.

Broader industry response and international context

That is a substantially narrower position than the one Signal has taken; the encrypted-messaging firm has warned it would simply pull out of the Canadian market rather than comply with C-22 in its current form.

The political picture has tightened in the last fortnight. The chairs of the US House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees wrote to Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree this month warning that the bill threatens US national security and the integrity of cross-border data flows.

Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa internet-law scholar who has been Canada's most consistent C-22 critic, has framed the government's dismissal of those concerns as a repeat of the Online News Act playbook, which produced a similar trans-Pacific dispute in 2023 and ended with most of the affected platforms walking away.

Global surveillance trends

C-22 is part of a wider pattern. The UK has used investigatory-powers legislation to compel design changes to Apple's iCloud encryption earlier this year. Australia has the assistance-and-access regime that gives its agencies similar powers. The European debate over backdoors in end-to-end-encrypted messaging continues to grind.

The substantive question across all of them is whether judicial oversight is the structural floor below which the surveillance powers cannot drop. Apple and Google's C-22 intervention is, in effect, asking Canada to accept that floor.

Legislative timeline

The bill is currently in committee. The next public test is whether the technical-capability provisions get amended or survive intact. Royal Assent is targeted for the autumn.