I’ve written about the work committees do before. And more than once in fact. But this latest insight is worth adding to that collection.

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What’s changed? Here’s one example. In the middle of a long question addressed to a witness, a member suddenly interrupted himself. He (politely) demanded that, before he would continue, the committee chair should ensure the recording camera focused on him and on the witness who was responding (rather than focusing elsewhere).

There was nothing wrong with the request itself of course. The whole purpose of the video feeds is to help remote viewers visually connect to the proceedings. What I found strange was the member’s insistence. Was the issue important enough to cut into the limited session time available?

I also noticed some measure of grandstanding. It's almost like the witnesses were primarily there as a way for members to theatrically score points for public consumption. I know: we’re talking about politicians for whom the word “grandstanding” was invented. The thing is that I’d normally only expect such behavior where there’s someone sitting and watching from the grandstands.

But how many people do you think actually tune in to Parl VU to grab an afternoon’s entertainment with HESA Meeting number 34 or SRSR Meeting number 37? I’m a pathological policy wonk and, as a rule, even I’ll only do it when I’m personally involved. Life is short.

Then it hit me. It’s now really all about social media engagement. The parliamentary video record is a powerful (and inexpensive) tool for generating 1-5 minute video clips you can publish to your X feed.

A little research confirmed that Bloc and Conservative members tend to have active X accounts where clips from committee meetings regularly appear. Although for various reasons, Liberals seem far less likely to use the platform this way. Getting the camera angle or witness response just right can make the difference between a viral tweet and no-news-Tuesday.

Now there’s nothing anti-democratic about all this. Love it or hate it, X is where much of the effective political conversation is happening right now. As I wrote just a few months ago, the Liberal Party has invested significantly in their X strategy.1

The problem is that committees are among the few places where constructive and even bipartisan work can happen. Honest and open debate is supposed to be an important element of that work. But focusing on scoring social media points should happen on social media.

Related:

The first was Mark Carney’s speech in Toronto where he announced the creation of a “ministerial advisory council on rights, equality and inclusion.” The second event involved an announcement that Toronto Police Services (TPS) had arrested five individuals for “public incitement of hatred and willful promotion of hatred.”

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Both events seemed designed as responses to persistent criticism that Canada’s official institutions have - at best - done nothing of substance to push back against growing Jew-hatred. And if you’d ask me, both efforts completely missed the point.

The Advisory Council to (hopefully) End All Advisory Councils

No doubt the new council will generate more of the same (cheap) talk that’s already featured in slightly older initiatives like Canada’s Action Plan on Combatting Hate. Those existing measures, by the way, are budgeted at more than $100 million, will measurably change nothing, and have to be seen to be believed.

I’m guessing that any “practical” suggestions delivered by the new council will probably focus on Liberal Party favorites. Hosting racism conferences no one notices along with ineffective and technology-ignorant proposals for suppressing offensive online speech will probably play large roles.

Sure, the internet can probably be blamed for some of the popularization of awful ideas. But there’s absolutely nothing any Canadian government can do about that. And, in any case, the internet is only one part of a much bigger story.

Like most real-world problems, what’s actually driving the recent explosion of antisemitism is complex. But some of the more obvious sources include:

• Issuing countless thousands of student visas to unvetted people from Muslim countries where Jew hatred is actively promoted.

• Allowing (or even mandating) openly anti-Israel and pro-terror curricular materials and activities in k-12 classrooms.

• Offering publicly funded university courses taught by openly antisemitic professors who proudly and frequently use online platforms to express their Jew hatred.1

• Funding the CBC which interviews dozens of Hamas/Iran/Hezbollah supporters with little or no push back against their historical revisionism and criticisms of Israel and Jews. (It would be hard to point to any similar interviews with Jews/Israelis in recent years.)

Those problems all have relatively simple and obvious solutions - and none of them would require the suppression of anyone’s free speech. K-12 teachers and university professors, for example, are perfectly free to teach whatever they want to any students interested in listening. But the government doesn’t have to pay them for the pleasure.

A public school district or university that did nothing more than eliminate support and funding for such content would send a powerful message. And students of such institutions would be exposed to a whole lot less hate. Ditto for the CBC.

The problem is that, to a large degree, university deans, provincial education ministry policy managers, school administrators, and CBC program managers are on board with the hate. Or, in some cases, they feel themselves powerless to do anything about it.

I strongly believe that this is the key issue. The substance and official voice of key publicly funded institutions are closely associated with loud and proud support for government-designated terrorist organizations and their narratives. How could you expect antisemitism to not metastasize?

The fact that so many normal Canadians are, in fact, deeply supportive of their Jewish neighbours says a lot about their ability to block out official messaging. And the fact that the preferences of so much of the educational and broadcast establishment are flat-out ignored by regular Canadians is downright encouraging.

Toronto Police Services and Willful Misdirection

The second event I mentioned earlier was that TPS announcement about antisemitism arrests. I don’t find the news encouraging in any way.

First of all, why now? Public street-level attacks against Toronto’s Jewish community have been going on for years. If the City of Toronto and their police service considered passivity the right approach until now, what’s changed? This certainly doesn’t feel like an admission of error.

What’s the point? The odds anyone will ever be convicted and punished for their actions lie somewhere between microscopic and laughable. I’ve already written about how - between Canada’s prosecution-averse Crown prosecutors and a chronically chocked criminal court system - only a tiny proportion of arrests ever lead to court appearances. So why bother?

And what’s with those charges? Public incitement of hatred and willful promotion of hatred? Really? Relying on such weak hate-speech charges opens you up to accusations of political persecution. And, frankly, I’d tend to agree.

This isn’t the first time, either:

“Hate propaganda” is a crime in Canada? So why aren’t half of our MPs already behind bars?

It’s not like there aren’t real crimes in play here. The guys TPS just charged were all using intimidation to try to prevent Jews (and others) from walking along a public sidewalk. There’s something about that word “intimidation” that sounds familiar.

Well as I’ve written, here’s how the Criminal Code puts it:

These arrests and charges smell like nothing more than frivolous PR stunts. I honestly can’t see what value they provide to society.

There’s more:

But I’m not quite so agreeable when I discover massive federal government spending being poured into programs that target - but fail to solve - the problem. To be clear, I’m not talking about spending on clean water for First Nation reserves or for training and healthcare. This is just about languages.

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How much money is on the table? Allocations related to the Liberal government's Indigenous Languages Act of 2019 have totaled at least $1.5 billion so far. Just the grants and contributions to the Indigenous Languages Program that are included in Main Estimates documentation added up to $181 million in 2024-5, $177 million in 2025-6, and $167 million in 2026-7.

So what to we have to show for all this generosity? Well sadly, we won’t see key data from the 2026 census until at least September 2027, but 2021 results showed that 4.3 percent fewer people could hold a conversation in an Indigenous language in 2021 than in 2016. That was the first decline recorded since 1991.

Did federal spending programs come with statutory outcome reviews or audits to identify progress measured outside of census data? None that I’m aware of.

However, as University of Manitoba associate professor Patricia Ningewance told CITY News recently, the Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages recently spent $10 million hosting a four-day conference in Ottawa. There were, according to Ningewance, no tangible recommendations and no apparent follow up. In other words, there was no chance for anything useful to come from the exercise.

“Can you imagine,” Ningewance was quoted asking, “for that amount of money, how many students could have been made fluent?”

It’s also possible (although unclear) that money from the Indigenous Languages Program could have been used to help bankroll the recent scandal involving the APTN1 and CBC-funded Northland Tales that involved trying to humiliate guests after luring them under false pretenses. The odds are, however, that most of that money would have come from the Indigenous Screen Office ($13 million in annual federal funding) and the CBC (upwards of $2 billion in annual federal funding).

