So what happens to the objectivity of governments drunk (and stoned) on revenue from taxes on liquor, drugs, and gambling?

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How drunk? Well that’ll depend on exactly how deeply invested they are. In Ontario, here’s how things stood in 2024-5:

• The Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) - with its control over the province’s retail liquor industry - transferred $2.13 billion to the Province.

• The beer, wine and spirits tax generated another $530 million.

• Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation - which regulates casinos and lotteries - sent more than two billion dollars to the Province.

• iGaming Ontario - responsible for online gambling - provided $181 million, which was up 24 percent from the year before. And a more recent report pegs the government’s total one-year share at more than $800 million.

• Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation on its own generated around $35 million, but Ontario’s share of federal cannabis excise duty added another $390 million.

• The tobacco tax brought in $693 million (although that’s been declining for decades due to falling consumption).

All that added up to roughly six billion dollars, or around 2.7 percent of Ontario’s total annual revenue.

Could a government whose hands are dug so deep into those cookie jars be trusted to make the right decisions impacting consumption? Ontario’s cancelling of its promised Gambling Research Exchange Ontario didn’t inspire confidence.

A strong argument can be made that increasing tax rates to raise the price of harmful substances will encourage people to consume less. That seems to have worked for smoking. The problem is that the principle simply doesn’t apply elsewhere.

By the nature of the product, online gamblers and lottery players will never see any government-mandated price increases. So there’s no practical disincentive at work.

And alcohol? Despite decades of heavy excise taxes, alcohol consumption has been rising in every province. So even if the original thinking behind the extra taxes was to reduce drinking, it’s obviously not working:

Despite the fact that government policy officials must realize that there’s no social benefit justifying their taxes, they’re still happy to impose heavy consumer costs on alcohol sales. How heavy? That’ll depend on where you live. Here are the per capita earnings from alcohol sales directed to provincial authorities (like Ontario’s LCBO):

Overall, Canada-wide liquor authority earnings increased between 2004 and 2024 by 36.7 percent. That’s a significantly faster rate of increase than actual alcohol consumption, which increased by just 25.63 percent.

Which is just another way of spelling “tax grab”.

I may sometimes use that phrase as a cynical joke, but there is an underlying truth to it. Take cancer outcomes. According to Statistics Canada, between 1992-4 and 2014-6, five-year net survival expectations increased from 14 to 23 percent for lung and bronchus cancer, from five to ten percent for pancreatic cancer, from 25 to 51 percent for myeloma, and from 62 to 85 percent for chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

That’s astonishing progress and it goes a long way to justify the billions we spend on cancer research.

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There have been other public health victories over that time. Statistics Canada data also shows us that total cross-Canada deaths in transport accidents dropped from 3,129 in 2000 to just 1,990 in 2024. And that’s despite the population increasing by 34 percent over that time.

So then why is it that, despite spending around $300 million of public funds annually on mental health research, and another $20 billion annually on mental health treatment - around 7.5 percent of all public health spending - there’s been no noticeable improvement in related outcomes?

When it comes to mental health, getting data that represents outcomes can be tricky. In some cases, useful data seems to exist but, for unknown reasons, is withheld from the public.

Ontario’s ICES mental health dashboard does provide some metrics. Between October 2016 and January 2026, for example, 30-day mental health and addictions-related hospital readmissions increased from around 14 per 100 hospital discharges to around 15. In the context of therapeutic outcomes, any readmission would have to be taken as bad news.

Similarly, the median length of stay for mental health and addictions-related hospitalizations has remained unchanged at six days. Breaking those numbers down into individual diagnoses shows little variation across the board.

But what we’d really like to see is evidence that, say, people suffering from mood disorders are more quickly transitioning to symptom-free lives than in the past. Or perhaps that new medications are making a predictable and measurable difference at the population level.

Unfortunately, I’m simply unable to find any data about the only things that really matter: durable recovery, sustained remission, and restoration of normal functioning for mental illnesses.

And medication-related outcomes seem to have been disappointing. For example, analysis of data from the National Population Health Survey and the Canadian Community Health Survey a couple of decades ago showed “episodes occurring in antidepressant users lasted longer than those in non-users” along with higher incidence of major depressive episodes.

Some have suggested that results like those are caused by the treatment-prevalence paradox (where those in poorest health were more likely to participate in such trials, skewing the results). But as far as I can tell, that’s never been proven.

And “never been proven” seems to be the story behind a lot of what goes on in the mental health industry. No one is suggesting that we just pull the plug on current research and care programs. But it would be useful to give Canadians a glimpse into the absolute, objective value of current “best-practices”.

In the meantime, the public health policy officials controlling billions of dollars of annual spending are completely blind to the actual outcomes their choices will have.

Canadians suffering poor mental health are not being well served.

Actually this isn’t going to one of those posts. Although I can assure you I’ve got more than one of ‘em trapped inside and screaming to come out. Instead, we’re going to talk about some disturbing mental health trends.

A recent report described how around a third of University of California Berkeley law students were claiming accommodation for psychological disabilities. I won’t challenge the need for reasonable accommodation. But the sheer numbers of young people facing mental health challenges are surprising. What’s behind such climbing statistics?

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In fact, IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) data from the U.S. suggests that the “percentage of students with disabilities is inversely related to how elite the higher education setting is”:

Weird.

Results from the 2021 Canadian Election Study raise similar questions, but aren’t nearly so dramatic. Only 6.7 percent of the general population self-reported as having poor mental health compared to other people their age. But that number jumped to 10.2 percent among students.

Since the 2025 Canadian Election Study (CES) results were just released, we might be able to update our knowledge of what’s going on.

As you might recall from my previous post, back in 2021, 18,073 people placed themselves on a scale where:

“0 means the (political) left and 10 means the right, where would you place yourself on this scale?”

