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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t stop here:

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

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

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

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

• Early satellite communications through the Anik geostationary systems.

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

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

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

• Large-scale resource extraction in difficult environments.

• Sustainable forestry infrastructure.

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

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

Well how’s all that working out now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More reading:

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

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

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

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

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

Could judges be held personally liable for their bad decisions?

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

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

Could mandated reviews help?

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

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

• Requiring independent post-incident system reviews

• Enhancing reasoning requirements in high-risk cases

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

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

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

Could Public Transparency Help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Administrative Expenses as a Proportion of Charitable Activities

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

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

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

Fundraising Costs as a Proportion of Fundraising Revenues

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

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

Program Expense Ratio

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

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

Government Revenue Ratio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which isn’t to say that Canadians aren’t doing it anyway. A quick search of Polymarket will show you that there are all kinds of active markets for events of exclusively Canadian interest - like whether the Bank of Canada will change its interest rate on a given date. Covert participation requires little more than a VPN and a cryptocurrency account.

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Prediction markets are popular because they allow users to (anonymously) commit cryptocurrency funds as wagers on the future outcomes of specified events. Millions of dollars worth of bets are made based on how users feel elections, economic developments, or wars will turn out.

How much money a successful prediction will earn depends on how much was invested in a particular market altogether and how many other users predicted correctly. Earnings will also depend on the complexity of the market question. Linked predictions going beyond just “win” or “lose” to “win or lose by how much” can increase the payout.

Besides their entertainment value, prediction markets are closely monitored by economists, social scientists, and political parties. That’s because market activity data represents many thousands of individuals who’ve actually put their money down in support of their opinions. In other words, prediction markets are turbo charged opinion polls.

But there’s a dark side to all this beyond the built-in risks of gambling and binary trading. It’s worth understanding how it can impact the way we’re governed right here in Canada.

As Racket News recently reported, prediction markets are seeing patterns that suggest a dangerous form of insider trading. As an example, markets for predicting a U.S. attack on Iran last June provided significant payouts to users whose predictions were unnaturally accurate - and who profited yet further by holding back their bets until the very last moments before attacks were announced.

This suggests that people with inside information were - perhaps illegally - profiting from their sensitive positions. Perhaps worse, betting behavior could possibly be used by adversaries to anticipate military activity. And there’s also evidence that official U.S. government publications have been distorted to falsify outcomes and alter market bets.

According to a detailed report, a Times of Israel journalist was pressured and eventually threatened with violence unless he edited details of a published report about a missile impact near Beit Shemesh in Israel.

It seems that whether the impact was classified as a hit from a missile or from missile debris would determine the outcome of many hundreds of thousands of dollars of Polymarket bets. People who needed a particular outcome were apparently willing to resort to blackmail and violence to “correct” history.

That particular journalist - Emanuel Fabian - stood firm and refused to allow the change. But who knows whether other journalists or government workers with authority over official records are made of the same stuff.

In a more local context, there’s not a lot of cash currently riding on Bank of Canada rate changes: typically around $100,000 is available in total for each bank decision. But just imagine how someone deep inside Department of National Defence might be tempted to anonymously throw his or her hat into the ring for a $20,000 market on whether Canada will back out of the F-35 deal with the U.S. Or couldn’t someone from Privy Council Office rationalize “earning” a bit of extra easy income relating to Canada’s tariff policies?

It’s not just that the insider trading disrupts the betting markets themselves. It’s that public servants in positions of power are able to change government policy - not for the good of the nation - but to enrich themselves.

At the very least, this might be a good case for some updates to official government policy, not to mention an extra clause or two in civic service employment contracts.

related:

Some remarkably detailed Statistics Canada data seems to confirm that economic activity in the public sector is growing a lot faster than in the private sector. The dataset - Building permits, by type of structure and type of work - gives us the monthly value of building permits issued across the country since 2018. But that’s relevant to much more than just construction.

After all, construction isn’t just about the trades who will do the building, but about the people who will eventually work in those locations.

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The data is broken down by building types and what kinds of work are being undertaken. I selected just “Total commercial” and “Total institutional and governmental” and requested the full value of all permits. That value represents the estimated construction costs that permit applicants expect their projects will face.

What’s interesting about this particular view of the data is that we can compare trends in economic sectors. Here’s a graph of the construction activity undertaken across Canada:

You can see how the value of all commercial projects has remained more or less stable (growing by just 24.88 percent) while the value of institutional construction increased by 160.16 percent over the same time. Institutional construction now makes up nearly 50 percent of all activity.

The “institutional and governmental” sector includes schools, hospitals, churches, and government buildings like legislative facilities and police stations. But the vast majority of that institutional construction is paid for with public funds.

It turns out that the dataset contains no numbers at all that are specific to “government buildings”. That means the real “institutional” numbers are actually much higher.

When I narrow down the data to just census metropolitan areas (CMAs), I get this:

Private sector construction here grew by just 14.16 percent since 2018, while the institutional numbers jumped by 179.11 percent. While commercial projects are still comfortably in the majority within CMAs, their 10-month average share of the market dropped from 74 percent around 2018 to 62 percent over the past 10 months.

All of which tells us that economic activity in the public sector is far stronger than what’s going on in the for-profit world. And 15 years from now, if current trends continue, commercial activity in the country will have dropped below 50 percent.

What’s driving the change?

Governments at all levels are spending more than ever on health care, education, and public facilities. (Alberta apparently lead the way in 2025.) At the same time, higher interest rates, regulatory complexity, and soft demand for office space have depressed commercial construction activity.

Why is that a bad news?

All that public sector spending relies on taxpayer or borrowed funds. Canada’s already dangerously high government debt levels mean sustained high spending could pressure budgets, leading to higher taxes, cuts elsewhere, or elevated borrowing costs. Once governments are forced to cut back (as will almost certainly happen sooner or later) fiscal policy will tighten, and the resulting transition will create volatility. And pain.

Government spending decisions - because they’re not led by market signals - are vulnerable to misallocation. That can happen through overbuilding in politically prioritized sectors, underbuilding in high-demand commercial segments, or infrastructure that doesn’t match economic geography. This can reduce overall economic efficiency.

