Parliament Audit1d ago

Carney Signed an RCMP Cooperation Deal With China's Police Ministry — the Same Body Behind the Illegal "Police Stations" in Canada. The Agreement Is Secret.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/carney-rcmp-china-public-security-mou-police-stations

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Carney Signed an RCMP Cooperation Deal With China's Police Ministry — the Same Body Behind the Illegal "Police Stations" in Canada. The Agreement Is Secret.

In January 2026, during Prime Minister Mark Carney's state visit to Beijing, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police signed a memorandum of understanding on law-enforcement cooperation with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Public Security (MPS). A joint statement from Carney and Chinese President Xi Jinping said the two sides "committed to strengthening law enforcement cooperation to combat corruption and transnational crimes, including telecommunication and cyber fraud and illegal synthetic drugs." The RCMP has refused to release the full text of the agreement, stating it will not do so without the agreement of China's government — drawing demands for disclosure from both the Conservative and New Democratic parties. The MPS is the same national police body whose subordinate Fuzhou Public Security Bureau operated the clandestine "overseas police service stations" that the NGO Safeguard Defenders exposed in 2022 and that the RCMP investigated in the Greater Toronto Area and in Montreal (the RCMP closed its Montreal investigation in September 2025 without charges; the two Montreal community organizations involved have sued the RCMP for defamation and contest the characterization). The cooperation agreement was signed against the backdrop of the Hogue Commission (the federal Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference), which in its January 2025 final report found the PRC to be "by far the most significant" foreign-interference threat and documented Chinese interference in the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. A former senior RCMP officer, opposition public-safety critics, and national-security commentators have characterized the secret MPS cooperation agreement as a counterintelligence and sovereignty risk. This article documents the agreement, the institutional connection to the police stations, the election-interference findings, the official threat assessment, and the criticisms — with precise attribution and the honest caveats around the un-charged community organizations.

Parliament Audit3d ago

A Canadian University Just Pledged $100 Million for 200 Indian Students. Forty First Nations Communities Are Still on Boil-Water Advisories.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/uoft-100m-india-scholarships-vs-first-nations-water-shortfall

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A Canadian University Just Pledged $100 Million for 200 Indian Students. Forty First Nations Communities Are Still on Boil-Water Advisories.

On a state visit to India that concluded on March 2, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a series of measures to deepen the Canada-India bilateral education relationship. The most-publicized commitment was a University of Toronto pledge of up to $100 million to fund up to 200 fully-funded scholarships for Indian students — covering tuition, living expenses, and associated costs. The funding is from the University of Toronto's institutional resources, not from the federal Government of Canada's consolidated revenue fund — an important factual qualifier this article puts up front. The announcement was made during a Prime-Minister-led diplomatic mission and was a centrepiece communication of that visit. In the same six-month window, the Parliamentary Budget Officer published a formal estimate that the federal Government of Canada is underfunding the operating and maintenance costs of First Nations water-treatment infrastructure by approximately $138 million per year. As of early 2026, 40 long-term drinking-water advisories remain in place on First Nations reserves — 9 of those have been in place for more than a decade. The Auditor General has characterized Indigenous Services Canada's progress on drinking-water as "unsatisfactory." This article documents both numbers, the political moment that brought them into juxtaposition, the honest distinction between institutional and federal funding sources, and what an apples-to-apples Indigenous-spending comparison would look like.

Parliament Audit3d ago

The CRTC Just Tripled What Netflix Owes Canada — From 5% to 15%. Is It a Tax? Here's the Honest Answer.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/crtc-streaming-contribution-5-to-15-percent-is-it-a-tax

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The CRTC Just Tripled What Netflix Owes Canada — From 5% to 15%. Is It a Tax? Here's the Honest Answer.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) finalized a decision on May 21, 2026 requiring foreign streaming services with more than $25 million in annual Canadian revenue to contribute 15% of those Canadian revenues to Canadian-content production funds. The rate is up from the 5% interim rate the CRTC announced in 2024. The contribution is imposed under the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11, 2023). Affected services include Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+, and Paramount+; Spotify is excluded because it is classified as audio-only rather than audiovisual. The federal government characterizes the requirement as a "regulatory contribution," not a tax — the contribution money flows to designated funds for Canadian English, French, and Indigenous content production, not to federal general revenue. Streamers (with backing from the U.S. trade representative) characterize it as a tax that will inevitably be passed to consumers through higher subscription prices. Both framings are defensible. The Constitutional law of taxation distinguishes between taxes (compulsory payments to general government revenue) and regulatory charges (compulsory payments tied to a regulated scheme); the 15% contribution is the second category, not the first. Functionally — for a household paying more for Netflix because of it — the two are indistinguishable. The article walks through who pays, who collects, where the money goes, the timeline, the legal challenges still pending in Federal Court, and the consumer-cost impact analysts expect.

Show threadThe Tyee6d ago
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Show threadThe Tyee6d ago

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Parliament Audit6d ago

Canada Has Granted Surveillance Powers Like Bill C-22 Before. Here Is How They Were Used.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/bill-c-22-canadian-surveillance-history-tommy-douglas-pipeline-protesters

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Canada Has Granted Surveillance Powers Like Bill C-22 Before. Here Is How They Were Used.

