A liquid natural gas carrier crossing into a seven-point section of the Pacific Pilotage Authority region meets a rule written for that class of ship alone under the new order.

It must be under compulsory pilotage.

The boundary is exact. It begins at latitude 54°35.25′ north and longitude 131°16.75′ west, then runs through six more positions. The reason for drawing it is much less specific.

In Interim Order No. 2 Respecting Area 4 of the Pacific Pilotage Authority Region, Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon states that an urgent issue involving pilotage services poses “a significant risk to safety, human health or the environment.”

The order does not identify the issue.

It does not describe an incident, name a vessel or state which of the three possible harms is at risk. Instead, it moves directly from the minister’s finding to the legal boundary and the ships caught by it.

Only liquid natural gas carriers.

Seven points and one class of ship

The order was made in Ottawa on July 29, 2026, under subsection 52.2(1) of the Pilotage Act. Its opening says the minister believes the measure is required to address the urgent issue. It also says the same provisions could be placed in a regulation under the Act.

What follows is compact.

Section 1 defines “Regulations” as the General Pilotage Regulations. Section 2 extends Area 4 of the Pacific Pilotage Authority region by enclosing waters within a line drawn through seven latitude and longitude positions.

Section 3 narrows the effect. Despite subsection 25.9(1) of the General Pilotage Regulations, “only liquid natural gas carriers are subject to compulsory pilotage” inside the extended area.

That word matters: only.

The order does not create a general compulsory pilotage rule for every ship moving through the added waters. It attaches the special requirement to one class of carrier. Yet the text does not explain why that class was selected, what pilotage problem required the extension, or how the new boundary responds to the risk the minister identified.

The document is precise where a navigator would need precision. Every turn in the boundary has coordinates. Its legal target is equally clear. A reader can determine where the extended area lies and which ships are subject to the order.

The public rationale remains one sentence.

An urgent issue exists. It concerns the provision of pilotage services. It poses a significant risk to safety, human health or the environment.

No further particulars appear in the order.

Emergency order, second edition

The title carries another detail: this is Interim Order No. 2.

Section 4 repeals an earlier Interim Order Respecting Area 4 of the Pacific Pilotage Authority Region, made on July 31, 2025. The new order was made on July 29, 2026, 363 days later.

The Gazette does not describe what happened during that interval. It does not say whether the risk changed, whether the first order solved part of the problem, or why a second interim order was chosen instead of a regulation.

It records the replacement.

The sequence is therefore visible even when the underlying explanation is not. A first interim order was made in July 2025. Almost a year later, the minister made Interim Order No. 2. The second measure repeals the first, extends Area 4 through a specified set of coordinates and isolates liquid natural gas carriers for compulsory pilotage within that extension.

This is not a consultation document. The order does not invite comments, present options or include a regulatory impact analysis. It states the minister’s belief, establishes the rule and repeals its predecessor.

For the affected carrier, the consequence is direct. Enter the extended waters and compulsory pilotage applies.

For anyone trying to understand why, the record stops one step earlier. It provides the conclusion that justified emergency action, but not the facts behind that conclusion.

The part the coordinates cannot show

Government orders sometimes make their purpose legible through operational detail. This one supplies operational detail without a narrative account.

The seven positions show the perimeter. The ship-class clause shows the scope. The repeal clause shows that the measure has a predecessor. The opening recital shows the statutory threshold the minister says has been met.

None identifies the urgent issue itself.

That omission does not make the order uncertain in its legal direction. The instruction is concise: within the extended part of Area 4, only liquid natural gas carriers are subject to compulsory pilotage under this interim measure.

It does make the public explanation incomplete on the face of the document.

The order asks the reader to accept two different levels of detail at once. On the map, it goes to minutes and hundredths of minutes. On the reason for acting, it offers three broad categories of possible harm.

Safety. Human health. The environment.

Which one drove the decision is not stated. Neither is the condition that made the provision of pilotage services an urgent issue.

Interim Order No. 2 leaves a clear legal trail. It names the authority, dates the minister’s action, draws the boundary, selects the vessels and removes the prior order.

The trail ends before the risk is described.

Hansard Files reads the orders behind federal action, including the details they settle and the explanations they leave out.

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Source Documents

• Department of Transport. (2026, July 29). Interim Order No. 2 Respecting Area 4 of the Pacific Pilotage Authority Region. In Canada Gazette, Part I, Vol. 160, No. 32, pp. 2179–2180.

