The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Bill C-2, C-8 and C-9 - Governments Against Free Speech and Privacy with Mark Jeftovic | The CBP

Episode Date: October 24, 2025

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Was that Jeb? Was that? Remember the politician in the States who had to say, please clap that one time? Was it Jeb? I don't think I'm low energy, but it sounded like it there. Anyway, what's going on? Good to see you again.

Hey, Joe. So there's a lot of Canadian legislation coming down the pipe that, so this talk was billed as a C2 fireside. There's actually been a change to that. And beyond that, there is even, two other bills that I think need to be, when you look at this entire picture, you have to look

at C2, C8, and C9 and Can we get this? Do you guys have the slides? No, it's here. It's right here. Okay. So, this was a C2 fireside. C2 is supposed to be the Strong

Borders Act, and there was a couple of tuck-ins into C-2 that made it pretty scary. One of which included Canada Post was going to have the ability to open your mail without a warrant, so warrantless inspection of your postal mail. That was already in, so the ability for Canada Post to open your mail is already in the

criminal code. They already have that structural right, but it has to be with a warrant. So the warrant part goes away. There's other things in C2, including a ban on cash transactions over $10,000, including serial transactions that amount to more than $10,000. And there was a tuck-in bill called, I can never remember it, supporting authorized access to Information Act, SAAIA, which gave various government functionaries the ability to order ISPs and ESPs

to basically wiretap your data or surrender your data to them without a warrant. Okay? So that was C2, and then what happened was there was a lot of opposition to C2, including all the other parties. So they're kind of doing the same thing that they're doing with the budget. They sort of stripped out the bad bank and the good bank, so they took all the actual immigration part of C2. They reintroduced a new bill called C12, and that's the one that's actually on the parliament track right now. C2 has kind of been skated into the boards, as they say, and it's on pause. However, they do want to bring back a lawful access act at a later date, which basically is going to pick up all this C2 stuff and kind of redress it up and bring it back.

But we're not off the hook because there is also Bill C8, which is the cybersecurity bill that was C-26 under the Trudeau regime. And that has a lot of the stuff, the lawful access stuff that was in C-2 is also in C-8. And it basically gives authorized persons, which ranges from the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Ontario Securities Exchange

and the Royal Canadian Mint can all order ISPs and ESPs to surrender data. They can send representatives on-site, request data, request access to data, request access to machines. And again, no warrant required, just a reasonable reason. And the kicker here is the ISP and the ESPs are what I call, you know, gagged and bagged. You have a gag order that you have, you can't tell your customer and you can't say that you've even received a gap like an order, so you can't even talk about this. And then C9 is the online hate crimes bill, which just basically lowers the threshold for, there's already a criminal code definition of hate.

They're going to lower, you know, the worry is they're going to lower the gauge, you know, the threshold on what meets hate. It's going to apply to all online posts. and you're going to face ramifications for that. I almost, so I'll turn it over to you in a second. You can keep going. I'm actually, we have no slides here. Mark is just absolutely ripping off the top of his head.

So this is impressive for me. So I just wanted to outline the landscape of these three bills, four if you include C-12. Yeah, I'm actually able to see it and then it disappears. But the other thing about C-8, we see a lot of like open-mouth slots. memes on social media about this that, you know, Melanie Jolie is going to be able to order you off the internet. That actually is in C8 that they can order someone to, like an

ISP, like Rogers or Fido or whoever, to stop rendering services to any individual or organization. And again, that service provider, is bagged and gag. They can't tell the user, right, that they've been cut off. They can't divulge to anyone that they've been cut off. So it really puts their hands behind their back. There was something else I was going to say before we start discussing it. I'm sure it's up. Oh, so then the status is, right, C2 on pause, C12 is in Parliament. C8 has passed second reading. and it is in committee right now and C9 is also second reading and in committee. What happens in committee a lot of times is, you know, there's some hope here because

sometimes in committee rational discourse is allowed to pass through and some of the more onerous passages get stripped out of this legislation. not to toot my own horn, but I sit on the board of the Canadian Internet Society. I'm really just kind of the base player. There's some really heavy hitters on that board that do a lot of great work up on Parliament Hill. And they've had some wins in the past of getting some of these things stripped out, like the lawful access provisions of previous incarnations of these bills. So it doesn't happen in isolation.

