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If a repair shop in Canada breaks the software lock on your dishwasher to fix it, that is no longer an offence under the Copyright Act. If the manufacturer refuses to sell the shop the part, nothing in that same law says it has to. Two private members’ bills changed the first thing in November 2024 and left the second untouched, and the obligations most people assume exist were written somewhere else entirely.
Here is the practical shape of it. A washing machine, a tractor, a coffee machine with a board in it: the useful question is rarely whether you are allowed to open the thing. It is whether the part, the tool and the service manual can be bought at all. Canada answered the first question federally and the second one provincially, and the answers arrive almost two years apart.
What the two federal acts actually changed
Two bills received Royal Assent on the same day, 7 November 2024. Both were private members’ bills, meaning they were introduced by individual members of Parliament rather than by the government.
Bill C-244, An Act to amend the Copyright Act (diagnosis, maintenance and repair), sponsored by Wilson Miao, member for Richmond Centre, became Statutes of Canada 2024, chapter 26. It added section 41.121 to the Copyright Act. The consolidated text of that section reads that the general prohibition on circumventing a technological protection measure “does not apply to a person who circumvents a technological protection measure for the sole purpose of maintaining or repairing a product, including any related diagnosing”.
A second subsection matters more than it looks. Section 41.121(2) says the exception “applies to a person who circumvents a technological protection measure in the circumstances referred to in that subsection for another person”. In plain terms, the independent shop doing the work for a customer is covered, not only the owner of the device.
Bill C-294, An Act to amend the Copyright Act (interoperability), sponsored by Jeremy Patzer, member for Cypress Hills, Grasslands, became Statutes of Canada 2024, chapter 27. It rewrote section 41.12 so that circumvention is permitted for the purpose of “obtaining information that would allow the person to make the program or a device in which it is embedded interoperable with any other computer program, device or component”, and for the purpose of making it interoperable.
What they did not create
Read both statutes end to end and there is no duty in either one. Neither act requires a manufacturer to sell a replacement part. Neither requires a diagnostic tool to be offered to an independent shop. Neither requires a service manual, a schematic, a firmware file or a password to be released to anybody. Both are exceptions to a prohibition, and an exception to a prohibition creates permission, not supply.
This is the gap the coverage of November 2024 mostly skipped. The headlines said Canada had passed a right to repair. What Parliament passed was the removal of a legal risk that sat on top of repair, which is a real change for anyone who was avoiding the work, and it is a different thing from a right to obtain what repair requires. The distance between what a document is assumed to do and what its text actually authorises is a recurring problem in Canadian policy coverage, and it is the same distance we found when we read what a petition with 57,000 signatures can and cannot compel.
Quebec wrote the obligations Ottawa left out
The duties exist in Canada. They are provincial, and they belong to one province. Quebec’s Bill 29, An Act to protect consumers from planned obsolescence and to promote the durability, repairability and maintenance of goods, sponsored by Justice Minister Simon Jolin-Barrette, was adopted unanimously by the National Assembly, 103 votes to none, and became chapter 21 of the Statutes of Quebec for 2023. It amends the province’s Consumer Protection Act rather than copyright law, which is why it can impose duties that a copyright amendment cannot.
Quebec’s Office de la protection du consommateur, the provincial consumer agency, sets out the obligations and their dates. The warranty of availability takes effect on 5 October 2026. From that date, merchants and manufacturers must make available, for a reasonable duration, replacement parts, repair services, and the information needed to maintain or repair the good, including instructions and software, in French. The price of parts and services must be reasonable and must not discourage access. Parts must be installable using commonly available tools and without causing irreversible damage. Techniques that make repair harder are prohibited unless they are necessary for safety or to comply with the law. Vehicle manufacturers cannot restrict an owner, a lessee or an authorised mechanic from reaching diagnostic and repair data.
A separate warranty of good working order for new household appliances and electronics takes effect the same day, covering parts, labour and reasonable transport costs for three to six years depending on the product.