Bill C-22's defenders argue that the bill's safeguards and stated use cases will prevent the new surveillance powers from being misused. The argument is not new. Canadians have heard versions of it before every previous expansion of federal surveillance authority, from the 1939 establishment of the RCMP Security Service through the 2015 Anti-Terrorism Act. The declassified historical record — through Access to Information releases, court orders obtained by the BC Civil Liberties Association, CBC News investigations, and the formal findings of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry — shows what was actually done with those powers, after the safeguards were in place. The RCMP surveilled Tommy Douglas (the founder of Medicare) for over 30 years. CSIS told police that Indigenous land defenders at Ipperwash were armed in 1995, a claim that turned out to be false, three days before an OPP officer shot Dudley George. CSIS surveilled peaceful Northern Gateway pipeline opponents and shared intelligence back to Enbridge — the company being protested. This article walks the documented record. It does not claim Bill C-22 will be used in any of these ways; it shows what HAS happened when similar latitude was granted.

Parliament Audit6d ago

The European Court of Justice Already Struck Down a Law Like Bill C-22. Here Is What It Found.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/bill-c-22-europe-data-retention-directive-struck-down

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The European Court of Justice Already Struck Down a Law Like Bill C-22. Here Is What It Found.

On April 8, 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) handed down its decision in Digital Rights Ireland (joined cases C-293/12 and C-594/12), striking down the EU's Data Retention Directive as invalid. The Directive had required telecoms in member states to retain user metadata — phone numbers, IP addresses, location data, device identifiers — for six months to two years, on every customer, with police access on a production-order standard. The CJEU found this regime to be a "particularly serious" interference with the fundamental rights to private life and personal data protection under Articles 7 and 8 of the EU Charter, and that the interference failed proportionality because (1) the retention applied to all persons without distinction, (2) there was no relationship between the retained data and the threat the regime was meant to address, and (3) safeguards on access were insufficient. The ruling does not bind Canadian courts. The reasoning is highly persuasive and will be central to any future Canadian Charter challenge to Bill C-22.

Parliament Audit6d ago

Bill C-22 Lets the Public Safety Minister Order a Telecom to Build Surveillance Tools. The Telecom Cannot Tell You. Here Is How That Works.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/bill-c-22-secret-capability-orders-public-safety-minister

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Bill C-22 Lets the Public Safety Minister Order a Telecom to Build Surveillance Tools. The Telecom Cannot Tell You. Here Is How That Works.

Bill C-22 contains a provision that civil-liberties advocates from Meta, Apple, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and academic privacy law have uniformly flagged as the bill's most aggressive feature: the Public Safety Minister's power to issue "capability orders" to electronic service providers. Under Part 2 of the bill (the Supporting Authorized Access to Information Act, SAAIA), the Minister can require a provider to build a specific surveillance capability into their service, maintain it, and not disclose its existence. The provider must comply. The provider is legally prohibited from disclosing that the order exists. The Intelligence Commissioner reviews the Minister's reasonableness on a case-by-case basis. There is no statutory requirement of public reporting — even aggregate. This article walks through how the order is issued, what the provider is and is not allowed to say, how the Intelligence Commissioner's review works in practice, and what amendments could restore public accountability.

MarkG6d ago

I was just watching About That with Andrew Chang on CBC. And wow, it was quite the love in of Mark Carney.

I had wondered how anyone could actually feel that Carney is standing up to Trump, given all the blatant capitulation to almost all of Trump's whims that Carney has shown. Well, this show demonstrated that for me.

It ignored stuff like: changing our tax policy, altering the Liberal platform's outlined defence spending, tossing commitments to maintain public services (now they're even phasing out pharmacare), supporting Trump's illegal war in Iran (later "with regret", but still supporting), tossing environmental policy out the window, adopting a hardline stance against refugees & immigrants (even turning refugee applicants over to ICE), etc, all to appease Trump.

Instead, it focused on Carney's Davos speech and some of Trump's tweets about this. I felt like I was watching a Liberal produced propaganda advertisement, designed to convince everyone that Carney's elbows are "up", rather than down so low that they're now dragging on the pavement.

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Parliament AuditMay 22

Bill C-22 Creates New Surveillance Powers. The Privacy Commissioner Has No Role in Overseeing Any of Them.

https://parliamentaudit.ca/news/bill-c-22-privacy-commissioner-no-oversight-role

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Bill C-22 Creates New Surveillance Powers. The Privacy Commissioner Has No Role in Overseeing Any of Them.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is the federal body designed specifically to audit how privacy-affecting government and private-sector practices are conducted. Every recent lawful-access bill in Canada — Bill C-30 (Toews, 2012), Bill C-2 (Strong Borders Act, 2025) — included some statutory role for the OPC in the regime being created. Bill C-22 (Lawful Access Act, 2026) does not. The OPC has no audit role over the bill's one-year metadata-retention requirement, no review role over the Public Safety Minister's secret capability orders, and no complaint jurisdiction over the new regime. The bill instead points to the Intelligence Commissioner as the review body for ministerial orders — a different review body with a different scope. This article walks through what changed between the predecessors and the current bill, and what an OPC role could look like as an amendment.