Aspirational goals are great. This particular cause certainly represents a noble ambition. But over the years, The Audit has discovered many aspirational programs whose deep funding was, from the start, an exercise in futility.

Understanding the value of this particular program isn’t rocket science. Anyone with a Social Insurance number and a pulse back in 2019 could have told you how this would end. There are some things that only governments can do. There are some things that governments can’t do well, but can get away with. And there are many, many things at which - as predictably as night follows day - governments will always fail.

This looks like one of those things.

For better or for worse, the numbers of Canadians who choose SRL has been growing for decades. To find out just how much, I used the CanLII database to search all cases across all courts in all provinces for phrases like “self-represented” or “without counsel”. That won’t give me an exact result, but as they say, it’ll be close enough for data. Here’s what I got:

That echoes much more dramatic findings in a Government of Canada report from back in 2016. So we’re on the right track.

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As you can see, the percentage of SRL cases has grown from less than two percent to seven percent in just 15 years. So far, I’m not looking at how often AI models are getting involved. But there simply weren’t models even remotely capable of helping before 2020 or so in any case.

We can get some sense of how (un)successful SRLs are in comparison with regular cases by searching for cases whose files included the word “dismissed”. Now I should be careful here, because “dismissed” can have very different meanings depending on context. For someone representing himself in a criminal case, “dismissed” is a great success. But for lawsuits or family law proceedings, it’ll often mean failure.

For this search, I assumed that self-represented criminal cases are relatively rare. In fact, it looks like criminal or statutory infractions generally make up less than two percent of all the cases in the CanLII database, so that’s probably not a bad assumption.

As you can see from the next graph, the total number of dismissals for all cases grew steadily from 12.59 percent to 18.67 percent between 2010 and 2026:

But when I focused on the dismissal rates specifically for SRL cases, success for SRLs was far less frequent (with dismissal rates as high as 57 percent):

To get some idea of how many SRLs are using AI as part of their court preparations, I searched cases with evidence of being SRL and containing phrases like “generative AI” or “artificial intelligence”. This is certainly a crude metric, but it nevertheless shows a clear pattern:

Keep in mind that data from 2026 is obviously incomplete, so the usage rate is definitely still climbing.

If you ask me, once people have made the decision to represent themselves, they’d be negligent in not consulting AI. When it comes to drafting and filing documents and mapping out strategies, I doubt even the most experiences human lawyers can compete with an intelligently-prompted AI.

However, you should never ever rely blindly on an AI for fine details like legal precedent. Too many litigants (not to mention lawyers who should know better) have suffered serious consequences when reprimanded by courts after submitting utter gibberish.

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Should you be so inclined you can view a recording of the session here. My first appearance happens at the 12:23 mark.

The problems being discussed are real. Nation-wide, the number of asylum seekers who are stuck somewhere in the review system grew from 168,206 in Q3 2021 to 518,489 in Q1 2026. That’s a change of 208 percent. But the change wasn’t uniform throughout the country.

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Since most of the overall growth was concentrated in Quebec and Ontario, those provinces are the most visible in this chart. But they actually grew by just 214 percent and 178 percent respectively.

What you can’t see there is the impact on some smaller provinces. However when I remove Canada and the larger provinces from the chart, it’s now possible to see that refugee populations in New Brunswick (597 percent) and Saskatchewan (501 percent) grew far faster than the others. And, in the context of their population, Manitoba is certainly not facing negligible raw numbers.

We can get a sense of how mobile refugee populations are from Statistics Canada data that tracks refugee tax filers between provinces in the years after their admission.

Manitoba loses the highest percentage of their refugee population over time. But overall, the numbers are fairly stable: around 85 percent of new permanent residents tend to stay in their original province.

Those refugees who did leave their “province of admission” were most likely to head west to Alberta. Although, as I’ve previously written, that’s also been the story for many Canadian citizens.

What does all this look like at street level? As of January 2026, there were 3,874 refugee claimants in Toronto shelters - representing 39 percent of all homeless shelter occupants in the city. That’s placing a serious strain on municipal and provincial budgets. But a lot of the costs are indirectly shifted to the federal government, which has spent $1.5–1.7B through the Interim Housing Assistance Program (IHAP), $1.1–1.2B on federally funded hotels, and nearly $900M annually on interim healthcare coverage.

Beyond simple shelter, the crisis is also impacting local social assistance agencies, schools, legal aid, and policing programs.

By far the largest contributor to the scale of the problem is administrative backlogs at the Immigration Refugee Board (IRB). I’ve discussed this already on The Audit:

As I noted in that post, adding more judges would speed up the process. But addressing the serious claims of a whistleblower from inside the agency and tightening up a culture that rewards rubber-stamped approvals would slow it back down again.

Jump-starting the IRB resolution workflow to quickly process those 500,000 pending applications is definitely the most effective single action the government could take. I would be surprised if IRB wasn’t already using AI models to instantly flag cases (for human review) that will likely be either successful or unsuccessful. That’s the thing about AI: it doesn’t get scared by big numbers, and it sees details and patterns humans will miss.

Another task that could be assigned to AI models is to identify applicants with professional credentials. Various levels of government have already claimed to be prioritizing wider recognition of in-demand foreign credentials. Results of those efforts could easily be matched to records in existing IRB databases. (Or, at the very least, failure could deeply embarrass the politicians - and professional colleges - who are responsible for the delays.)

One more thought. As at least a couple of witnesses in that committee session noted, moving claimants from urban shelters and street encampments to permanently funded reception centres (or dorms) can go a long way to both relieve municipal infrastructure and speed up the resolution process. And they could also save money and protect claimant welfare.

Such centres - which have been used in European countries like Germany and the Netherlands - could be expanded to welcome other claimants beyond those suffering from homelessness. One important attraction could be proximity to healthcare, social services, and even purpose-built IRB facilities.

The government is facing serious pressure - mostly resulting from its own awful policy choices. But at least they’re now asking the right questions. I’ll wait for the committee’s final report to Parliament to see whether anything productive comes out of these consultations.

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Keep reading:

All that’s based on the 2021 survey. But I just discovered data from the Consortium on Electoral Democracy’s 2024 Democracy Checkup - which covers much of the same ground as the CES surveys. So, three years later, those numbers have shifted a bit. Both groups saw a decline in self-assessed mental health from 2021 to 2024, but the left cohort declined a bit more and the gap between cohorts widened even further.

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Specifically, the self-reported mental health of those on the left worsened by around 1.94 percent while the right worsened by just 0.94 percent. The gap between the two groups increased by about 9 percent. The disturbing trend from 2021 sure looks real.

A second product of that earlier post was a question in the comments section: what about people - like libertarians - who don’t fit so neatly on the right-left spectrum? Does the Canadian Election Study data have anything to say about them?

First, we should define exactly what a libertarian might be. The academic figure most often associated with libertarians is the Nobel laureate economist, Milton Friedman. So that’ll be as good a place as any to find a working definition.

As a rule, Friedman believed that governments should engage only in activities that the market cannot do effectively on its own. For Friedman, those activities would be limited to:

• Protecting individual freedom and property rights through contract enforcement, fraud prevention, and institutions of law and order.

• Providing national defense.

• Providing basic infrastructure like roads.

That’s about it. It’s true that, for instance, Friedman believed governments should fund basic education, but government should never provide it. In other words, he would have strongly preferred something like a voucher model through which parents get to choose which private-sector schools they prefer for their kids.

