The voters left the Liberals short of a majority. They assembled one, then passed a surveillance bill with no vote to cast.
Analysis. Donald Morton is NFNM's publisher.
A bill that gives the government new power to reach into Canadians' private communications passed the House of Commons on June 18. Not one Member of Parliament has a name on it. Not for it, not against it, the Member for Lanark-Frontenac included.
The House Journals record Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, as "passed on division." That is the parliamentary term for a vote with no count and no names, the quietest way the Commons can pass a law. The day before, the government used its control of the House calendar to shut down the bill's last real stage of scrutiny and lock in that silence.
What C-22 does is serious, and it is below. But the heart of this is how it passed, and on whose authority. The voters did not give this government a majority. They left the Liberals short of one in 2025, and the majority that pushed C-22 through was assembled after the fact. It cut off the review at the stage where the details get tested, and it moved the bill out the door with no recorded vote anyone has to answer for. NFNM opposes that method, on this bill and on any bill, and the record of how C-22 cleared the House is the case against it.
The majority the ballot box did not give them
In April 2025, Canadians elected a minority government. The Liberals won 169 of the 343 seats in the House of Commons, three short of the 172 a party needs to govern on its own, on 43.8 per cent of the national vote. The majority that carried C-22 through the House more than a year later did not come from that result. It was built afterward, as Conservative and New Democrat members crossed the floor to the Liberals and the government added seats in byelections, lifting the Liberals to 174. By the CBC's account, it is the first time a prime minister has relied on floor-crossings to reach a majority government, and Canada's first majority since 2019.
That is the majority that shut down debate on a surveillance bill. The Conservatives' public safety critic, Frank Caputo, named it plainly. The Liberals, he told CBC, were "using their manufactured majority in what might be the most aggressive programming motion I've ever seen." This was not a fringe complaint. CBC ran piece after piece on the fast-track, and the Globe and Mail reported the government's move to curb the debate. The arithmetic underneath it all belongs to the public record: a governing majority the 2025 election never delivered, spent on shutting down scrutiny of a bill that expands the state's reach into private life.
What the forcing actually was
The government's defenders have one fair point, and honesty requires conceding it. C-22 was not slipped through in the dark with no one watching. It was debated at second reading across four April sittings, studied by the Public Safety committee through May, and argued over for roughly four hours on June 17. The charge is not that the bill never saw daylight. It is narrower than that, and the government cannot answer it.
On June 17, Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon moved a programming motion, listed as Government Business No. 13, that cut short the committee's clause-by-clause study of C-22 and capped the debate left in the House. An opposition amendment to soften it failed. The main motion then carried 166 to 150 on a recorded division, over the objection of every opposition party. That motion is the act of force. It killed the line-by-line review while dozens of amendments were still on the table, and it pre-set how the bill would end. The next day, C-22 passed "on division" with no recorded vote, bundled with several other bills, and the House rose early for the summer.
The government did not shut down a debate it had already won. It shut down the one stage where the debate still counted: the clause-by-clause review and the final vote, when amendments live or die and members have to declare themselves.
The opposition that had no vote to cast
The clearest proof that the procedure denied Parliament a decision is what the opposition had to do to be heard. Because the bill went through with no roll call, members who wanted their dissent on the record could not do it the ordinary way, by voting no. They had to stand up and say it out loud.
On June 18, New Democrat Jenny Kwan, her party's lead on the file, rose on a point of order for that single purpose. "The NDP would also like to make sure that it is on the record that the NDP members do not support Bill C-22," she told the House. Green Leader Elizabeth May did the same, asking that it "be placed on the record very firmly that the Green Party does not support Bill C-22." Two caucuses had to use a procedural workaround to enter their opposition into Hansard, because the path the government chose left them no division to vote against. That is not a talking point. It is the stenographer's record of a Parliament being denied a vote.
The Conservatives' Frank Caputo had made the same charge on the floor the day before. "Why is the Liberal government insistent on ramming Bill C-22 and part 2 through when we would gladly pass part 1 swiftly?" he asked in Question Period. His party was not against the whole bill. It wanted the bill split, so the investigative-tools half could pass and the lawful-access and encryption machinery in Part 2 could be stopped. Caputo moved at committee on June 9 to divide it. The government refused.
Underneath the procedural fight ran the reason any of this is worth slowing down for. Kwan put it at second reading in words that belong to no party. "Privacy is not an abstract concept," she said. "It is what allows people to speak freely, organize and participate in public life without fear of constant monitoring." The Bloc Québécois put a number on the imbalance. On April 13, Marilène Gill pressed the minister over a government moving to "grant more power" to police and intelligence services while "cutting the budget of the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency, or NSIRA, by 15%," which she called "rather inconsistent."
Four caucuses that agree on almost nothing, a Conservative, a New Democrat, the Green leader, and the Bloc, all stood against this bill or the way it was being moved. The government had the votes to override them on the timetable, and it used them.
