Ian Merrithew

Conservative thinker in the socialist wasteland that is Canada

[Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms @JCCFCanada]

Tech companies on Bill C-22

• Shopify @Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke @tobi warned that Bill C-22 could become a “death blow to Canadian tech viability” and make Canada “essentially unviable for those with choices on where to build.”

• Signal's @signalapp VP of Strategy & Global Affairs Udbhav Tiwari stated, "In its current form, Bill C-22 would convert the everyday tools Canadians rely on into a sprawling, insecure surveillance apparatus."

• Apple @Apple Senior Director of User Privacy & Child Safety Erik Neuenschwander warned that Bill C-22 allows the Government of Canada to force companies to break encryption by inserting backdoors into their products - “something Apple will never do.”

• Google's @Google Director of Government Affairs and Public Policy Jeanette Patell warned that Bill C-22 “goes well beyond lawful access regimes in other G7 democracies, and risks creating new surveillance infrastructure that would introduce serious security vulnerabilities, undermine user trust and hinder our ability to innovate and offer pro-privacy technologies.”

• Meta @Meta warned that Bill C-22 could require companies to build or maintain capabilities that weaken encryption and that could force providers to "install government spyware directly on their systems."

• Proton VPN @ProtonVPN General Manager David Peterson warned that complying with Bill C-22 could conflict with Swiss and European privacy obligations. He said, “Complying with foreign surveillance orders without Swiss legal process is a criminal offence...We’ll defend our Canadian users and never compromise them.”

• NordVPN @NordVPN stated that “there isn’t a scenario in which we would compromise our no-logs architecture or encryption protections" and that it would consider limiting or removing its Canadian presence.

• ExpressVPN @expressvpn warned, “Legislation that mandates data retention or technical access, however well-intentioned, undermines the security that millions of users rely on."

• DuckDuckGo @DuckDuckGo stated that "if the bill passes, we will be forced to stop offering our VPN in Canada."

• Windscribe @windscribecom stated, “...they want to destroy the entire essence of our service to basically spy on its own citizens."

Privacy protects citizens. It also protects innovation.

Note: These statements were made before Bill C-22 was amended on June 18, 2026. In our view, those amendments did not meaningfully address concerns raised by tech companies, privacy experts, or civil liberties organizations. The companies above are free to tell Canadians whether the amendments have changed their assessment.

[JABO Vancouver @jabo_vancouver]

With this being the end of Hockey Night in Canada on CBC it only makes sense to post this. If you were a 90s kid like me, this is what you saw every Saturday night. The music, the intros, were as iconic as the games themselves. A very sad day.

[Wesley Yang @wesyang]

Transgenderism is proof of concept that there are absolutely no limits on what cult ritual from the outermost fringe of human extremity we can market to young children and normalize in less than a decade.

You could say that it's a portent of greater horrors to come, but brainwashing tens of thousands of quirky young people to yearn to be chemically castrated and dismembered and threaten suicide unless they get the ruinous self-harm they have been propagandized into believing is their sole chance to become their true selves is already at the outermost limit of horror from the childhood of humanity that the postmodern age has brought back to life in a monstrous and all-encompassing new form that implicates the professional and leadership classes of the whole of the Western world in a terminal moral and epistemic corruption.

Let no one gaslight you into saying or seeing otherwise.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@caroline_m57994 @annbauerwriter When you stand up in front of people and deliver a heartfelt eulogy for a beloved friend/family member, it stays with you in a profound & moving way.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@_CryMiaRiver My 11-yo son, when he sees the Jays advertise their Pride night hats, doesn't quite groan, but clearly doesn't like it & wants it to stop. I nod in approval.

[Kenneth Cheung @kennethdavid]

I am not sure I am understanding exactly what our government does.

We give unlimited funds to accommodate people with fraudulent asylum claims.

Can we move hell and high water to accommodate this Canadian family in need?

I don't care if it's the province the feds or both - if you can't get this done, what are you good for?

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@erinotoole @joesmith323 @_kruptos "We must learn from it" - yet not a single gov't in 🇨🇦 has conducted an honest inquiry into Covid policies. It was all flushed down the memory hole as rapidly as possible. Think about why that might be.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Modernity convinced people that freedom was the absence of obligation, then old age reveals that obligation was the architecture of belonging.

