Proton says it won't expand in Canada if lawful-access bill passes
The Swiss tech-privacy company says Bill C-22 would compromise user privacy and make expansion impossible.
Swiss tech-privacy company Proton says it has stopped considering Canada for a North American headquarters and that expansion here would be impossible if Ottawa's lawful-access bill passes in its current form.
Bart Butler, the company's chief technology officer, told The Globe and Mail that Bill C-22 could compromise privacy safeguards for Canadian users.
The Liberal government's bill would require telecoms, internet companies and other digital service providers to make changes to their systems to give surveillance and monitoring capabilities to police services and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
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Proton, which has more than 100 million customers worldwide and uses end-to-end and zero-access encryption, joins a growing list of companies who have warned the bill, if passed, would restrict their ability to expand in Canada or even continue to provide their services.
Earlier this month, Toronto-based Psiphon said it has started drawing up plans to move its operations out of Canada.
In May, secure messaging service Signal said the company would rather pull out of the country entirely than "be compelled to compromise on the privacy promises we have made to our users."
Windscribe, a Canadian online-privacy company with more than 100 million registered users, has warned it would also consider leaving the country.
Windscribe's CEO said the bill would make Canada an "untenable place for most companies to operate in, foreign and domestic."
CSIS and law enforcement have long argued that Canada is lagging behind its Five Eyes intelligence partners in not having such a lawful-access regime to help investigations.
Tech companies say the bill's requirements go further than those regimes, and could weaken or break encryption and threaten users' privacy.
European civil rights organizations used Prime Minister Mark Carney's high-profile visit last month to warn Canada's bill could force EU companies operating in Canada to weaken encryption and retain the metadata of European users.
"A partner cannot credibly seek deeper digital trade integration while legislating the power to compel European providers to weaken their products in secret," they said in a letter.
After passing through the House of Commons in June, Bill C-22 is now getting a sober second thought in the Senate, where changes could be insisted upon before being sent back to the House of Commons.
If it makes it back to Senate, its existence depends entirely upon the Liberal government's ability to keep a voting coalition together long enough to pass it.
Canada's efforts to manage its digital space have been the source of trade and corporate friction for years.
The country drew the ire of the U.S. government in 2023 when it moved ahead with its Online Streaming Act, and its Online News Act triggered an outright war with Silicon Valley that led to Meta blocking news across Canada.
Ottawa then defied the consensus of the OECD by breaking an international moratorium to push its own unilateral digital services tax in 2024, a move that became such a major trade irritant with U.S. President Donald Trump that the government completely rescinded the tax in June, 2025, to salvage trade talks.
With files from The Globe and Mail