Now based on those principles, we should be able to identify libertarians from their responses to the survey. There were five spending-related questions in particular for which I figured any card-carrying libertarian would select “spend less” from among the options.

Indeed, as you can see from this table, between 5 and 45 percent of all respondents did go with reduced spending:

The problem was that there were exactly zero from that group that remained consistent across all five questions. However for some reason, when I removed the affordable housing question, there were 246 people left in the cohort.

I understood the question (“How much should the federal government spend on affordable housing?”) to mean “should the government spend more to subsidize the construction of affordable housing?” To which my answer would be a resounding “Heck, no!”

But perhaps some of the respondents took it to mean “should the government top up the social support net for at-risk families?” In fact, even Milton Friedman believed in governments supporting the truly poor - although he preferred that support should come from a “negative tax” rather than delivered through government programs. So I guess it’s reasonable to exclude affordable housing from my cohort eligibility.

When I added the “The government should leave it entirely to the private sector to create jobs” question to the profile, there were just 26 lonely libertarians left in our group. (And - in case you’re keeping score at home - only 18 of those reported their mental health as either “good” or “fair”.)

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At this point, the question isn’t “where should Canadian libertarians fit on the political spectrum?” but “are there any Canadian libertarians (who answer surveys) at all?”

A lot of the attention has focused on claims that more and more unqualified drivers - and immigrant drivers in particular - are operating heavy equipment. That, and the possibility that safety regulations are routinely ignored by rogue trucking companies, are apparently contributing to higher road carnage.

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Well I have no access to data that identifies dangerous drivers by their residency status and I have no eye-witness insights into industry trends. But road carnage? That I can measure.

In fact I have multiple data sources, so we can even compensate for the fact that each of them is measuring subtly different things. The first source is the online version of Transport Canada’s National Collision Database. The chart below represents fatalities caused by collisions involving a “truck tractor” (and school buses).

As you can see for yourself, the decline in the number of truck-involved deaths has been fairly steady since 2004. When you consider that Canada’s population grew by more than a third between 2000 and 2025 - and urban traffic congestion along with it - anything even close to steady fatality numbers would have to be considered a victory.

My second resource is the Ontario Road Safely Annual Report published by Ministry of Transportation Ontario. Here are the total province-wide fatalities for each year between 2011 and 2024. Once again, accounting for population growth, the fatality numbers clearly aren’t rising.

Finally, Statistics Canada publishes cause of death data that’ll also be useful here. Sure, those numbers won’t be perfect. Coroners do sometimes guess when documenting a death because it’s often not at all obvious what really killed a person.

But a dying patient just brought in by ambulance from an accident scene presents a whole lot less ambiguity. I don’t think we really have to worry that hundreds of crash victims are annually reclassified as COVID deaths.

As you can see, these Statistics Canada raw numbers are a bit higher than those from Transport Canada. And the “pedestrian injured in collision with car, pick-up truck of van” metric is just there for comparison sake. But the overall downward trends are, if anything, even more clear in this data. Canada’s highways, simply put, are safer than ever.

In fact, deaths caused by all categories of motor vehicle accidents have noticeably declined throughout this century. According to Statistics Canada, 2,582 people were killed in motor vehicle accidents in 2001, which represented a rate of 8.3 per 100,000. By 2024 the raw number had fallen to 1,853 which, due to population growth, was just 4.5 per 100,000.

All of which - taken together - strongly suggests that Canada’s pedestrians and drivers are not facing Mad Max road conditions out there. Which is good news, right?

Read on:

I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election - the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.

There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1

I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.

I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.

Anxiety

I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.

The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.

Overall Mental Health

Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).

By any measure, those numbers are highly significant. But there are some caveats:

• The mental health status was self-reported rather than the result of a formal diagnosis.

• There’s no proof that relatively poor mental health causes left-leaning political beliefs (or the other way around): the two could just be the results of confounding variables.

• There are a lot of potential confounding variables in play, including urbanicity, gender, religiosity, employment status, and age.

To improve the value of my results, I controlled for some of the most obvious variables. Those included:

• Those on the right considered religion of greater importance (averaging 2.21 where “1” is very important) than on the left (whose average was 2.6).

• Males made up 52.4 percent of the far right cohort, while males only represented 39.3 percent of the far left respondents.

• The average age among right-leaning respondents was 53.5 against 47.7 on the left.

Given that people who are female (and non-binary), younger, and non-religious are all known to experience poorer mental health, those are likely contributors to the right-left gap we’re seeing. In other words, perhaps the health problems on the left are more the result of their gender, age, and religiosity than their political beliefs.

After applying a regression analysis to control for age, gender, urban/rural, and religious importance, the far-right advantage shrinks to 0.187 points but remains highly statistically significant (t = -7.17, p < 0.000).

The fact that the coefficient on the far right drops from -0.294 to -0.187 shows that some of the raw difference is explained by demographics (especially age: the far-right group is a lot older). But a substantial and significant ideological gap remains.

All of which suggests there’s a very strong association between strong left-leaning political ideology and poor mental health. That’s not to say that the ideology causes illness, but that the two will often appear together.

So it’s safe to conclude that those Canadian numbers do echo what researchers are seeing in the U.S.

I’ll wrap up with a (mild) shocker: the more closely you “follow politics on TV, radio, newspapers, or the Internet”, the less likely you are to report poor mental health. Specifically, the average response to the question: “Compared to other people your age, how would you describe your mental health?” for avid political followers was 2.06 (where, again, 1 indicates excellent mental health, and 5 indicates poor mental health). By contrast, responses from less engaged Canadians averaged 2.39.

Make what you will of that one.

If you’re curious about the way I handled this data (or you’re interested in challenging my conclusions), feel free to check out my code here.

You might recall how I’ve previously discussed Canadian efforts on major digital media platforms, including Spotify. Without putting too fine a point on it, Canadian companies - including the CBC - are all seriously under performing.

But here’s a chance to dive a bit deeper into the Spotify world. Let’s grab it.

Without a doubt, the CBC is Spotify’s most visible Canadian producer. 910 unique CBC episodes appeared at least once in the top 200. The corporation’s most popular shows seem to be their “top stories in 10 minutes” episodes. But the average top rank for all CBC episodes was just 73rd.

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Besides CBC, I noticed only three other obviously Canadian producers: The Sports Network (TSN) whose average top rank was 75, Moose on the Loose (87.8), and Sportsnet (103).

Although 1,235 unique French-language podcast episodes made the top-200 in Canada, not a single one of them came from Radio Canada. In fact, as far as I can tell, not one was even Canadian.

All that means Canadians are far less likely to listen to home-grown podcasts than the foreign stuff. That’s no doubt partly because there’s more of the foreign stuff to choose from. But we shouldn’t ignore the obvious fact that Canadians - and especially taxpayer-funded Canadians - are failing to create programming that Canadians find interesting.

So, while it certainly wouldn’t be fair to say that CBC’s much-trumpeted digital endeavors are invisible, they’re hardly taking the country by storm. And when measured against the billions in public support they receive, their record actually looks pretty dismal.

Now what about the rest of the world? Using the dataset, I aggregated all the Spotify episodes that hit the charts outside Canada and that also referenced Canada somewhere in the episode description. I then asked an AI model to assess the dominant sentiment of those descriptions.

Here’s what my AI told me:

Based on the podcast descriptions in your subset, the overall portrayal of Canada is mixed but recognizable in a few recurring patterns. The dataset does not read like a sustained anti-Canada or pro-Canada discourse. Instead, Canada appears as:

• a geopolitical actor,

• a setting for crime and mystery stories,

• a cultural reference point,

• and a comparatively stable or “civilized” society against which other countries are contrasted.