I categorized those submitting between zero and three as “far-left” and those between six and ten as “far-right.” All told, 29.4 percent of respondents were far-right against just 26.1 percent who self-identified as far-left.

By 2025, that had reversed: 27.6 percent leaned left vs 26.1 on the other side. Since I don’t do political punditry, I have no clue what - if anything - that means.

But what I can see is that the previous snapshot showing more self-described mental illness on the political left is now an ongoing trend. Back in 2021, the average right-leaners scored their mental health as 2.02 (where one is “Excellent” and four is “Poor”. left-leaners were a statistically-significant 0.3 points less healthy, at 2.32.

In 2025, those on the right had remained exactly where they were, while those on the left had even worse mental health, averaging 2.36.

That was interesting a few months ago and it’s interesting now. But I suspect the bigger story has nothing to do with politics and - as they seem to have discovered at Berkeley - more to do with age. Young people seem a lot more susceptible to mental illness.

This is a widely documented swing across the Western World. But what the new CES data shows us about Canada is that those whose occupation was reported as “student” suffered such illness at 10.2 percent in 2021 vs a whopping 14.8 percent in 2025. Although I should note that, for some reason, there were considerably fewer people (just 209 in 2025 vs 1,161) answering that question than four years previous.

For context, among all individuals aged 18-25, those reporting poor mental health dropped from 16.3 percent to 14.2 percent in the years since 2021. And those between 26 and 30 with serious mental health concerns fell from 15.4 percent to 12.4 percent.

Trends notwithstanding, all of those are very high numbers. Especially when compered with the 2.3 percent reported in 2025 by individuals listing their occupation as retired.

Are there policy solutions for this problem? Should we be assessing K-12 and post secondary educational systems for complicity? Is it smartphones and screens in general?

I honestly don’t know. And I’m pretty sure no one else does either.1 But I can say that any government intervention restricting digital access will unavoidably end badly for privacy, data security, and free speech. And any attempt to regulate public school teachers and university professors will be overwhelmingly opposed by unions and other entrenched interests.

Besides the suffering caused by mental illness, there are larger demographic consequences in play. The CES 2025 data shows that fertility rates for those who reported poor mental health were significantly lower than national averages.

While around 59 percent of all respondents had one or more children, only 37 percent of those reporting poor mental health had even one child, and only 15 percent had more than two (considered necessary for population replacement.

We might as well also look at the same data through the lens of political leanings. Among those identifying as far left, just 47 percent had at least one child. But 64 percent of those on the far right were parents.

So not only do your mental health and your politics clearly predict your fertility, but (healthy) conservatives are in a better position to both produce and raise future generations of Canadians.

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Reducing Spending

The Liberals promised to “throttle government spending growth by scaling it back from nine per cent to two per cent.” The problem is that there’s no way to be sure what Carney had in mind with “spending growth.” Or, for that matter, with “nine percent” and “two percent.”

Consider how spending in the:

• Compensation of employees

• Use of goods and services

• Consumption of fixed capital

• Interest

• Subsidies

• Grants - expense

• Social benefits

• and Other expense

…categories1 grew 9.62 percent between Q2 2025 and Q1 2026 - the period following the election. Spending in those same categories grew just 0.43 percent over the five quarters leading up to that election. That doesn’t sound anything like the original plan does it?

Using the total expenditure numbers from the same Statistics Canada dataset gives us roughly the same spending growth picture: 0.58 percent over the year+ leading up to the election, and 9.25 percent since.

Similarly, Canada’s net financial worth was reported as -$550 billion in Q1 2024, -$564 billion in Q1 2025, -$515 billion in Q2 2025, and -$538 in Q1 2026. That translates to 2.59 percent deeper debt in the period leading up to the election vs 4.51 percent more dept in the quarters since - with a significant drop in between.

The bottom line is that I have absolutely no idea what the Liberals’ promise actually was, but I am pretty sure they haven’t kept it.

External Consultants

Those Liberal promises included reducing the use of consultants in federal government work. Why, after all, should we employ 370,000 in-house workers while out-sourcing much of the work they were hired to perform?

How’s that working out so far? To find out, I downloaded the details of all federal contracts from 2024, 2025 and the first three months of 2026. I then aggregated all contracts from those years that were awarded to any of the big international consulting and accounting firms, including: McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG. (Disclaimer: I have a son who works for Deloitte…but then who doesn’t?)

Here’s what all that spending looked like month by month:

That huge jump in August 2025 is the result of two large contracts procured by Department of National Defence worth, between then, $335 million. The contracts went to a joint venture involving PricewaterhouseCoopers, Si Systems, and Accenture. The work is described as involving “information technology and telecommunications consultants.”

Between January 2024 and April 2025, the average total monthly value of outsourced contracts was $58,716,078. Between May 2025 and March 2026 - since the April 2025 election in other words - that average dropped to $49,216,166. That’s a significant decline, but the practice is far from abandoned.

We’ve got no choice but to wait for new data releases to see whether things are turning round. But right now, there’s not a lot of evidence that the Liberal government is making much effort to meet their commitments…whatever they were.

Now, OAS is a critical function of government that no one is seriously considering eliminating. But that doesn’t mean its current structure is ideal or that there might not be ways to significantly reduce its drain on government finances.

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The goal of the OAS program is to provide support for low-income seniors with no other source of funds. To ensure that only genuinely deserving Canadians receive it, OAS eligibility is income tested: if you earn more than a basic amount during the year, your OAS payments will be clawed back.

