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Canada deserves to know.
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14 articles
Federal lobbying in Canada is governed by the Lobbying Act, which starts from the premise that lobbying is a legitimate activity — and that the public is entitled to know who is doing it. The Act requires paid lobbyists to register in the Registry of Lobbyists, a free, searchable public database administered by the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying. Consultant lobbyists — people paid by clients to lobby — must register each engagement. In-house lobbyists — employees of corporations and organizations — are registered by their employer's most senior paid officer once lobbying makes up a significant part of employees' duties, a threshold the Commissioner has long interpreted as roughly 20 per cent. On top of registration, lobbyists must file monthly communication reports disclosing oral, arranged communications with designated public office holders (DPOHs) — ministers, their staff, senior public servants, and, since 2010, MPs and senators — naming the official, the date, and the subject matter. Former DPOHs face a five-year ban on lobbying after leaving office. The Commissioner of Lobbying, an independent Agent of Parliament, administers the registry, enforces the Lobbyists' Code of Conduct, investigates suspected breaches, and reports findings to Parliament — but cannot levy fines, and suspected offences under the Act must be referred to police. The registry is one of the most useful accountability tools in Ottawa, but it has structural blind spots: unpaid advocacy, lobbying below the in-house threshold, and most written or informal contact never appear in the monthly reports — and the registry records that a meeting happened, never what was said.
The federal access-to-information regime — usually called ATIP, for Access to Information and Privacy — rests on two statutes. The Access to Information Act gives Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and individuals and corporations present in Canada a right to records under the control of federal government institutions, for a $5 application fee. The Privacy Act runs in parallel and covers requests for your own personal information, at no charge. The right of access is the rule, but it is qualified by exemptions and exclusions: cabinet confidences are excluded from the Act entirely for twenty years under section 69, and institutions routinely invoke exemptions for advice and recommendations to ministers (section 21), personal information, third-party business information, law-enforcement and security matters, and solicitor-client privilege. Institutions must respond within 30 days but may extend that deadline — with no fixed statutory cap — for large volumes or consultations, and long extensions and missed deadlines are the system's most persistent and best-documented failure. A missed deadline is a deemed refusal, which the requester can take to the Information Commissioner of Canada, an independent officer who investigates complaints and, since 2019, can issue binding orders for the release of records — orders the government can contest only by going to Federal Court. Journalists use the system to surface documents governments would not volunteer; the largest share of request volume, however, comes from people seeking their own files, especially immigration files.
Canada's federal accountability system relies on a set of independent watchdogs commonly called the Officers of Parliament (and related agents and commissioners). Their defining feature is independence from the government: they are appointed through processes involving Parliament, report to Parliament rather than to a minister, and have security of tenure designed to insulate them from political pressure. The core group includes the Auditor General (audits how government spends money and whether programs deliver value), the Parliamentary Budget Officer (independent analysis of the nation's finances and the cost of proposals), the Chief Electoral Officer (administers elections), the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner (enforces the conflict-of-interest rules for ministers and MPs), the Commissioner of Lobbying (administers the lobbying registry and code), the Information Commissioner (oversees access-to-information rights), the Privacy Commissioner (oversees how government and, in part, the private sector handle personal data), the Commissioner of Official Languages, and the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner (whistleblower protection). Their powers vary — some can compel documents and testimony, some can levy findings of wrongdoing, some can order release of records — but they share a structural limit: most can investigate, audit, and report publicly, but cannot themselves punish, fine, or compel the government to change course. Their power is the power of disclosure: putting findings on the public record so Parliament, the press, and voters can act on them. That is precisely the lever this site is built around.
The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) was created in 2006 to provide non-partisan, independent analysis to Parliament on the federal budget, economic projections, and the financial implications of legislation. The PBO is led by an Officer of Parliament appointed for a seven-year term and reports directly to Parliament rather than the government of the day. This article walks the PBO's mandate, the reports they publish, what the "independent" designation actually means, where they have publicly contradicted government numbers, and why every serious civic conversation about federal spending should start with the PBO's estimates rather than the government's.
Across Prime Minister Mark Carney's first year in office (March 2025 - February 2026), in-flight catering on the 28 official flights he took as Prime Minister cost approximately $524,815 CAD (£281,773 in the original UK media reporting). The figure was provided in writing by the Government of Canada in response to Order Paper Questions tabled by opposition Members of Parliament — meaning the number is the government's own published answer, drawn from internal expense records. Specific high-cost examples documented in the response: approximately $21,000 in catering for a two-hour flight to Washington DC in May 2025 for the Prime Minister's first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump; approximately $159,000 in catering for a combined visit to the United Arab Emirates and the G20 summit in Johannesburg; and an October 2025 flight where the refreshments cost approximately eleven times the fuel costs for that journey for 55 delegates. For comparison: Statistics Canada's Survey of Household Spending reports the average Canadian household spent $8,659 on food from stores in 2023; Canada's Food Price Report 2024 projected a typical family of four would spend $16,297.20 annually on a healthy diet, or $339 per person per month. The Carney flight-catering total therefore equals roughly 60 family-of-four annual healthy-diet budgets, or 32 average household annual grocery bills. This article documents the proactive-disclosure record, the specific high-cost flights, the family-food comparison, and the honest caveats — including the fact that "refreshments" covers the entire travelling delegation, not just the Prime Minister personally.
