CALGARY—The data scandal the Alberta separatists have constructed is nothing compared to what Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals have in store for us.

Behind the bright lights of separation lies the nefariousness of Bill C-22, An Act Respecting Lawful Access. Its abominable creation came from the failure of Bill C-2, a bill about which I wrote in The Guardian last year. This iteration is no better than its predecessor. The bill is currently at the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU) where they are studying its potential effects. 

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What this legislation does is force electronic service providers to build and maintain systems that store the metadata of the providers’ customers for up to one year, regardless of whether that person is under investigation. According to the CBC, Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree likened these new requirements to accessing an office cabinet: “like a filing cabinet, where certain types of information would be available with legal authorization.” The legislation would provide the legal authorization, which requires very little evidence and little judicial oversight. This is circular reasoning. 

Let’s be clear on what metadata is and how accessing it without your knowledge is problematic. Metadata is information about your data. For example, when you take a video, the metadata that is stored is information about that video: location, time, type of camera used, duration, file size, etc. While this is tantalizing information, the real grandaddy of internet tracking is the internet protocol address, or the IP address, which is a unique numerical identifier assigned to every device that is connected to a network. Not only does it identify the device, it identifies the location of the device. As the digital rights advocacy group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, clarified: “Metadata can reveal a lot about who you communicate with, where you go, and when you do so.” It can also reveal online behaviour. For example, frequent visits to a women’s health centre in under a year for a........

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