Here are the strongest recurring sentiments and themes I noticed.

Positive or Admiring Sentiments

1. Canada as stable, orderly, and polite

Several descriptions explicitly or implicitly frame Canada as socially orderly, safe, and courteous.

Examples included wording like:

• “a quiet and orderly city”

• “courtesy is almost a religion”

• references to Canadian civility or predictability

Even when these introductions lead into true-crime stories, the rhetorical setup often depends on the assumption that Canada is normally peaceful and trustworthy.

2. Canada as culturally respected

Canadian creators and personalities are frequently referenced positively:

• Margaret Atwood

• Canadian comedians

• Canadian hockey culture

• Canadian television adaptations

• Canadian athletes and entertainers

The tone here is generally warm and familiar rather than exotic or controversial.

3. Canada as principled or sovereign

Political podcasts — especially those reacting to U.S. politics — often frame Canada as:

• defending its sovereignty,

• resisting U.S. pressure,

• or acting more predictably than the United States.

Some descriptions portray Canada as a moderating or stabilizing force in international affairs.

4. Canada as cooperative and pragmatic

A recurring geopolitical sentiment is that Canada is adaptable and pragmatic in trade and diplomacy:

• balancing relations with China and the U.S.

• navigating tariffs and energy disputes

• participating in international coordination

The tone is usually analytical rather than emotional, but generally respectful.

Negative or Critical Sentiments

1. Canada as vulnerable to U.S. pressure

A major 2026 theme in the dataset is anxiety about U.S. assertiveness under Trump-related scenarios:

• tariffs,

• Greenland disputes,

• energy conflicts,

• military rhetoric,

• sovereignty concerns.

Canada is sometimes portrayed as exposed or strategically vulnerable because of its proximity to the United States.

This is less “anti-Canada” sentiment than concern that Canada could be pushed around geopolitically.

2. Canada as the backdrop for disturbing crime stories

A surprisingly large share of mentions occur in:

• murder podcasts,

• disappearances,

• serial killer stories,

• custody disputes,

• military scandals,

• and paranormal stories.

Cities like Edmonton or regions like British Columbia often appear in narratives emphasizing hidden darkness beneath an orderly exterior.

This creates a recurring narrative pattern:

“Even in polite, peaceful Canada, terrible things happen.”

3. Economic unease

Some business/economic podcasts describe:

• youth unemployment,

• trade dependency,

• energy disputes,

• and shifting alliances.

The tone is not hostile, but Canada is occasionally depicted as economically constrained or strategically reactive.

4. Canada as secondary to U.S. narratives

In many descriptions, Canada appears mainly in relation to:

• U.S. elections,

• American military actions,

• World Cup hosting,

• or U.S.-China rivalry.

That can create an implicit sentiment that Canada is important, but not fully central.

Neutral / Recurring Identity Themes

A few broader patterns stood out repeatedly:

Hockey as shorthand for Canadian identity

Hockey references consistently carry positive or affectionate undertones.

Canada as “the North”

Many podcasts invoke Canada symbolically as:

• remote,

• cold,

• rugged,

• Arctic,

• or expansive.

Canada as internationally familiar

The dataset suggests that Canada remains globally recognizable and culturally legible across many languages:

• French

• Italian

• Dutch

• Hindi

• Filipino

• English

That alone is notable — Canada appears as a routine reference point in international media.

Overall Impression

If I had to summarize the dominant emotional tone in one sentence, it would be:

Canada is portrayed less as a controversial nation than as a stable, recognizable, culturally respected society navigating external pressures and occasionally revealing darker stories beneath its polite image.

So the aggregate sentiment is:

• more positive than negative overall,

• but heavily shaped by:

  • geopolitical anxiety,

  • true-crime storytelling,

  • and comparisons with the United States.

But tracking down the data you’d need to figure out what’s actually happening in Canada is hard. I gave it a shot a while back for the specific context of Canadian universities with mixed results. And there is data out there1 suggesting that spending on administration in at least the education sector is growing dangerously.

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However I thought it might just be possible to tease useful numbers from Statistics Canada data to help us understand employment trends in both the education and healthcare sectors. Since no one approach will give us a perfect representation of the situation on the ground, I decided to use three distinct methodologies. Either way, the data that came out the other end wasn’t what I was expecting.

Analyzing Employment by Industry Data

I derived total sector employment for the education (educational services) industry from the Statistics Canada labour force characteristics table and total healthcare employment by adding together the ambulatory healthcare, hospitals, and nursing numbers from the employment by industry table.

To get an estimate of how many of those workers were involved in administration, I subtracted the health or education “occupations except management” numbers from this table.

Those numbers are definitely not perfect matches. After all, subtracting just management roles leaves out layers and layers of coordinators, supervisors, team leads, and administrative staff who are also not directly involved in the delivery of education or healthcare. But I believe what we have can give us enough to let us catch long-term hiring trends.

So what did I find? Well, when it comes to the healthcare industry since 2001, the management share of total employment has steadily dropped from nearly 25 percent to just 13 percent. Now it’s highly unlikely that 25 percent of healthcare workers were ever classified as “management”. But it’s the ratio I’m after here.

And the proportional management decline for all levels of education (from elementary to university) was nearly as dramatic, falling from 60 percent in 2001 to 56 percent last year. Again, there’s no way that management ever occupied anything like 60 percent of all educational workers. But here’s how the trend looked:

One thing that’s absolutely clear is that, if anything, there are fewer per-capita managers in both educational and healthcare sectors now than a quarter century ago. That doesn’t mean operational costs and efficiency have necessarily improved. But it does suggest that there’s no obvious evidence of administration bloat within the system.

Analyzing Labour Force Survey Microdata

Using Statistics Canada’s microdata resource allows us to dive a bit deeper into the data by creating custom subcategories. To do that, I took the total size of the education (or healthcare) workforce and, from that cohort, identified workers whose job roles suggested support or administration duties. I then calculated the proportion of the total populated by that subset.

Since the microdata collection only covers the past 20 years, I was only able to track changes since 2006. When I visualized the data, it was obvious that there have been no dramatic changes.

There was a modest five percent increase in the proportion of administration workers in the education sector and virtually no change at all in healthcare.

University Employment vs Enrolment

Finally, I used two data tables from Statistics Canada to track the ratio of total university employment against university enrolment. The result, as you can see for yourself, shows negligible change between employees making up 21.13 percent of the enrolment number at its lowest, and 24.06 at its highest.

All three of those methodologies indicate that there’s been no significant growth in administration overhead in education or healthcare workplaces.2 If we’re looking to explain and correct institutional failures in those sectors, perhaps this isn’t where we should focus our attention.

Gurney admitted that there isn’t any hard data confirming these trends. But this is something he’s hearing from his contacts. The truth is that even I’ve been throwing around the idea of packing up for some time now. I mentioned it to my lawyer last week and he replied “Well we’re all thinking about that.”

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But none of that qualifies as reliable population-level evidence. Gurney did point to disturbing net business formation numbers as a possible indicator. Indeed, according to Statistics Canada, business exits (i.e., businesses that stopped paying employees) have outnumbered business entries (new business that employ at least one person) each and every month since November 2023. As you can see from this chart, that’s a very unusual trend:

With the brief exception of the first months of the COVID craziness, business entries (blue) have pretty much always outnumbered exits (red)…until mid-2023. Whether thousands of rich Canadians are gradually pulling out or actually placing for-sale signs on their lawns, you’d expect to see more business exits. And we’re definitely seeing them at historic levels.

