Kate Robertson/The Globe and Mail: If this bill isn’t revised then all companies doing business in Canada will have a maple letter tattooed to their corporate charters: how can any customers know whether the Canadian government has secretly poisoned the company’s security and privacy guarantees? Is a product really protecting user privacy and complying with the European privacy laws? Market trust questions aren’t theoretical. In Australia, the very existence of such powers was shown to have had a significant economic harm to Australia’s technology sector. For example, one company said that loss of trust cost them an estimated $1-billion Australian dollars in economic damage.
…The government did pass an amendment but it wasn’t even a fig leaf: the public safety minister publicly admitted as much this summer when he stated that the bill does, in fact, still permit the government to compromise encryption in what he describes as “extenuating” situations…