1. Is that a bad thing?

2. Is the licensing system unbalanced?

Anyone (like me) who’s generally suspicious of government regulatory overreach will instinctively assume we’d benefit from truly open markets. But let’s see what we can actually discover.

Using the Canadian Information Centre for International Credentials (CICIC) database, I selected those occupations - including Red Seal trades - where credentials of some sort provided an exclusive right to practice. That gave me around 85 employment categories. I then manually mapped that list against Statistics Canada’s Labour force characteristics by occupation table.

My mapping was far from precise. The CICIC occupation designations - that were specific to five-digit National Occupational Classification (NOC) codes - didn’t always correlate precisely with Statistics Canada’s designations that used just two or three digits. So there will be occupations that’ll be either over or underrepresented. But at least the vagueness is consistent across the dataset, so it should at least be useful for spotting trends.

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By my estimate there were 7,998,100 Canadians employed in restricted occupations of one kind or another in 1987. The total employment pool that year consisted of 13,526,000 workers. So in that year, 59.13 percent of all workers required some kind of license to perform their work.

By 2025, that number climbed to 66.89 percent (15.1 million licensed workers out of a total of 22.6 million). This graph shows how steadily the portion of the workforce employed in restricted occupations increased since 1987:

Predictably, some categories grew faster than others. The number of Canadians employed in “Professional occupations in applied sciences (excluding engineering)” increased by 516 percent between 1987 and 2025. Through those same years, “Therapy and assessment professionals” increased by 324 percent.

At the other end of the spectrum, the “Supervisors, central control and process operators in processing, manufacturing and utilities and aircraft assemblers and inspectors” category grew by just 17.6 percent - far slower than the growth of the general population.

Still, the case for attributing all that growth to out-of-control occupational regulatory bloat isn’t a slam dunk. For one thing, many - if not most - of the restrictions are perfectly appropriate. I wouldn’t be comfortable flying in a commercial jet being piloted by a teenage hobbyist. And some of the data trends we’re seeing are no doubt the result of an evolving economy (explaining the rise in licensed healthcare professionals) and our increasing reliance on technology (explaining the decline in manual trades).

The truth is that the data we’re using right now isn’t detailed enough to give us as much clarity as we’d prefer. A 2020 study by the CD Howe Institute did discover that increasing occupational regulations leads to higher costs for consumers. And it doesn’t take a think tank study to understand that adding new certification and training requirements creates new barriers to entry for potential workers.

But the data we’ve got access to right now isn’t enough to confidently say that governments and regulators are, as a group, causing economic damage. Right now, in fact, I can’t find anything specific to criticize.

Nevertheless, there are some restricted occupations whose existing restrictions are difficult to justify. Those include:

• Hairstylists

• Real estate agents

• Accountants (CPAs - although auditors should be licensed)

• Massage therapists

• Kinesiologists

• HR professionals

Where there’s abuse in such fields, the bad guys are mostly governing colleges and associations that seem to exist more to guarantee higher pay for existing members than to protect and serve customers.

Well how would I know one way or the other? But it’s probably worthwhile listening to what teachers themselves have to say. I collected more than 300 comments spread across three 2026 threads on the CanadianTeachers Reddit community (here, here, and here). Those threads all focused on the problem of in-school violence. I’ve already written about the chaos in Toronto’s public schools, but here’s an opportunity to get a different picture from people actually slaving away on the front lines.

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To organize the content, I asked an AI model to summarize the comments and identify major themes and insights. Before I share what I learned, I should first tell you about what I did not learn:

• There was compelling - and valuable - anecdotal evidence describing serious acts of violence. But there’s no way we could use that to draw conclusions about national trends. In fact, while some commenters felt things were getting worse, others noted that they only rarely encounter violence in their schools.

• Even though some hints of a consensus around certain ideas emerged, the self-selecting Reddit community can hardly be assumed to reliably represent all Canadian teachers.

If there was one idea that was absolutely clear from the comments, it’s that many teachers have lost confidence in the system’s ability to balance the needs of all students. Children suffering from serious behavioral difficulties are often allowed deny everyone else’s access to a safe learning environment.

This thinking raises questions about the design of inclusion policies. More directly, it notes how those responsible for those policies are rarely the same people who bear the immediate costs. Part of the reason for that is that incidents are inconsistently documented and seldom escalated. That’s something we’ve already seen in the Toronto District School Board’s hot mess of an event reporting system.

Another popular idea from the threads was that in-school violence was effectively being normalized by weak consequences. Students could throw chairs and hit staff and then face little more than a conversation with an administrator. The official message is pretty obvious. (And if there’s one thing kids do well it’s picking up on unspoken messages.)

Some of the teachers drew attention to the fact that non-violent students are themselves victims and are often ignored by the system. These kids are forced to spend long hours in unsafe environments, yet their needs and rights are often secondary to misbehaving classmates. Other teachers credibly portrayed themselves as employees forced to do their work in unsafe environments.

There were attempts to identify root causes for violent behavior. Some pointed to family dysfunction and parents who fail to establish appropriate boundaries. Weak community social services that fail to address problems in homes were also discussed.

There were also some proposed solutions, including:

• Better incident reporting

• Stronger workplace protections

• Meaningful consequences for violent behavior, including temporary removal

• Specialized classrooms or programs for violent children

• Stronger parental responsibility and better support from home

• Better mental-health interventions

An excellent test for the value of an incident response is whether the intervention actually changes anything the classroom moving forward. But for many teachers, it’s not clear anyone cares enough to even apply such tests.

Because I’m also old enough to realize that most normal people aren’t nearly as interested as me, I’ll normally keep those thoughts to myself. But I just came across some fascinating research into how books containing significant AI-generated content are impacting the general book market. So I hope you’ll forgive me for this one exception to my rule.

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The researchers - Tuhin Chakrabarty, Xinyue Liu, Jane C. Ginsburg, and Paramveer Dhillon - published a preprint of their paper: “Generative AI floods and dilutes the market for books” back in August. Tuhin Chakrabarty nicely summarized their research on X.

The study involved using the Pangram AI-detecting tool on the complete text of 14,419 self-published genre fiction ebooks available on Amazon. The researchers had access to three years of detailed private Amazon sales data from a Big Five publisher. (I had no idea such data even existed outside of Amazon itself. I’m not saying I would kill to get my hands on it. But I’m not saying I wouldn’t, either.)

The bottom line is that Amazon sales of novels with significant AI content are increasing faster than their bio-authored competitors. The titles people buy across all fiction genres are just about as likely to be written by clankers as humans. And more and more, real-world human readers seem to prefer the clankers.

We’re not talking about the countless thousands of awful AI-slop books that have been polluting Amazon book category algorithms for the past few years. Even non-experts can usually spot the inevitable spelling and punctuation errors on their landing pages before purchasing those. And I have the sense that Amazon has recently been doing a better job hiding them from sight.

Instead, the research focused on books that sold enough copies to reach the top 25 spots in their genres. These books were earning their “authors” real money - sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And they’re pushing human-authored books out of the bestseller rankings and out of sight to potential readers.

As long as it’s possible to reliably coax an AI model into generating readable content, the business model is compelling. The idea is that a combination of clever prompts and some human reworking and reorganization of the output can produce a book that’s good enough to compete seriously on Amazon. Since the entire process can take as little as a couple of days, selling just a few hundred copies of each title can be enough to justify your time and effort.

Five years ago, as the first truly usable generative AI tools were coming on line, I did my own quick experiment. I used AI-generated content as the base for five technology-related books. If you note the publication dates on those titles, you’ll see that all five were published within two-weeks of each other.1

My effort might have been premature: the content was accurate and useful enough, but the writing was dead-boring. And I didn’t have the advantage of the professional marketing guidance available through today’s more mature AI models. In the end, all five books sold just 75 copies between them.