However there’s something else you’d expect a mass wealth exodus to produce: fewer high-income taxpayers. In fact, according to Individual Income Tax Return Statistics from the Canada Revenue Agency, the exact opposite has been happening. Well, that would be true at least until the 2024 tax year. More recent data isn’t yet available.

That tax data for just Ontario shows us that there were 265,950 taxpayers reporting income of at least $250,000 in 2024, compared with just 232,430 in 2023, 214,750 in 2022, and 105,550 back in 2014. Those increases outran both inflation and population growth.

Specifically, between 2023 and 2024, the number of high earners in Ontario increased by 14.42 percent. During that time, the province’s population “only” grew by 3.28 percent, and the inflation rate was around three percent.

It’s possible that rich Canadians are leaving the country and they’re being replaced by a steady flow of nouveau riche. But frankly that’s unlikely. It’s also possible that 2025 data might show a significant downward trend. I’ll keep an eye out for updates.

There’s more great stuff where that came from:

It’s been a while since I last wrote about higher education in Canada but the industry’s steady clamor for more public funding hasn’t gone anywhere. Universities Canada and the Canadian Association of University Business Officers just released a new report on the desperate state of academic finances.

The industry claims that they’re facing an existential crisis. Although, as I wrote last year, the strength of that claim will largely depend on exactly how you define “crisis”. Long story short: as a rule, universities are among the wealthiest institutions in the country.

Now, you might recall my previous discussion of Universities Canada from the deep, distant past. This time around, they’re highlighting sector-wide revenue losses (via declining government support and sharp reductions in foreign students), aging infrastructure, and rising operating costs.

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Those are all very real challenges. But I’m really not convinced that all of the report’s fine details are in especially close contact with reality. Take this whopper:

Projections! Expert projections! Well then what more is there to say?

Perhaps we could take just a wee peek at how Statistics Canada sees that population-related stuff:

The thing is, for “hundreds of thousands of additional students” to demand an education in 2040, they’ll need to have existed already from 2020 or so. That 2017 “baby boom” you see in the chart above? It represents just 2,300 kids above the 2016 crop. And the odds are those kids will have graduated from university well before we reach 2040. (Unless they come to their senses and choose more direct routes to the career world.)

Perhaps those expert projections are relying on growing immigration rates and expansions to the student visa program. What’s that you say? Those programs have been cut back and there’s no political will to reverse the decision any time soon? Oh. So I guess the projection is just another plain ole’ fashioned higher ed self-own.1

But there’s lots more fun where that came from. Here’s another quote from the report:

Sometimes to ask the question is to answer it.

The report presents those numbers from the perspective of passive victims, as if those two factors lay completely beyond their control. But you could just as easily turn it around and ask why universities decided to permit - and even encourage - out-of-control growth when they knew they couldn’t afford it.

In fact, universities have no mandate to accept everyone who applies. They’ve always set admissions standards based on both student skills and faculty/facility capacity. There was nothing stopping institutions from further tightening their standards so they could remain within their budgets.

Different choices could also have largely prevented other bad outcomes identified in the report:

But those aren’t really “fixed” costs, are they? Compensation liabilities are products of variables like administration growth, tenure structures, and program duplication. And enrolment. Don’t forget enrolment.

Besides their desire for more government funding, the report also complains about how mandated tuition ceilings cut off their primary alternative income source. While the basic point is legitimate, it’s presented without critical context.

Raising tuition could, for example, price many students out of the market and actually reduce revenue. The claim also ignores the genuine political and social pressures that led to the tuition ceilings in the first place. The report’s framing fails to acknowledge the damage that could come from lifting the ceilings.

The report also notes the impact of the decline in the number of student visas for issued.

First of all, they’re saying the quiet part out loud: foreign students are actually welcomed by Canadian schools because of the money they bring. It’s not primarily about education at all. But this also suggests that the existing model was never really sustainable. After all, if a university can only survive through such unstable revenue streams, then perhaps its choices weren’t great to begin with.

Finally, the report contains some interesting assumptions about the value of university programs:

Snark aside, I’m honestly not sure what makes universities uniquely capable of producing the people best qualified to provide the “policy and ethical frameworks needed to guide” the responsible use of AI.

Sure, cutting edge AI research can’t happen without knowledge of cutting edge physics, mathematics, and engineering. But policy and - especially - ethics? Those domains aren’t built on formal curricula. I have no idea how one should go about training effective and trustworthy ethicists, but I don’t think universities have earned any kind of monopoly on their production.

Keep reading:

It turns out that I’m far from alone on this one. The Leger Opinion Panel - as part of their 2024 Democracy Checkup - asked if “you agree or disagree that people should be able to say what they think even if it offends some people”. 74 percent of the question’s 8,102 respondents agreed either somewhat or strongly. That’s up a couple of points from the 2019 survey.

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Let’s break those latest results down a bit. 78.6 percent of all men in the survey supported the position against just 70 percent of women. When looking at specific ethnic identifications, the position was accepted by 77 percent of West Asians, 74 percent of whites, 70 percent of blacks, and 65 percent of Chinese. 70 percent of people born in Canada agreed as opposed to 73 percent of those born elsewhere.

In other words, even though the Liberal government is pushing hard to provide official agencies with the tools to suppress and punish offensive speech (which they call “hate speech” and “harmful rhetoric”), the vast majority of Canadians of all demographic profiles clearly disagree.

Bear in mind that this survey was conducted in 2024, so it largely predated the pendulum swing away from peak “woke-i-verse” popularity. Since then, the idea that everyone’s free speech rights should be restricted to account for the feelings of designated victim groups is probably even less popular.

Some of the other survey responses were predictable: 92 percent of all respondents agreed that “politicians are willing to lie to get elected”. The recent series of Liberal-bound Parliamentary defections have probably only strengthened that sentiment.

Other responses were thought provoking. For example, only 38.7 percent felt that most people are trustworthy. Specifically, men and whites agreed by 42.1 percent and 40.7 percent respectively, while only 35 percent of women defaulted to trusting people. But just 23.1 percent of blacks and 26.9 percent of West Asians felt that confident about the people around them.

Since I knew you’d be wondering, I won’t hold anything back. It’s true: I couldn’t resist using all that nice data representing more than 8,000 Canadians and felt compelled to tally up (average) income levels by educational attainment:

Looking at the disappointing experiences of high school dropouts compared with those who just finished elementary school, I can only echo Alexander Pope:

Need some more stuff to read?

If major international measures of corruption are any indication, Canadians are justified in their mistrust. The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) published by Transparency International combines assessments from multiple organizations, including the Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey.

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Those assessments are designed to measure countries’ susceptibility to bribery, diversion of public funds, use of public office for private gain, and the relative effectiveness of their anti-corruption enforcement.

The numbers aren’t direct representations of corruption. Instead, they’re useful proxies for how well societies are working and how they’re changing. Here are Canada’s CPI scores since 2012 (higher scores indicate less corruption):

The steady decline is obvious. For context, Canada’s international CPI ranking fell from ninth place in 2012 to 16th in 2025. So the decline isn’t just following along with a global phenomenon. In fact, according to Transparency International’s notes, “31 countries have significantly reduced their corruption levels since 2012.”

I created my own index that included Canada’s CPI scores, but also the Basel Anti–Money Laundering (AML) Index, IMF / Schneider “shadow economy” estimates, changes to Canadian government lobbying intensity numbers, and an incomplete tracking of the number of flags reported by the Auditor General.

