The U.S. Supreme Court is weighing whether police can force Google to hand over the location of every phone near a crime scene. American licence-plate cameras have tracked a woman who left her state for an abortion. The Canadian chattering class follows all of it with alarm. A bill now before Parliament would build much of the same capacity in Canada, and the alarm has been harder to detect.

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On April 27, 2026, the United States Supreme Court heard argument in Chatrie v. United States, and a decision is pending. The case began with a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia, and a single warrant served on Google. Police did not have a suspect. They had a location and a time, so they asked a magistrate to order Google to identify every device that passed through a roughly 17.5-acre zone around the Call Federal Credit Union during a two-hour window.

To answer that warrant, Google had to search the Location History of more than 500 million users. The technique is called a geofence warrant, and it inverts the ordinary logic of a search. A conventional warrant names a person and authorizes a look at that person's effects. A geofence warrant names a place and a time and works backward through everyone who was there.

The federal courts have not been able to agree on whether this is constitutional. The full Fourth Circuit split seven to seven on whether a geofence query is a search at all under the Fourth Amendment, and resolved the case on a narrower ground. The Fifth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in United States v. Smith, holding that compelling Google to comb through all 592 million accounts with Location History enabled "amounts to the exact sort of general, exploratory rummaging that the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent." That division sent Chatrie to the Supreme Court.

The same questions surround Flock Safety, the company that has built the largest automated licence-plate reader network in the United States. Its cameras logged more than 12 million searches by over 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. A Texas sheriff's office ran a woman's plate across 83,000 cameras after she ended a pregnancy, with the search note "had an abortion, search for female." U.S. Customs and Border Protection was given access to Illinois data in violation of that state's privacy law.

What is notable about the American argument is the broad reaction across the spectrum. The libertarian Cato Institute filed a brief urging the Court to find that Fourth Amendment property rights "do not dissolve merely because one's records are stored by a third party." The ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology filed on the same side. Reason covered the case sympathetically. On the merits, the right-libertarian and the civil-liberties left agree that a search which sweeps in everyone near a crime is a problem. But yet, depending on country and context, there's a difference about who is willing to say it out loud.

Carney Liberals are pushing the Canadian bill quietly

In March 2026 the federal government introduced Bill C-22, its lawful-access bill. It is the successor to the data-disclosure provisions of the 2025 Strong Borders Act, Bill C-2, which were withdrawn after the privacy community objected and never reached committee. C-22 carries the core of that regime forward.

Three features matter. The bill authorizes regulations requiring providers to retain metadata — the sender, recipient, location, date, and time attached to communications — for up to a year, with no individualized suspicion required before the data is preserved. It lowers the threshold for police access to subscriber information from "reasonable grounds to believe" to "reasonable grounds to suspect," which the University of Ottawa's Michael Geist describes as "the lowest investigative threshold in Canadian criminal law." And it allows the Minister of Public Safety to issue orders compelling providers to build interception capability, including measures that bear on encrypted services, while barring the companies from disclosing that such an order exists.

The bill also expands data-sharing with foreign governments, the United States among them. A law marketed as a defence of Canadian borders would route Canadian subscriber and metadata into the same American security apparatus that Canadian commentators describe as a threat.

Let's focus on the metadata retention provision. Metadata is not the content of a message, but a year of it draws a precise map of associations and movements: who contacted whom, from where, and when. The Supreme Court of Canada has already considered how revealing that kind of record can be. In R. v. Spencer, decided in 2014, the Court held that Canadians retain a reasonable expectation of privacy in the subscriber information that links an identity to online activity, and that obtaining it without authorization is a search under section 8 of the Charter. The Court treated the ability to stay anonymous online as part of personal privacy, and found that no existing law — not Canada's privacy legislation, not the Criminal Code — gave police the power to demand the data on their own. Lowering the statutory threshold to "reasonable grounds to suspect" is a legislative response to Spencer rather than compliance with it.

The objections to C-22 have come almost entirely from outside the partisan arena. Geist, who does not write from the left, has catalogued the bill's problems in detail. The digital-rights group OpenMedia has campaigned against it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an American organization, called it a repackaged version of the previous year's surveillance bill. The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group called it one of the greatest threats to privacy in Canada in two decades. These are privacy specialists and civil libertarians. These are not the voices of Canada's political opinion class.

Trump-obsessed, Carney-blind

Canadian progressive commentary treats American surveillance as a standing emergency. The Walrus has run pieces with titles such as "Trump's Terrifying New Security Doctrine". The Tyee has tracked the sale of surveillance tools to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, quoting the specific capabilities on offer — "live cellphone records, arrest records, health-care provider information, real-time geolocation data and licence plate recognition" — and describing the vendor's role in "the surveillance, imprisonment, and deportation of hundreds of thousands of immigrants each year." Immigration enforcement and abortion access do not neatly divide Canadians along the same lines they divide Americans, but they animate the Canadian progressives who follow American politics as a spectator sport.

As Toronto prepared to host World Cup matches in June 2026, Mayor Olivia Chow declared American Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents "not welcome" in the city and carried a council motion, 21 to 4, opposing any ICE presence during the tournament — a stand against a foreign agency that has no authority to operate in Toronto regardless. The gesture cost nothing and changed nothing — a virtue signal to her base during an election year. Meanwhile no comparable defiance has met the surveillance powers the Carney government is actually legislating at home.