Today’s AI models can give you the very best state-of-the-art guidance for assembling covers, content, and marketing materials that’ll both attract customer attention and provide a satisfying read. In other words, people using AI are guaranteed access to the magic formula necessary for creating optimized, market-ready products.

Sure. If you’re looking for a seriously inspiring/depressing reading experience, then there’s currently no AI substitute for Kafka or Dostoevsky. And poetry? I can’t see a robot beating the Blake or Milton (or Kipling) experience anytime soon. But if it’s a few hours of simple entertainment with a convincing murder-mystery or engrossing contemporary fiction you’re after, then you’ll be just fine with AI.

What’s all this have to do with Canadian government policy? Well I’ve written plenty about the tens of millions of dollars of federal and provincial government subsidies aimed at companies that publish books no one reads. My guess is that there’s now even less of a chance those products will have any impact because of all the new competition from books that no one has even written.

Keep reading:

Here’s how those numbers varied by province (where data was available):

Those numbers aren’t quite so straightforward. Teaching children in full-time special education programs will obviously cost more than mainstreamed kids.1 And those direct expenses don’t include the costs of provincial Ministry of Education programs run in support of K-12 education.

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According to Ontario Ministry of Education financial filings, for example, such programs would include “Responsive Education Programs”, “Funding to External Partners”, “Official Languages Projects”, and the “Education Quality and Accountability Office”. The 2024-2025 cost of those programs came to around $736 million.

If you add those expenses to Ontario’s total, the per-student spending will rise from $18,246 to $18,599. Those aren’t perfect numbers but - as the saying goes - they’re close enough for data.

Now let’s use that figure for a simple thought experiment.

What’s currently missing in public education? If you ask teachers, teachers unions, and many parents, the primary problem is that schools are underfunded. Teachers claim that there aren’t nearly enough teachers and front-line support staff. Right now, the average Ontario elementary school employs one full time equivalent (FTE) teacher and, at most, one educational assistant (EA) per class.2

So let’s see how much government money is already available. Based on the Ontario average we just saw, every group of 30 students receives around $557,970 (that’s $18,599 times 30).

That should be enough for two FTE teachers earning a handsome $150,000 each and five EAs earning $50,000 each. Seven adults for 30 kids would be a dream for any school.

In the context of the current average Ontario full-time teaching salary of $73,300, let’s pay our two teachers a more modest $100,000 each and drop a couple of EAs. That’ll still give us five adults and leave $207,000 unspent. That money could easily cover the equivalent of:

• The class’s share of capital, administration, and busing expenses

• The class’s share of the Ontario’s Special Education Fund ($3.71 billion in 2024-2025) - which would be just over $50,000

• Teachers’ health benefits and pension contributions

Problem solved.

Ok. I’m sure it wouldn’t be quite that simple. But the thought experiment does raise the question: why do governments not allocate funding that way? Why do there appear to be so many non-classroom priorities?

Some might argue that cutting “administration” programs like the $29 million spent annually by Ontario's Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) would leave us without insights into educational outcome trends.

I would argue that EQAO provides precious little value: there’s not enough public-facing data to provide any system-wide insights, and changes to the “standardized” tests make meaningful over-time comparisons impossible.

Ditto for the millions spent annually on curriculum development.

In other words, most stakeholders insist that students need more in-class support and there’s more than enough money already in the system to fund it. So why does no one rejig the system and make it happen?

I’ve written about some of the costs of over-regulation in Canada, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about regulations on their own terms. This is a complex and poorly understood world.

For example, did you know that, for the most part, governments may only impose regulations as legislative instruments made or approved under an Act of the Legislature (i.e., a statute)? Or that statutes often authorize a Lieutenant Governor in Council or a cabinet minister to create new regulations without the need for further approval in the legislature?

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Because there are probably millions of individual regulations across all layers of government in Canada, I’ll focus here on the Province of Ontario. The province’s e-Laws database currently lists 857 consolidated laws.

A consolidated law is a combination of a statute passed by the legislature and any regulations and amendments that were subsequently added to the law. The database currently contains exactly 6,479 individual regulations, of which 2,865 are still active (meaning: they’re neither “spent” nor “revoked”).

803 of those active regulations are associated with the three Planning Acts.1 The Education Act (R.S.O. 1990, c. E.2) has 125 active regulations, and the Highway Traffic Act (R.S.O. 1990, c. H.8) has 99.

29 of the Planning Act regulations are entitled “ZONING ORDER - CITY OF TORONTO”, seven were identified by “ZONING ORDER - CITY OF VAUGHAN, REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY OF YORK”, and another seven were “ZONING ORDER - CITY OF MISSISSAUGA, REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY OF PEEL”.

Those don’t sound like micro-managing, entrepreneurship-stifling regulations to me.2 I’m sure there are some of those among the rest of those active regulations, but the regulatory system as a whole isn’t obviously evil. As it turns out, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business awarded an A grade to Ontario’s government for their regulatory reform.

So if Ontario’s regulations aren’t evil, are they at perhaps unnecessarily obstructive? That’s an answer I would love to be able to answer. I would, for instance, love to track how regulations move through each of their key milestones:

• Are certain ministries more likely to add complexity than others?

• Are certain classes of regulation growing faster than others?

• Are average lag times between the introduction, enactment, and commencement stages of new regulations increasing?

• Are regulation creation rates growing?

We may be able to at least partially answer that last question from our e-Law database. This graph infers the creation dates of active regulations from their reference citations. That’s not a perfect source, but it does suggest that Ontario’s regulation production growth isn’t exactly spiraling out of control.

But for now, most of those questions will sadly remain unanswered. That’s because the structural limitations of Ontario’s official data makes most big-picture analysis largely impossible.

Which is not to say that the government has made no effort to make their legislative record available to the public. There’s clearly been some serious and helpful work done here. And I’ve seen absolutely no evidence suggesting that anyone is trying to hide anything.

But managing fast-moving, complex, population-scale datasets effectively isn’t something governments do particularly well. This is, after all, the same provincial government that gave us - or, more accurately, didn’t give us - eHealth Ontario (a.k.a. Smart Systems for Health Agency). So it’s hardly surprising that full transparency isn’t yet easily available.

There are obviously many American schools where real education happens and plenty of teachers - even unionized teachers - who care deeply about their work. But the point made by the Free Press is that the underlying structure and incentives common to at least some unions feed horrible outcomes.

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Do teachers unions in Canada present similar threats to students’ success and well being? Any attempt to answer that question will require some background.

For the most part, Canadian teachers unions exist as large, province-wide institutions that are effectively embedded in the governance structure of public education.

How deep does the structural integration go? In Ontario, for example, a teacher in the publicly funded system is legally required to belong to the one of four provincial teachers unions - each corresponding to a publicly funded school system. BC goes even further, with all 60 public boards bargaining with the BC Teachers Federation through a common employer organization (BCPSEA). Those arrangements would tend to inflate the power of the unions.

In contrast to Canada’s relative uniformity, the experience faced by American teachers will depend on the particular state where they work. 36 states require school districts to bargain collectively with teachers, nine states permit but do not require bargaining, and six states prohibit collective bargaining altogether. It’s reasonable to assume that unions in at least some of those 36 “mandated” states self-moderate their activities based on the possibility that an unfriendly state government could disrupt their business models at any time.

As an aside, that state-by-state variability makes it possible to compare results. As the National Council on Teacher Quality dryly reported:

“Research finds that collective bargaining is associated with higher salaries for teachers, but research is inconclusive on the outcomes for students.”

