[calgarygeologist]

Originally Posted by rubecube

This is pretty gross and draconian, especially the part about allowing Canada Post to go through people's mail without a warrant.

Hopefully the SCC slaps this down as a s.8 violation.

Another piece of interesting proposed legislation from the Liberals which seems to be flying under the radar is buried in the tax bill. The tax bill proposed the income tax reductions that Carney promised as well as a GST break on housing purchases. In addition to the tax changes they are proposing that political parties will be able to do whatever they want with voter data they collect and that they won't have to comply with any provincial data regulations. They are eliminating a lot of data safeguards with this proposal.

At the very end, the government has added a section related to laws governing the use of Canadians’ personal information. The gist of it is that political parties won’t have to follow any.

Canada’s federal parties have been united in fighting this battle for years. The Liberal and Conservative parties collect massive amounts of personal data on Canadians, the better to get them out to vote, volunteer, and donate. And the parties don’t want to follow laws governing how they keep or use that info.

The big parties have been fighting a court battle to preserve their hands-off status, after a British Columbia court ruled that they should have to follow the province’s privacy laws.

Instead, the parties want to make their own rules, and without any consequences if they break them. They tried in the last Parliament to pass legislation to that effect, but ran out of time. So they’ve squeezed the legal changes into Carney’s tax-cut bill.

The proposals in C-4 include a clause that makes explicit that any registered political party, or anyone acting on its behalf, may “carry out any activities in relation to personal information”, including its collection, use, disclosure, retention, and disposal.

It includes another clause that says that parties and their representatives “cannot be required to comply with an Act of a province or territory that regulates activities in relation to personal information.”

The only requirements to be placed upon the parties is that they develop and publish a privacy policy, and follow whatever terms they include in that policy.

That bill is sponsored by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne (Saint-Maurice–Champlain, Que.).

https://www.hilltimes.com/story/2025...t-bill/463074/