What they were denied a real vote on
The bill they could not properly vote on is not a small one. Part 2 creates a new power for the Public Safety Minister to order an electronic service provider to build a technical capability so investigators can reach into its systems, with those orders reviewed by the Intelligence Commissioner before they take effect. Apple told the committee the bill would let the government "force companies to break encryption by inserting backdoors into their products," something it said it would never do. It compared the demand to ordering a hole cut in a wall: once the hole is there, anyone who finds it can use it. The bill also requires providers to keep communications metadata, the running record of who you contact, when, and from where. Halifax privacy lawyer David Fraser warned that turns an ordinary cellphone into a retrospective tracking device.
The most revealing moment came at committee. Philippe Dufresne, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and an Officer of Parliament, had told members on May 26 that the bill reaches well past telephone companies, that its metadata retention lacks necessity-and-proportionality limits, and that its secrecy rules could block his own office from overseeing how the powers are used. When the committee turned to clause-by-clause, internet-law scholar Michael Geist reported, the RCMP and CSIS, the agencies that asked for these powers and would wield them, were on hand to walk members through the amendments, while Liberal members rejected a move to bring Dufresne back. The agencies that gain were in the room. The watchdog who would check them was kept outside it. Geist, who has tracked lawful-access bills in this country for more than a decade, did not hedge about the ending, calling the final days of C-22 in the House "a genuine abrogation of democratic norms."
Where the government is owed credit, and where it is not
The government is not inventing its problem, and it deserves to be met at full strength. Investigators do hit a real wall when serious crime and foreign threats move onto encrypted platforms, and Ottawa is right that some of the law it is modernizing predates the smartphone. The bill keeps a warrant requirement for basic subscriber data, routes Part 2 orders through the Intelligence Commissioner, and lets a provider refuse a capability that would create a systemic vulnerability in its systems. The government also moved on the substance. It heard the objection to a year-long metadata retention mandate and, the Globe and Mail reported, cut the period to six months. That is a real concession, and anyone claiming the government ignored its critics outright would be wrong.
Which is exactly what makes the procedure indefensible. The government proved it could listen on the substance, then refused the same patience on the process. It improved the bill and still would not let Parliament put the improved version to a recorded vote. A government confident in its legislation argues it to a division and dares the opposition to vote no in public. It does not run the bill out the door on the last sitting before summer, under a motion that spares everyone the recorded choice. The concession on retention is the tell. The government had time to negotiate the substance, so the rush to deny a final vote was a choice, not a necessity.
The Frontenac vote that does not exist
Scott Reid has represented this corner of eastern Ontario since 2000, in a riding redrawn from Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston to Lanark-Frontenac for the current Parliament. As Conservative caucus chair he holds a senior internal role, and he does not sit on the committee that studied C-22. His name is on two votes tied to the bill, both cast June 17: a Yea to the failed opposition amendment, and a Nay to the programming motion that carried. Reid is on the record against the procedure, and nowhere on the record on the bill itself, because the route the government took left no recorded division for him to appear on. He made no statement in the House on C-22 at any stage, a finding NFNM confirmed across the parliamentary debate record and his own speech index.
That silence is worth setting against his own past. In the fall of 2001, facing Jean Chrétien's Anti-Terrorism Act, Reid mailed every household in his riding and asked whether he should vote for it, telling constituents the bill's reach into civil liberties troubled him. A majority said no, and he voted against it, as his constituency office documented from the Journals. Fourteen years later he voted for the Harper government's Bill C-51 at both readings. On the surveillance bill of 2026 there is no vote of his to weigh at all. NFNM imputes no motive to that. The record is the record, and the people who elected him are entitled to read it, or to notice that this time there is nothing to read.
Government goes dark while the citizen is lit up
There is a pattern here NFNM has reported before, and it is structural, not a conspiracy. We documented how Ontario's Bill 97 retroactively closed Greenbelt records to the province's freedom-of-information law, and how the local MPP, John Jordan, cast a recorded aye. That bill pulled visibility away from citizens trying to see their government, but it left a name on the vote. A constituent can look up how Jordan chose.
C-22 runs the same direction and erases even that. It pulls visibility toward the state through secret orders, gag rules on the companies that receive them, and a standing record of the public's communications, and it passed by a procedure that left a name on nothing. Bill 97 sealed the file and recorded the vote. C-22 opened the citizen's file and recorded none. Government is being made harder to watch while the people are being made easier to watch, and on C-22 the procedure made sure the decision left no fingerprints.
The third attempt, and the one that worked
This is the third run at lawful-access expansion in roughly fifteen years. In 2012 the Harper government's Bill C-30 collapsed after Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told the House that critics could stand with the government or "with the child pornographers." It was withdrawn the following year. In 2025 the Carney government folded lawful-access powers into Bill C-2, the Strong Borders Act, then pulled them back out after a similar backlash, according to the law firm Fasken. C-22 is that same architecture, re-tabled on its own.
The earlier versions died in daylight, beaten by public argument and a minister's own words. This one never got that test. The difference is not that Canadians stopped objecting; four parties and the country's privacy and technology establishment objected again. What changed is that this government had the assembled votes to override them, and the will to use them before anyone had to go on the record.
C-22 is not law yet. It sits at first reading in the Senate, where the government has signalled it will wait until the fall. NFNM will be there for every stage, and we will keep saying the plain thing about how it cleared the elected House. A law that lets the government watch you should not be forced through on a majority the voters never granted, by a vote no member had to put a name to. We will not let the absence of a vote become the absence of a record.