To a large degree, Canadian teachers organizations aren’t just labour unions tasked with collective bargaining. Their mandates also include professional development and standards, legal representation, and education policy advocacy.

Those activities can translate to serious political power, perhaps even greater power than what’s enjoyed by their U.S. colleagues. And some of that power can be aimed directly at provincial governments - because the unions are effectively negotiating with them.

And it’s not just political power. The larger U.S. unions famously spend a lot of their financial resources on overt activism. As I’ve written, the American Federation of Teachers directs 22 percent of the $190 million in annual dues paid by their members to political lobbying.

There’s no way to know exactly how much money teachers unions in Canada spend on political activism. But based on financial reports from Ontario’s four unions, a reasonable estimate would place their total annual spending on such activism somewhere between 12 and 20 million dollars.

Depending on the larger context, that might not necessarily be an insane figure. But the ability to spend like that certainly adds to an organization’s political clout. How might unions be using that power?

One possibility is for shielding teachers under performance review. Ontario, for example, has a formal performance-appraisal process for teachers facing complaints. A school board can in theory terminate a failing teacher, but the process involves jumping through multiple hoops.

The collective agreement lets unions challenge aspects of that process. At least one Ontario agreement, for example, explicitly gives the union the right to challenge a performance-appraisal report that could lead to termination.

If a school board actually dismisses a teacher, the union can demand the dispute moves to grievance arbitration. The union doesn’t necessarily have to prove that the teacher is competent or effective in the classroom. On the contrary, unions can force employers to prove they followed the rules and had sufficient evidence to justify dismissal.

So the problem isn’t necessarily that arbitrators are sympathetic to bad teachers. Instead, it’s that proving incompetence is difficult, particularly when the evidence consists of subjective assessments of teaching quality.

Having said that, dismissals do sometimes happen. CanLII database data covering ten years of arbitration cases involving the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, reports 21 decisions where the complaints against the teachers were upheld. Four of those led to suspensions of between one and six months, three led to revocation of teaching certificates, and the rest resulted in weaker consequences that included reprimands and publication of the decisions. There were zero outright dismissals.1

However, those numbers suggest a selection-effect hypothesis, where the 21 CanLII cases are just the visible end of a much larger funnel. In other words, there may have been many more cases where administrators decided that the costs of working through the process outweighed the educational benefits required to remove bad teachers.

Consider what it would take to successfully move through all of these steps:

Administrator notices poor performance
↓
Informal intervention / coaching
↓
Formal Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA)
↓
Unsatisfactory TPA
↓
Improvement plan / additional observation
↓
Second unsatisfactory TPA / review status
↓
Possible third unsatisfactory TPA
↓
Board considers termination
↓
Union grievance / settlement / resignation / retirement / reassignment / arbitration
↓
Possible report to OCT
↓
OCT investigation
↓
Possible caution/admonishment/remedial undertaking
↓
Possible Discipline Committee hearing
↓
Published decision

So it’s possible that the numbers we’re seeing substantially understate the real number of terrible teachers. It’s also plausible that the cost, procedural burden, and uncertain outcomes associated with efforts to get rid of dangerous teachers convince some administrators or boards to opt for less drastic alternatives, or to do nothing at all.

This could be particularly relevant when the unprofessional behavior involves in-class indoctrination for politically-charged causes - like teachers who pressure students to support designated terrorist organizations like Hamas. Even assuming a principal opposes such behavior, who would want to expose himself to the kind of firestorm that would surely inspire?

Here’s some more related reading:

I’ve written a lot about government research funding on these pages. Arguably too much. But I haven’t yet broken down where all the money for university-based research comes from. I think it’s about time we took a look. And Statistics Canada’s university revenues dataset is a great place to begin.

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Foreign funding

First off, I recently complained about the lack of official data tracking foreign donations to Canadian post secondary institutions. Well perhaps I was just a tad hasty. After all, That Statistics Canada university revenues table lets us break down revenue by source. Here’s what the major categories of foreign funding looked like:

As you can see, the vast majority of foreign funding targeted research rather than operating expenses. Which makes sense: why would you want to pay for drywall repair in some other country’s faculty office space?

Overall, total funding for sponsored research across all Canadian universities grew steadily from $3.3 billion in 2000/2001 to $11.2 billion in 2024/2025 (measured in current Canadian dollars). All funding sectors increased their spending, but some grew far more than others. And the uneven growth will provide us with a fascinating story.

Direct government funding

As you can see from the next chart, domestic funding for sponsored research was dominated by federal government sources.

How much of government funding goes for research? Depending on the specific year, between 84 and 95 percent of federal funding for universities went to sponsored research, while that was true for only 8-12 percent of provincial funding. That also makes sense, since provincial responsibilities focus primarily on general educational operations rather than research.

In current Canadian dollar amounts, federal research funding grew by 253 percent over those years (to around $5.4 billion), provincial funding by 137 percent, and municipal funding by 39 percent. Over that time, foreign funding grew from $55 million in 2000/2001 to $174 million in 2024/2025.

Non-government funding

While the dollar value of corporate sponsorship of research grew by 125 percent over the past 25 years (to just over a billion dollars a year), the percentage of total research funding those grants made up dropped over that time from 13.83 to just 9.27 percent.

Who picked up the slack? It wasn’t the federal government: their percentage of all funding moved up and down between 45 percent and 51 percent and currently sits at 46 percent. It certainly wasn’t provincial governments whose share dropped from 19 percent to 13 percent.

So where is the funding increase coming from? The data tells us it was “grants made by not-for-profit organizations” including foundations. NGOs, in other words:

Over the past 25 years, NGO funding for sponsored research went from $373 million a year to $2.2 billion and their overall share grew from 11.2 percent in 2000/2001 to 20.06 percent in 2024/2025.

The question, however, is whose money those NGOs were spending. There’s no doubt that some of them relied on private donors. But there’s also no doubt that many - perhaps most - Canadian NGOs are funded through government grants of one type or another.

We’ve already tracked federal funds through layers of NGOs on their way to destinations that don’t fit federal policy. There’s no reason to think that a lot of this research funding isn’t also moving in odd directions.

Now, it’s true that some of those government-funded NGOs exist because they’re better at managing distribution than their government agency benefactors would have been. But if that was all that was happening here, then we wouldn’t be seeing such a sudden increase in funding from the NGO sector.

What actually lies behind that change would be worthwhile figuring out.

More:

First though, we should list some of the vulnerabilities facing an industry that’s worth $19 billion1 annually in Canada.

By their nature, even the best academic disciplines accumulate jargon, methodological silos, and citation networks that make it hard for any one researcher to know what's happening two fields over. Even good researchers will struggle to avoid big-picture errors where untested assumptions quietly make their way into otherwise credible work.

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The sheer volume of papers on any single topic - and the collapsing peer review system - make in easy for gross errors and non-replicable findings to make it through to publication. And from there, it’s a quick journey to “settled science”

Besides honest errors, there’s a “venerable” academic tradition of fabricating data, p-hacking, and selective reporting. Not to mention libraries full of useless, unoriginal “research” and outright plagiarism. It can be nearly impossible to find genuine value inside databases of literature that have been poisoned by such garbage.

None of that is new: those are all problems that have been compounding for decades. What is new is:

1. There’s a growing demand for serious reform coming from the inside the academy

2. Artificial intelligence tools are increasingly available to identify bad research at scale

After all, AI systems can effortlessly account for the full content of millions of papers - regardless of discipline. That makes them unusually good at spotting both redundant and contradictory research.

AI tooling has already been widely used to catch fabricated data, doctored images, p-hacking, and selective reporting. Once those tools are set loose against hundreds of thousands of published papers, they’re almost certainly going to uncover problematic patterns. And given how AI models can (hopefully) be relied on to ignore in-group loyalties and career-oriented incentive structures, those problems will quickly come to light.

