Signal and Psiphon Say They Will Leave Canada If Encryption Bill Passes

Canada is the latest democracy to consider legislation that could effectively require backdoors in encrypted products and force services to keep more user data. The bill has not passed. The companies most affected are already saying what they will do if it does.

Psiphon VPN, a Canadian anti-censorship company that keeps millions of Iranians online during government internet shutdowns, says it will leave the country if the bill becomes law. Signal, the encrypted messaging app, has said it would exit the Canadian market. Its stated reason: the legislation would require changes to its open source projects that it considers unacceptable.

Apple and Meta have criticized the bill. DuckDuckGo and NordVPN say they would consider pulling their services.

The technical problem with backdoors

The aim of proposals like this is to give police and intelligence agencies more power to access people's information. That is a legitimate goal on its face. Crime has consequences, and investigators need tools.

The sticking point is the method. Cryptographers and security engineers have said for decades that a deliberate flaw built into an encrypted product for one party cannot be kept safe from everyone else. A door for the police is a door.

Kate Robertson, a senior research associate at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, says some officials fixate on access to the exclusion of everything else. "There have always been some officials within certain agencies that tend to view technology as a crime scene in and of itself, and it becomes a myopic point of fixation where access is desired," she says.

She argues that approach ignores what the technology protects. "Technology needs to be the secure operating platform for hospitals, for banks, for national security agencies, for police services themselves to protect victims who report private information to them," Robertson says.

Not just a Canadian impulse

Governments already hold broad digital surveillance powers and investigative tactics for crimes involving encrypted data. The new proposals typically add to those powers rather than replace them.

The UK and Australia have both passed surveillance reforms that can compel companies to break their encryption. Similar proposals have surfaced in the EU, France and India.

That pattern raises a practical question. If hostility to encryption keeps spreading, which countries or regions become safe havens for privacy services? Canada's bill is a live test of what a company does when a market turns hostile: leave.

A separate threat to encryption: quantum

Government mandates are not the only pressure. On Sept. 30, 2026, BTQ Technologies CEO Olivier Roussy Newton appeared on Mornings With Fox Business to discuss the risk quantum computing poses to Bitcoin's encryption and to stablecoins.

Roussy Newton analyzed reports that quantum technology could crack Bitcoin by 2029. That is a projection, not an event. Nothing in his appearance establishes that such a machine exists today.

He also said stablecoins are preparing for the quantum threat. The segment gave no technical specifics on what that preparation involves.

Two different pressures, one asset

The Canadian bill and the quantum warning are unrelated developments. One comes from legislators, the other from physics and engineering. Neither has been linked to the other by any source.

But they bear on the same thing. Encryption secures messaging, banking, hospital records and digital currency. Weakening it by law, or losing it to a technical breakthrough, puts the same infrastructure at risk.

The difference is that one of those threats is a choice. Lawmakers in Ottawa can decide whether to write a mandate that, per the companies and researchers above, would drive services out of the country or force changes they say they will not make. A quantum breakthrough is not something a parliament can vote on.

There is also a cost-benefit question that a limited-government view should take seriously. Mandated retention means companies store more sensitive data, and stored data gets breached. Police gain access. Criminals and foreign intelligence services gain a bigger target.

What to watch

The Canadian bill still has to pass. Signal, Psiphon and the others have tied their exits to that outcome, so the next step is a vote, not a departure. If it clears, Psiphon's departure would affect the millions of Iranians who depend on its service to get around state-imposed shutdowns. Whether any country positions itself as the destination for services that leave is still an open question.