The construction sector already faces tight labour markets and material constraints. Heavier public spending will push up costs for concrete, steel, and skilled trades. This will likely deepen Canada’s housing supply crunch and can slow business expansion in offices, retail, or logistics.

Commercial construction (offices, logistics, retail, industrial space) is tightly linked to business formation, productivity, and private-sector expansion. Social programs are important, but they can’t replace those critical economic drivers.

Governments appear to be increasing their role in Canada’s overall economy. Perhaps that’s intended to replace commercial investment lost to over-regulation and taxation or perhaps it’s about implementing a big-government ideology. But our data seems to be hinting to us about where all this could end.

I say “poorly planned” because, more often than not, hindsight shows us that the policy was a miserable failure. If you’ve been reading The Audit for a while and that sounds familiar, it’s because so much of what I write about here involves comparing policy goals to real-world outcomes. Here are just a few examples representing many billions of dollars of ineffective government spending:

And I say “overtly political” because a government’s working agenda is unavoidably designed with electoral survival in mind at least as much as the national interest.

Still, all that’s not to suggest that no one in Ottawa cares about Canada and Canadians. In fact, Parliamentary and Senate committees often host genuine and even intelligent bi-partisan debate over the value and legality of pending legislation. The system is designed to ensure that meaningful amendments are applied to bills before they hit the streets.

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What I’d like to talk about here is the question of how much all that good-faith debate actually impacts the laws that Parliament eventually passes. Specifically, I’m going to measure how much of an influence official reports tabled in Parliament by committees had on the legislative outcome.

To make this happen, I compiled data representing laws passed during Parliament’s 44th session (Monday, November 22, 2021 to Monday, January 6, 2025). There were, in total, 60 government bills introduced in the House of Commons that achieved Royal assent (i.e., became law) during that session.

As far as I can tell, of those 60 bills, committee reports existed for only 37 of them. It’s reasonable to assume that the other 23 bills passed with little or no input from committees. In some cases, that’s because the bills were simple and uncontroversial. In addition, committees might have debated some of the others but, for whatever reason, failed to submit their report.

I asked two separate AI models to compare three documents related to each of the 37 bills in question:

• The official text of the bill’s first reading

• The official committee report relating to the bill

• The official text of the final law on receiving Royal assent

The scope and nature of any changes between first reading and Royal assent - and how much those changes aligned with the committee’s recommendations - should tell us how much of an impact committee debates have on our laws.

The AI models assigned each bill a score between one and ten, where one to three represented some minimal technical amendments, four to seven suggested there were moderate substantive changes, and eight to ten suggested that the committee report sparked major restructuring or a policy shift.

There was a significant gap between the two responses: one model gave me an average score of 6.46 while the other averaged 2.85. If I apply those scores to all 60 laws from the 44th Parliament - which makes sense when you consider that committees had no measurable impact on the 23 bills for which there weren’t reports - then those scores would drop to 3.99 and 1.76 respectively.

I wouldn’t take those precise numbers too seriously. After all, they’re the products of unsupervised AI assessments. But I think they do allow us to make a very general observation that the value of committee work is limited.

Let’s dive down for a bit more detail. Government bills in their original, first reading state seldom arrive in their final state. By the time they reached Royal assent, the texts of these 37 bills had, on average, 3,283 added words, 3,280 deleted words, and a text change rate (TCR) of 2.32.1

Our 37 committee reports contained an average of 34.84 “legislative amendment units” (LAUs). Each unit represents a single instruction to modify, add, or delete something in the current bill’s text.

Is there a statistically significant relationship between those two numbers. In other words, can we safely say that the more amendment instructions filed in a report the more clauses of the bill’s final version are changed?

As you can see from the scatter plot below, there is indeed a visible correlation between TCR scores and change rates. That single outlier at the top-right of the chart influenced the statistical effect, but the overall significance was still there even when I removed the outlier.

Of course, that doesn’t prove that the final version of a bill necessarily reflected the committee’s preferences. But it does strongly suggest the possibility.

So in the final analysis, we can justifiably conclude that the work done by Parliamentary committees has a relatively minimal impact on the big-picture legislative process. At the same time, we can assume that, when committees actually do execute the hard work resulting in formal reports, they’re making a difference.

What should change? I’m no expert in the inner workings of Parliament, but my suspicion is that there’s a serious conflict between a government’s legislative aspirations and overwhelming forces of institutional inertia (and incompetence) standing in its way.

Out of frustration, powerful Parliamentary leaders might be aggressively stewarding bills between readings to the point that there’s not enough time for proper analysis in committee.

The problem is, at root, mostly political. Governments chronically under perform and compensate by removing important guardrails.

One obvious solution? Refocus on just those few areas where government can make a positive difference and get out of the business of micromanaging what can’t and shouldn’t be managed at any level of detail.

Admissions are backlogged because there aren’t enough beds available.

Beds are often in short supply because they’re being occupied by Alternate Level of Care (ALC) patients - who no longer need acute hospital care but remain in hospital beds because there’s nowhere appropriate to discharge them.

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ALC patients are often stuck where they are because there aren’t enough Long Term Care (LTC) beds available.

And LTC beds are in short supply because…well, just why are they in short supply? A lot of the story revolves around negative incentives that can convince investors to avoid the market altogether.

• Rising construction and borrowing costs are certainly a factor. It’s estimated that a modern LTC facility often costs $300k–$400k per bed to build in Canada.

• Delays due to the usual licensing, permitting, and plain old government inertia issues play a role. It can take close to a decade from an official announcement of a new public LTC facility before a facility opens.

• Regulatory inflexibility can limit the ability of providers to adjust their pricing to account for economic changes.

• Finding trained staff to handle the huge growth in demand is, according to some analyses, the most significant problem.

Let’s take a closer look at staffing. According to Statistics Canada, there were 282,818 individuals employed by nursing and residential care facilities in 2003. By 2024, that number had risen 83 percent to 516,898.

Of course, because the patient population could have grown even faster over that time, that number won’t help us. Unfortunately there’s no useful data available representing the number of patients in residential care over time. So we’ll have to look for proxies.

Canada’s population grew by 30 percent through those 21 years. Using the annual population numbers we can calculate that the number of nursing and residential care facilities employees per 1,000 Canadians grew from 8.87 to 12.53. That’s a relative growth rate of 40 percent, which is significantly faster than the overall population change. If that’s the whole story, than there should be no staffing shortages in the industry.