Naturally, a healthy scientific community would embrace the use of such tools as an opportunity to voluntarily policy their work. Sadly, I haven’t seen much evidence of that happening here in Canada.

But given how accessible AI engines are, it’s only a matter of time before someone else independently lights the match on the great unraveling. I’m trying to visualize how that might look.

To a large degree, academic institutions are, themselves, incapable of responding appropriately:

• Flagging thousands of published papers as statistically suspicious doesn’t automatically translate to thousands of dismissals. At best, it would lead to investigations, most of which stall.

• Revealing how a particular field has been promoting sub-standard research standards for years probably won’t inspire a comprehensive cleanup: there’s simply too much reputational weight at stake.

• Historically, contested fields (like parts of nutrition science, some social psychology) fought back for years before quietly - and partially - changing course.

Instead, responses to revelations of widespread fraud and incompetence will mostly come from the outside. As a result, the correction will likely look more like it was done by a sledge hammer than a surgical scalpel.

It’s not hard to imagine the public mood shifting to a place where politicians feel pressure to scale back or even eliminate entire classes of research funding. Major grant agencies could feel similar pressure to correct for previous years of poor oversight. And declining credibility at both the field and department levels could choke incoming donations - which currently make up around four percent of total revenues for Canadian universities.

Twenty years from now, we may be looking at a post secondary world that gets by on smaller budgets, hosts fewer research positions, and focuses on fewer research targets.

Overall, that sounds about right.

The risk, though, is that some of what gets lost could have changed the world in a positive way. But the fact that the research sector tolerated a situation where worthwhile research drowned in a tidal wave of garbage, made an alternative outcome impossible.

The odds are that Tesla’s Robotaxis (along with their recently deployed Cybercabs) will perform at least as well.

This is hardly an untested, emerging technology. Waymos are currently active in 30 U.S. cities (plus Tokyo and London). And Tesla is already running its Model Y Robotaxi vehicles in five U.S. cities, with their new Cybercab so far available only in Austin, Texas.

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So why has none of that safety, savings, and convenience reached Canadian streets?

Ontario, to take just one example, is still stuck in the testing stage with no clear route to actual operations. Although fear not: the province’s Automated Commercial Motor Vehicle Pilot Program should be complete on August 1, 2035 (that’s not a typo).

Why not rely on results from all the testing and actual deployments from the rest of the world? You might argue that Canadian winters present unique conditions. Well, Minneapolis, Chicago, and Pittsburgh are certainly no strangers to lousy weather, and they’re all among the lucky cities enjoying successful Waymo rollouts.

Perhaps Canadian regulators are worried about privacy complications from having so many mobile cameras moving through our cities. That seems unlikely. After all, the federal Liberals just signed a deal with the Chinese government to permit 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country annually. That’s despite such cars being loaded with their own cameras. And also despite the fact that Chinese manufacturers are required to expose their customer data to their government’s security forces.

By contrast, based on fears over privacy and security, the U.S., U.K., E.U., Poland, and Israel have all placed restrictions on the import and/or use of Chinese EVs. Privacy and security do not appear to be urgent Canadian priorities.

Working through the complex insurance, safety, and general regulatory details necessary to allow such a new technology to set itself up can’t be easy. But why does Canada have to take so much longer getting it done than the rest of the world?

This isn’t to say that there’s nothing happening. A quick search of the Federal Lobbyist Registry shows that Waymo employees met with Federal Government officials at least 19 times over the past year or so. Those meetings included representatives of more than a dozen government agencies, including Transport Canada and the Treasury Board Of Canada Secretariat.

Tesla Motors Canada has registered more than 60 meetings, although it’s not obvious that any of those dealt with driverless services.

I for one would love to move past the stress and expense of urban driving. Sadly, all indications suggest that Canadian governments are in no rush to overcome mountains of political and regulatory inertia.

Here’s more for you to chew on:

For years now, governments at all levels have been promising to fix the problem by increasing housing supply through new construction. Between them, they’ve plowed countless billions into tax credits, subsidies, and loan guarantees. Have those efforts made any measurable difference?

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One helpful - but incomplete - proxy for tracking new construction is the number of building permits issued by municipalities over time. Fortunately we have excellent data for just that. In fact, we have a choice: we could use either the numbers of permits that were issued or the total value of the projects they represent. As you can see from this chart, there doesn’t seem to be much advantage one way or another, since they seem to closely track each other:

So we’ll go with numbers of permits issued. Since the primary focus of many government initiatives has been affordable housing, we should begin with multiple family dwellings. This graph visualizes monthly permits issued for all major projects across the country involving what are referred to as “multiple dwellings”:

As you can see, there’s been some growth since the earliest data available in 2018, but statistically, that growth has been minimal.

By contrast, this graph covers all new dwelling units built as part of major projects (rather than just multi-family).

If you compare the red trend lines from those charts, you should be able to see the upward slope in the “all new dwellings” chart is a lot steeper than the one in “multiple dwellings”.

How much steeper? The actual numbers allow us to confidently say that Canadian building permits for all new dwelling units do indeed show a highly statistically significant upward trend since 2018 (p < 0.000001).

However, even after controlling for monthly seasonality and serial correlation, the multiple-dwelling growth is not meaningful. And the difference between the two trends is itself highly statistically significant (p ≈ 0.000003).

This suggests that those billions spent by governments haven’t accomplished a whole lot. Now, of course, the big question is who can we blame for all that wasted money? Surprisingly, there seems to be evidence that it wasn’t primarily the federal government’s fault. That’s because there are significant performance differences between provinces.

When I compared the number of permits issued by each province in June 2018 with June 2026, I see that not all provinces have been equal. As you can see from the next graph, Of all ten provinces, only Ontario and BC approved fewer permits in 2026 than in 2018:

When you consider how it’s people in Ontario and BC who are suffering the most from housing costs, that doesn’t look good. But guess what? Responsibility might not even lie with the provinces.

This final graph compares changes in permitting numbers among large metropolitan regions in both Ontario and BC:

As you can see, Hamilton, London, and Ottawa-Gatineau managed to improve their permitting rates while Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria didn’t just drop the ball, they seem to have completely lost it somewhere near the bottom of an long-abandoned coal mine.

Or did they? There’s an argument to be made that federal and provincial incentives made some sense. And it’s possible that municipal governments really did find ways to streamline their approval processes.

But if developers don’t think they’ll make back their investments from a project, they won’t bother applying for permits. Between the recent crash in the condo market and rising interest rates and construction supply costs, many projects simply no longer make economic sense.

Sure, government policy changes could make a difference at the margins. I’ve already written about building code standards that fail to accomplish their stated goals while raising construction costs. And it’s no secret that the complexity and costs of government compliance can add more than 20 percent to the purchase price of a new single home.

The bottom line is that government programs seem to have had a minimal positive impact on the crisis. However, they’re not necessarily directly responsible for new housing supply showdowns in large cities.

Which suggests that there may not be all that much governments can do

“steps to ban the importation of goods from [Israeli] settlements and enforce targeted measures against settlements and those who facilitate them or profit from them.”

It’ll be worthwhile to take a quick look back at last year’s initiative. According to the official statement from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office, Canada’s recognition was conditional on:

• Commitments by Palestinian Authority President Abbas to fundamentally reform its governance

• General elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part

• Demilitarization of the Palestinian state

• Hamas’ immediate release of all hostages taken in the terrorist attack of October 7

• The disarming of Hamas

• Hamas playing no role in the future governance of Palestine

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Of course, none of those were actual conditions. We know that because, a full year later - besides the final hostage release orchestrated by the Trump administration - not one of those conditions has been met.

