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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Take a close look at this image taken the other day in a residential neighborhood in Toronto:

That sign marking the end of the reduced speed zone is just 150 feet from the stop sign. Given that the unposted city limit is 50 km/h, one can’t help wondering:

1. Whether the laws of physics would even allow such quick acceleration for normal vehicles.

2. Whether Tesla drivers (who have the hardware to possibly pull it off) would ever want to drive that way.

3. What city planners were trying to accomplish with the grand effort.

For full context, there’s another “MAXIMUM 30 AREA BEGINS” sign just 150 feet after the stop sign…and just 250 feet before the road veers sharply left, followed soon thereafter by another stop sign.

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It gets worse. Think about this picture, taken just a few blocks from the first;

Did you notice the public elementary school just 150 feet past the end of that reduced speed zone. That amounts to an official invitation to accelerate as you approach a place where a few hundred small children regularly gather.

All that isn’t quite as crazy as it seems. Ontario’s Highway Traffic Act sets the default, unposted statutory speed limit for any road within a municipality in Ontario to 50 km/h. Until recently, cities had no legal right to make any changes to those limits. So when Toronto originally decided reduce speeds on residential streets, a simple declaration wasn’t an option: without explicit signage, any new laws would be unenforceable.

Since then, however, the province amended the Highway Traffic Act to permit designated-area speed limits. This happened all the way back in 2017. Which means that the kind of local block-by-block signage you’re seeing in those images is no longer necessary. All Toronto has to do is post area speed limits at neighborhood entrances.

All that sounds like multiple levels of government cooperating with each other to get stuff done. Great. And those signs in my pictures? They’re leftovers from the period between the initial policy decision and 2027. Right?

Wrong. Those signs were actually installed - at great cost - some time in the last couple of years. The reason I know that is because mowing my front lawn was much easier three years ago. And the only thing that’s changed (besides the density of weeds) was the unexpected appearance of one of those signs.

Which means that the city has been implementing an expensive and, in many ways, irrational policy for no good reason. By the time their policy hit my street, they could have just as easily installed a far smaller number of area signs.

My guess is that the team responsible for sending out sign crews has no contact with the office that coordinates with the provincial government. Or, at the very least they’ve had no contact since 2017.

Not inspiring.

Keep reading:

As they stand, the rules prohibit organ removal before the determination of death followed by a five minute “no touch” period. But removal from euthanasia cases could theoretically begin as soon as the patient slipped into unconsciousness.

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Would that be a legal and moral bridge too far? Well, perhaps it’s a legal and moral bridge that, for the most part, we already crossed decades ago.

It all comes down to two questions:

1. How do you define death?

2. Who gets to apply that definition?

Medical standards once required the irreversible loss of all brain function (“brain death”) before harvesting was permitted. That standard has, over the past few decades, shifted to allow intervention as soon as “controlled circulatory death” occurs - even before brain death. This means organs can be removed while there’s still measurable brain stem activity.

According to Ontario Health’s Trillium Gift of Life Network, the final go ahead is signaled when “two physicians who are not connected to Trillium Gift of Life Network will confirm that a patient has died.”

But can donors and their families know which standards those two physicians will use? Will those standards necessarily fit with the requirements of various religious traditions and with the wishes of potential donors?

As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no way to find out.

Because I have no pressing plans for my organs once I’m no longer using them, I was once interested in signing up for the program. Why not make them available for other people? So five years ago I contacted Trillium for clarification. They didn’t seem to even understand my question.

To my knowledge, no one has yet objectively defined the precise biological transition between life and death. At a certain point, we can all agree that it’s over. But I don’t particularly want some distracted, sleep-deprived residents with conflicting incentives to decide when that point has arrived.

What kind of conflicting incentives could there be? We can all appreciate a doctor’s impatience to use my organs to save another life. But then there’s CanMEDS 2025 (now often described simply as CanMEDS). That’s the Royal College of Physicians’ new framework for identifying and describing “the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve.”

According to the College website, the proposed changes (now only available as a web archive) will require physicians to:

• Support the goals of anti-racism and anti-oppression

• Support the goal of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility

Those are incentives about which I’m less comfortable. Doctors trained with those standards might honestly try to establish that there’s been genuinely irreversible1 damage before signing off on my death. But they might also opt for “their truth” and apply “equity” priorities instead. And there’s no way for me to know in time to do anything about it.

Considering how loosely end-of-life is currently defined, what do you want to bet that, soon enough, it’ll be extended ever so slightly to include breathing MAID patients.

But we are allowed to notice.