it might seem like these things just kind of get rammed down our throats and they sort of do but there is a process there is some friction that gets put up against it whether it succeeds or fails in the long run is really up to us I think as a population but I think that covers the lay of the land for the three bills that we're looking at so what do you think of all that Joey, you want to keep voting liberal? I think you might need a glass of water. How many people here before Mark just gave that killer crash course

knew about this stuff? Just show a hands. I'm not saying you have to know everything about it but it's crossed your mind, you've read a bit so half the room, let's say. And you guys are terminally online, right? Would you say that? You spend more time looking at this stuff than anyone else. So you can imagine

at your church, at your local diner, at your gym, how many people are thinking about this? The answer is very few, which is not good. When I look at the landscape for privacy and data collection and information security and sort of the expectation that Canadians have for private comms, basically, is at the center of all this. What I see is a shift in the thinking of the population. This is not unique to Canada. This is happening everywhere. It used to be the case that rational actors in a society like Canada, any first world nation, would cooperate and participate, because that was the rational thing to do. So you had a community group or you had a school or at your place of

employment and you would say to yourself, yeah, I want to cooperate and participate in this community because it's beneficial for me, beneficial for my family, beneficial for the community, and I'll see the growth and the improvement and the sort of net positive from those activities. The problem the government is having now is that participation and cooperation are no longer the rational way to behave. We think this in Bitcoin, right? You're opting out with your money. Chances are some of you guys

were at the homeschool talk earlier downstairs. We're opting out, you know, as far as education, you're opting out of the, you know, slop farm on the internet, you're opting out of the slop trough at the restaurants, you're eating better, you're doing all these things. The thing is that much the way we spoke this morning,

you know, Richard, Joseph, Rajat, and I about the need for infinite, growth and infinite, you know, inflation of products and services, when you stop participating and you stop cooperating, even if you're not doing any harm to anybody, it's still a problem. It's still a problem. And if you've been paying attention in the UK, tweeting about immigration being an issue, will, you know, net you a visit from a couple of ill-equipped officers at your door. Have you guys seen that video, that picture?

Yeah, everyone's nodding. I don't want to say too much about it. you get it. You know, if you tweet about something like money in Canada, you already met with quite a bit of side-eye, let's say. At some point, if the currency starts to really wobble or the immigration debate really gets to a fever pitch, saying that stuff online is not going to be allowed. The worst part about it is that you're going to find out it's not allowed when your mail doesn't come to you, or when your ISP throws you off, or when your cell phone provider stops allowing you service.

Or when someone shows up at your door with a group chat receipt, right? The problem is that this stuff is happening, like Mark said, not in isolation and not necessarily forced down our throats, but pragmatically there's no difference because as we saw when I asked who knew about this stuff before, very few people are thinking about it or talking about it. And so I think part of our responsibility is Bitcoiners, whether it's on the money side or on the societal side or on the cultural side,

whatever, is to be an amplifier for these things. I realize it's difficult. This is a friendly crowd. You know, it's easy for me to say that here. It may not be so easy at Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or whatever. But the thing is that rational people look at this and they are alarmed too. Nobody, thanks to COVID, I think, or at least very few people now, are of the opinion that I'm okay because I have nothing to hide.

The problem is that the definition of what you should be hiding is always changing to serve the regime. and if you don't start addressing this now, you will be under the thumb before you know it. I'm laughing, but... You're trying, I know, flashing up and down. Before I handed it over to Joey, I sort of jokingly said, do you want to keep voting liberal?