Just how little has changed?

• To the surprise of exactly no one, Fatah secretary-general Jibril Rajoub just announced that the Palestinian elections scheduled for November 2026 will be delayed indefinitely

• The Palestinian Authority’s financial support for convicted (and dead) terrorists - known popularly as pay-to-slay - continues as before under different names (to confuse incurious EU auditors)

• Hamas has been forcibly suppressed but clearly not disarmed

• Hamas is still the dominant governing force in the parts of Gaza not under IDF control

Has any of that inspired second thoughts at Global Affairs Canada or the Prime Minister’s Office? There’s no indication that they’ve even noticed, much less cared.

The latest announcement was described as an effort “to protect the two-state solution”. So it would also be worthwhile digging a bit deeper into that.

The issues aren’t quite black and white. There’s definitely much more the Israeli government should be doing to curb rogue settler violence. Although by the same token, there’s much more the U.K., French, and Canadian governments should be doing to curb violent and deadly antisemitic attacks within their own borders.1

The primary grievance driving the new boycott, however, was continued housing and road construction in the E1 area. The claim is that such construction will preempt Palestinian territorial demands.

The strength of that particular argument could perhaps be measured against federal home construction initiatives on contested land much closer to home.

Keep reading:

South of the border, section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires U.S. colleges and universities receiving federal financial assistance to publicly disclose gifts and contracts from foreign sources that total $250,000 or more in a calendar year. At a time when the U.S. faces multiple hostile foreign governments with unknown strategic incentives, being able to reliably track the more than $5 billion spent annually is critical.1

But there are exactly zero requirements for Canadian higher education institutions to publicly report similar funding. Are Communist Party officials in China setting the curriculum your kids receive at University of British Columbia? Does Qatar determine whether pro-Hamas protesters get to intimidate Jewish students on campus at Metropolitan University in Toronto without fear of sanction? If you’re not an insider, there’s no way to know.

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Not only is there no data, but I’m not even sure which government department - or even which level of government - should theoretically be responsible for such decisions.2

What’s at stake?

Cultural and Academic Influence

Confucius Institutes - which were in some cases rebranded as “Chinese Language and Culture Institutes” - have long been embedded in some Canadian universities. They were officially designed to promote Mandarin language studies along with cultural understanding. Over time, the institutes were accused of spreading Chinese government propaganda and interfering with university curriculum development and faculty independence.

Although changing attitudes have more recently led to the winding down of many such relationships, some still exist. And there’s no reason to think that the Chinese government has abandoned the strategic goals that drove the original institutes.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has published the results of their digging into the issue in their Assault on Democratic Values and Principles: how Islamist entryism weakens civil society and higher education in Canada.

ISGAP is aware of some funding for energy infrastructure-related research projects in the millions of dollars. But that might be just the tip of the iceberg.

ISGAP highlights the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) and its investments targeting at least Toronto Metropolitan and Dalhousie. Qatar-owned University of Doha for Science and Technology is reportedly developing a similar relationship with University of Toronto.

There’s certainly no proof that anything inappropriate is going on here. But in the context of how little hard evidence exists, that’s hardly a surprise.

Institutional Influence

It’s no secret that international students pay an average of $41,746 in tuition for a year of undergraduate education - far more than their local classmates. It’s also no secret that, until recently at least, international students were a major source of funding for Canadian universities.

In fact, for the 2023-2024 academic year, international students made up nearly 20 percent of all university enrollment.3 It’s worth noting that that’s more than double the percentage from 2009-2010, when the 98,877 international students were just 8.24 percent of the total.

Nevertheless, besides the fact that recent demographic trends and changes to visa rules have triggered falling foreign enrollment, receiving tuition from overseas parents should hardly qualify as a security threat. So what’s the concern?

In fact, overseas parents are not the issue. But many students from countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE are funded by their governments. And some of those arrangements take the form of direct third-party billing that bypass students and their families altogether.

Consider how the tuition payments for aggregated cohorts of students could be consolidated into fewer but larger funding transfers. The foreign funders signing off on the payments could conceivably leverage their financial power to build relationships with key university officials. And those relationships could, in turn, be used to influence university policies in ways that fit foreign goals.

And as long as there’s no mandated reporting providing public visibility, there’s no way for Canadians - or Canadian governments for that matter - to know what’s going on.

Last Wednesday afternoon Toronto got hit by a major wind and hail storm, which gave me an opportunity to assess its “serious collision” appearance.

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Many of my close neighbors suffered multiple broken windows, damaged roofs, and trees blown down. Many roadways were badly flooded. This tree inspired me to adjust my travel plans the next morning:

In the immediate aftermath of the storm, as many as 65,000 Toronto Hydro customers (including me) lost power. Here’s what Hydro’s outage map looked like:

That was the challenge faced by the city and its agencies. All things considered, the response was pretty good. Most of the widespread outages - including mine - had been resolved in less than an hour.

That left a couple of hundred mostly block-level incidents - each involving 5-10 customers - still being addressed by the next morning. Presumably, those involved replacing damaged lines or transformers that had suffered direct physical damage.

All of which got me thinking about my long-term experiences with core City of Toronto utilities. By and large, they seem to work well and when something does go wrong, it gets fixed fast.

But are those just my feelings, or is that institutional reliability measurable?

Let’s see what we can learn about Toronto Hydro. The corporation (whose only shareholder is the City of Toronto) servers 797,000 customers and is responsible for:

• 188,700 poles

• 15,424 km overhead wires

• 14,289 km underground wires

• 61,630 distribution transformers

That’s a lot of exposed infrastructure. It’s impressive that just 65,000 customers (eight percent of all customers) lost power in a storm capable of pulling roofs off buildings and knocking down enormous trees. But we can find better data sources.

It turns out that there are three industry-standard measures of service reliability:

• SAIDI: Total outage time experienced by the average customer in a year

• SAIFI: Number of sustained outages experienced by the average customer

• CAIDI: Average duration of an outage when a customer actually loses power (which is really SAIDI ÷ SAIFI)

Here are 2024 SAIDI scores for a dozen or so major North American cities:

The average Toronto customer lost only 56 minutes in 2024 (SAIDI) across 1.29 outages (SAIFI). The average outage duration (CAIDI) would therefor have been 44 minutes. By all accounts, that’s a pretty good score. Compare that with Montreal, whose customers averaged 436 minutes without power.

One weakness of those raw SAIDI scores is that they don’t take extreme events (like tornadoes and hurricanes) into account. This chart breaks down outages in a way that takes major events into account:

So if you discount blizzards and ice storms, Montreal’s average outage minutes would drop by around 40 percent, while Toronto’s would be unchanged.

For comparison, besides Toronto and Montreal, this report showed Hydro Ottawa customers losing 52 minutes in a year, and Calgary (Enmax) lost just 30 minutes.

Among provincial providers, the scores are significantly higher - which might be partly due to the nature of the communities they serve:

• BC Hydro 3.56 hours

• Manitoba Hydro 3.2 hours

• SaskPower 6 hours

• Hydro One 6.79 hours

Overall, we’re doing pretty well here in North America. After all, here’s what things look like in Africa:

Only Mozambique and Cape Verde are competitive.

The bottom line is that, for the most part, Canadians still enjoy first world utility infrastructure. And I’m not complaining.

Claims of political bias at the CBC are an excellent case in point. Last week, we all became aware of a policy memo blocking use of the word “terrorist” in connection with the 9/11 attacks unless there was direct attribution. It seems CBC employees could report how “U.S. officials claimed the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were the result of terrorism”. But something like “Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks” would not be allowed.

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After heavy push back from many directions - likely including some focused political communication from cabinet - the CBC backed down. They’ve since reversed their policy (or at least the public-facing version).