Of course, since we all know that Canada’s elderly make up a rising proportion of the population, we should probably narrow down our focus. In 2003, Canadians aged 85-89 made up 0.94 percent of the total population. That number had grown to 1.35 percent by 2024. The change was just over 44 percent.

As you can see from the chart below, the elderly population (the people most likely to require residential care) is growing faster than the cohort of caregivers they need - but not much faster. The relatively narrow difference isn’t nearly enough to fully explain the depth of the shortage in beds.

Assuming this official data is accurate, claims that workers abandoned the industry in large numbers during and after COVID are simply wrong.

It’s unlikely that the patient-caregiver ratio has increased over the past decades. If anything, the spread of labour-saving tools like patient lift devices and electronic monitoring has probably reduced the proportional staffing needs. And while competition from higher-paying hospital jobs has always been a challenge, hourly wages for the sector have actually more than kept pace with inflation.

To some degree there isn’t any simple solution to the LTC supply problem - and, by extension, to the consequent problems with healthcare access in general. But there are definitely opportunities for partial wins, especially when it comes to government’s traditional role as a provider of artificial constraints.

Or, to put it differently, it would be wonderful if Canadian governments at all levels rediscovered the fine art of getting out of the way of people who want to build stuff.

But it’s notable that the average number of eligible Canadians who can’t be bothered to participate is climbing. On average, in the eight elections contested since the election of November 27, 2000, 36 percent were no-shows. Even though last year’s Liberal victory attracted by far the most voters since the millennium began, 31 percent of us still sat it out.

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Is the decline really about apathy and laziness or is there something else going on? As you might recall from my “Are Elections More Consequential Now Than a Generation Ago?” post from a while back, the policy gap between the Liberal and Conservative parties has grown considerably over the half century leading up to the 2021 election. Here’s how that change mapped out:

So it’s possible that, rather than laziness, some Canadians1 feel party polarization has left the political middle unrepresented. Depending on your definition of “the political middle”, there’s certainly solid evidence to support such conclusions. Both Liberals and Conservatives have shifted away from the center over the past decades.

Broadly speaking, such alienated Canadians are hardly unique. 45 percent of Americans currently identify as independents - more than at any time in history. And the intense unpopularity of most (all?) formerly mainstream parties in Europe appears to point towards significant political fragmentation.

So that’s where we seem to be right now. But how did we get here and, more importantly, where might we find ourselves next?

Before we go there however, it’s worth asking a more basic question: is low voter turnout a bad thing? After all, no democracy has ever actually collapsed primarily because people just stopped showing up for elections.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that lackluster voting patterns aren’t in and of themselves destructive, but they (1) are indications of serious trouble and (2) can lead to negative outcomes.

What Weak Voting Tells us About a Society

The loudest message we can take from the silence of millions of eligible voters is that they don’t seem to trust the system. Specifically, they don’t believe that their vote will translate into improved living conditions for themselves and their communities.

That could be because - as I’ve previously written - a single vote represents much less than a voter’s share of the population. If tiny First Nation bands can derail national projects; Quebec receives far more than its mathematical share of seats in Parliament and the Senate; and the Prime Minster’s office effectively unilaterally decides who will occupy thousands of the most powerful jobs in the country; then what value does a regular vote have?

The distaste for politics might also come from years of chaotic and expensive policy shifts. Spare a thought for those poor Liberal supporters who, in 2015, were assured that their votes would allow the party’s just and righteous (and expensive) immigration and climate policies to save the world from imminent destruction - only to discover in 2025 that it was all a ghastly mistake. If the folks in charge don’t trust their own passionately held (and recently discarded) assumptions, why should anyone else?

Perhaps, too, it’s the thought that the MP you’re officially voting for is little more than a robot who will reliably vote along party lines. It’s certainly true that genuine dialog and debate does sometimes happen in Parliamentary committees. But how much of that translates to policy? A cynic would suggest that legislation is effectively shaped and sealed long before it arrives in committee.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not advocating against the value of voting. I’m just trying to understand why a third of us can’t be bothered.

How Weak Voting Can Damage a Society

While there may be no historical examples of democracies that imploded through simple disinterest, that doesn’t mean that bad things can’t come from poor voter turnouts.

Consider how just 30.1 percent of eligible voters brought the Liberals to power in 2025. The election was certainly fair and legal and the party has every right to exercise its power. But seven out of every ten Canadians now feel disenfranchised.

Now consider how only a tiny - and mostly anonymous - fragment of whichever party’s in charge has a meaningful say in how policy is designed and delivered. This is a process known as elite capture - which will often appear alongside crony capitalism. And voter apathy represents a big part of what makes it happen.

Canada hasn’t yet seen the worst abuses that are common following elite capture, but it’s a direction we shouldn’t be heading.

No one wants to solve the uncommitted voter problem more than Canada’s political parties. Whoever figures out how to reshape the narrative and swing even one in three of those no-shows to their side will probably gain power for a generation.

Splitting that atom will probably require some serious reforms to the way the political process currently works. And regardless of our particular political leanings, we all share an interest in finding a way forward.

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Getting back to immigration if you don’t mind, have the facts on the ground actually changed since late 2024? The short answer is “yes.” And that’ll be your long answer, too. According to official figures, Canada’s population increased by just two-tenths of one percent between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025 (compared with 2.5 percent over the previous 12 months).

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By the fourth quarter of 2025, the number of foreign work permit holders had dropped by more than five percent since the Q4 2024, and there were 28 percent fewer study permit holders here.

What about refugee claimant numbers? Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada reports that “34 percent fewer people submitted an asylum claim in 2025 compared to 2024” and that they “saw a 56 percent drop in asylum claims from TRV (temporary resident visa) holders in December 2025 compared to December 2024.” So not only are fewer people filing refugee claims at the border, but the TRV-to-asylum flow also seems to be drying up.1

Who says opinion polls don’t matter? It looks like even creaky old governments can get stuff done if they’re sufficiently motivated.

Assuming those reports are accurate, I guess that’s all good news for the country’s long-term economic stability.

However, that’s not quite the whole story. It’s no secret that a big part of the problem with immigration in Canada is how the refugee processing system is, to put it gently, chronically backed-up. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were applying for asylum or stranded somewhere along the process.