Let me just explain that lobbying intensity metric. Numbers from the official Registry of Lobbyists show that the number of federal lobbyists has grown from 16.14 per 100,000 in 2020 to 20.33 per 100,000 in 2026. That doesn’t prove the presence of corruption, but it does suggest that professional activists and corporate interests have increased the volume of their voices inside government - at the expense of the rest of us. I’ve written previously about the impact of lobbying and related industries.

After normalizing all those values, here’s how my full index looked. In this case, the higher the score, the greater the measure of corruption.

While it’s pretty clear that things are moving in the wrong direction, we shouldn’t take those charts too seriously. After all, they’re just abstract numbers.

If you’d ask journalist Sam Cooper of The Bureau, he’d probably tell you that the real measure of corruption is in how many Canadian politicians (and parties) are “owned” by the Chinese Communist Party, how deeply our real estate and banking industries are controlled by organized crime cartels and their drug trade, and how many Canadians are harassed or even murdered by foreign threat actors willfully ignored by Canadian law enforcement agencies.

Others would point to claims that unaddressed conflicts of interest between Mark Carney and his financial entanglements are unduly influencing policy. I haven’t personally seen proof that such conflicts have ever been exploited. I’m not even sure how I’d go about looking for evidence. But the perception that there’s a problem would certainly demand some transparency and at least a robust official response.

In a way, that’s the story behind so much of public life in Canada. Stuff just happens and none of us ever finds out whether it was by design or innocent accident. And then other stuff happens and the first stuff just disappears under the radar.

Don’t stop here:

“The United Arab Emirates had no nuclear engineers. No regulator. No nuclear history. In 2009, it decided to build four nuclear reactors anyway. By 2024, all four were operating. Delivered on time, on budget, and cleaner than almost anything else on the grid...5,600 MW of capacity. About 25% of national electricity…They built in sequence. Units 1 through 4 were staggered roughly a year apart. The same workforce moved from one unit to the next, carrying forward lessons in real time. By the fourth unit, construction and commissioning timelines had improved dramatically.”

Up until a quarter century ago, Canadians could point with pride to areas where we punched above our weight. Those included:

• Atomic Energy of Canada’s CANDU reactor program that built and exported world-class, safe, and reliable heavy water reactors.

• MDA Space Ltd. (Canadarm) innovations in space robotics.

• Early satellite communications through the Anik geostationary systems.

• Leadership in grain storage, transport, and prairie farming systems and development of hardy wheat strains.

• Early leadership in universal healthcare policy and epidemiological and public health infrastructure.

• Advanced cold-weather engineering and logistics and large-scale hydroelectric development.

• Large-scale resource extraction in difficult environments.

• Sustainable forestry infrastructure.

• A highly regulated and stable banking sector that, for example, largely avoided the 2008 financial crisis.

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The keys to those successes seem to include the realization that we can leverage local geographic and governance conditions to excel in specific niche sectors. We knew our place in the larger scheme of things and competed where it made sense.

Well how’s all that working out now?

• There’s little market room available for half-century-old nuclear technologies now that the world has shifted to light-water and Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)

• The Canadarm was cool but MDA Space Ltd. has done little to expand their reach (so to speak) or to stimulate a serious domestic space industry.

• SpaceX currently far outperforms 50 years of Anik Satellite functionality every couple of weeks.

• Recused institutional vision and a global consolidation of agri-tech firms mean that public agricultural research and innovation plateaued. Arguably, Canadian farms now survive only through government subsidies and anti-market regulation (like supply management).

• Healthcare efficiency and innovation? I don’t think so.

• Given competing political agendas and consultation requirements, resource extraction and large infrastructure projects are now nearly impossible to execute.

• Canadian banks are still stable, but there’s been growing domestic criticism that they’re not always serving the best interests of Canadians or of Canada.

The bottom line is that there’s now precious little that Canadians (in Canada) do that’s changing the world in positive ways. And there’s arguably even less we do that makes us measurably wealthier or more secure.

None of which is to say that we’re irredeemably and inescapably done. Sure, the number of truly powerful people in the world who listen when Canadian politicians nag them could probably fit inside a mid-sized SUV with plenty of room for luggage. And there’s no foreseeable future where Canada becomes an apex industrial predator confidently striding the planet.

But here are some areas where we could still make a difference:

• In a world struggling to build out energy transmission and storage capacity, grid management and storage integration are valuable skills. Assumes interprovincial politics and permitting delays don’t get in the way of innovative domestic roll outs.

• SMR projects recently announced by Ontario Power Generation could lead into competitive markets. Assumes they avoid cost overruns and long delays and aren’t held back by licensing hurdles.

• Institutional climate variability expertise in the agricultural sector could contribute valuable developments in drought-resistant crops, cold-climate farming systems, and precision agriculture for large-scale farms. Assumes access to commercialization and venture scaling - for which there’s currently little political will.

• Integrated, traceable, and reliable supply chains for sourcing critical minerals are among the most realistic paths to hard economic power. Assumes we can somehow overcome slow permitting and close infrastructure gaps in remote areas.

Keep reading:

I was curious to know whether there are suspicious patterns in Canadian charitable activities that could signal similar problems here. Long story short, the good news is that, whatever waste and fraud exist in Canada’s non-profit world, the evidence strongly suggests that we’re not seeing American-style crimes on a large scale.

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Using charitable tax filing data for Canadian charities, I organized all 82,000 charities by the three-character Forward Sortation Area (FSA) from their postal codes. The idea was to look for geographic patterns in charity spending and, in particular, patterns in the money that governments spend through charities.

One useful specification of the postal code system is that, for low-density rural areas, the second character will always be a zero, while codes for urban areas always get a number between 1-9.

FSAs designated as rural are likely to serve between a few hundred and a few thousand addresses. Urban FSAs will probably average between 5,000 and 10,000 addresses. There are 183 rural FSAs out of the 1,669 currently in the system; around 11 percent of the total.

The first oddity I discovered is that 13 out of the 20 FSAs with the highest numbers of registered charities were rural. Last I looked, 13/20 is a lot higher than 11 percent. Here are the top five FSAs along with the total revenues all charities combined received from any level of government:

In fact, more than 26 percent of all Canadian charities are registered in rural communities. Those are astounding numbers for such small communities. Even going with the upper estimate for addresses in rural areas, those communities would have more than one registered charity for every ten addresses!

However it’s important to note that rural charities receive only 2.66 percent of the total government spending directed to charities. Rural non-profits are obviously built differently than their urban cousins.

Don’t get excited about the $301 million in government payments going to S0K. $234 million of that is provincial funding for two public school districts: Horizon School Div No 205 BoE and Prairie Spirit School Division No. 206.

In fact Prairie Spirit, which educates around 11,000 students scattered across a huge area, still manages to spend less per child ($10,500) than the Toronto District School Board ($12,970) with all of its fancy consultants and economies of scale.

It might be helpful to identify FSAs where there are particularly dense concentrations of charities receiving just federal funding. That’s in part because any systemic fraud of the kinds that we’ve seen in the U.S. would be more visible.

So I narrowed down my results to just organizations that received at least $10,000 from the federal government over the course of 2024. There were, in total, 9,682 of those.

When I divided the number of charities receiving federal funding within a single FSA into that area’s population - to get the density of charities within a population - I discovered 39 FSAs with more than two charitable organizations per 1,000 people. Some of those results were obviously the product of weird data anomalies (like the FSAs with just less than 20 people but as many as seven charities). I ignored those.

Here, however, are the top ten “normal” FSAs arranged by density per 1,000 people:

K1P, obviously, is downtown Ottawa. Even without looking you just know that most of those 43 organizations are built to carry out government-sponsored functions. That’s not to say that their spending isn’t all wasted, but it’s not what we’re looking for right now.

