"If Prime Minister Mark Carney's election was meant to be a rejection of authoritarian trends south of the Canadian border, things are not off to a good start.
That’s Robert Diab’s conclusion given what’s been rolled into Bill C-2, the government’s Strong Borders Act, tabled in June.
While past governments have unsuccessfully attempted to make it easier for police to access Canadians' private data, specifically the subscriber information attached to an internet service provider account or an internet protocol address, he says the current government’s kick at the legal access can is in a league of its own.
“(The provisions) do more to expand the state’s power to access private data in Canada than any law in the past decade,” Diab, a professor of law at Thompson Rivers University, specializing in law and technology, and constitutional rights, wrote in a piece for Tech Policy.
In an interview with National, he says he was surprised by how many new search powers have been rolled into the omnibus bill, how extensive they are and how many are unrelated to border security.
Among the lawful access provisions buried among border security measures, the bill proposes expanding the legal definition of subscriber information. While there’s currently no definition in the Criminal Code, in 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Spencer defined it as “the name, address, and telephone number” of a customer associated with an internet protocol (IP) address.
Last year, in R v Bykovets, the Court went a bit further, defining subscriber information as “the name, address, and contact information” associated with an individual IP address."
https://www.nationalmagazine.ca/en-ca/articles/law/in-depth/2025/a-big-brother-bill