Canada's lawful access bill may push Psiphon out
Circumvention tools · 13.10.2026

Canadian company Psiphon, which helps people in authoritarian countries bypass censorship, is ready to leave Canada. The reason is Bill C-22 on "lawful access," which would require telecom and internet companies to build in surveillance capabilities for police and intelligence services.

Psiphon is no fly-by-night startup. The company originated from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, has been operating for almost 20 years, and has about 20 million monthly users worldwide, including in Iran, Russia, and China. In February, as Tehran cracked down on protesters, the number of Iranian users jumped to 21 million. In Myanmar, where the military cuts internet access and bans VPNs, Psiphon has 3.5 million monthly users.

This year Psiphon received about $600,000 in government funding from the National Research Council of Canada to develop its network.

Psiphon's key feature is open-source code: anyone can verify it, which is the basis of users' trust. But the surveillance law would require changes that, by its own logic, must remain secret. Company vice president Kenzie Elsworthy explains that hiding a backdoor in open-source code is physically impossible — any access capability built in under legal requirements would be visible to the entire world, including the authoritarian regimes users are fleeing from. In her words, this isn't lawful access but a published vulnerability.

Uncertainty remains about exactly which companies would fall under the law — the criteria will only be defined after it passes. That's why Psiphon has to plan its business around the worst-case scenario, assuming the requirements will apply to it too. Elsworthy stresses that the company doesn't want to leave Canada, where it was founded and has operated for nearly 20 years, but if the law passes in its current form, relocating will be the only way to keep operating.

Windscribe, a VPN service with 100 million registered users, has joined Psiphon in warning of a possible departure. Both companies are among the signatories of a letter to the Minister of Public Safety asking for the bill to be revised.

This summer, the government already introduced amendments in the House of Commons, including protections for end-to-end encryption, in response to criticism from Apple and Meta. The bill is now under review in the Senate. Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree calls the current version "the right balance," under which breaking encryption would only be permitted in exceptional cases. A spokesperson for the minister added that the mere existence of a lawful access regime doesn't make it impossible to run a secure and private service in Canada, and that not all electronic service providers would fall under the law's obligations — that would depend on the nature of the service and the scale of its use in the country.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-psiphon-vpn-provider-plans-to-quit-canada-over-lawful-access-bill/