H3B, M5C, and R3B are all large business districts (within Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg respectively). You’d expect such areas to contain head offices for larger charities.

In fact, if there were large numbers of geographically concentrated Minnesota-style organizations fraudulently milking federal programs, we’d almost certainly see them among the top FSAs. After all, once one organization figures out how to game a resource, others would join in the feeding frenzy.

Obvious targets would include federal programs like Social Development Partnerships Program (SDPP), New Horizons for Seniors Program (NHSP), Sustainable Development Goals Program (SDGP), or Supporting Black Canadian Communities Initiative (SBCCI). But a quick scan of the organizations in the most dense FSAs doesn’t show multiple charities with telltale similarities between their mandates. From just a brief look, I can’t know whether those charities are legitimate. But I am pretty sure that there aren’t dozens of fake early childhood centres out there.

Why did Canada appear to dodge this particular bullet? Perhaps in part because:

• Canadian rules often include greater control of spending through pre-approved budgets, defined deliverables, and reimbursement-based payments rather than lump sums.

• Canada requires more detailed financial reporting and disclosures from charities.

• Canada requires multi-year financial histories, conflict of interest disclosures, and (often) audited statements.

• Funding is often delivered directly from the government or through vetting intermediaries rather than through layers of state, municipal, and third-party agencies.

We’re certainly not immune to program fraud - and continued diligence and oversight is necessary - but we do seem to be doing some things well.

Further reading:

The first thing to know is that clear migration patterns do exist. Decade after decade, Canadians have consistently and noticeably moved in one direction: westward. This chart - based on Statistics Canada estimates since 1990 - shows net inbound migration for Canada’s four largest provinces:

Cumulatively, through those 35 years, Quebec lost more than 300,000 residents to interprovincial migration while Ontario shed 214,000 of their own. A large majority of those losses probably ended up in either Alberta or BC, which attracted net internal migrants totaling 552,000 and 381,0000 respectively.

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As you should be able to see from the graph, people left Quebec in significant numbers in nearly every quarter since 1990. Ontario, by contrast, enjoyed some popularity between 1997 and 2002, and again between 2016 and 2020. Since 2020, Ontario has been struggling, losing as many as 25,000 people in a single quarter.

There’s also something of an inverse relationship between Alberta and BC. There’s a measurable negative correlation where oil sands and other energy booms sparked migration to Alberta in sync with lower performance in BC. Then, when oil-price crashes hit Alberta between 2015-2017, BC seemed to absorb the difference.

That’s the demographic reality. But the obvious question is “why?” What are Ontario and Quebec consistently doing wrong that makes Alberta and BC such attractive alternatives?

You wouldn’t be wrong to point to jobs. But Statistics Canada reports that employment opportunities account for just 42.5 percent of all interprovincial moves. What else gets Canadians itchy? Housing affordability would be a big one, and Alberta has a definite advantage there. Lower taxes, the general cost living, quality-of-life and lifestyle factors also play roles.

Why were migration rates for just Ontario hit quite so hard in the wake of the pandemic? Historically, Ontario’s - and specifically Toronto’s - key selling point has always been its labour market. Once the remote work surge made that anchor largely disappear, crazy housing costs became a pure liability with no offsetting job-market premium.

Besides bragging rights, are higher provincial populations actually a good thing? Using some broad assumptions, Quebec’s population loss over the years could translate to around four billion dollars in lost revenue each year. Here’s how that might break down:

Those are obviously just estimates. We’re assuming that most outbound migrants are working-age, which will increase income tax losses. Healthcare and education delivery expenses often represent fixed costs, so fewer people might not always translate to lower costs.

Besides economic impacts, the ongoing population drain should have resulted in fewer Quebec members of Parliament. However, the Liberal government’s Preserving Provincial Representation in the House of Commons Act of June 2022 froze Quebec’s representation no matter how far its population might drop.

All things considered though, provinces have an interest in maintaining their population levels. But - despite the fact that at least some of the incentives driving the exodus are the result of discretionary policy choices - this is a goal that’s proven difficult to achieve.

More reading:

It would be useful to know whether some judges presiding over Canadian criminal courts are more responsible than others for releasing repeat offenders over and over again.

Because we have to live with the consequences of violent crime, regular Canadians who aren’t public figures and don’t get armed security details would prefer it if repeat violent offenders were kept inside.

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However, even assuming the government would respond to public demand, finding an appropriate legislative solution to the problem wouldn’t be easy.

For one thing, not all repeat offenders go on to commit new violent crimes. Statistics Canada numbers tell us that, overall, just 21 percent of all adult offenders will commit new violent offences within three years of release. And even among offenders with two or more convictions behind them, only a quarter1 will commit new violent crimes within three years.

Which strongly suggests that justice wouldn’t be well-served by indefinitely detaining the 75 percent of the offender population who wouldn’t go on to violently re-offend. The trick is in identifying the 25 percent that’s dangerous.

Could judges be held personally liable for their bad decisions?

Probably not. Legislation that defines something like “negligent judicial release” or “reckless disregard for public safety” as actionable would probably be unconstitutional. That’s because such definitions could compromise judicial independence and immunity. Any judge could justifiably fear political pressure or unearned retaliation.

Even if all that was a good idea - and I’m not convinced that it is - barking up the constitutional amendment tree - even under the best conditions - is unrealistic.

Could mandated reviews help?

Legislation that would mandate Crown review for all serious violent release decisions could in theory make a difference. Those might also include:

• Triggering automatic hearings after any breach of an offender’s terms of release

• Requiring independent post-incident system reviews

• Enhancing reasoning requirements in high-risk cases

In theory at least, such reviews could force courts to more carefully consider decisions

But it’s complicated. For one thing, adding built-in reviews would place serious pressure on an already-overburdened court system. As it is, police often don’t bother arresting people who openly offend because they know there’s a virtually no chance the offenders will ever see the inside of a courtroom. Piling on hundreds of extra court procedures will only make things worse.

And you can be sure there would be Charter challenges. Even if the constitutional logic powering the legislation was sound, having to survive rounds of lawfare will definitely lower the odds of success.

Could Public Transparency Help?

It might be possible, using public court records, to build a database of all rulings that led to the release of repeat violent offenders who subsequently re-offended. Such data could be used to identify whether there’s a small number of judges who were responsible for most of the release rulings that imposed a violent cost on the community. Assuming that was possible, we could also identify those judges publicly.

To be sure, no one has a right to doxx court officials or expose them to abuse or unlawful persecution. But many court records are, by law, already in the public domain.

In 2024, according to public sector salary disclosure data for Ontario, the median salary for the 349 judges employed by the Ontario Court Of Justice and the Superior Court Of Justice was $359,134. That money comes with responsibilities to the people who pay it. It would be healthy for judges to have some skin in the game and take some responsibility for their choices.

To that end, I’m going to focus on just one official rezoning effort for just one neighbourhood in Toronto: the city planning initiative called Growing Marlee-Glencairn. Understanding what drove the city to launch this multi-year effort and how that inspiration is defining both their policy and strategic choices is going to take us to some interesting places.

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At a quick glance, the primary problems motivating the exercise seems to be:

• The "population and jobs per hectare” density of the neighbourhood is well below the provincial goal of 200.

• Very few commuters are accessing the subway system through Glencairn Station. There were just 5,878 of them on a typical weekday in 2023-2024.

