In a vast country like ours, Canadians rely heavily on telecommunication, and though most of us don't know all of the technical details, we know enough to realize it's pretty easy for snoops to rummage through our email correspondence and to listen in on our cell-phone conversations. The truth is, tools to protect your privacy are alive and well and living in a computer near you. Although primitive rules for scrambling messages can often be broken by people with enough time and ingenuity, recent advancements have yielded a variety of sophisticated techniques that, for all practical purposes, simply can't be broken. And that scares the shit out of some people. Because unlike most people who think that protecting their privacy is a good thing, there are a select few, principally cops and spies, who have rather enjoyed the ability to eavesdrop on other people's conversations whenever there was something they wanted to know.
Strong encryption changes all that.
Just about everybody else argues that privacy is more important. The result has been a long and tedious battle. Not surprisingly, the proposal was a complete failure. The idea is that businesses might want to keep backup copies of encryption keys to make sure they don't lose access to their own encrypted records. With appropriate court authorization, police could get access to those keys as well.