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I’ve already written about how Liberal attempts to control Canadians’ online speech are at sharp odds with the 74 percent of us who believe people “should be able to say what they think even if it offends some people”. For details on those attempts, see:

• Bill C-36 - hate propaganda, hate crimes and hate speech (2021)

• Bill C-11 - Online Streaming Act (2023)

• Bill C-63 - Online Harms Act (2024)

• Proposed Safe Social Media legislation

And that’s not all. Consider the broad unpopularity of:

• Carbon tax

• Bail reform

• Drug decriminalization and “safe supply” programs

• Weak policing of demonstrations supporting Hamas, antisemitic incidents, intimidation, and encampments

And who can forget immigration?

While the worst elements of Canada’s irrational immigration policy are at least temporarily on hold, I haven’t been able to forget them. In general, there was one thing I could never understand about the self-destructive immigration policies pushed not just here, but by many other wealthy Western governments: Why do it?

• Why knowingly anger your own citizens by suppressing their ability to discuss real things that are in right front of their eyes?

• Why knowingly harm your own citizens by tolerating “cultural” crimes like rape gangs?

• Why knowingly cripple your economy by accepting far more asylum claimants than your systems can handle?

• Why knowingly harm and marginalize existing populations (like Jews) by tolerating imported racism and violence?

• Why knowingly reverse decades of women’s rights efforts by importing hordes of people who actively resist?

Governments must have known all this would happen. They realized it wasn’t in the best interests of most of their citizens. So why did they do it?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the government’s own official claim that immigration was “critical to Canada’s economic growth”. I also showed how Canada’s distinctive lack of economic growth over the past immigration-heavy decade wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement for the policy.

Some claim that it’s really all about social/political manipulation, with the idea being that most immigrants will eventually skew left and vote Liberal. I wouldn’t dismiss such a possibility out of hand, but it would represent a high-risk, high-stakes gamble. And I wouldn’t be comfortable signing on without seeing some significant supporting evidence.

Of course, ten years of government policies weren’t all driven by just one thing.

• Post secondary institutions no doubt lobbied for easier access to large and profitable pools of foreign students.

• Elite policy insiders no doubt felt pressure to conform with the ideology that was popular among their international peers.

• Governments no doubt found it difficult to reconfigure the immigration-related bureaucracy even after the consequences became obvious.

Perhaps there might be something to learn from someone’s recent post describing a trip to the UK:

The author emphasized that in the stretch of just one or two generations the entire UK working class was replaced by imported labor. The traditional lower class who served their “betters” for centuries and had now moved up the economic ladder, seem to have largely lost interest in dead-end service jobs. It was either import replacements or find a way to get by without a service sector.

I’m not sure how applicable all that is to Canada. Our employment economy isn’t identical to England’s. But our countries’ governing classes do seem to share a common dose of self interest and a noticeable lack of self awareness.

What has to happen to reestablish a healthy public-to-government connection?

The report acknowledges that Statistics Canada’s “victims of police-reported violent crime” metric (which reported 1,183 violent crimes per 100,000 in 2024) is not covering exactly what’s measured by the FBI Crime Data Explorer (which reported just 359.1 per 100,000) - so comparing those numbers won’t be all that useful.

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In fact, finding reliable cross-border crime data that provides genuine apples-to-apples comparisons isn’t at all straightforward. And on reflection, it may just not be worth the effort. But while I was poking around through that Canadian data, I did notice something interesting.

After nearly a decade of declines ending in 2018, the crime rate across Canada has been steadily rising ever since.1 As of 2024, the rate was 1,183 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. But how vulnerable you might be will largely depend on where you live.

Perhaps surprisingly, big cities aren’t nearly so bad. Rates in Toronto and Vancouver are well below the national average, and Montreal is right on the average. But as you can see from the chart, smaller centres like Drummondville, Chilliwack, and Lethbridge are far more dangerous places. And Saskatchewan and Manitoba are by far the worst among provinces.

This isn’t exactly breaking news. Statistics Canada has already noted the trend:

In fact, the “violent Crime Severity Index in rural areas is almost 50% higher than in urban areas”. And indigenous people - who are more likely to live outside of urban centers - are significantly overrepresented both as victims and accused in violent crime statistics.

Why should this be? There are a few theories you’ll see discussed. But each of them is weakened by the existence of strong counter-examples.2

I’m not being cynical or ironic when I say that I honestly have no idea what’s behind these crime numbers. Or, more accurately, I have no idea why there are more rural than urban criminals.

What should we do? Cleaning out Chinese and other foreign criminal gang activity from every layer of society (including government) wouldn’t be bad place to start. Beyond that, I can only say that I’m pretty confident blindly throwing more government subsidies and benefits at the problem won’t help.

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.