How many hundreds of thousands? According to Statistics Canada, the total number of asylum claimants, protected persons and related groups2 in Canada in Q4 2025 was 504,767. That’s an increase of 17 percent over a year earlier.

How can that number grow at the same time as new asylum claims are, as we just saw, dropping?

Well that’s because previous waves of claimants have still not been processed through the system. And that, it would seem, is largely because there are at most 700 or so members of the Immigration Refugee Board (IRB) to screen applicants and around 100 federal judges available to hear judicial reviews.

Why the government originally thought it was a good idea to encourage refugee applications at a scale far beyond any realistic ability to manage them is a mystery for the ages. But the fact that the IRB faces an impossible task introduces serious real-world consequences.

Besides the incredibly costly build up of claimants - often receiving public support - waiting for their cases to be completed, there’s intense pressure on IRB members to process as many applicants as possible in as short a time as possible.

As the whistleblower report presented by this thread on X reveals, it takes far less time and effort for an IRB member to say “yes” to an applicant that to say “no”. Apparently - as is documented by the data provided here - some officials are much better at resisting the pressure than others.

Specifically, there are members whose “recognition rate” (i.e., the percentage of “yes” decisions issued by a given member) is below 20 percent, and others whose rate is 100 percent. To be sure, some of that disparity is due to members who specialize in particularly high- or low-risk countries of origin. But that’s certainly not the whole story.

The whistleblower’s analysis of the Refugee Law Data site data apparently found a strong correlation between low recognition rates and briefer employment at the IRB. In other words, members who say “yes” more often last longer in their jobs.

This clearly isn’t good. Besides the real risk of admitting dangerous criminals into the country under the guise of refugees, the whole mess is costing us a fortune.

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Federal government spending for 2026-27 on “early learning and child care” programs - at $9.2 billion - would slip neatly into the number five slot on that list. Although that $9.2 billion number is not quite correct, since an unknowable portion of the Canada Social Transfer is also spent on child care. Also, another $318 million will be provided specifically through the Indigenous Early Learning and Child Care Transformation Initiative.

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All that makes child care among the largest budget items taxpayers face. It’ll definitely be worth exploring how all that money is spent and what concrete results we’re getting.

What Is the Funding Supposed to Accomplish?

Affordable child care is reasonably associated with increased income for mothers.1 It’s also possible (although by no means proven) that improved access to affordable child care could, population-wide, increase fertility rates.

As defined by the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) System, the primary goals of the government’s spending include lowering the costs parents pay and expanding the availability of regulated (licensed) child care spaces. Specifically, the program was expected to achieve a national average of $10 per child, per day rate by March 2026.

Well, hey! It’s March 2026 as we speak. Are we there yet?

I appears not. Statistics Canada reported that, in late 2025, half of all parents who use child care had difficulty finding a provider. 31 percent of parents who were not currently using child care claimed that their child was on a waitlist. Average monthly expenses for full-time centre-based child care across the country dropped from $663 in 2022 to $435 in 2025. That’s an improvement, but it’s still well above $10/day.

Does the CWELCC Program Serve the Right Families?

Across Canada, there are currently more than 600,000 children aged 0-5 enrolled in licensed child care programs. But that’s out of a total of around 2.2 million children in that age cohort.

What about the other three-quarters of Canadian families? Some of them send their kids to unlicensed care programs - which aren’t eligible for government subsidies. But most families without access to subsidized programs care for their children themselves.

In many cases, of course, that’s an ideal choice. And it happens to be the choice my wife and I made for all of our own kids when they were young. But more often than not, it’s the alternative forced on mothers who can’t find external care that fits their needs or budgets. And raising their own kids will invariably reduce the income that the caregiver - usually the mother - could have earned during those years.

How much of the $10+ billion in annual child care spending does the government direct to the three-quarters of Canadian families who aren’t served by subsidized care? Not one penny. Now it’s true that everyone is eligible for the Canada Child Benefit and its provincial equivalents. But child care-subsidized families are also included in “everyone”.

As we’ll see in just a minute, for structural reasons, it’s wealthier families who are more likely to benefit from CWELCC subsidies. That means lower-income families are more likely to be left without support, which further contributes to reduced income.

The obvious solution would be to redirect some or all of the funding directly to families. This wouldn’t be at all difficult to implement as part of the existing Canada Child Benefit - which would offer the added bonus of being income-tested.

Is the CWELCC Program Disproportionately Benefiting Wealthier Families?

For various reasons, the federal government decided not to incorporate income testing into the program’s eligibility requirements. As a result, wealthier families could well end up with more spaces than you’d expect given their proportion of the population. There are a number of possible reasons for that:

• Higher income families are more likely to have the resources to monitor application windows closely, apply to many centres simultaneously, and take time off work to complete paperwork or attend interviews.

• Higher income families are more likely to live in neighborhoods where there’s high centre density, newer or larger facilities, and more stable (i.e., better paid) staffing.

• Higher income families are more likely to satisfy provider priorities for stable, full-time employment and predictable work schedules.

• Higher income families are more likely to be able to find alternative solutions to tide them over while they’re signed up for waiting lists.

Is the CWELCC Program Itself Making Things Worse?

Statistics Canada data on centre-based child care providers in 2024 pointed to widespread waiting lists for care spaces existing side-by-side with available capacity. 46 percent of non-profit providers across the country reported that they were not currently at capacity, while 79.6 percent of the same providers had a waiting list.

Well which is it? Are there too many spots or too few?

What’s likely going on here is that at least some providers can’t find all the workers they need. They’re unable to fill their spaces, but it’s not because there aren’t parents lining up to get their kids in.

This chart averages the maximum-capacity and waiting-list rates across both the for-profit and non-profit sectors and presents them as a single composite scarcity intensity score:

Why is this happening?

The CWELCC program works by imposing fee caps on providers. Any revenue shortfalls providers experience due to the limits on what they can charge parents are meant to be offset by operating grants paid from the program. But economic conditions change. And the lag between real-world events and governments getting around to approving new limits can sometimes be long enough to prevent some providers from adjusting quickly enough.

It’s also possible that it’s not the cap itself that’s directly causing trouble, but that the promise of cheaper child care opportunities has itself driven demand higher. The resulting new demand for child care labour could have indirectly driven salaries beyond sustainable levels.