In the mid-1970s, Ottawa was gripped by a specific, high-voltage anxiety. It wasn’t just the specter of inflation or the energy crisis; it was the silent, algorithmic takeover of the national economy by multinational giants. At the center of this storm stood IBM Canada, a subsidiary so powerful, efficient, and integrated into the American mothership that it functioned almost as a state within a state.

The mood was captured by a single, haunting line in the introduction of a government report filed in December 1976: “This is a Tale of Power.”

The document was Study No. 14 of the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration. Authored by Marcel Côté, Yvan Allaire, and Roger-Emile Miller, it was not merely a financial audit. It was an autopsy of the “branch plant” economy at its most sophisticated. While politicians debated sovereignty in the House of Commons, IBM Canada was operating a machine so profitable and so dominant that it forced the Canadian government to ask a fundamental question: In the age of the mainframe, does the state control the corporation, or does the corporation control the state?

The “New Leviathan”

To understand the stakes of 1976, one must appreciate the sheer gravity of “Big Blue.” The Royal Commission noted that if U.S. Steel was the paradigmatic corporation of the early 20th century, and General Motors defined the middle decades, IBM was the undisputed avatar of the modern era.

By 1975, the IBM Corporation sat on a cash hoard of $4.7 billion—a war chest that exceeded the reserves of many nations. In Canada, its dominance was absolute. The Commission estimated that IBM controlled approximately 35% to 36% of the entire computer systems market. But this figure masked the true extent of its influence. In the “mainframe” sector—the heavy iron that ran banks, insurance companies, and government payrolls—IBM’s grip was tighter.

The Commission’s researchers found that IBM Canada’s profitability was staggering. In 1975, while the average Canadian manufacturing firm scraped by with a 7.8% profit on sales, IBM Canada posted an 18% margin. This discrepancy wasn’t just good business; in the political climate of the 1970s, it was a liability. It suggested that IBM possessed “market power”—the ability to set prices above competitive levels without fear of reprisal.

The researchers even attempted to calculate the “allocative inefficiency” caused by this dominance—the deadweight loss to the Canadian economy due to monopoly pricing. Their estimate was $3.2 million for the year 1975. While a small fraction of IBM’s $500 million in sales, the number was symbolic. It represented the “tax” Canada paid for relying on a single foreign provider for its digital nervous system.

The World Product Mandate: “Autonomy by Isolation”

The heart of the Commission’s study—and its most enduring lesson for Canadian economic policy—was its analysis of the “World Product Mandate.”

Critics of foreign ownership often viewed subsidiaries as “miniature replicas” of their parents, inefficiently producing a full line of products for a protected local market. IBM was different. It didn’t just make what Canadians bought; it integrated Canada into a global assembly line through a policy of “rationalization”.

Under this system, IBM Canada fought for the exclusive right to manufacture specific products for the entire world. In exchange, it imported almost everything else.

The Commission detailed how this system played out on the factory floor. The plant in Toronto was designated as a “General Systems” facility, while the plant in Bromont, Quebec, became the battleground for a fierce internal corporate struggle. Originally built to produce substrates (component bases), the Bromont facility faced obsolescence as technology shifted. To save the plant, IBM Canada’s management had to lobby the parent company in Armonk, New York, for a new mission.

They won the mandate for typewriters and “key entry” products.

This victory, however, exposed the friction between corporate strategy and national ambition. The Canadian Department of Industry, Trade and Commerce (ITC) was reportedly frustrated. They wanted IBM Canada to produce “high technology” hardware—CPUs, memory units, the “brains” of the computer. Instead, under the rationalization plan, Canada was assigned the “fingers”—typewriters and keyboards.

The Commission authors defended IBM’s choice, arguing that software and electromechanical devices offered a more stable employment base than the volatile semiconductor industry. Yet the tension remained: Canada was a net exporter of office products but deeply dependent on the U.S. for the high-end computing logic that ran the nation.

The “Bohemian Grove” Hypothesis

Beyond economics, the Royal Commission was tasked with investigating “Political Power.” Did IBM Canada use its size to subvert democracy?

The authors examined what sociologists called the “Bohemian Grove” hypothesis—the idea that elites coordinate policy through interlocking directorships and private clubs. They scrutinized the Board of Directors and the company’s lobbying efforts, which were channeled discreetly through the Canadian Business Equipment Manufacturers Association (CBEMA) rather than via flashy public campaigns.