And that might have given the wrong impression that this is a partisan thing. I remember, like, I've been involved in the internet for a few years, and I lost it for the Harper Conservatives because of their, I think it was Bill C-93 at the time, was their internet surveillance bill, which at the time raised the level of surveillance to a level that kind of enraged me. And forever, I said, you know,

I'm done with the conservative parties, and I went, like, I joined the Libertarian Party at that point. The takeaway message here is it's incremental, and it's kind of a uniparty, right? It doesn't matter which one is in power at the moment, but we're watching either side kind of raising the bar or lowering the bar, actually speaking of lowering the bar, you know, the Harper Conservatives put in C-93, which gave all these rights to C-Sys and the RCMP to do this surveillance with a warrant. What's happening under C-2 and C-8, and we don't know yet with C-9, actually we do, but with C-2 and C-8, the word reasonable is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I just took one thing out. But this is the clause that says that the Minister of Industry, is it? Which one is Melanie Jolie? Yeah, she, you know, that ministry can de-platform somebody, not with a warrant, but with reasonable grounds. And there's a whole process there, but it happens in Cabinet, and it is reasonable grounds, and it is warrantless. And so that's the thing that we have to watch out for,

because it's this incremental erosion of due process and oversight. And now we've got this additional, you know, ratchet down, like the next level. No more warrants. And I was telling Joey, we did a Canadian Bitcoin podcast a few weeks ago, and I sort of told them the anecdote. At EasyDNS, we have our, you know, our interactions with law enforcement over the course of the years. and for the most part we're on friendly terms with our

opposite numbers in the Toronto, the OPP, the RCMP. Even CIS has come to us with requests over the years. There are warrants, they're judicial orders, but those are even Kafkaesque. They call us up, they tell us they're

coming to us with an order. You sit in a room, they put the order in front of you, you can write down the date, the order number, the name of the judge who issued it, and the domain name in question. You cannot take a copy of the order. You cannot take any other notes about the order. You have to read it, understand it, hand it back to them, and then make arrangements to hand over the data that they're asking for.

Now, granted, it's never been for anyone that anyone in this room would recognize. Like, we've never even known that these domains were on our system, and when we looked at it, it was like, okay, that makes sense. But, you know, one day that same thing is going to happen, and it's going to be for zero hedge or for Canadian bitcoiners or your domain. And it's very Kafkaesque. And we, you know, with these new provisions, I wouldn't even be able to tell this story on stage. And so that's kind of where we're headed. It's this boiling frog phenomena. And, you know, what do you want to do about that?

Are you passing it to me? For me, the other thing that's under-discussed, because I think the broader population doesn't understand the way that the currency is headed, the 10,000 cereal purchase limit, so like Mark said, it's one thing to have a cash purchase limit at $10,000, you know, presumably if you could produce a receipt for a boat

that you drunkenly messaged a guy on Facebook marketplace about and then went to pick up in Aaron, Ontario on a Sunday morning, and you could, you know, show the guy that you only paid $9,500 for it. Presumably that would be okay. And there's, you know, K-Y-C-A-M-L rationality behind some of these things. We may not necessarily agree with them, but at least it's defensible, okay? The problem is that when the definitions are left intentionally vague, you leave wiggle room to get political or to carry out, you know,

to have an axe to grind against certain people, certain transactions. I think Mags was up here yesterday saying that it's going to get more difficult, for example, to buy like $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, is that going to be allowed? How many people here buy more than $10,000 worth in a year, for example, of Bitcoin? In cash, though? I mean, what's cash mean? Cash used to mean paper currency. Now you can't get $10,000 out of the bank.

And so because that definition is intentionally vague, you wind up with, okay, well, you've got a lot of transactions here off your debit card, for example. Or, you know, you're taking a lot of cash out of the ATM. Let's say you're taking $500 every time you go buy Bitcoin somewhere. Like, these things are all, they all become reasonable, like you said, to look into. And once they start looking, who knows what they're going to find that they don't like, you know? Everyone's got skeletons, everyone's got problems. There's, you know, like I said earlier, as the, how many people here have read sovereign individual?