From the outside it looks like the officials behind that memo are uncomfortable passing moral judgement on the violent habits of the folks at Al Qaeda and Hamas. And it’s unlikely that the public retreat will change anything.

My earlier analysis of story selection, interpretation, and institutional viewpoint bias at CBC left me confident I’d identified a pronounced left-leaning tilt. That identification has only been reinforced in the months since my original research.

But I can assure you - with equal confidence - that that’s definitely not how CBC leaders see it. Take former CBC ombudsman Jack Nagler’s 2024 report. He acknowledged that 55 percent of the 1,882 complaints he received concerning CBC coverage of the Gaza war focused on the network’s unfair treatment of Israel. But apparently the other 45 percent complained about unfair treatment of Palestinians.

With some justification, insiders can take numbers like those and conclude their coverage is exactly where it should be: they’re annoying everyone equally.

That may be so. But what does it say about the reliability of their product? If, like Jack Nagler’s 1,882 pen pals, you don’t trust CBC’s claim of neutrality, how is their reporting useful to you?

Official numbers tell us that only a low single-digit percentage of Canadians actually tune into CBC News - or, for that matter to any of their broadcast and digital content. It seems that most Canadians have already voted with their feet.

Parliamentary funding for the CBC has come unstuck from public consumption. The corporation’s ever-growing allocations are paid out entirely as the result of a political choice.

Canadians, of course, are free to get their news wherever they like. Some will go with outlets that wear their bias proudly. Others will prefer platforms that at least try to deliver objective reporting in the news section and opinions through op-eds and X feeds. Fewer and fewer will bother with CBC.

Given there’s no obvious way to solve whatever it is that ails CBC, perhaps the next best thing is to simply ignore it.

But as it turns out, that’s nothing compared with the productivity that’s regularly misdirected to what essentially amounts to unpaid government work.

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Consider how Canadian businesses are expected to spend some 100 hours/year managing their income tax and GST/HST filings, 70 hours dealing with payroll issues, 20 hours for record keeping relating to employment standards, 25 hours coming up with safety plans and other occupational health and safety documentation, 40 hours applying for foreign worker hiring, 50 hours for procurement of government contracts, and 50 hours dealing with food regulations. Etc.

Obviously, you won’t find any one company that faces all of those categories of compliance. But I think those are reasonable averages when you account for the fact that those hour-estimates are specific to small businesses. Larger companies will obviously spend a lot more time. Hopefully those two approximations will more or less cancel each other out statistically.

In total, my rough estimates suggest the average Canadian business annually spends 397 hours on government paperwork.1 Given Statistics Canada data telling us that there are 1,023,359 private sector businesses in Canada, that’ll come to 406,273,523 work-hours nation-wide. And assuming the workers tasked with all that thankless labor are being paid $25/hour,2 the annual cost of their time would be $10,156,838,075.

Similarly, each of Canada’s 34,009,470 adults should expect to spend around 15 hours a year filling out personal tax forms and (averaged over many years) applying for municipal permits of one kind or another. That’ll add up to 510,142,050 hours and - at $25/hour pay - the equivalent of $12,753,551,250 in lost labor productivity.

That’s $23 billion dollars of productivity drained annually from the economy through forcing private citizens to perform unpaid government work.

Now this isn’t to say that we should simply eliminate all regulations, or even all regulatory reporting requirements. Complex societies need some regulation and associated data inputs.

But there’s an awful lot of fat that could be trimmed without disrupting the system. And most of that fat can be found in an insanely complex Tax Act.

I just filed my business taxes so, as it turns out, these are things I’m thinking about myself. Just imagine how many millions of hours could be saved by a simplified business tax process that involved:

• One corporate tax rate for all businesses regardless of size, ownership, and passive investment income

• Immediate expensing instead of deprecation schedules

• Fewer corporate tax credits (if the government wants to subsidize R&D, it could do so through an explicit expenditure program)

• Simplified interest deductions

• Combined (income tax, CPP, and EI) payroll remittances and reporting

That’s only one possible approach to reform out of may alternatives people have suggested. The point is that the law we have doesn’t need to be the law we’re stuck with forever. And the tens of billions of dollars regularly wasted on unnecessary paperwork aren’t necessarily lost forever either.

Here’s some more reading for you:

However, I’m not convinced that all that extra efficiency and effectiveness will necessarily translate into universally better outcomes for regular Canadians. Sure, we’d all like to get our new passports or resolve mix-ups over benefits eligibility faster. But there might be some government functions where more doesn’t necessarily equal better.

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First though, let’s take a look at the registry of existing federal government AI projects that accompanies the strategy. The registry currently contains 412 entries.

• 356 (86 percent) of the projects primarily target internal Government of Canada users, 25 are meant for both employees and members of the public, 23 are just for the public, and 6 - intriguingly - are for “Neither employees nor public”.1

• 180 of the projects were developed internally by government employees, 156 were purchased from external vendors, and 25 came from open source resources.

• Microsoft and Microsoft Azure were, between them, responsible for 37 of the tools that came from external vendors, with OpenAI contributing 4 projects, and Thomson Reuters, 3.

• 88 of the projects involve the use of personal information. Data for three of those came from deidentified datasets from health records.

• Canada School of Public Service has the most entries in the registry at 31. They’re followed by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (26), Statistics Canada (25), National Research Council (25), and Global Affairs Canada (21).

There’s no question that certain operations will noticeably improve as departments build out their integrations. Expect to see more open consultations where Canadians are invited to share their thoughts about various policy questions. The fact that AI can both accurately summarize and classify millions of unformatted text (or audio) responses means that your opinions can be reliably represented and communicated to policymakers.

Internally, governments will be able to produce limitless impact assessments, regulatory impact analysis statements, and guidance documents. Played right, this could counteract suffocating regulatory review requirements - although it might just as easily trigger waves of new regulations.

Even if, ultimately, final decisions would still require human review for legal compliance, AI tools could still speed up processing for immigration, tax, or access to information cases. In the overall scheme of things, those sound like potential wins for Canadians.

The flip side to that of course, is that governments will likely improve the most where they’re already engaged. Those will almost certainly include tax fraud enforcement. If someone’s worried about being caught for tax avoidance now, expect the stress level to dial up to at least eleven once an AI-powered CRA kicks into gear.

But for those of us who - however reluctantly - reliably dig deep and pay our taxes each year, there might still be something just as dark waiting for us.

Consider how AI tools make facial recognition (from official archives, public webcams, and online videos and images) and inter-agency data sharing a trivial task. Now consider how such data integrations can facilitate 24/7/365 digital tracking of entire populations.

With all that data already in place, why would a government not take its obsession with online offensive behavior and “disinformation” to the next level? And if that government has already demonstrated its passion for “social” collaboration with elements of Chinese Communist Party security apparatus, why not quietly create some local version of a social credit scoring system?

Perhaps those are unrealistic fears. But without any comprehensive privacy legislation restricting the government’s use of AI in Canada, you’d be hard pressed to convince me that they’re completely unfounded.

As you may recall, I recently assessed the usefulness of result metrics reported by a few government departments. Many entries from Health Canada and Canadian Heritage were depressing examples of narrowly-focused box-checking that didn’t even try to connect to the real world. The examples we saw from Department of Veterans Affairs on the other hand were an encouraging contrast.

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But that was all more or less random. For all I know, the samples I chose were one-off anomalies and failed to representative of the work of individual departments or of the government as a whole.