The verdict was surprising. The Commission found little evidence of heavy-handed political interference. In fact, they discovered that IBM Canada was often too careful. The company was so terrified of being perceived as a “bad corporate citizen” that it over-corrected.

For example, in 1973—years before the strict language laws of Bill 101 were enacted in Quebec—IBM Canada voluntarily published a policy to establish fully bilingual operations in the province. They didn’t do this out of altruism, but out of survival instinct. As a multinational, they knew their “legitimacy” was fragile. They had to be more Canadian than the Canadians.

However, this corporate citizenship had limits. The report noted that IBM’s “self-imposed decision rules” included adherence to U.S. laws regarding political donations, which once “unwittingly contravened” Canadian practices. The subsidiary was autonomous, but the leash to Armonk was never cut.

The Verdict on Breaking Up Big Blue

By the end of the 1970s, the U.S. government was deep into a massive antitrust suit aimed at breaking up IBM. The Canadian Commission asked the “What If?” question: Would Canada be better off if IBM were shattered into smaller companies—one for CPUs, one for peripherals, one for maintenance?

The authors concluded with a warning. A breakup, they argued, would likely hurt the consumer. A spin-off “CPU Company” would lack the integrated sales force and maintenance network that corporate clients relied on. The “Peripherals Company” would face brutal competition and likely fail to support the R&D pace required to keep the systems running.

“It is our contention,” the authors wrote, “that the marketplace is benefitting from IBM’s expertise”.

It was a pragmatic, almost resigned conclusion. IBM had successfully woven itself into the fabric of the nation. It provided the efficiency Canada needed, even if the price was a permanent dependency on American innovation. The “Tale of Power” ended not with a revolution, but with a renewed contract: Canada would accept the dominance of the multinational, provided it kept the factories in Bromont open and the mainframes running on time.

If you enjoyed this deep dive into the archives of corporate power, consider subscribing to the Hansard Files. We dig through thousands of pages of forgotten commissions and reports to uncover the history that shaped the modern economy.

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Source Documents

• Côté, M., Allaire, Y., & Miller, R. (1976). IBM Canada Ltd.: A Case Study (Study No. 14). Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration.

At Gaspé city council, Mayor Daniel Côté had learned to notice an empty chair.

Reporters from other outlets came regularly, he told a Senate committee. A Radio-Canada journalist rarely did, even though Gaspé was the region’s largest city. Côté said the broadcaster’s coverage had improved over the previous seven years. It still missed most council meetings.

“Is the reason that city councils deal with local issues and Radio-Canada has a broader, regional or national, mandate?” he asked.

The question runs through the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications’ new report, Local News Matters: Rethinking CBC/Radio-Canada’s Role in a Changing Media Landscape.

CBC/Radio-Canada operates 27 television stations, 88 radio stations and several digital platforms. Its governing law tells it to reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences. It does not require the broadcaster to target local audiences or provide a set amount of local programming.

The committee wants that changed. It also found that the public cannot see enough local financial data to know where service is thin, where the money goes or where it is needed most.

The promise is local. The ledger stops at the region.

The mandate never reaches city hall

The study spanned two Parliaments. The committee held 10 meetings between October 22 and December 11, 2024, heard approximately 60 witnesses and received 30 briefs. It concluded in October 2025 with testimony from CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard.

Witnesses kept returning to the same distinction. Regional coverage was not always local coverage.

Francophones on the island of Newfoundland receive regional news and programming from Moncton and Halifax. Those in Labrador receive service from Quebec. Martin Théberge, president of the Société Nationale de l’Acadie, said this deprives the province’s francophone community of a common platform.

In rural Alberta, independent journalist Jen Gerson said people discuss housing, crops and daily concerns in farming communities without seeing those subjects reflected by CBC Calgary. Amélie Hinse of the Fédération des télévisions communautaires autonomes du Québec said Radio-Canada fulfilled its regional role well but provided inadequate local coverage.

The Broadcasting Act permits that gap. It requires CBC/Radio-Canada to reflect Canada and its regions while serving those regions’ special needs. The committee found no instruction to reflect local communities and audiences.

Broadcasting licences fill only part of the gap. The CRTC requires at least seven hours of English-language local television programming each week in non-metropolitan English markets and five hours in non-metropolitan French markets. Most CBC Radio One and ICI Première stations face no minimum number of local programming or news hours. The French-language CBEF station in Windsor is the exception.

