American and British officials have been warning with an increasing sense of purported urgency that their inability to decrypt communications could have serious consequences. American authorities have claimed that if they cannot demand decrypted communications from telecommunications providers then serious crimes may go unsolved. In the UK this danger is often accentuated by the threat of terrorism. In both nations, security and policing services warn that increased use of encryption is causing communications to ‘go dark’ and thus be inaccessible to policing and security services. These dire warnings of the threats potentially posed by criminals and terrorists ‘going dark’ have been matched over the years with proposals that would regulate encryption or mandate backdoors into any otherwise secure system. Comparatively little has been said about Canada’s long-standing efforts to inhibit end-user encryption despite the federal government’s longstanding efforts to restrict the security provided to Canadians by encryption.

This article outlines some of the federal government of Canada’s successful and unsuccessful attempts to weaken cryptographic standards. It starts by explaining (in brief) what communications encryption is, why it matters, and the implications of enabling unauthorized parties to decrypt communications. With this primer out of the way, we discuss why all of Canada’s mobile telecommunications carriers agree to implement cryptographic weaknesses in their service offerings. Next, we discuss the legislation that can be used to compel telecommunications service providers to disclose decryption keys to government authorities. We then briefly note how Canada’s premier cryptologic agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), successfully compromised global encryption standards. We conclude the post by arguing that though Canadian officials have not been as publicly vocal about a perceived need to undermine cryptographic standards the government of Canada nevertheless has a history of successfully weakening encryption available to and used by Canadians.

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