My understanding is that they're claiming worldwide jurisdiction over Clearview's use of Canadians' pictures, such that Clearview letting a US client query their database for a picture of a Canadian would be contrary to the order.
As much as I dislike legal overreach in international matters, I agree: the pictures of Canadian individuals are likely to have been taken in Canada, or to come from Canadian sources or websites. The fact that they may have been shared with a US company (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn) is irrelevant: copyright etc. does not cease to exist when crossing a digital border. Some countries also have extra protections on top of copyright, like use right, certain rights you can't sign away, etc.
Even worse: by being able to correlate that to Canadian individuals (using metadata or facial metrics, etc), the company can't pretend they don't know who these pictures are from, or where they come from: they know damn well, which makes the court requests limited scope even more acceptable.
Also, claiming to be ignorant of Canadian law may not be a good excuse. They should have known, if only to start doing business there.
Let's construct an equivalent: if in ISIS or Afghan territory, a terrorist group had scraped pictures of people living in the EU or US, and known by them to be "enemies of the caliphate" or something equivalent and that's it's totally A-OK within their legal system to publish that on a website say to call for their murder (I must confess my ignorance on these matters but you get the idea), we'd all say "no it's not". This is just the same. What's legal for us to do domestically with domestic pictures of citizens may not be legal to do somewhere else, and importing the pictures to do it domestically doesn't magically make it legal.
Telling your followers to kill someone in another country is considered committing a crime in that country. Distributing information that at some point originated in another country is generally not. Where it is, it's because of something like a copyright treaty.
There's a bit of a hitch, as a photo can be legally taken, and legally transferred to a non-Canadian entity, at which point things get problematic. Canadian copyright and privacy rules don't usually apply to foreign entities.
If a canadian takes a picture of a canadian in canada, for example, it's canadian jurisdiction. And so long as any consequences for breaking it are limited to canada as well, it seems like it's still just canadian jurisdiction. It's not like they're trying to extradite the CEO for what they did in the US, or provide any extra-canadian consequences, right?
That's not really how it works. A judgment is kind of a universal thing. It is a right to the the value of the judgment and you can assert it in any number of ways. If you have a judgment against a foreign company, and that company temporarily has some assets in a bank in the country that issued the judgment, you can get a court order to have them seized. You can also go to other countries and enforce that judgment. If I sue you in the UK and win, but I can't adequately enforce the judgment in the UK because all of your assets are in another country, I can generally go to that other country and ask a court there to enforce the judgment. One of the main things that court will look into is whether the court that issued the judgment was acting properly under international law in the first place.
A country that issues a judgment beyond the scope of its jurisdiction under international law is violating international law. There's no international police to come get you, but you're not operating by the rules of the road and foreign countries will start to look at judgments originating in your country with suspicion. If you aggressively enforce illegally extraterritorial judgments, such as by seizing the assets of foreign actors that are just passing through your company, you might even get into tit-for-tats with other countries.
Extraterritorial jurisdiction is not totally illegal, but there are limits and this would seem to be outside of those.