Mark Carney joined Brookfield Asset Management in 2020 as Vice Chair and Head of ESG and Impact Investing, later becoming Chair of the Brookfield Asset Management board. He held those roles until January 2025, immediately before launching his successful Liberal leadership campaign and becoming Prime Minister in March 2025. According to Brookfield's 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Carney held 409,300 unexercised Brookfield stock options worth approximately US$6.8 million as of December 31, 2024. Brookfield is one of the largest residential property owners in Canada, with 31,211 residential units in the country (part of a North American portfolio of over 73,000 single-family lots). Upon becoming Prime Minister, Carney placed his assets in a blind trust and established a conflict-of-interest screen — administered by his chief of staff Marc-André Blanchard and Privy Council Clerk Michael Sabia — intended to wall him off from official decisions involving Brookfield and the payment-processing firm Stripe (on whose board he also served). His ethics filing lists more than 100 entities under the conflict-of-interest screen. In April 2026, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics published a report recommending that prime ministers be required to fully divest their investment portfolios on taking office, not merely place them in a blind trust. Democracy Watch has characterized the blind-trust-and-screen arrangement as "loophole-filled." This article documents the financial relationship, the conflict-of-interest architecture, the specific concerns raised about it, and Carney's defenses — sticking strictly to the documented financial record.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is the federal body designed specifically to audit how privacy-affecting government and private-sector practices are conducted. Every recent lawful-access bill in Canada — Bill C-30 (Toews, 2012), Bill C-2 (Strong Borders Act, 2025) — included some statutory role for the OPC in the regime being created. Bill C-22 (Lawful Access Act, 2026) does not. The OPC has no audit role over the bill's one-year metadata-retention requirement, no review role over the Public Safety Minister's secret capability orders, and no complaint jurisdiction over the new regime. The bill instead points to the Intelligence Commissioner as the review body for ministerial orders — a different review body with a different scope. This article walks through what changed between the predecessors and the current bill, and what an OPC role could look like as an amendment.
On April 28, 2026 — the first day the Liberals’ new House majority took effect — two House of Commons standing committees voted to go in camera on motions involving public-interest accountability. At HESA (Health), Liberal Parliamentary Secretary Maggie Chi moved to take the meeting in camera while a Conservative motion to ask the Auditor General to audit PrescribeIT was on the floor. The vote was 6–5: six Liberals YEA, four Conservatives plus one Bloc MP NAY. At ETHI (Ethics), Liberal members made an identical move on a Conservative motion that would have required the Privy Council Office to provide regular updates on the Prime Minister’s ethics screen. The pattern triggered a public defence from Liberal House leader Steven MacKinnon, who pledged "open committees" the next day.
PrescribeIT, the federal e-prescribing service operated by Canada Health Infoway and built primarily by Telus Health, will go offline at 11:59 PM EST on May 29, 2026. Health Canada has acknowledged "more than $290 million" in federal spending on the program over 10 years; Conservative MPs use the rounded "$300 million" figure. Roughly $98 million of that flowed to Telus Health, which retained approximately 85% of the underlying intellectual property. Adoption never broke 5% of Canadian prescriptions. On April 27, 2026, four Conservative MPs on the House of Commons Health Committee — led by Conservative health critic Dan Mazier — formally asked the Auditor General to investigate. The Conservative Party stated that on the same day, "Liberal Members filibustered the health committee to block the release of those documents." Bloc Québécois MP Maxime Blanchette-Joncas endorsed the audit request. Health Canada told the committee that detailed PrescribeIT spending is not centrally tracked.
On November 4, 2025 — the morning of the federal budget — Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont became the first Conservative to cross to Mark Carney’s Liberals, six months after winning re-election by 533 votes on the Conservative ticket. Within ten days, the watchdog group Democracy Watch filed a formal complaint with the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, arguing that d’Entremont’s loss of his Deputy Speaker salary top-up created a financial motive that warranted investigation under the Conflict of Interest Code. The Commissioner declined to investigate.
Conservative MP Michael Ma crossed the floor to Mark Carney’s Liberals on December 11, 2025 — nine days after a Hansard speech in which he attacked the Liberal record on housing, productivity, and economic governance, calling them "team feudalism." He has since admitted he was "truly a Conservative" at the Conservative Christmas party the night before he crossed. A constituent petition calling for his resignation has reportedly gathered tens of thousands of signatures.
On November 6, 2025, Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux announced he was resigning from Parliament, telling constituents there was "no coercion" involved and that his focus needed to be on his family. On February 18, 2026, he reversed course, kept the Edmonton Riverbend seat his constituents had elected him to as a Conservative, and crossed the floor to the Liberals. Within weeks he was named a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on Economic and Security Partnerships and joined Mark Carney on a trip to India, Australia, and Japan.
On January 11, 2026, Conservative MP Marilyn Gladu told a local newspaper she supported a petition calling for automatic byelections when MPs switch parties, saying voters "deserve a chance to have a redo." On April 8, 2026, she crossed the floor to the Liberals herself. Sarnia-Lambton’s mayor and the local Conservative riding association president have publicly called for her to face a byelection. She has not.
Between November 2025 and April 2026, four Conservative MPs crossed the floor to join the Liberal caucus. Combined with three byelection victories, these crossings gave the Liberals a working majority in the House of Commons — without a general election. An Angus Reid poll found 74% of Canadians believe floor-crossing MPs should be required to run in a byelection.