Psiphon Says It Will Leave Canada if Lawful-Access Bill Passes

Psiphon has started planning to move its operations out of Canada if Bill C-22 passes in its current form.

The Toronto-based company told The Globe and Mail it would relocate rather than comply with the lawful-access bill now before Parliament. Psiphon provides software that helps people evade censorship and stay online. It originated at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. The Globe and Mail

The company says it has about 20 million monthly users worldwide, including users in Iran, Russia and China. It said it had 21 million users in Iran in February during Tehran's crackdown on protesters. It has about 3.5 million users per month in Myanmar. Psiphon says the bill would force it to weaken safety features that protect the privacy of users in authoritarian countries.

Bill C-22 is formally titled An Act respecting lawful access. Parliament It may be cited as the Lawful Access Act, 2026. Part 1 is titled Timely Access to Data and Information.

The bill would create a new process for Canadian police to get court authorization to request subscriber information. Justice Canada That generally means basic account details, such as name and address, not the content of messages. It would also require telecoms, internet companies and other electronic service providers to alter their systems to give surveillance and monitoring capabilities to police and CSIS.

Apple and Meta warned in May that the bill could require encryption backdoors and put user security at risk. Apple said it could be forced to weaken device encryption. Meta said the bill grants broad powers with minimal oversight. Reuters End-to-end encryption, where only sender and receiver can read a message, sits at the centre of that dispute.

The federal government amended the bill in the House of Commons before the summer recess to answer concerns from tech companies including Apple Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. One amendment protects end-to-end encryption. The bill is now due for scrutiny in the Senate. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said he expects Bill C-22 to pass in its existing form.

Psiphon was built in 2006. Its apps and core tunnelling technology, the method that carries user traffic past blocks, are open source and available for public review. Independent security firms, including Cure53, have reviewed key parts of the system. The company says it does not collect personally identifiable information or build profiles of what users do online.

Vice-president Kenzie Elsworthy said: "We spend our days protecting people from authoritarian surveillance. This bill would compel Psiphon to help build an arbitrary surveillance system in Canada."

The broader context here is jurisdictional friction meeting operational reality. Ottawa has argued that judicial authorization plus tailored interception tools can preserve both public safety and compliance with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Providers that operate globally, and assume domestic networks may be under hostile state control, assess that balance differently. When engineering staff, infrastructure and logging are centralised, a domestic preservation or interception duty is not contained domestically. For Senate review, the points to watch are the scope of provider duties, whether the House protection for end-to-end encryption is technically workable, and whether the subscriber-information rules change production timelines in practice. A relocation threat does not change the legislative arithmetic, but it tests Ottawa's argument that Canada can expand police and CSIS technical assistance powers while retaining privacy-enhancing firms.