The problem is that program eligibility isn’t means tested. So a senior in Toronto who owns a mortgage-free two million dollar house and has another couple of million dollars in unrealized investments could, under some circumstances, receive the maximum OAS payment. While another senior living in a basement rental and surviving month-to-month from CPP payments and RIF withdrawals could - because CPP and RIF income are both taxable and trigger claw backs - see half of his OAS payments cut.

That’s obviously not fair. But there’s not a lot that any government could do about it: reliably testing for means would be unjustifiably complicated and invasive.

However it might be possible to play around with OAS recovery thresholds to exclude a higher number of seniors whose income isn’t desperately low.

Current rules allow any senior whose net income is below $95,323 to keep the full payment (around $8,917 annually for those 65-74, and $9,800 for those older than 75). Any income above $95,323 will reduce OAS payments by 15 percent until they fall to zero. That’ll happen at around $152,062 for those under 75 and $157,923 for those who are older.

Reducing all thresholds by $20,000 - so that only those earning less than $75,323 would earn the maximum amount - could save the system around two billion dollars a year. And leaving the minimum income recovery threshold at $95,323 but dropping the maximum thresholds to, say, $120,000 and $125,000, could save a billion or so.

That’s real money. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near close to enough real money. There’s no way politicians of any party are going to risk annoying the high-election-turnout seniors demographic. So, for political reasons, that’s a non-starter.

However, there might be another approach. Imagine simplifying the tax system1 by reducing income tax rates, but maintaining overall revenue by removing some deductions. This would increase the amount of money many seniors get to keep - but also reduce marginal eligibility for OAS and GIS. If the changes were properly calibrated, they might not trigger any net losses for seniors.

Over time, the reform could additionally prompt more Canadians to choose to remain in the workforce for longer and build stronger retirement savings for themselves (not to mention pay more income tax in the process). In theory, this would happen because getting to keep more of your employment income makes work more meaningful and satisfying.

But I’ve never been able to quantify the cost and impact of government funding for entertainment and documentary television programming. Data included in the 2024-25 annual report from Canada Media Fund (CMF) can provide some new clarity.

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First of all, recent Main Estimates documents from the Treasury Board indicate that post-COVID budgetary top-ups to CMF may be winding down and returning to pre-COVID levels.

Besides those federal government amounts, CMF is also funded through broadcasting distribution undertakings (BDUs). BDUs are cable, satellite, and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) operators who are licensed by the CRTC and required to contribute at least five percent of their broadcast revenues to Canadian content creation and production funds. Most (or all) of that money moves through the CMF and is redistributed to content producers - including the CBC.

One problem CMF faces is the ongoing collapse of BDU revenues. As Canadians continue to choose internet streaming options over traditional media providers, BDUs have less money to share.

CMF funding is awarded for the creation of content types including television, interactive digital media, and software games. Most of those funds (nearly $285 million in 2025-26 out of a total of $330 million) goes to television production.

Of those amounts, $50 million went directly to CBC productions, $13 million to Rogers, and $15 million to the French-language TVA. In 2025-26, more than 1,400 productions were supported at some stage between predevelopment and post-production.

The CMF annual report includes (on page 118) this list of the most-watched CMF-funded programs:

That list includes viewership measurements in terms of average minute audience (AMA). As you can see, Law and Order attracted nearly 1.2 million viewers, with the remaining nine shows attracting between a half a million and 827 thousand viewers. It can’t be said that those productions are ignored.

However, eight of those ten shows were in the drama category. According to the report (page 117), CMF-funded drama attracted only eight percent of all viewers in 2023-2024. 82 percent watched foreign programs instead, and 10 percent went with domestic but non CMF-funded programming.

Even if there are eyeballs on the funded programming, they’re still only a small proportion of Canadians who are watching TV. And those are a small percentage of all Canadians. (I’m not sure I still know anyone who even owns a TV!)

So even if CMF is largely fulfilling its mandate, given the context, does that mandate in its current form do enough for Canadians to justify the cost?

Here are some considerations:

• Would the private sector have produced a Canadian edition of Law and Order without government intervention (and expense)?

• Would the Canadian cultural environment be missing anything of substance had a Canadian Law and Order1 franchise never existed in the first place?

• Has anyone defined - and measured - exactly what public good there is in television drama programming?

• Could whatever social gains expected through such programming be delivered via other (less expensive) channels?

Entertainment is great. But should taxpayers be funding it? Are there no more pressing demands on our attention and funds?

Besides television and other video content, Canadian Heritage also provides $40 million dollars a year to the Canada Music Fund. According to the GC InfoBase Canadian Heritage page, the Fund’s current formal target is for the number of streams of “Canadian music”2 on the top 10,000 domestic streaming chart to reach 13 percent.

No matter how deserving and talented creators of contemporary Canadian music might be, paying them $40 million a year will never help reach that goal - or anything like it. Ever.

Tellingly, to the best of my knowledge, no actual results related to that target (from any year) have ever been posted to GC InfoBase. But even if they’d reached those goals, you know who would make up nearly every last music stream in that 13 percent? Canadian creators who achieved their success without any help from CMF - and, as often as not, from all the way back in the 60s and 70s.

There’s simply no way for even talented young musicians to guarantee attention and traction in today’s fragmented music market. Why waste $40 million a year to prove what we all already know?

Read on:

The most common tool for the job is per capita gross domestic product (GDP). The problem with many flavors of GDP however, is that they’re really measuring economic activity, rather than household income or wealth. Also, currency fluctuations can help mask the results of GDP comparisons between countries.

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PPP-adjusted GDP per capita (Purchasing Power Parity) can be a lot better. But there doesn’t seem to be any easily-available PPP-adjusted GDP-per-capita dataset for all 50 U.S. states and all 13 Canadian provinces/territories. So, practically speaking, that’s out.