When placed in the context of policies encouraging high-density housing wherever possible, the study team found that the obvious solution is to pack more residents into the area. The official rationale for the study is to:

“Guide growth, align with provincial density requirements around transit stations, and provide for a resilient and inclusive complete community”

It’s just a bit bizarre that provincial guidelines require the disruption of stable communities and coercive micromanagement of personal life choices to justify the existence of an under-performing transit system. But the Growing Marlee-Glencairn planning documents are yet more ambitious. This is clearly about much more than provincial compliance.

The most recent documentation available right now is the Community Roundtable Presentation from last December. Various combinations of possible zoning and infrastructure changes were presented. To be sure, no final decisions have been made yet and city staff are apparently still available for community feedback (my email-based feedback to Study officials sent on March 22nd did - on April 17th - inspire an invitation to provide feedback at a community meeting).

But it’s remarkable that the process has moved this far with such a narrow scope of discussion. Here’s some of what seems to be missing.

The active policy goals - and especially the key density goals - don’t seem to account for the recent collapse of immigration rates and the condo market meltdown. Why displace a healthy community to address external conditions that no longer exist? And even if those concerns were still valid, the main focus of the city plan is on affordable housing rental units: they seem largely uninterested in solving the home ownership crisis.

I would hope that such high-visibility trends should impact planning, but the documentation offers no indication that anyone’s actually been following developments.

There are many plans for improving pedestrian and transit accessibility, but nothing addressing either existing traffic congestion or the significant increased congestion that’ll come from adding 20,000-40,000 new residents to the area.

Even by Toronto standards, things can already get pretty nasty in Glencairn-Marlee. There are multiple quiet residential intersections that, for 90 minutes a day, host unrelenting backups of upwards of 50 vehicles coming from three directions as they desperately attempt to move north (both morning and afternoon). This kind of thing already happens regularly across the area.

The documentation is heavy on proposed “streetscape improvements”. Streetscaping will often include wider sidewalks, protected bike lanes, improved pedestrian crossings, landscaping with trees, public art, and traffic calming measures such as curb extensions. What those all share in common is that they take up space, which can come from only one source: vehicle lanes.

Now this isn’t to say that there’s no good argument to be made for streetscaping. But the current framing places an enormous unaddressed elephant in the room: where should all the existing and extra cars, trucks, buses, and delivery traffic go?

Alongside streetscapes is the goal of achieving a “broader public realm”. As far as I can tell, that would create open design spaces that encourage pedestrians to make use of retail and even residential resources (food concourses and apartment lobbies, I guess). How compatible that might be with an increasingly low-trust society is unclear.

In fact, security and crime prevention are pretty much ignored throughout the plan. There’s no indication that thought has been devoted to managing any of the second-order pressures that could come alongside heavily expanded low-income housing.

The planning does seek to “provide new housing that meets the needs of people of all stages of life”. Well, people of all stages of life besides families raising children, that is. The official planning discussion is exclusively and explicitly focused on removing single-family homes wherever possible and replacing them with high-density housing. Given the well-documented correlation (although not necessary causation) between denser housing and lower fertility, that could be a problem.

I’m not sure depressing fertility should be a policy goal for the City of Toronto or the Province of Ontario.

A (minor) element in the “community focused services and facilities” discussion includes creating new public library access. Given how in-person visits to existing Toronto Public Library facilities have dropped by more than 30 percent over the past twenty years, I’m not sure whether that’s a useful idea.

If you happen to have a personal connection with an organization that you know does good work and is well run, then you’re in business. But trying to understand charities from the outside is challenging.

U.S. online services like Guidestar (that now seems to mostly go by the name Candid) have historically published fundraising ratios for organizations as an assessment tool. The thinking is that a charity that spends 95 percent of its revenue on administration and fundraising probably has very little left for actual charitable activity. Why spend money supporting a self-licking Popsicle?

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Since the CRA publishes detailed information on the charitable tax filings for all Canadian charities, generating spending ratios is simple enough. And researching the results of any one charity is even easier thanks to the charitydata site. Since I’ve got access to the complete 2024 dataset, I’m going to take a look at sector-wide trends.

But I should first note that there are limits to what ratios can tell us about an organization. For one thing, many charities make simple accounting mistakes when completing their 3010 filings. Such mistakes can innocently mislead researchers.

As an example, I came across one group who reported spending 738,740 times more for administration than for charitable activities. Realizing that simply wasn’t possible, I took a closer look and saw that they’d reported just one dollar for charitable activities despite employing more than half a dozen people who were obviously working to carry out their charitable mandate (it’s a busy community church).

Ratios can also legitimately misrepresent normal business activities. Sometimes a well-run organization with strong systems, good data, and professional staff may spend more on administration and deliver better outcomes than a lean operation running on volunteers and goodwill.

Similarly, a one-time capital investment can make an organization appear to be hopelessly inefficient when the spending was really designed to improve outcomes a decade into the future. Context is important, and “blind” ratios won’t always pick that up.

Of course, “mistakes” happen both ways. It’s apparently common for administrators to categorize purely administration costs as though they’re charitable activities. That’ll improve their ratios and reduce their chances of getting red-flagged by CRA. But it’s not an honest representation of their financial profile.

With those caveats in mind, here are system-wide trends based on four different ratios, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Administrative Expenses as a Proportion of Charitable Activities

CRA expects charities to report management and administrative expenses separately from fundraising expenses. So this ratio looks at just management and administrative costs in relation to the expenses reported as charitable activities.

Across the 50,334 charities for which the necessary data exists, administration costs made up less than 25 percent of charitable spending for nearly 69 percent of charities. In other words, around seven out of ten Canadian charities direct less than a quarter of their spending to administration.

If you’d like to test a particular charity for yourself on this metric, simply divide line 5010 (Total expenditures on management and administration) by line 5000 (Total expenditures on charitable activities). You can find those numbers on the charity’s charitydata page.

Fundraising Costs as a Proportion of Fundraising Revenues

This measure will give us a sense of an organization’s level of efficiency (or inefficiency). You can reproduce it by adding up all costs (lines 5010 and 5021) and separately adding up all fundraising revenue (lines 4500, 4510, and 4530). You would then divide the costs total by the revenue total.

Based on that, the total costs of 38.25 percent of all charities represent less than 50 percent of total revenue.

Program Expense Ratio

It can also be useful to examine the relationship between total charitable program spending (line 5000) to total expenses (line 5100).

When I divided the charitable spending into overall spending, I found that the ratio of more than 67 percent of charities was 70 percent. Or, to put it differently, just seven out of ten charities directed more than two thirds of their spending to actual charitable activities.

Government Revenue Ratio

The final ratio is focused mostly on exposure to external risks. The continued existence of a charity that depends on government for most of its funding will depend on policy decisions that it can’t control. So it’s worth assessing how vulnerable a particular organization is to such risks.

In Canada, charities like hospitals or school boards are, by definition, locked into this kind of vulnerability. But measuring the extent of the dependency can help with a full assessment.

As it turns out, only 31 percent of charities received less than a quarter of their total revenue from federal (line 4540), provincial (4550), or municipal (4560) sources. The remaining 69 percent face significant exposure to this particular risk.

To help you visualize all this, the chart represents institutional “compliance” percentages for each of the four ratios. In each case, the higher score, the greater an institution’s efficiency or stability.

Should CRA up its audit game to encourage better financial practices among Canadian charities? I certainly can’t say. Although it probably wouldn’t hurt to pull back on politically-driven crackdowns so it can focus more on its core mandate.

But what’s clear is that there are public-facing tools we can all use to be far more discriminating about the causes we choose to support.

There’s much more on charity in Canada that’s available for you to read here.