Two regimes, side by side
| Question | Copyright Act, federal, in force 7 Nov 2024 | Consumer Protection Act, Quebec, in force 5 Oct 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| May a lock be circumvented to repair? | Yes, s. 41.121 | Not the subject of the Act |
| Must a replacement part be available? | No provision | Yes, for a reasonable duration |
| Must repair information be available? | No provision | Yes, including software, in French |
| Is the price of parts regulated? | No provision | Must be reasonable and not discourage access |
| Are repair-hindering designs restricted? | No provision | Prohibited, with safety and legal exceptions |
| Who is covered? | Anyone in Canada | Consumers dealing with merchants in Quebec |
How long each step took
Raw POV counted the intervals, which neither Parliament nor the province publishes as a figure. Bill C-244 was first read on 8 February 2022 and received Royal Assent on 7 November 2024, which is 1,003 days. Bill C-294 was first read on 17 June 2022, 129 days after C-244, and reached Royal Assent on the same afternoon, which took it 874 days. Quebec’s Bill 29 was assented to on 5 October 2023 and its availability warranty comes into force exactly 1,096 days later.
Line the two systems up and the distance is 697 days. That is the gap between the day the federal permission arrived and the day the provincial obligations begin. For the 669 days between Royal Assent and this article, the position across the country has been the same: the lock may be opened, and nobody outside Quebec has to hand over what is behind it.
What this means for a small shop
The two levels answer different questions, so the useful reading is to ask which question you have. A shop worried about legal exposure for bypassing a lock is asking a copyright question, settled federally since November 2024. A shop that cannot get the part at all is asking a supply question, and outside Quebec no statute answers it.
For a business deciding what equipment to buy, repairability therefore remains a purchasing decision rather than a legal guarantee, and it stays that way in nine provinces and three territories after 5 October 2026. That is the shape of most technology decisions made without a rule to fall back on, where what a firm does with a new tool depends more on its own capacity than on what the law obliges anyone to provide.
What a reader can actually do with this
None of this legislation creates a right to demand a part from anyone. What the copyright change did was remove the legal risk from opening the device yourself, which is what makes a proper precision repair kit worth owning rather than a novelty: the tools are legal to use on your own hardware in every province, even in the nine where getting the part itself is still the shop’s problem, not the law’s.
Frequently asked questions
Did Canada pass a right to repair law?
Parliament passed two amendments to the Copyright Act that took effect on 7 November 2024. They permit circumventing a digital lock for repair, maintenance, diagnosis and interoperability. They do not require anyone to supply parts, tools or documentation.
Which Canadian law requires manufacturers to sell replacement parts?
Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act, as amended by Bill 29. The warranty of availability of parts, repair services and repair information takes effect on 5 October 2026. No equivalent federal obligation exists.
Does the federal repair exception cover a repair shop, or only the owner?
Section 41.121(2) states that the exception applies to a person who circumvents the measure for another person, which covers work done on someone else’s behalf.
What are the limits of the federal exception?
Section 41.121(3) provides that a person does not benefit from the exception if, in the course of the work, they do something that constitutes copyright infringement. The interoperability exception carries comparable conditions.
Sources and method
From the sources. The bill numbers, sponsors, ridings, first reading dates and Royal Assent date come from LEGISinfo, the Parliament of Canada legislative database, for Bill C-244 and Bill C-294, both of the 44th Parliament, first session. The quoted statutory language comes from the annual statutes and from section 41.121 of the consolidated Copyright Act, current to 21 June 2026 and last amended on 7 November 2024. The Quebec obligations and their dates come from the Office de la protection du consommateur and from the National Assembly record of Bill 29.
Our own analysis. The interval counts are ours: 1,003 days for C-244, 874 days for C-294, 129 days between the two first readings, 1,096 days from Quebec’s assent to the availability warranty, and the 697 days between the federal Royal Assent and the Quebec date. The side-by-side table is ours, built by reading each statute for the presence or absence of a duty. Neither government publishes these comparisons.
What we did not do. This article describes the text of legislation. It is not legal advice and it does not assess any particular device, contract or dispute. We did not test how the exceptions are applied in practice, because there is no published record of enforcement or litigation under either federal provision that we could examine. We did not examine whether other provinces have bills in progress. We also did not evaluate the reasonableness standard in the Quebec rules, which the province has not yet defined product by product in the material we consulted.
Related reading on how Canadian consumer rules compare with other countries: flight delay compensation in Canada, the European Union and Brazil. On Canadian consumers and price sensitivity: what value meals did and did not do.