That is the real wound.

The story is not simply about women.

Men are getting wrecked by the same force through different doors.

Women more often meet the cliff through fertility, family formation, aging, and late-life solitude.

Men more often meet it through purposelessness, porn, addiction, divorce, estrangement, work identity collapse, and becoming old with money but no one emotionally bound to them.

Same disease.

Different symptoms.

The modern world made autonomy sacred.

No one can tell you what to do. No one can claim you. No one can constrain your options. No one can interrupt your self-expression. For a while, that feels like power. You can travel, work, paint, date, spend, move, leave, reinvent, avoid compromise, avoid sacrifice.

Then the years start closing doors.

The deepest lie is that relationships are optional lifestyle accessories. They are not.

Durable bonds are infrastructure.

Marriage, children, siblings, cousins, neighbors, church, old friends, shared rituals, family obligations. These are not just sentimental decorations. They are the human load-bearing system.

A society can survive poverty better than it can survive mass unbonding.

That woman’s 20s and 30s probably did feel free. That freedom was real. The mistake is pretending early-life freedom and late-life belonging cost the same. They do not. Freedom pays upfront. Belonging compounds slowly. By the time the difference becomes obvious, the compounding window may have passed.

The cruel people dunking on her are missing the tragedy. The sentimental people defending every choice are also missing it. The truth is harder: choices create architecture. You can choose autonomy, but you cannot choose away the long-term consequences of a life with fewer permanent claims.

Final compression:

Modern life sells people the right to belong to no one.

Late life exposes the bill.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@englebr3cht Excellent. I'd only allow that it isn't just PP who exhibits "AAA" behaviour; it's the CPC as a whole. The notion that "AAA" just might be false would cause their entire operating system to break. They'd have no -idea- where to go from there.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@DrRTFM @TheBlackHorse65 And/or: all retail may only operate for "X" hours each seven days, and may distribute those hours as they please.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@TheBlackHorse65 Sunday shopping turns out to be a "be careful what you wish for" thing. Having it makes nothing better.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@BillboardChris @PierrePoilievre Notice what he did NOT say: no commitment to repeal the bills you mention. No commitment to ban puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. No admission that the CPC has been on the wrong side of the entire issue. I don't think he means what you think he means.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@RM2074125449497 @Sean_Speer Add to that - CRTC is often very favorable toward the entrenched "Robelus" oligopoly that dominates 🇨🇦 telecom. Liberals + Robelus = CRTC. It's really that simple. Policy arguments will fall on completely deaf ears.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@mgeist I wonder if it's a case of someone on the inside knowing how stupid this all is, putting up the 'use a VPN' post to intentionally embarrass the bosses.

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@Damon98_ That #4 from Vladdy was just all kinds of ugly. Way off the plate. He lays off that and walks on the next pitch.

[Michael Geist @mgeist]

Bill C-22 has gone off the rails. My post explains how the government scrapped one bad lawful access provision, but created a two-headed monster of mandatory metadata retention and a technical capability mandate that could apply to all digital providers.
https://t.co/S7rnmB1wAC

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@_CryMiaRiver The final field is for comments; I wrote that gender is synonymous with sex for human beings and that the government of Canada should cease believing otherwise. Not that anyone reading it will care (maybe it lands me on a 'subversive' list...) but it felt good at least.

[Dwight Singh Schrute @DwightSinghS]

Indian man speaking Hindi makes YouTube video showing his fellow Indians how to scam free food from “Loaves and Fishes Community Kitchen” in Sydney Nova Scotia.

He then proceeds to go inside and everyone there is Indian.

Low trust Indians are not compatible with Canada

[Ian Merrithew @MerrithewIan]

@CakeMcJabe Likely Springer, too. If anyone would trade for him with those numbers.

[Jonathan Kay @jonkay]

that CBC-funded “prank” didn’t just target pundits. In @Quillette, I report on their efforts to mock a humble 82-yr-old Brockville granddad who enjoys 19th-c historical re-enanctments. Producers repeatedly lied to him for months, then exploited his trust
https://t.co/XemYbTsWMB