Canada’s Bill C-22 Forces New Metadata Harvesting on Service Providers

Bill C-22, recently tabled in the Canadian Parliament, expands the government’s authority to collect metadata from domestic electronic communications. The law broadens the definition of “vulnerable” data to include routine service logs, obligating Internet service providers, email hosts, and cloud platforms to implement new collection, storage, and retention mechanisms for a wide range of metadata elements such as timestamps, IP addresses, and routing information.

For defenders, the bill creates several operational and security challenges. Mandatory retention increases the attack surface on service‑provider infrastructures, making log repositories attractive targets for threat actors. Compliance also forces security teams to redesign data handling pipelines, enforce stricter access controls, and audit government requests. Staying ahead means updating incident‑response playbooks, hardening log storage, and monitoring potential overreach that could expose sensitive network patterns.

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