So tens of billions of dollars were spent, specific program goals were missed, big-picture plans for social change haven’t worked out and, instead, it’s likely that the program itself is at least partly to blame. And perhaps worst of all, CWELCC seems to be attracting precious little attention from media platforms and from the public.

Considering the vast funds underwriting this experiment, is it time for some serious oversight? Or perhaps this is just what we’ve come to expect from government programs.

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According to the National Post, Federal Justice Minister Sean Fraser recently rejected Alberta’s request for input into the selection of judges - including Supreme Court justices - explaining: “We need to rigorously adhere to the boundaries of the Constitution, including the need to protect the independence of the judiciary.”

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Now it's well known that the Province of Quebec already has significantly greater powers than Alberta is looking for. So it would seem obvious that the minister intentionally employed a false justification for his government's policy.

Put plainly, seeing that upset me. But it also made me wonder how often our government uses disinformation when talking to us.

Well first of all, how often do they try to tell us stuff? An awful lot, it turns out. Through just 2025, Global Affairs Canada - for example - issued 411 information releases through their canada.ca page. Multiply that by the more than 100 departments and agencies that enjoy communicating in one way or another, and it’s clear that government produces a steady torrent of communications.

How many federal public sector workers are involved in the government’s messaging-industrial complex? Searching on the Government Electronic Directory Services (GEDS) page shows us that there are 1,660 individuals across government whose job descriptions include the word “communications”. Of those, 770 are Communications Advisors and 117 are Communications Assistants.

There are an additional 336 positions identified by terms like “engagement” (106), “marketing” (43), or “outreach” (58). That’s around 2,000 full-time positions that are officially advertised as messaging-related. But I’m sure there are countless more who are expected to devote only partial focus to communicating and others whose job titles aren’t caught by my simple search.

We can safely assume that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of official press releases regularly pushed out into the world are boring and routine. They’re hardly the stuff of controversy, much less deceit. But if even one in a thousand contains a willful attempt to misdirect our attention away from an inconvenient truth, then the government’s credibility is damaged.

I’m afraid I can’t accurately estimate the likelihood that a given news release will contain lies. But I can assure you that Sean Fraser’s Justice Department is far from the only dishonest source of official disinformation.

Since the next examples will also relate to climate change policy, I’m sure some of you will complain that I’m over-focused on anti-left talking points. And that’s true. But it’s because, for the past decade, we’ve had a left-leaning government in power. For better or for worse, no one else has been authorized to issue official announcements.

With that caveat in mind, I’ll note how multiple federal ministers recently attributed rising food prices in Canada primarily to climate change. In fact, François-Philippe Champagne (Minister of Finance and National Revenue) himself rose in the house to confidently assert that climate change at least partially explains the inflation we’re experiencing:

“All of this is part of our response to a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world. We know, for example, that while inflation has cooled off since its postpandemic peak, food inflation remains stubbornly high for Canadian families. Global supply chain shocks caused by tariffs, geopolitical disruptions and climate change have all caused food prices to rise around the world.”

Given how Canada’s food inflation right now is more than double what they’re seeing in the U.S. and the highest among G7 countries, this claim is clearly untrue. If it’s really about the climate, shouldn’t everyone suffer broadly similar inflation? I wasn’t aware that global warming respected national borders.

I’m sure that, one way or another, climate change is impacting economies around the world in many ways. But to hang the local food inflation of the past year or so on the climate - rather than more relevant influences like government policies - sounds like a hammer desperately in search of a nail. And it’s not honest.

Similarly, official communications on the Climate Competitiveness Strategy makes objective claims that simply don’t reflect reality. The Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (Lena Metlege Diab) claims that:

“Canada must continue to take climate action to protect our planet and the competitiveness of our economy”

Considering how, after $200 billion and a decade’s worth of government effort, global warming hasn’t reversed or even slowed down, that’ll be a hard sell. Even if the actual results of continued climate change were unavoidably catastrophic, government action is highly unlikely to make any difference. Claiming otherwise is - what’s the word? - disinformation.

But the real whopper here is the claim that climate action can “protect…the competitiveness of our economy.” I’m unaware of any support for the idea that diverting $200 billion away from business growth, infrastructure investment, and social services will deliver an economic result that doesn’t involve suffering for low income Canadians.

The Minister of Environment and Climate Change (Julie Dabrusin) claims:

“With the Climate Competitiveness Strategy, we are positioning climate action and economic growth as inseparable. Canada must continue to take climate action to protect our planet and the competitiveness of our economy”

There’s no serious evidence that we’re “positioning” to do anything of the sort. And there’s a great deal of evidence that it’s current government efforts that are killing economic growth.

All of those examples could have played very differently with just a few minor edits. Instead of:

Canada must continue to take climate action to protect our planet and the competitiveness of our economy

Something like this would have inspired more trust and confidence:

Taking reasonable counter arguments in account, the government has nevertheless chosen to focus on the anticipated benefits of continued climate action

A government that’s genuinely open with its citizens and receptive to their concerns is a government that at least might be trusted. But publishing content built on disinformation - and then trying to restrict the free speech of its opponents - is setting itself up for trouble.

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Everyone in these parts knows that CBC plows through upwards of two billion dollars of public funding each year. And it’s certainly no secret that their “linear” (i.e., TV and radio) audience is collapsing even faster than their budget is growing.

No matter how brilliant their programming might (or might not) be, if no one’s watching, what’s the point? Just what do Canadians get for all that spending?

CBC insiders and supporters tell us that it’s the digital world where the real action’s happening. That’s where all the eyeballs are and that’s where those eyeballs are enjoying all the magic that only public broadcasting can deliver.

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So how’s that playing out in practice? Way back in 2024, I noted how only four CBC products ranked among the top 200 Spotify podcasts in Canada. To be fair, since then there were months where a few more made the list and probably some with less. But when you account for CBC’s competitive economic advantage, the corporation is clearly under-performing.

Measuring CBC’s Digital Distribution Reach

Now how about YouTube? As you can see for yourself, Global News just squeaked onto the Canadian top 100 list at number 100, but not one of CBC’s highly-curated YouTube channels was anywhere to be seen.