So I thought I’d gather together six (mostly) economic metrics describing both U.S. states and Canadian provinces and use them to build my own wealth index. With a little luck, we’ll get enough useful data for a passable comparison. You should feel free to download my spreadsheet containing my raw numbers and calculations.

I began with the latest mortality rates from Statistics Canada and World Population Review. It’s widely accepted that a population’s wealth is an accurate predictor of health and longevity. So living longer (or, more accurately, experiencing fewer deaths per year) would suggest the possibility of greater population-level wealth.

There are six U.S. states with higher mortality rates than even the worst Canadian score (which was Newfoundland at 11.5 deaths per 1,000 population). Canada’s best score (Ontario: 7.4 deaths) would rank behind just Utah and District of Columbia in the U.S. Overall, the provinces at least appear healthier (and therefore wealthier).

Next up was unemployment. The overall average unemployment rate of all U.S. states was just a hair over four percent, while the average of all ten provincial rates1 was 6.96. The top province here was Saskatchewan whose 5.2 percent rate would rank it 47th among states!

The percentages of people living below the poverty level in the U.S. was far higher than the numbers here in Canada. The average of all provincial rates was 10.86, compared with 12.62 in the U.S.

Home ownership is one place where we’d expect to see greater stress here at home. After all, even with the collapse of the condo markets in Toronto and Vancouver, buying even a tiny home on a typical Toronto or Vancouver income is mathematically virtually impossible.

To avoid currency and purchasing power mismatches, the best way to go about this is to calculate the income-to-housing ratio. So I took the median employment income for every state and province and divided that into the median home price for each state and province. The result is the number of years it would take for someone earning the local median income to pay for the average home (assuming every penny of income went into the purchase).

Bear in mind that we’re using provincial averages. That means Ontario’s 5.14 ratio isn’t something anyone in Toronto is ever likely to see. But the same will apply to, say, Manhattan vs Upstate New York.

That 5.14 ratio would, as it turns out, place Ontario in 25th spot among states. And Alberta’s 2.99 score - Canada’s best - would easily beat Iowa (3.37) the best in the U.S. I’m not sure how Newfoundland ended up in last place domestically with a 10.4, but only Hawaii (12.74) scored worse.

So while housing affordability is certainly a problem here, it’s not necessarily all that much better south of the border.

To incorporate the rental experience, I also calculated median rental costs by state (using table GCT2514) and province into median income. This will give us the percentage of income the average resident who rents living accommodation spends on shelter expenses. To get numbers for Canadian renters, I adjusted the “rented living quarters” numbers2 (which are an average of rental expenses incurred by all Canadians - even those who own their homes) to cover just the segment of the population who actually rent.

Here I got a real shock. The most expensive province (BC, where renters spend 10.73 percent of their income on housing) would have been the third least expensive state! It’s possible that the U.S. and Canadian numbers aren’t measuring exactly same things. I guess it’s also possible that Statistics Canada’s numbers underestimated rental expenses. But that’s what I’m seeing right now.

The final metric I used for my index was all income tax expenses as a percentage of income. That is, what’s the total federal, state/provincial, and municipal burden and how much of your income is left once taxes have been paid. As with rents, I’m not 100 percent sure that the U.S. federal and state/local numbers are measuring exactly what Statistics Canada’s income tax metric represents. But it’s probably not that far off.

Quebec is the province where the tax burden (25.78 percent) was highest. Only seven states cost their residents more. Saskatchewan, who pay just 16.8 percent of their income to governments, would have come fourth in the U.S. - behind just Wyoming and the two Dakotas.

Which is another way of saying that Canada’s tax-burden distribution isn’t all that different than the U.S. Note, however, that I didn’t include healthcare or post secondary education expenses in this comparison. If anything, those would tilt the results still further against American wealth.

Now let’s take a look at the index I created from all of those data points. Mississippi, by the way, ranks 32nd among U.S. states. Overall, as you can see from the first chart, four provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Manitoba) ranked among the top 14 U.S. states.

And three provinces (Ontario, PEI, and Newfoundland) showed up among the bottom 18 states:

The most obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that there are significant economic differences between provinces and states. But there isn’t any clear pattern differentiating between them based exclusively on country.

Everything I’d seen relating to other departments suggested a similar pattern. Official goals are typically process-oriented rather than tied to actual outcomes. Millions of dollars are regularly poured into generating detailed annual reports that, in fact, measure nothing of substance.

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Just for completeness, I thought I’d look through the actual program performance indicators, targets, and results as they’re reported in the GC InfoBase. The detailed and focused performance data you’ll find there would be hard to duplicate at scale through individual department reporting. But it’s probably the closest we’ll get to useful accountability with the system.

Let me share some examples of actual results from 2024-25.

• Health Canada’s departmental results include “Canada has modern and sustainable health care systems”, whose target was per-capita spending between $4,386.00 and $5,361.00. No results were provided. But if they were, what difference would it make? How does heavy spending in any way guarantee a “modern and sustainable health care system?”

• Health Canada also aimed for drug spending reaching between one and two percent of Gross Domestic Product. The actual result was 1.7 percent. But, again, calculating spending amounts is a terrible proxy for the only thing that counts: medical outcomes.

• Canadian Heritage targeted at least 1,190 Canadian TV productions delivered across “multiple platforms.” Results were not provided, but even successfully producing 1,190 productions will have zero impact on Canada’s heritage if virtually no one watches them. “If you build it, they will come” was a great line in a fantasy movie, not a how-to manual for “social cohesion”.

• Canadian Heritage also targeted the publishing of at least 6,000 Canadian-authored books. In the end, they claim 6,094 were published. But as I’ve written, considering how the overwhelming majority of Canadian books sell less than a few hundred copies each, does a number like 6,094 really demonstrate any reasonable return on public investment?