To fix that, I thought I’d expand my analysis. So I used the complete 2024-2025 dataset from the Government of Canada’s InfoBase open datasets relating to departmental results reports. That dataset contains activity names and descriptions for all programs authorized to achieve policy goals. For each activity, there’s also a target status, whose value could be “met”, “not met”, “to be achieved” or “not available”.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here are some examples of target descriptions that I consider meaningful:

• Degree to which Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada advances the resolution or the mitigation of market access barriers, World Trade Organization disputes and technical trade issues

• Percentage change in the economic performance of the agriculture and agri-food sector

• Revenue growth rate of firms supported by ACOA programs

• % of supervisors who report improved performance of employees; in particular for those employees in management and leadership development programs

And here are some targets that I felt were largely meaningless:

• Percentage of surveyed Indigenous partners who indicate their experience engaging on policy initiatives led by the Canada Water Agency as meaningful.

• Number of international commitments through which Canada works with partners to address strategic peace and security challenges.

• Number of women’s organizations and women’s networks (international and local) advancing women’s rights and gender equality that receive GAC support for programming and/or institutional strengthening

• Amount of climate finance announced for specific initiatives to help developing countries transition to low-carbon, climate-resilient economies

• Dollar value of CALA loans registered to established and beginning farmers per fiscal year ($millions)

Notice how the only events referenced in those examples were designed as part of a process. There’s nothing indicating that any real world problems were actually addressed. There’s no direct suggestion that water is cleaner, foreign poverty and suffering are alleviated, women’s right are actually advanced, climate harms are measurably reduced, or agricultural outcomes are improved. Good things might have happened, but there’s nothing in those metrics that proves it.

Since there were more than 2,700 distinct results reported for 2024-2025, I’m unable to manually assess each one. So I tasked the Claude AI chat model with the job instead, asking it to rate each official indicator of success as “largely meaningful”, “largely meaningless”, or “neutral”. That last option was to avoid forcing Claude to make a weak decision under pressure. I’m really only looking for clear examples one way or anther.

When its analysis was done, Claude had classified 1,571 of the results as neutral, 609 and meaningless, and 545 as meaningful. Obviously, we can’t blindly rely on those numbers. But after looking through a sample, I’d say that the AI model appeared to understand what I was looking for and was at least mostly on target. You’re welcome to take a look through the results yourself.

What that means is that just 545 of the 2,725 activities (20 percent) were unambiguously useful.

There’s more. Among all results that Claude designated as “meaningful”, only half were officially self-rated as meeting their targets. By contrast, department officials gave the thumbs up to nearly 59 percent of the indicators that were designated “meaningless”.

Given the scale of the data we’re working with, that’s a statistically significant divergence. Perhaps it suggests that people are more comfortable overrating the success of unrealistic targets. Or maybe the higher scores are simply the product of how easy it is to satisfy fake requirements.

I also asked Claude to rate each activity success indicator as either “within government control”, “outside of government control”, or “neutral”. My thinking is that, by and large, targets that lie within the reach of governments are more likely to be detached from real-world outcomes.

When I ran the numbers, I discovered that only 28 percent of those activities with meaningful result indicators lay within government control. By sharp contrast, nearly 86 percent of the meaningless indicators were within government control!

I can’t tell whether departments looking to use meaningless targets to game the reporting system consciously look for targets that they control, or whether it just works out that way. But there is an obvious connection between fake, box-checking results and domains that aren’t touched by the real world.

Here’s a simple visualization of those two metrics:

Finally, I took a look at results at the department level. Global Affairs Canada, Employment and Social Development, and Public Works and Government Services were responsible for the highest concentrations of meaningless targets: 63, 55, and 34 respectively. Department of National Defence and Correctional Service of Canada scored 54 and 34 meaningful targets (respectively).

In any case, I’ll repeat what I’ve said in the past: governments have no business legislating policies whose outcomes can’t be meaningfully measured: they’re wasteful by design. Even if all those garbage metrics are the products of inadvertent coincidence, their existence undermines government credibility.

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The trend driving the disruption is known as private equity roll-up. “Private equity” simply refers to investors with a taste for using capital to buy existing businesses. The “roll-up” part of the deal happens when investors purchase multiple businesses in a single industry, consolidate their operations, capitalize on their assets, and then sell what’s left at a profit.

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Industries that are particularly attractive targets are often:

• Highly fragmented, traditionally consisting of many small independent owners

• Focused on providing essential (non-discretionary) services to recurring customers

• Heavy in owner-operators nearing retirement with no succession plan

Industries that are undergoing the greatest change include:

• Dentists, chiropractors, optometrists, and accountants

• Plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors

• Veterinarians

• Self-storage warehouses

• Funeral homes

Regulations restrict outside ownership of businesses in some of those sectors. So private equity firms will often buy up the real estate, brand, back-office, and non-clinical assets while a professional nominally holds the clinical licence.

How significant is this trend? The following chart uses Statistics Canada counts of business counts in more than a thousand industry categories. I used counts for common private equity targeted sectors from 2015 and 2025 to track changes.

As you can see, over those ten years, the numbers of businesses with 50 or more employees (as a share of total businesses) increased by two percent or more for home health care, optical goods, and veterinary services. Overall, there was clearly a statistical trend away from smaller businesses (less than 10 employees) and visible growth in larger companies - meaning existing clinics are likely getting bigger rather than lots of new small ones opening.

However that’s far from the whole story. The problem is that those Statistics Canada datasets only report numbers of registered businesses, while ignoring indirect ownership. Since a single private equity firm could own dozens or even hundreds of distinct companies within a sector, we’re obviously not yet getting the full picture.

I’ll use Dentalcorp to illustrate what I mean. As of 2024, Dentalcorp owned 550 dental practices across Canada and was in advanced negotiations with 160 more. Their clinics account for over 5.7 million patient visits annually. Last year, Dentalcorp itself was acquired by the U.S. private equity firm GTCR.

One reason all that activity didn’t have more of an impact on our Statistics Canada data was because Dentalcorp still owns less than five percent of the Canadian oral care market - and each of the hundreds of offices they control still exists legally as standalone businesses. But the trend we’re seeing will - for better or worse - obviously change the dental care Canadian’s receive in coming years.

The number of Canadian veterinary clinics under corporate ownership has apparently grown from around 13 percent in 2021 to as high as 25 percent in 2025. Typically, corporate players in Canada’s vet clinic industry - like VetStrategy and VCA Canada - are owned by foreign investors.

Consolidation among optometrists’ clinics is happening, but by way of a different model. For the most part, it’s been practitioners themselves (supported by foreign minority partners) who’ve been building a collective - the FYihealth group - consisting of 370 locations across the country.

As of March 2025, StorageVault Canada - Canada’s largest self-storage company with a $1.73 billion market cap - owned and operated around 250 storage locations - with more coming on line all the time. Overall, Statistics Canada reported 503 self-storage sites in 2015, and 855 in 2025.

The main reason StorageVault - despite its industry dominance - doesn’t show up as a major “consolidator” in Statistics Canada data is that each (nominally independent) centre will usually require only a few human beings on staff.

The truth is that those trends represent nothing more than the free market responding to opportunities and optimizing operational positions. An argument could be made that governments have no business interfering. However, such macro-scale changes can carry some real economic risks.

Research in the U.S. into private equity ownership of healthcare providers found that such business models often led to increased consumer costs and reduced quality of care. That’s partly because markets with less competition offer fewer real alternatives, forcing customers to stick with what’s available and reducing providers’ incentives to improve. But it’s also a reflection of how - specifically - private equity firms manage their businesses.

There’s also the risk that investors would be more likely to close “underperforming” branches in their portfolios. The branches most likely to underperform from an investment perspective would be those serving smaller and rural communities. This, in an environment were there are few or no private practitioners, could lead to service deserts.

Practitioners themselves can, when working for large consolidators, lose bargaining power. It wouldn’t surprise anyone to see workers in regions where one or two investor groups dominate the market experience disappointing pay and conditions, with little leverage to demand more.