Do you know this book? It's like, you know, the gospel. This is a religious crowd. I don't know if I could say it's like gospel, but. Why is every hand not up in this room? You should read the sovereign individual. because one of the the theses they had, and this book was written 30 years ago, I guess, or 35 years ago at this point, and one of the theses they had was, as government loses

control over its population, the adjustment will not be, we need to listen to the people. The adjustment will be we need to clamp down. And, like, I don't know how anyone can look at this stuff. Like, that reasonable page you put up is great, and say that anything about these legislative options are reasonable. Like I said earlier, it's not just us. This is happening other places, too. And, you know, we've talked in the past about how there might not be a they behind all

this, but it sure fucking seems like it. Does it not? And no matter where you go in the modern world, you have these same issues, whether it's at the border between Canada and the United States, whether it's at the airport, whether it's at the bank. You know, I'll tell a story. We had a fence built at my house last year, and my wife went to the bank to get money off our helock to do it. It was a fight. The fence was like 3,500 bucks, man. The fence is only

going to get more expensive. Those limits are never going to be inflation adjusted. And so, before you know it, everything you're buying is like triggering a review of your finances, a review of your tweets, whatever. You can't live this way. And I think people in this room know that. But, you know, when you're thinking about should I be buying Bitcoin every week or every month, I would say, yeah, man. Because, you know, like our friend Hervoye Moritz says from geopolitics and empire, if you don't opt out to some of these systems, you will be a prisoner of the algorithm ghetto before you know it. Some of you guys probably already are. How many people are scrolling YouTube shorts every day at night, you know, before they go to bed or Instagram

reels or whatever? You're closer than you think. And as soon as they take away money and your ability to freely transact based on something that's popular or something that's the ether at the moment, you know, trucker convoy or who knows, you know, there was a whole era there where you couldn't call somebody fat on the internet without getting fired. Like, if you're fat, you're fat. Why should I be fired for that, you know? But this is where we are. You know, you wind up in a bon-bomb battle with some heavyweight online, and before you

know what, you're out of a job. Okay, retard. Let's talk about... Love it. Love it. How many more untouchables can be? we do up here? I don't know. Let's talk about freedom tech a bit. So, you know, someone, the ultimate freedom tech, obviously Bitcoin, that's why we're here, we're the obligatory

Bitcoin mentioned here. But, you know, you can, what about VPNs? Like everyone say, well, use a VPN. The problem, I mean, that's, that is an answer, and that should be part of your toolkit, but VPNs nowadays are pretty centralized, right? So you have the same. The reason there is no, you know, there's easy web, easy mail, easy DNS, I don't mean to plug the company, but why is there no easy VPN? There is no easy VPN because around five, six years ago, the RIA and the Motion Picture Association went to war against VPN providers, and they were getting their credit card, merchant accounts canceled, and they were getting debanked, left, right, and center. And so other businesses look at that and other businesses who might be well positioned to go

into the VPN business, look at that and say, I'm not doing that because that jeopardizes the rest of my business. That's all the chilling effect. So the solution is decentralized VPN. So I have to say a very bad no-no word here because most of the decentralized VPN projects happening are happening on other blockchains, right? And so it's true, and it's not happening on Bitcoin yet. I hope it does happen on Bitcoin. I think there are things that will start happening at, you know, that are more, like there's Noster, of course, but that's not a VPN. That's just a completely decentralized peer-to-peer communications protocol. It's uncensurable, but it's not really private. Simplex and things like that. So it is happening.

But I think the Freedom Tech Toolkit has to follow the same direction as the monetary reset, and it has to go with a decentralized solution. Because, I mean, you do Access of Easy every week. We write Access of Easy every week, and we're talking about VPN providers that turn out to be operated by the CCP out of China, or they get hacked. And so we've even seen it happen with the Tor network where, you know, 60% of the, the Tor exit nodes are operated by FBI Honeypot. Do you know what a Tor exit node is?

Everyone's familiar with Tor, right? So Tor is like a quote-unquote private shrouded browser, whatever, but there's always an exit node that the private users use, and the exit node can see all the traffic. Yes. Yeah, so the other thing, I mean, we're kind of getting towards the end, what you can do. I think there's also, and Brad Mills was talking about it in the prior panel,

like get involved. civically, politically, even at the local level, probably more importantly at the local level, because I really do think that grassroots changes starts at the bottom and works its way up, not at the top and works its way down. There are some organizations that we probably all heard about here. There's the, well, like I mentioned, I'm on the Canadian Internet Society Board. They do a lot of good policy work. The Free Speech Union of Canada just started up this year, and the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedom. They make it, you know, their bag is suing the government

when they engage in various kinds of overreach. And Joey and I are involved in a project called Ready.C.A., which is like a grassroots thing that's still taking shape and, you know, yet to be determined how we're going to mobilize, but it's really an information exchange and local support things. So it's the Freedom Tech Toolkit. Of course, Bitcoin is a short on Clown World, right?