• One more example. Canadian Heritage established a goal requiring that at least 86 percent of Canadians feel that human rights are a shared value. They claim that 2024-25’s result was 95 percent. Really? One of every 20 Canadians they managed to find didn’t believe in human rights? Where were they polling: Iran’s IRGC headquarters? And how was Canadian Heritage comfortable taking the credit for this?

There’s plenty more publicly-funded slop where all that came from. As far as I can tell, we’re looking at thousands of federal employees across the public service working 9-5 to game their own system. Unless I’m missing something here, it’s embarrassing.

But when I checked out Veterans Affairs Canada, I got something very different. First of all, you can see just how extraordinarily detailed their programs are from this document. But the real difference is in how practical, precise, and measurable their goals are.

The department’s GC InfoBase page offers plenty of examples:

• Percentage of veterans who are satisfied with their financial situation. The target is “to be determined”, but the actual percentage was 66 in 2024-25.

• Percentage of veterans who have high level of mastery of their life skills. Target: 40 percent, actual score: 27 percent (up from 24 percent in 2023-24).

• Percentage of veteran clients of Veterans Affairs Canada who report an easy adjustment to post-service life. Target: 70, actual score: 49.

• Percentage of veterans who report that their health is very good or excellent. Target: 50, actual score: 41.

• Percentage of recommendations made by the Office of the Veterans Ombudsperson related to systemic issues addressed by the Veterans Affairs Portfolio. Target: 74, actual score: 74.

• Percentage of individual complaints reviewed and escalated by the Office of the Veterans Ombudsperson to the Veterans Affairs Portfolio that are addressed. Target: 80, actual score: 92.

I can’t tell you whether Veterans Affairs’ numbers are accurate, nor whether or not there are veterans whose serious needs are being ignored. But those targets tell us that at least someone in the department is serious about addressing real problems and tracking how well those problems are being met over time. Even if they’re failing more often than succeeding, at least they’re working hard at understanding where they stand.

If you’d ask me, this is what program tracking should look like.

Perhaps, however, you’ll argue that the work Veterans Affairs Canada does lends itself to this kind of easily quantifiable metric more than its peer departments. I would respond by saying that governments have no business legislating policies whose outcomes can’t be measured: they’re wasteful by design.

There’s more:

I’m in no position to predict the impact the strategy might have.1 What I can do is take a look back at previous attempts to control food pricing and assess their success.

Just for yuks, let’s go all the way back to Canada’s Anti-Inflation Act of 1975. The Act was passed as an effort to fight a serious run of inflation largely driven by oil prices. Grocery prices were never targeted directly by the Act, but restrictions aimed at large producers were expected to ease consumer prices indirectly.

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This chart uses Statistics Canada data to compare Canada’s Consumer Price Index (for all items besides food) with the CPI numbers representing just food. We get the years leading up to the Act and the half-decade that follows:

If the measures had been successful, we would have expected to see the inflation experienced by non-food products to slow or even drop, and the rate of food inflation to more or less follow along. In fact, while there was a brief pause in growth for the general CPI, food inflation continued its climb. Over the subsequent year or so (through 1977), food prices clearly rose more quickly than other commodities.

Overall, it would be difficult to call that effort a success. Fortunately, these days there’s no one with serious influence who’s pushing for a repeat of 1975. I hope.

Ok. So how have things been going over the past decade? Here’s how more recent data from the same Statistics Canada table looks:

There’s clearly a disconnect between food inflation and the rest of the economy that didn’t exist a half century ago. In fact, the two measures first came unstuck midway through 2008.2

It’s not immediately clear what’s behind this disconnect. Triggers from those years could have included destabilizing fluctuations in the Canadian dollar; oil pricing (along with related food-production cost increases); global price increases for wheat, corn, and other staples; transition to biofuels in the U.S.; and growing demand in China and India. But the economies of other nations didn’t react quite like Canada’s.

The fact that the regular CPI seems to have come permanently unstuck from food costs suggest that there’s something structural going on. That could include unsustainable agricultural costs, broken food supply chains, strange consumer demand patterns, or general productivity growth that somehow missed food production and grocery sectors. No one knows for sure.

Recent government moves - like the one-time grocery rebate in 2023 and the temporary GST/HST holiday at the end of 2024 - have had no measurable impact on costs. And they didn’t provide meaningful assistance where it was most needed. For a low-income couple with two children, the 2026 enhancement to the GST rebate would add just $22 a month over and above the original Credit.

What could actually make a difference? Well how about:

• Eliminating GST/HST on all foods. There are valid arguments for taxing snack and restaurant food. But there are way too many exceptions (like seniors and people living alone who have no choice but to buy food in small packages) to justify the policy.

• Eliminating industrial carbon taxes. No hand-waving and clever accounting theories can cover the reality that taxing food production and transportation will drive up food prices for consumers (although, realistically, the pass-through premium might not amount to more than $100 a year for a typical family).

• Eliminating (or replacing) supply management for dairy, chicken, turkey, and eggs. Supply management programs - which also happen to be a major trade irritant with the U.S. - likely add between $500 and $1,000 to a typical low income family’s annual food costs.

• The elimination of interprovincial trade barriers - which have remained largely unchanged despite Liberal election-themed hopes - would increase efficiency and competition and reduce compliance costs. Such changes could likely add another $250 or so in annual household savings.

None of those appear to be even aspirational targets in the government’s National Food Security Strategy. So my guess is that we’re in for more of the same.

Two years ago, I wrote here on The Audit about using government employment as a measure of public sector productivity. Since governments don’t produce anything tangible - and the quality of the services they provide doesn’t seem to be improving - what other productivity measure could there be?