The committee’s first recommendation is seven quoted words long: add “the reflection of local communities and audiences” to the mandate.

That would put local service into the law. It would not show whether CBC/Radio-Canada delivered it.

Public money, regional totals

CBC/Radio-Canada received $1,407.4 million in parliamentary appropriations in 2024-25. Advertising brought in $343.9 million. Subscriber fees and other income added $244.8 million.

Those broad figures are public. The local ones are not.

The corporation’s annual reports list major categories of revenue and spending. CRTC filings provide partial data for five large areas: Atlantic Canada, Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and the territories, and the Prairies. Neither source breaks staffing, revenue or expenses down by local station. The regional figures also exclude CBC/Radio-Canada’s digital services.

This makes some available numbers hard to read. Quebec and Ontario received more than 75 per cent of the parliamentary appropriations assigned to conventional television and radio between 2012 and 2024. The report says that share reflects the Ottawa head office and the main English and French networks in Toronto and Montreal. It does not show what any station received.

The same regional data show 3,581 fewer employees in CBC/Radio-Canada’s conventional television and radio services in 2024 than in 2012. They do not show how those losses fell across communities.

The committee recommends stable, multi-year funding for local programming. It pairs that request with another demand. At the next licence renewal in 2027, the CRTC should require public reports on local programming and spending across traditional and digital platforms.

The recommendations work together. More money would increase local capacity. Public reports would show where that capacity went.

Eleven bureaus and no common measure

Bouchard acknowledged a “lack of connection in some areas with the public,” which she attributed in part to limited resources.

CBC/Radio-Canada’s plan through 2030 includes enough journalists to serve 15 to 20 communities with populations above 50,000 that have little or no local presence. In January 2026, it announced 11 new bureaus and 33 journalists, from Richmond, British Columbia, to Châteauguay, Quebec.

The report commends the expansion. It also shows why a bureau count cannot settle the matter.

For official language minority communities, presence depends partly on whose lives reach the screen. Denis Simard of the Assemblée communautaire fransaskoise said that when young Fransaskois do not see people like themselves anchoring Téléjournal and other programs, they conclude that only Quebeckers and Montrealers can hold those jobs.

Some communities still lack all of CBC/Radio-Canada’s conventional services. Marie-Nicole Dubois of the Fédération des francophones de la Colombie-Britannique said the provincial Radio-Canada signal is unavailable in parts of British Columbia.

Digital distribution does not solve the problem. Online sources are now the primary source of information for 73 per cent of Canadians, according to figures in the report. But witnesses from the North and several francophone communities described gaps in broadband access. Annick Forest of the Canadian Media Guild said Whitehorse can lose phone service when its only supplier fails.

The committee’s sixth recommendation calls for CBC/Radio-Canada’s television production investments in official language minority communities to respect substantive equality. Its seventh asks the corporation to examine its emergency role and provide full coverage in remote and isolated places with few alternative broadcasters.

The station, signal, journalist and emergency connection are all parts of local service. The public accounts do not join them into a picture that can be tested.

Collaboration without displacement

The committee also wants CBC/Radio-Canada to work more closely with private and community media in every region.

Witnesses described a possible exchange. Small outlets could provide reporting from communities where the public broadcaster has few people. CBC/Radio-Canada could share its reporting, reach and training. Matthew Hatfield of OpenMedia proposed releasing CBC journalism under Creative Commons licences. Christopher Waddell of Carleton University suggested free distribution of CBC’s domestic and foreign reporting through The Canadian Press, along with greater exposure for stories produced by small news organizations.

But local collaboration has a local labour market.

Corey Larocque, managing editor of Nunatsiaq News, said his outlet competes with CBC for journalists and cannot match its pay. Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters said CBC expansion in a small or mid-sized market can raise the cost of hiring reporters beyond what some private stations can afford.

The committee accepted the warning. It supported a larger CBC/Radio-Canada presence but said growth should not come at the expense of established local media.

The report does not treat CBC/Radio-Canada as the only answer to declining coverage. Since 2008, Professor April Lindgren’s Local News Research Project had counted 521 local outlets closed in 347 communities. Only about half as many had opened. Small communities, she said, were hit hardest.

The committee proposes a stronger public broadcaster within a broader local media system, with enough disclosure to measure the effects.