Consider, too, how deeply some large Canadian pension funds - including CPPIB and the Ontario Teachers’ fund - are invested in private equity operations. When decisions that would maximize investment return threaten the services regular Canadians rely on, which consideration should win?

Should competition regulators intervene? Under current legal frameworks, they’re currently unable to do anything. That’s because the Competition Act only requires notification for mergers where the target’s Canadian assets or revenue exceed roughly C$93 million. That’s rare for scenarios where individual roll-up bolt-ons involve single vet clinics, dental practices, or dry cleaners.

But this is something that could benefit from some more official attention.

Like it or not, the world is going digital. More and more categories of financial transactions are already electronic-only. And it’s not just your mortgage payments. Cash is increasingly not welcome when paying for things like parking, restaurant meals, Uber rides, sports events, and city services.

You may laugh, but I’ll often go months at a time without even touching notes or coins.

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With so little currency in active use, I would have expected that the volume of Canadian cash in circulation would have dropped noticeably in recent years. But I would most definitely have been wrong. Very wrong.

This chart represents the actual dollar value of “currency outside of banks” (using the M2 Gross measure) between 1953 and 2025. Don’t worry if you can’t see the blue “Unadjusted” line: that’s because, over time, there’s been virtually no difference between “Seasonably Adjusted” and “Unadjusted”. What is obvious is that, if anything, we’re holding more cash than ever.

Specifically, there’s currently around $118 billion dollars of cash out there. Compare that with 1946, when there was barely one billion.

Perhaps the reason the value of cash has risen is because inflation means we need so much more money to buy anything. Ok. So take a look at this next chart that compares “Currency Outside of Banks” to the rate of inflation.

Ok. But perhaps you’ll argue that, because there are so many more Canadians now than in 1946 (around 32 million more), there’s more cash across the system, but each of us holds less of it.

Nope. The amount of per capita cash “Outside of Banks” in 1946 was $84.52. Adjusting that number for inflation would make that worth $1,478.20 in 2025 dollars. But the actual per capita amount in 2025 was $2,834.80. In other words each of us is stuffing our wallets with twice as much hard cash than the inflation rate itself would explain.

What’s going on here? Some of that cash is certainly being used for a tax-avoiding cash economy. But such things existed forty years ago as well, so they wouldn’t explain the more recent growth in cash holdings.

The Bank of Canada is definitely aware of the trend. They note that it’s actually primarily the higher denominations that are being used, rather than coins or low-denomination bills. The Bank suggests that we’re largely looking at Canadians (and foreigners) using such cash as a safe store of value.

The only problem is that cash is a terrible store of value: inflation erases three percent or so of its market worth every year. So why would anyone do this?

Canadians, as a group, aren’t stupid.1 My bet is that most people are well aware of the downsides of holding cash. It seems they’re convinced that the downsides of not holding cash are greater.

It’s possible that many people are worried about the possibility of a bank failure, payment system outage, or serious social disruption.2 Some are also worried about the risk of official (and unofficial) surveillance of their financial activity.

In other words, they’re not trying to store value so much as avoiding the costs of too much digital engagement.

I can’t know whether their concerns are justified, but it does seem like something of a vote of non-confidence in the banking sector and the government that regulates it.

I know that’s not a particularly accurate way to identify program goals, but International Development Assistance Program documentation isn’t particularly transparent. It’ll have to do for now.

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In any case, we’re not talking about research conducted by Canadians here in Canada. Instead, those billions pay for programs executed by foreign researchers and institutions. In the context of some of the excesses discovered in thousands of now-cancelled USAID projects,1 I’m curious how standards and oversight are applied to the non-government organizations (NGOs) and foreign institutions that handle all that money.

Dr. Yehudis Stokes recently shared with me some findings from a new paper she’s currently completing. The paper includes a meta review of existing studies into the use of art therapy for trauma patients. Dr. Stokes isn’t particularly interested in measuring outcomes from art therapy programs: she believes program delivery is far too complex and varied to be usefully evaluated. Instead, her research is focused developing a standardized intervention framework.

As far as I can tell, none of the 40 or so studies Dr. Stokes reviewed was directly funded by GAC (although GAC did provide $10,772 for a closely related study in Burkina Faso back in 2018). However, they do seem to reflect methodological standards that are common in the modern academic industry. So even if we didn’t pay for those specific research projects, we undoubtedly paid for many others like them.

And for anyone concerned about academic integrity and funding oversight, that’s bad news.

Take these five separate published studies focusing on the use of dance or art therapy on cohorts of former Nigerian child abductees:

• Comparative analysis of the effect of interactive audio-visual based art

  therapy and music therapy in reducing suicidal ideation among school

  children who survived abduction (2023) - Psychiatry Research (Elsevier)

• Effect of Audio-Visual-Based Art and Music Therapy in Reducing

  Adolescents Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (2023) - Journal of Adolescent Health - Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (Elsevier)

• Interactive media-based dance and art therapies as interventions

  for treating posttraumatic symptoms among school children with

  abduction experience (2023) - Journal of Pediatric Nursing (Elsevier)

• Using interactive television-based art therapy to treat post-traumatic symptoms among survivors of abduction in Nigeria (2023) - Health Promotion International (Oxford University Press)

• A randomized control trial establishing the effectiveness of using interactive television-based art, music, and poetry therapies for treating the post-traumatic stress disorder of children exposed to traumatic events (2023) - Psychiatry Research (Elsevier)

The problems with those publications are obvious, and include:

Salami slicing

Academics under pressure to publish research at scale will divide the relatively modest results of a single study into multiple papers. The goal might be to enhance their academic reputations, or to multiply the proceeds from government and NGO funding sources.

In that context, it’s noteworthy that each of these five Nigerian/Chinese papers involves:

• Between 400-470 freed child abductees divided into either two or three cohorts.

• Individuals often included as authors of two or even three of the papers.

• No reported funding sources (even though executing four 6-12 week studies involving ongoing interventions with nearly two thousand subjects would be expensive).

Despite all the overlap, the papers were published in four separate journals (were the authors trying to maintain a low profile?).

The five papers were written using a highly similar structure. There’s a sense that the authors worked from a single template and simply swapped out some methodology details and outcome numbers.

Improbable effect sizes

The most astounding element is how all five papers report between 50 and 75 percent improvements in measures (like PTSD symptoms) among the treatment arms, but no significant change at all among the control arms. That such improvements could occur at all in just a few weeks is unlikely - unprecedented, in fact. But that it would occur all five times beggars belief.

It’s similarly unlikely that the control arms (those who received no therapy at all) would have seen no improvement through natural healing. Some healing is apparently expected, given the growing passage of time since the ends of their ordeals.

I’ve previously written about the thousands of children kidnapped and murdered by Islamist gangs in Sub-Saharan Africa. I’m sure that survivors suffered serious trauma and they deserve support. But I’m not convinced that those particular studies either reflect reality or are useful in finding successful treatment for such children.

I guess it’s possible that the anomalies from those five reports are the results of innocent errors. But the fact is that the studies were, one after another, approved, each of the papers was peer reviewed and then published in (notionally) reputable journals, and the real costs were carried by someone.

The odds are that neither the Chinese or Nigerian governments were the ultimate source of that funding. Instead, the money probably came through NGO’s which are, in turn, funded by Western governments like the U.S. and Canada.

Which brings us back to GAC and the International Development Assistance Program. GAC is notoriously awful about properly auditing their overseas spending. Is there anyone in the department who’s reviewing the results, auditing the processes, and watching the spending for the foreign research programs we’re paying for?

I haven’t yet seen any evidence that inspires confidence.

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