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You might remember this graph from that earlier post. It represents the federal government employment population as a proportion of Canada’s total population:

Since then, the proportion climbed yet further to 0.94 percent in 2024 before falling back a bit to 0.91 percent in 2025 and then 0.89 percent by Q1 2026. All things considered, that’s not a lot to show for nearly a full year of post-election policy implementation.

This chart, based on Statistics Canada data, shows raw employment numbers over the past three years. You can see that there was a decline in the months following the election, but hiring has since returned to its older growth trend.

So the quick answer to “have the federal Liberals meaningfully implemented their public sector reduction policy yet?” would be “No.” And the same answer would apply to measures of government productivity. They’re still hiring more people to provide static or even reduced service levels.

Believe it or not, federal workers make up a minority of Canada’s public sector. And given the near-universal employment growth at both the provincial and municipal levels, we’re forced to conclude that productivity hasn’t been stellar anywhere in the country.

This chart shows us employment growth (as a percentage) between April 2023 and March 2026 by province:

There are obviously some noteworthy changes going on there. However we’ll need some context for that to make sense of those numbers. So this next chart gives us provincial employment per capita. That is, how much public sector employment grew in relation to population changes:

You can see that one out of every forty residents (not workers: residents!) of PEI works for their provincial government in some capacity. And New Brunswick and Saskatchewan aren’t too far behind. Ontario and Alberta appear to be the most efficient in the country.

That would seem to show an interesting shift from the results I reported in this post from two years ago:

In any case, Canadian municipalities have something to say to both provincial and federal governments: “Hold my beer transfer payment.”

The 515,689 individuals who proudly carry the lanyard for Canada’s cities and municipalities have reason for joy: there’s currently a whopping 11.12 percent more of them than there were just three years ago. Think that’s a big number? There are actually 44 percent more of ‘em now than there were in 2006.1

This chart breaks down municipal employment growth over the past three years by province:2

None of this is to suggest that public servants as a group do nothing useful and don’t care about their work. But it does hint that government hiring isn’t guaranteed to solve real-world problems. And it would also seem that Canadian government policy makers at all levels haven’t yet sufficiently absorbed the idea that irresponsible spending is - well - irresponsible.

I’ve already discussed the costs involved with generating all those publications (not to mention the misaligned incentives resulting from setting targets internally). But there’s another problem that might loom yet larger: who’s actually reading all this stuff?

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Now it’s true that Treasury Board works very hard to make that information as accessible as possible. The Results tab on the GC InfoBase page for a given department will definitely make it easier to quickly visualize an organization’s programming performance. But even with all that information, we’re still missing context.

So I decided I’d feed a small subset of that data to an AI model to see what insights would come out the other end. I went with departmental results reports from 2019-20 and 2024-25 from Canadian Heritage. For good measure, I also uploaded InfoBase results data. I then asked for assessments based on these points:

• The extent to which key deliverables were met or missed

• Whether there were changes to frames of reference that make it difficult/impossible to compare

• Were any statements or descriptions in the documents in conflict with reality?

• Were any predictions proven wrong?

• Were any goals/accomplishments more about words and ideology than real-world changes?

Here are some quick observations:

1. Most formal departmental targets were met, but that’s because the targets were usually activity-based rather than outcome-based.

2. There are few outright factual conflicts with reality, but there are many instances where spending, consultation, or representation are treated as evidence of success without demonstrating real-world effects.

3. Some broad ambitions—especially around social cohesion and language vitality—show weaker evidence of success than the reports imply.

4. The 2024–25 report contains substantially more ideological and values-oriented language than the 2019–20 report, and success is more often defined in terms of alignment with those values rather than measurable societal outcomes.

And here’s the full response:

The reports generally demonstrate that Heritage Canada became better at reporting activities, consultations, funding distributions, and inclusion initiatives, but not necessarily better at demonstrating concrete societal outcomes.

1. Changes in the Frame of Reference

This is perhaps the biggest issue.

The 2019–20 report focused heavily on:

• cultural exports

• arts funding

• official languages

• Indigenous languages

• multiculturalism

• youth engagement

• participation metrics

The 2024–25 report increasingly focuses on:

• inclusion

• equity

• representation

• accessibility

• anti-racism

• gender-based analysis

• online harms

• platform governance

• diversity of creators and audiences

Many performance indicators shifted from measuring outputs and participation toward measuring representation and inclusiveness.

For example:

2019 framing

• How many projects were funded?

• How many Canadians participated?

• How much Canadian content was produced or exported?

2024 framing

• Were underrepresented groups included?

• Were equity objectives advanced?

• Were funding tools modernized?

• Were diverse voices represented?

These are not necessarily bad metrics, but they make longitudinal evaluation difficult because the underlying definition of success changed.

2. Deliverables That Were Clearly Achieved

Several initiatives can reasonably be called successes.

Indigenous Languages Act implementation

In 2019 the Department predicted that the Act would become a major pillar of activity.

By 2024:

• permanent funding streams exist

• Indigenous Screen Office funding was secured

• implementation structures were created

• language revitalization programs expanded

The prediction that Indigenous-language policy would become institutionalized was largely correct.

Creative Export Strategy

The 2019 report highlighted:

• export funding

• Frankfurt Book Fair preparations

• international market access

Those programs survived and expanded over the next several years.

The prediction that exports would remain a major policy focus proved correct.

Digital Policy Agenda

The 2024 report emphasizes:

• Online Streaming Act

• Online News Act

• platform regulation

The groundwork for this direction was already visible in earlier Heritage planning documents.

The Department successfully shifted from traditional cultural policy toward digital-platform governance. Whether the policies themselves are successful is a different question.

3. Goals That Were Not Clearly Met

Several areas appear weaker.