In fact, where C-22 is covered, it is covered as a technical dispute about retention periods and encryption standards and warnings from technology companies. The treatment is dry, procedural, and confined largely to the academics named above. In Canada, the American apparatus is described as a step toward a police state, while the Canadian one is described as an esoteric privacy file.

The explanation is not complicated. The government building the Canadian apparatus is one that left-of-centre commentators broadly trust. A surveillance power feels administrative when the right people hold it and ominous when the wrong people do. The moral outrage stays focused on Trump because the partisan cognitive dissonance to address what's happening at home is too great.

Canada has already run this experiment

Canada does not need to speculate about how a government uses a power to compel private firms to hand over personal data without a warrant. The Liberal government did so in February 2022, when it invoked the Emergencies Act against the convoy protests in Ottawa.

The Emergency Economic Measures Order required banks to freeze the accounts of designated persons and to disclose customer information to the RCMP and CSIS, with no court order, no warrant, and no defined standard. Roughly 200 to 260 accounts holding close to $7.8 million were frozen. The officer who oversaw the order, Superintendent Beaudoin, acknowledged under cross-examination that the RCMP applied neither a reasonable-grounds nor a reasonable-suspicion standard, and that all the order required was "bare belief."

The Federal Court found that unconstitutional. In Canadian Frontline Nurses v. Canada, Justice Richard Mosley held that freezing the accounts was a seizure, that financial records fall within "the biographical core of personal information," and that "the failure to require that some objective standard be satisfied before the accounts were frozen breached s. 8" of the Charter. The government called the ruling wrong. Then-finance minister Chrystia Freeland said plainly, "We do not agree with this decision," and appealed.

The government lost.

On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Mosley. The most serious flaw in the order, the court found, was that personal banking information "could be shared with the RCMP and CSIS without a warrant or any form of prior authorization." Warrantless compelled disclosure of personal records to security agencies is not a hypothetical risk in Canada. It has been done, to political opponents, and the courts have twice struck it down. And now C-22 refocuses from bank accounts to everyone's metadata.

The courts keep saying the same thing

The pattern is the same in both countries. The judiciary holds that compelled access to data held by a third party is a search that requires authorization, and the executive keeps building tools that operate without it.

In the United States, the Fourth Amendment gave rise to Carpenter v. United States, the 2018 ruling that the government needs a warrant to obtain historical cell-site location records, and now to the geofence question in Chatrie before the Supreme Court. In Canada, section 8 of the Charter did the same work in Spencer on subscriber information and in Mosley and the Court of Appeal on the convoy account freezes. Courts in both countries reached the same conclusion. Trump and Carney have responded the same way, by legislating or operating around the rulings rather than within them.

C-22 fits that pattern exactly. The Supreme Court of Canada said in 2014 that subscriber information carries a reasonable expectation of privacy. The bill answers by letting police demand it on the weakest standard in Canadian criminal law: reasonable grounds to suspect.

A government that won't enforce the laws that already exist

The government justifies new surveillance powers in the name of public safety. The record makes that justification difficult to take at face value, because the same government has been reluctant to use the ordinary powers it already holds.

Parliament had to pass Bill C-48 in 2023 to re-tighten the bail rules it had loosened in 2019, after police forces across the country reported repeat violent offenders reoffending on release. The Edmonton Police Service tracked one cohort of released arrestees and counted, over three years, more than 3,600 further violent-crime incidents and 26 homicides. Statistics Canada's violent Crime Severity Index rose 15% across 2021 through 2023 before a slight dip.

Auto theft reached a record $1.5 billion in insurance claims in 2023, up 254% nationally since 2018 and 524% in Ontario, severe enough that Ottawa convened a national summit on the problem. British Columbia, with federal cooperation, walked back its drug-decriminalization pilot in 2024 and then ended take-home so-called safe supply in 2025, conceding that prescribed opioids were being diverted into the illicit market.

A state that will not hold violent repeat offenders, slow a record wave of auto theft, or keep the free opioids it hands out from being trafficked back onto the street, but that does want to execute digital dragnets of Canadian metadata and build a mechanism to reach inside encrypted services, is not following a public-safety logic.

The more plausible motive is harmonization. Bill C-2 was a border bill, drafted under American pressure on the shared frontier, and C-22 expands the sharing of Canadian data with the United States. The reach for these powers is more aligned with the demands of the bilateral relationship than it is with addressing crime in Canada.

Mark Carney was elected on "elbows up," a promise to resist American overreach. On surveillance the elbows are down: C-22 feeds Canadian data into the apparatus he campaigned against, and the wager is that his supporters will swallow it obsequiously.

Powers outlast governments

Surveillance infrastructure is permanent in a way that governments are not. A metadata retention mandate, a lowered threshold for subscriber data, and a standing capability to compel decryption do not expire when a government changes. They are inherited by whoever wins the next election, and the one after that.

The leftist commentators comfortable with C-22 because they approve of the government building it are extending a trust they cannot expect their successors to honour. The same powers, in the hands of a future Conservative government, would not be received as anodyne administrative housekeeping. The left would call these powers the "fascist" police-state machinery that the Trump version is being called.

The constitutional fight playing out in Washington is playing out in Ottawa with less noise and fewer voices raised against it, and the case for resisting it should not depend on who happens to be in office when it passes.