When you can't do anything else, you can always stack some more sats, and that gives you that optionality down the road that has been hinted on by others. Yeah, I don't have anything to add to that, Mark. I know we have a few minutes. Maybe we'll break rank here. Is there like a question or two? Anybody?

I see one there. I don't have a mic for you, but if you want to belt it out there. Yeah, you against the wall there, sir, yeah. So the question is, is there a private communications protocol? Right, yeah, it's like, are these private? I'm actually learning smoke signals, so I'll be, uh, you can communicate with me any time. Just light up a dart and we'll see what happens. Yeah, are birds real?

That's a whole other conversation. Anyway, I don't, I actually don't know. I know in the U.S., they've started employing this digital canary thing in financial reporting. I was talking to one of you guys about this yesterday. So for something like Apple, I message, for example, Apple, like Mark said, similar to in Canada, Apple can't tell people by law that someone has asked to see a message. an I message or private message or something like that, a government agency, for example. But what they can do is they can put a line in their financial reporting, their quarterly,

right, their SEC filing that says we haven't been asked to do X, Y, Z by X, Y, Z agency. Sorry, Z, it's a Canadian conference. Those digital canaries are popping up more and more. A lot of companies are putting that in the reporting. That's something to keep an eye on. That doesn't answer your question. For me, private comms Like, signal and telegram

Signal and telegram are okay Assume that they're encrypted We don't know for sure if there's no There's a story that pops up every year or two About signal and telegram not being as secure as you think I know there's stuff like Session Which is a platform that takes sats For a private messaging instance with another person

Have you heard of that one, sir? Okay, so that's one I think you can get for iPhone Keybase. Keybase is good too Keybase is another one that's a sort of OG Bitcoiner. When we were really poor at like $3,000 and just cruising for apps to download to look cool, signal was one, or sorry, Keybase was one that came up a lot. At the end of the day, like, I know we don't like to talk about trust, but, you know, if I send Mark a message, I'm trusting that he's going to take care of his device

and he's not going to share the message. Probably like you, you know, when you're sending stuff to your friends, right, on popular memes, anti-regime memes, I'd love to see your meme folder. Uh, you have to know that the other person is square, you know? Um, and that's getting, I think, easier in Bitcoin, but man, it's hard everywhere else, wouldn't you say? Yeah. Um, it's almost using any, quote, unquote, encrypted app is itself a leap of faith. Um, unless, like, there's, some of them have open source stacks or components to them. So, but then, unless you're a coder yourself, and you can look at the open source and see what's in there.

You kind of have to trust once again that enough people who do understand the code have looked at it and sort of blessed it. But it is happening. I mean, let's end on a positive note. The decentralized revolution is proceeding apace, and I think it's always going to be a step ahead because, I mean, some of these ideas

that have come out of Parliament Hill when the Trudeau regime was still going, going, I wrote a response for the Internet Society about the internet kill switch. They had a bill that sort of made it elite, they wanted to pass a bill that made it illegal to taunt politicians. I can't remember which one it was. And it had a kill switch in there. And I, you know, I just kind of wrote a paper on like how impossible it was to implement on a technical level. And any, like, you just can't do it. You can't do what this bill says you're supposed to do. So the tech will always be ahead of the law or the legislation, and that'll be our ongoing advantage. I think we're out of time. We're done. Yeah. If you have more questions about this, Mark really is the guy to ask.

I'm not just saying that because he's a friend and the sponsor of the podcast. And I'm also not saying it because he might be wearing the best pair of shoes I've seen in the last 10 years. But he's really the guy who knows this stuff. He's been around long enough to answer your questions. So thank you very much for your time, and we'll get going here. Thanks.