Official Languages

The Department continued to report activities and agreements.

However, broader demographic trends moved in the opposite direction:

• declining relative weight of French outside Quebec

• continuing assimilation pressures in minority-language communities

• ongoing concerns about bilingual service delivery

The reports frequently measure:

• agreements signed

• money spent

• organizations funded

rather than actual language retention outcomes.

This creates a gap between activity and demonstrated success.

Social Cohesion and Inclusion

One recurring departmental goal is a more inclusive and socially cohesive Canada.

Yet between 2019 and 2025 Canada experienced:

• heightened polarization

• rising antisemitism

• rising anti-Muslim incidents

• increased social conflict around race, gender, and identity issues

The reports rarely engage with these outcomes.

Instead, success is generally defined by:

• number of funded projects

• number of consultations

• awareness activities

rather than measuring whether social cohesion actually improved.

This is probably the largest gap between reported accomplishment and observable societal outcomes.

4. Predictions That Were Proven Wrong

Several implicit assumptions from 2019 did not age well.

“Inclusion programming will strengthen social cohesion”

This appears throughout Heritage reporting.

The evidence by 2025 is mixed at best.

Many indicators measure participation in programs, but Canada became more politically and culturally polarized during the same period.

The reports provide little evidence that funded inclusion initiatives produced measurable improvements in cohesion.

Public Service Media Stability

2019-era reporting assumes a continuing central role for traditional broadcasting.

By 2025:

• television audiences fragmented further

• streaming services gained market share

• CBC audience challenges persisted

This is partly why Heritage shifted toward Online Streaming Act implementation. The original assumptions about the broadcasting environment proved too optimistic.

5. Statements Potentially in Conflict with Reality

I would not say there are outright falsehoods.

However, there are several areas where the reports arguably present inputs as outcomes.

Example:

funding was provided to support inclusion

That is factually true.

But it does not demonstrate:

• reduced discrimination

• increased trust

• improved cohesion

• improved life outcomes

The reports often move rhetorically from:

“money was spent”

to

“progress was achieved”

without showing the causal link.

The same issue appears in:

• anti-racism programming

• multiculturalism programming

• youth engagement programming

• diversity initiatives

This is common across many federal departments, not unique to Heritage.

6. Growth of Ideological Language

This is where the difference between the reports is most noticeable.

The 2019 report certainly contains language around:

• diversity

• inclusion

• reconciliation

But it remains largely program-focused.

By 2024, language emphasizing:

• equity

• representation

• intersectionality

• accessibility

• anti-racism

• gender-responsive approaches

appears much more frequently and often serves as a success criterion in itself.

A recurring pattern is:

2019

We funded X projects.

2024

We funded X projects that advanced equity, diversity, accessibility and inclusion objectives.

The latter may be entirely legitimate policy, but it is a shift from measuring outputs toward measuring alignment with normative values.

7. The Most Important Structural Weakness

The reports tend to evaluate:

• activities

• consultations

• funding decisions

• partnerships

• participation rates

far more rigorously than they evaluate ultimate outcomes.

For example:

A strong outcome measure would be:

Percentage increase in Indigenous-language speakers.

A weaker measure is:

Number of Indigenous-language initiatives funded.

The reports heavily favor the second type of metric.

As a result, Heritage Canada generally appears successful according to its own indicators because the indicators are often measuring departmental activity rather than societal change.

• What was the original problem it was supposed to fix?

• Has the implementation of the Act led to any positive outcomes?

• What other important work could have been done with the resources committed to compliance (i.e., opportunity costs)?

What I will do here however, is discuss some of the legislation’s indirect impacts. Specifically, the compliance costs.

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Here’s how government documents describe reporting requirements:

So every single year, every single government department is required to generate and submit detailed Gender-based Analysis Plus (GBA Plus) compliance reports.

In practice, departments decide for themselves how to fulfill their reporting obligations. Some, like Parole Board of Canada, will incorporate their GBA Plus report into their general planning document. For their 2026-27 departmental planning document, the GBA Plus section took up just 440 of around 7,500 words.

At the other extreme, Veterans Affairs Canada published a standalone GBA Plus document that stretched past 6,500 words in length. Canadian Heritage’s 2026-27 departmental plan compromised by incorporating GPA Plus reporting into each of the five core responsibilities sections of their general planning document. GPA Plus-related reporting took up 3,300 out of that document’s 15,000 words.

And then there’s the Canadian Grain Commission who chose to publish their own 1,000 word GBA Plus compliance document. I’m not sure whether there isn’t a subtle, cynical subtext to this introduction:

Some of the personnel costs of compliance can be sensed from this excerpt:

And it looks like there’s an ongoing struggle to figure out how to apply GBA Plus objectives to actual, real-world department programming:

To be sure, transparency is important. If a government decides to create a policy, then they are responsible for ensuring that it’s applied by all relevant departments.

Nevertheless, if you’re going to force dozens of government departments to commit significant resources to yearly reporting at this scale, the benefits had better be worth it.

Sure, a lot of the work probably amounts to cutting and pasting boilerplate text from one year to the next. Hopefully, even that will soon be handled invisibly by AI: not only will no one ever read the stuff, but no one will have even written it either. It’ll just be a digital workflow, silently moving electronic characters from one file system location and web page to another.

But that’s definitely how things work right now. The legislation’s goal involved lots of human interaction. And that interaction would undoubtedly drain time and resources away from actual program operations and drown out other, more important reporting.

After all, we’re not just talking about someone typing away at a keyboard. Real compliance will require that each federal organization ensures they’re:

• training staff in GBA Plus methodology;

• conducting analyses of programs and expenditures;

• collecting and disaggregating data;

• attending interdepartmental working groups;

• maintaining GBA Plus “responsibility centres”;

• drafting, reviewing, translating, and approving the annual tables;

• responding to Treasury Board and Women and Gender Equality Canada requirements;

• program-level analysis;

• management review and sign-off.