By contrast, there are five separate BBC YouTube channels ranked in the UK top 100, all significantly ahead of their commercial news competitor, Sky:

CBC News also can’t claim to be outperforming their broadcast peers when measured in either YouTube subscriber numbers or content volume. This, despite the fact that CBC enjoys much larger budgets and has no existential need to return a profit on its online investments.

In terms of followers on the four main social media platforms, it’s obvious that CBC News is leading its peers:

On X at least, CBC News also boasts more followers than the Globe and Mail (1.8M), Toronto Star (1.1M), or National Post (1.0M).

The CBC website does attract more monthly visits than its primary competitors:

Although you should bear in mind that, since that CBC number covers the full website rather than just the news pages, this isn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison.

But in the context of CBC spending, it’s hardly a fair fight. Remember - since they also enjoy revenue from advertising, subscriptions, and asset leasing - even the massive public funding numbers only represent 70 percent of total CBC income.

For (estimated) context, CTV spends just $600M annually on their news operations, Global News checks in at around $840M, Globe and Mail costs hit $300M, and the Toronto Star burns through $250M.

The bottom line is that taxpayers are heavily funding CBC to compete head-to-head with (nominally) private companies and the CBC is still just barely keeping up.

How many Canadians consume CBC content?

Let’s assume that those 4.55M YouTube subscribers and 3.5M X subscribers are all actual human beings, all Canadian, and that they’re not being counted twice - all of which are unlikely to be true. That would still represent only a small fraction of Canada’s population.

And let’s assume that those 64M monthly cbc.ca visits were the product of, on average, three visits per person, per day.1 That would mean that there were only around 650,000 unique visitors each month, which is just over one percent of Canadians. That would represent a tiny fraction of the population.

If so few Canadians are being informed, enlightened, and entertained, by what measure is CBC successfully fulfilling their parliamentary mandate to “provide a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains”?

By what logic should we bleed all that funding away from more pressing national interests (like reducing our crippling deficit) when, by all the metrics we’ve seen, the private competition is getting the media creation job done on their own?

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Well perhaps, thanks to data provided by ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data), it may be possible to find out. ACLED data identifies and documents global instances of protests, riots, and violence against citizens. Obviously, events leading to serious violence and mass death are their primary concern. But the data covers peaceful protests as well.

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In total, since the earliest records in the dataset from back in late 2020, there have been 9,253 events in Canada. That would come to around 225 events per million Canadians. For comparison, the U.S. experienced 97,311 events over that time, a rate of 285 per million.

So, when expressed as a proportion of our population, we have around 21 percent fewer events than the U.S. That could mean we’re a more peaceable bunch, that we’ve got less to complain about, or that Canadian governments do a better job mercilessly crushing dissent. My guess is that your political predisposition will largely determine which of those you choose.

Fully 93 percent of Canadian protest events went off peacefully, compared with 91 percent in the U.S. There were 172 events involving looting, property destruction, or violence here (4 events per million), compared with 1,662 (5 per million) in the U.S.

While we might have “won” that particular competition with the U.S., visualizing 172 violent events1 across Canada is still sobering.

Diving down into the data a bit, 34.15 percent of that violent nastiness took place in Ontario. But since Ontario’s population makes up 38.9 percent of the national total, I’ll count that as a plus. The Maritime provinces - along with Alberta and Saskatchewan - also contributed violence and looting at levels below their share of the population.

That would leave Quebec, BC, and Manitoba (literally) punching above their weight. Quebec - the worst offender - contributed 29.3 percent of our collective poor behavior, while only representing 21.8 percent of the population.

The dataset’s population exposure numbers could possibly give us a sense of the impact demonstrations have. Population exposure is a data-derived estimate of the number of people who are potentially exposed to the event by virtue of living nearby. This number would represent the level of general disruption a protest causes.

Overall, the average event in Canada impacted 13,254 people, while protests in the U.S. affected 30,545. This could possibly suggest that American protests are larger and better organized. Although the difference could also be explained by the fact that U.S. cities tend to be more densely populated, which would expose more people to protests no matter how many participants there might be.

In support of that reading of the data, when broken down by province, we see that population exposure visibly drops in low-density provinces. This strongly suggests that, at least in Canada, these numbers have more to do with where demonstrations happen rather than their intensity.

What we already know is that, even what confronted with criminal behavior, Canadian law enforcement agencies will rarely make arrests. And when they do, there’s a vanishingly small chance that those arrested will ever face consequences - or even see the inside of a courtroom.

The violent events highlighted in this dataset represent just one more indicator of the kinds of criminality that’s (fairly) common in the country and, for the most part, left uncontrolled.

As I’ve written, the government does make many of the details driving charity financing available to us. But there’s also a great deal that’s invisible. For me, one mystery involves at least some of the vast sums that are commonly transferred between registered charities each year. Why don’t charities use the resources they’ve been given to execute their mandates themselves rather than outsourcing it to others?

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In some cases, the reasons are obvious. CanadaHelps.org, for example, distributed more than $775 million to other Canadian charities in 2024. But, considering their mandate, that’s exactly what you’d expect them to do. After all, they exist to help their website users find and donate to charities. As someone who’s been using the service for many years, I appreciate the convenience - especially having to deal with only a single tax receipt at the end of the year.

But what about, say, The Mastercard Foundation (TMF) who, in 2024, transferred $552 million to “qualified donees” (and another $305 million to non-qualified donees)? Did you know that TMF has long term investments worth $72 billion that, in 2024, they spent more than $2.2 billion in total, and $1.2 billion on charitable activities? Just in terms of operational size, the charity would easily rank in the top ten Canadian cities.

TMF exists due to something of an historic anomaly. As the name suggests, the foundation was created through a one-time donation of assets from the U.S. company, MasterCard Inc. There may have been charitable intentions involved, but the original deal was primarily meant to benefit the company’s tax liabilities. Due to peculiarities of Canadian charity tax law, the foundation was created exclusively here, rather than in the U.S.

There is currently no legal relationship between MasterCard Inc. and TMF. Canadian government tax revenues are not reduced through the charity’s activities and, it should be noted, TMF receives no government funding. Although it’s hard to get a precise number, I suspect that the majority of TMF donations are directed at non-Canadian organizations. Still, there’s no doubt that many hundreds of millions of dollars remain here in Canada.