What does all that cost taxpayers each year? All told, probably upwards of $50 million. Which means that since the 2018 program start - and independent of implementation of the actual Act - CBA Plus reporting compliance costs alone are probably approaching a half billion dollars. And after all the reports, can we really positively identify any concrete street-level improvements?

What else could we have done with that money?

There’s more:

If you ever need to make financial, educational, employment (or retirement) decisions, then you should share at least some of my enthusiasm.

You might already have joined me on my travels through Reddit comments sentiment analysis, setting AI models loose on detailed demographic data, reverse-engineering insider trading activities, or my recent post on using Canadian Election Study survey data in eccentric ways. The common thread of all of those efforts involved looking for new ways to understand Canadians through creative data analysis.

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So a new API provided by Delphi Markets caught my attention. The API allows you to use an AI model to analyze the complete datasets of multiple prediction markets - like Polymarket and Kalshi - with a single prompt. That gives me a lot of analytic power for assessing the betting decisions of thousands of people.

At any rate, the goal of analyzing bets taken by other people would be to identify trending market sentiment as it’s applied to Canadian economic, social, or political events. More specifically, I’d like to be able to measure the accuracy of prediction market sentiment against the stuff produced by high-cost government consultants and officials.

First though, let’s see if we can use historical market activity to measure how successful prediction market predictions have actually been. There have definitely been some spectacular failures:

2025 Canadian federal election (the Liberal party comeback)

Prediction markets at one point heavily favored the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre. On several large markets, Liberal victory odds reportedly fell into roughly the 10–25% range before rebounding sharply after the leadership vote and tariff-related political shifts.

The eventual Liberal win therefore represented a pretty obvious “market miss” relative to the earlier consensus. This is particularly telling because:

• Millions of real dollars were invested by users of various prediction markets, so this wasn’t just some random online poll.

• The market clearly underestimated the party’s leadership replacement effects, widespread anti-U.S. nationalism, and voter consolidation dynamics.

Carney becoming Prime Minister quickly

Markets initially treated Mark Carney entering frontline Canadian politics as unlikely or speculative. But once leadership transition pressure accelerated, the repricing happened very quickly. Traders who entered early on “Carney PM” or “next Liberal leader” style contracts likely captured substantial returns, but most early players simply missed it.

Early resignation pressure on Justin Trudeau

For much of 2024, prediction markets still assigned meaningful probability to Trudeau remaining Liberal leader through the next election cycle. Like most of us, they obviously missed growing internal caucus pressure, donor fatigue, and the panic caused by some awful electoral math.

Canadian housing / Bank of Canada rate timing markets

There were several periods where markets overestimated “higher for longer” persistence. When growth slowed faster than expected, most betting contracts - even in markets with six- and seven-figure cross-platform liquidity - were caught incorrectly anticipating delayed easing or economic recovery.

Immigration-cap reversal markets

Markets (and “expert” political commentary) initially underestimated how aggressively the government would reduce caps on international students, temporary residents, and immigration-growth. Dominant market sentiment instead voted against visa restrictions, population-growth slowdown, and sharp policy tightening.

No one is claiming that these large, skin-in-the-game markets are supposed to be perfect, but they are expected to deliver predictions that outperform opinion polls or common knowledge.

Having said that, in many of those same predictions, markets were quicker to correct to changing conditions than many pundits and experts. But in the context of Canadian events, those benefits will mainly show up at the margins.

However, information from prediction markets could be particularly valuable where information is fragmented or politically distorted, official forecasts are unreliable or slow, and existing incentives reward optimism or opacity. Here are some real possibilities:

Immigration and refugee system backlogs

Here’s a sector that’s long suffered from chronic forecasting failures, “politically constrained public discussion” (translation: “You’re a racist and a bigot for even using the word immigrant!”), and poor operational transparency.

Prediction markets - fueled by inside information - could potentially forecast:

• refugee-claim inventory levels,

• IRB processing times,

• asylum approval rates,

• temporary resident population levels,

• or shelter utilization by claimants.

There are people both inside and outside government who know that information. Some of them could be willing to put their knowledge to work.

Housing completions and construction bottlenecks

Canadian housing policy - especially programs involving First Nations - is full of aspirational targets that frequently conflict with reality and seldom produce useful status reports.

Prediction markets could therefore be useful for:

• housing-start targets,

• condo completion rates,

• municipal approval timelines,

• infrastructure delivery,

• or labor-shortage constraints.

These are markets where the expertise of developers, lenders, contractors, and municipalities, can be profitably tapped.

Major Canadian government IT projects

Canada has a…mixed…record on federal IT-projects. See Phoenix, ArriveCAN, PrescriptIT, and IRCC digitization delays for details. Large complex and unwieldy tech projects always attract unhappy (and chatty) contractors and engineers. And they can be much more reliable sources of information than senior management.

Housing stress interactions

CMHC and other official agencies do provide useful data and analysis covering the housing market. But it doesn’t always arrive as quickly and in much detail as we’d like. Lenders, brokers, insolvency trustees, and real-estate professionals on the other hand, all have access to localized information that’s not immediately visible through official statistics. Which could make prediction markets especially attractive destinations for any insiders willing to put some money on the line.

I think you get the idea here. You should feel free to use your favorite AI model to dip into the wisdom of the prediction markets yourself. But I hope to test it out for myself for at least a few topics in the near future.

For now, Canadians buying market bets on these platforms might be exposing themselves to legal risk. But the fact that so many Canadians seem willing to take that risk presents an opportunity for the rest of us.

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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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?

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