Which raises in interesting side point. Considering the scale of spending by TMF - along with what’s spent by many hundreds of TMF’s wealthy peers - it’s probably fair to say that private charities have a meaningful impact on many high-profile social problems. TMF, for example, supports many of the same indigenous groups and “diversity-identified” populations as do our governments.

Is the impact of those private donations taken into account when governments map out their own support for overlapping programs? Is actual need and program effectiveness in a strategic context the only consideration used for planning?

In any case, some of the huge numbers I’m seeing in charity-to-charity transfers are still curious. To be sure, although I have no clue why the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation saw fit to donate $152,676,086 to University Health Network in 2024, I’m fairly confident that there’s nothing dark going on.

But there are many other cases that aren’t so easy to dismiss. One possible explanation that came to mind would involve CRA’s disbursement quota for charities. The quota requires charities to, each year, spend a certain percentage of any assets1 in their possession rather than simply accumulating wealth. The threshold is 3.5 percent of the average value of unused property up to $1 million, and five percent on the portion that exceeds $1 million.

Consistently failing to meet the spending threshold could eventually lead to the loss of an organization’s charitable status - and exposure to tax liabilities. So perhaps some of the movement of funds back and forth between charities is nothing more than organizations generating fake charitable activity to meet their disbursement quotas.

To find out, I examined 2024 filings for 22,615 Canadian charities who reported at least some charitable spending and transfers to qualified donees. Three-quarters of those spent more than six percent of the value of their assets in charitable activities.

However, 4,769 organizations spent less than five percent of their asset valuation, and 3,806 spent less than 3.5 percent. 25 percent of the sub-3.5 percent spenders own more than four million dollars in assets.2 Allowing for the fact that I don’t have access to precise asset valuations, there nevertheless do seem to be more than a few charities who should be upping their game.

I’m assuming that many organizations feel pressured to keep their spending in line with quota requirements and, the more assets you own, the greater the pressure you’d feel. Therefore, if transfers between charities often represent “fake” charitable activity, you’d expect to see more of it among organizations with larger gaps between their spending and their declared assets.

However, when I tested my assumption, I found absolutely no correlation between large gaps and more transfers. That, as far as I can tell, means that organizations with larger gaps are no more likely to engage in transfers than other organizations.

To show you just how clear that conclusion is, I plotted the relationship. If there was a lot of such fake activity, there would be something like a straight line from the bottom-left corner of the graph to the upper-right. I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I’m seeing:

So I guess it’s unlikely that charity-to-charity transfers are masking dishonest quota-avoidance on a large scale. But there are definitely enough curious transfers going on that warrant a closer look.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure exactly what form such a closer look might take. But there’s an awful lot at stake, including the very real possibility that government funding is being misdirected to organized crime gangs and terrorist groups - both here and abroad. So why not tighten up the system just a bit?3

Sure, the Liberals are hyper-focused on making sure no Canadian will ever be able to use AI to generate something that doesn’t meet CRTC approval. And they’re busy enough planning their lottery ticket purchases major investments into AI research and infrastructure build-out. But I haven’t yet seen evidence that the government has been serious about gaming worst-case scenarios and thinking about how the disruption could be managed.

So this post will offer a couple of realistic scenarios detailing what could happen, followed by some practical suggestions for policies that could possibly lead us to a softer landing.

The “Gee, AI Sure Is Helpful” Scenario

On the plus side, we could experience a relatively modest expansion of AI integration that - through cost reductions and new digital services - boosts real gross domestic production (GDP) growth to 2.5 percent annually (compared with a current baseline of around 1.8 percent).

The flip side to that is the downscaling of the current workforce by 10 to 20 percent. We’d see some wage polarization, with AI-ready labour in urban tech hubs coming out as winners and everyone else losing. Since human contributions to productivity will be relatively minimal, wages would likely flatten for most of those still employed.

Using software developers as an example, through the next five years, we’re likely to see the loss of between 40,000 and 160,000 jobs in the coding-adjacent technical workforce. That would represent between eight and 25 percent of current employment in the sector. That would likely also come with depressed wages for those left with jobs.

These are changes that are already in progress. I can’t imagine any scenario where I would ever need to hire a human programmer - unless he’s also willing to shovel my driveway and mow my lawn.1

That’s one possible scenario. But it’s a pretty optimistic take.

The “Whoa! AI Sure Is Disruptive” Scenario

There are industry insiders who are convinced that things are moving a whole lot faster than most of us probably imagine. In this “worst-case” scenario, agentic AI tools are increasingly capable of independently executing complex tasks. This will allow significant labour substitution at the system level, replacing most human activity involving legal, technical, and financial operations.

I’m definitely seeing plenty of signs of this in my own work and I’ve heard about parallel developments across multiple sectors. Work that once required retaining a handful of lawyers for weeks or a team of analysts over a fiscal quarter can now be done in hours or days. At that point, demand for labour doesn’t decline. It collapses.

Now add in exponential growth in general-purpose robotics where technologies are increasingly commercially deployable for dangerous, dirty, and repetitive physical tasks. Think how many people are currently employed in warehouse, construction, mining, agriculture, and maintenance operations. Also: think about that from the perspective of a business owner whose major costs involve salaries, benefits, and healthcare expenses.

The sudden economic shock from all that would be unprecedented and devastating. We could see millions of jobs eliminated or radically deskilled. Sure, we’ll still need plenty of “human-in-the-loop” oversight jobs, but they’ll pay far less than the roles they’re replacing. Think how much less senior analysts now earning $120,000 will be able to demand once they’re renamed “AI supervisor”.

Lost income on that scale would lead to some significant system-wide pain, including:

• $50 billion less federal and provincial income tax revenue each year

• Maxed-out Employment Insurance systems

• 30 percent lower urban residential property values

• Spiking mortgage defaults

• Municipal council defaults

• <Your worst nightmare here>

How Might Canadian Governments Respond?

Based on decades of experience, you can expect governments to draw on many of the same go-to tools they used to manage previous crises:

• Skills retraining programs for the unemployed and underemployed. Such programs historically led to modest successes - even in economies where there was plenty of unmet demand for specific skills. That will likely be far less true this time around.

• Deep deficit spending to finance supplemental wage subsidies and EI expansion.

• Deeper deficit spending to subsidize critically damaged industries (which will often face no realistic hope of survival).

• New taxes, capital gains formulae, and usage levies on businesses driven by AI and robotic workflows. In principle, there’s certainly nothing wrong with taxing successful businesses to support social programs. But designing taxes that aren’t punitive to the point where they drive businesses out of the country can be complicated. And the performance of recent Canadian governments hasn’t been steller on that score.

• Rebalancing payroll tax systems. As with business taxes, this is a devilishly difficult needle to thread.

To be fair, there may not be a lot of great options available for even the smartest policy planners. But it’s a pretty good bet that what never worked well in the past will probably fare even worse this time.

What Should Governments Be Doing to Prepare?

While there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of thinking about these issues inside government, it’s not like no one has addressed the potential crisis. And, to be fair, at least one parliamentary committee has published thoughts on the subject. Although, hilariously, a primary focus of that discussion appears to have been assisting “diverse” workers. This is “arranging deck chairs on the Titanic” level prioritizing.

It would be nice to get some sense that the galaxy brains in Ottawa have at least dragged themselves out of bed to address the real issues.

At the same time, I would suggest that “positioning Canada” to “show leadership through global initiatives” is a distracting waste of time. The number of influential people and institutions on Earth who care what Canada thinks about these things is zero. And even if the Prime Minister did find some audiences keen on listening to his thoughts, the private businesses driving change are not among them.

Similarly, building AI compute infrastructure here in Canada in a way-past-its-prime attempt to create a local market is crazy talk. Elon Musk is just months away from deploying the first of tens of thousands of AI data centers into orbit where they’ll be powered by the sun. Do you really think a couple of overpriced warehouses somewhere in northern Quebec can compete? And that’s assuming such projects even received preliminary approval before 2038.

From everything I’ve seen, the number one priority right now should be eliminating government deficits and sharply reducing debt. Facing catastrophic tax revenue declines at the same time as catastrophic personal financial crises would be difficult even with room in the budget to maneuver. But heading into history’s greatest economic crisis with a $90 billion annual budget deficit is pretty much the same as vigorously waving a table cloth in surrender before the battle even begins.

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It doesn’t take much effort to find insightful discussions describing how online sports gambling is damaging both individuals and sports events themselves. This recent piece in The Free Press is a great place to start. But it’s a lot harder to find evidence that Canadian governments - busy legalizing sports gambling opportunities - have done much to minimize the harm.

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First, some numbers. nation-wide revenues from all gambling industries in Canada had been fairly stable between the mid 1990’s and the COVID disruption in 2020. But as you can see from the chart, something definitely changed in 2022 that was much more than a “normal” post-COVID recovery.

Two regulatory changes likely sparked that growth:

• The 2021 legalization of single-event sports betting (Bill C-218, the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act)

• Ontario’s launch of regulated online gaming in April 2022 through iGaming Ontario (a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario)

In fact, since 2022, revenue growth in the sector was much faster in Ontario than (nearly) any other province:

Ontario saw 101.38 percent growth in their gambling industry GDP between 2015 and 2024, more than double Quebec’s growth and nearly 10 times the growth in BC. Only Alberta saw a greater rate of growth: 127.43 percent.

If anything, Alberta has tightened its online gambling laws in recent years. So why are they seeing so much income from the industry? Understanding this might take us somewhere interesting.

If you examine industry statistics, you’ll see that employment numbers have mostly been falling since long before COVID. There were 40,448 Canadians working for the gambling industry in 2015 but just 38,063 by 2024 - a six percent decline. That combination of rising business volumes and declining employment suggests a general shift from bricks-and-mortar operations to labour- and capital-efficient online activities.

By contrast, Alberta’s employment levels in the sector have remained basically stable: going from a peak of 6,200 in 2019, through COVID declines, and back up to 6,137 in 2024. This could reflect stronger ongoing performance for physical gambling venues like casinos and VLTs - which could possibly also explain the increasing business activity.

Now let’s look at Ontario where employment in the industry since 2017 has dropped by 20 percent. Proportionally, Ontario’s industry productivity may not have grown as dramatically as in Alberta, but the raw numbers are far more attractive. That’s because - requiring so little labour - they come with higher profit margins. But also because they generate so much income for the provincial government.

Thanks to online deregulation, this is an industry that won’t provide much employment. But much like the case with the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the income is just too attractive to resist.

How about the consequences? In the U.S., where online sports gambling has been legal for longer and where the problem has been more seriously studied, here’s what seems to be true:

• Approximately 2-5% of sports bettors develop a gambling problem

• Sports betting addiction accounts for about 15-20% of all gambling disorder cases

• Around 3 million Americans are addicted to sports betting

• Online sports betting accounts for nearly 70% of sports betting addiction cases

• Sports betting addiction increases the risk of criminal behavior by about 25%, due to financial desperation

In addition, research has identified what are known as “dark patterns” (design elements that subtly push users toward undesirable or harmful behavior) specifically in online gambling platforms. These include:

• Harder-to-find controls for setting limits

• Urgency prompts

• Default high bet values

• Friction in closing accounts

• Complex bonus terms tied to continued play

AI and personalization features are linked in research to changes in gambling behavior. Algorithms can tailor promotions based on real-time behavior, such as offering bonus credit when someone is about to quit or has just lost. Such interventions can change a player’s perception of risk and betting frequency.

Closer to home, a Statistics Canada study published in 2022 - before the impact of the Safe and Regulated Sports Betting Act could be measured - found that:

• 1.6 percent (304,400) of past-year gamblers were at a moderate-to-severe risk of problems related to gambling

• The number of gambling activities played increased the risk for gambling-related problems

• 7.9 percent of Canadians (15 and older) engaged in sports betting in 2018

That gives us a helpful baseline snapshot of gambling in Canada before the introduction of legalized online platforms. Although we still have no idea how things are working out at street-level.

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As it turns out, neither the federal government’s Safe and Regulated Sports Betting legislation nor Ontario's deregulation in 2022 came with any controls over potentially addictive user experience features in “regulated” online gaming platforms. Not only is it hard to identify any relevant safeguards built into the risky legislation, but, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any serious ongoing research into the consequences.

And if all that sounds a familiar to you, perhaps it’s because we recently saw the same process playing out in the context of the legalization of cannabis.