It also recommends regular outside analysis of CBC/Radio-Canada news and current affairs for fairness and balance. Trust in CBC News among anglophones fell from 76 per cent in 2018 to 62 per cent in 2025. For ICI Radio-Canada and ICI RDI among francophones, it fell by 14 percentage points over the same period, to 71 per cent.

Witnesses said local reporters could help. Lindgren said journalists who know a community and its issues earn trust. Gerson argued that a newsroom concentrated in Toronto cannot expect people in Lethbridge or the North to see it as present in their lives.

The committee has recommended more money, a clearer mandate, outside review, new partnerships and full emergency coverage where alternatives are scarce. Before Canadians can judge whether any of it restores the missing connection, they need to see past the regional total.

Back to the station. Back to the newsroom. Back to the empty chair at city hall.

Hansard Files follows the public record from the national promise to the local result. Subscribe for calm, source-based reporting on what the documents show.

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Source Documents

• Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. (2026, June 17). Local news matters: Rethinking CBC/Radio-Canada’s role in a changing media landscape. https://sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/451/TRCM/Reports/TRCM_45-1_SS-1_CBC_Report_final_e.pdf

The proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline would carry one million barrels of crude a day from Alberta to a deep-water port near Delta. The federal notice specifies the machinery, but not the path, price or construction date.

At a proposed tank terminal in Bruderheim, about 50 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, Canadian crude oil would be received, measured and stored. Pumps would then push it into a new pipeline.

The oil’s next specified stop would be a deep-water port near Delta, British Columbia, about 35 kilometres south of Vancouver. There it would enter delivery tanks, move through an offshore loading facility and be loaded onto Very Large Crude Carriers for shipment to global markets.

Between those points, the federal record leaves a blank.

The Canada Gazette notice, published in a supplement dated August 1, describes a pipeline as long as approximately 1,250 kilometres, supported by about 11 pump stations and capable of moving one million barrels a day. It does not identify the route those kilometres would follow.

The notice calls the proposal the West Coast Oil Pipeline. It supplies a starting point, a destination and a list of major components. It also gives notice of a possible decision to place the project on Schedule 1 of the Building Canada Act as a project of national interest.

It is not an approval. It is not yet a listing. It is notice that the Governor in Council may make one.

One million barrels, eleven pump stations, no line on the map

The physical outline is short and specific.

The project would include a receipt tank terminal at Bruderheim. The pipeline could extend up to approximately 1,250 kilometres. Power interconnection, transmission and possible generation would support it. Approximately 11 pump stations would maintain flow rate and pressure over the distance.

At the British Columbia end, a delivery tank terminal and offshore marine loading facility would be built with capacity for Very Large Crude Carriers. The notice does not identify the precise port site. It places the destination near Delta.

Three organizations are advancing the proposal: Trans Mountain Corporation, the Alberta Petroleum Marketing Commission and Pembina Pipeline Corporation. According to the notice, they would form and lead a new jointly owned entity.

The ownership shares are not given. Neither is the cost.

There is no construction schedule, operating date or account of how the pipeline would cross the distance between Bruderheim and Delta. The notice does not list intermediate communities, water crossings or the location of the proposed pumping stations. It describes the machinery of a corridor before identifying the corridor itself.

That distinction matters because the document is not a project application. Its immediate purpose is narrower. The Major Projects Office is giving notice under subsection 5(1.1) of the Building Canada Act that the Governor in Council may add the proposal to the law’s schedule of national-interest projects.

The project’s specifications therefore arrive inside a decision about status. Ottawa is not yet publishing the full plan. It is identifying the proposal that the Governor in Council may choose to move through a streamlined federal approval process.

The decision before the Governor in Council

The notice says the Building Canada Act allows the government to streamline federal approval processes for projects determined to be in the national interest. It says that process is intended to move projects forward efficiently while protecting the environment and upholding the rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The Governor in Council may consider any factor it regards as relevant when deciding whether to list a project. The notice gives five examples.

The first is whether the project can strengthen Canada’s autonomy, resilience and security. The second is whether it can provide economic or other benefits to Canada. The Governor in Council may also consider the likelihood of successful execution, whether the project advances the interests of Indigenous peoples, and whether it contributes to clean growth and Canada’s climate-change objectives.

The document does not say how the proposed pipeline performs against any of those considerations. It states the criteria, then describes the project.

It also does not identify which federal approval processes could be streamlined if the pipeline is listed. The legal consequence is presented in general terms. The project-specific consequences are left for later.

The Building Canada Act’s concentration of decision-making power has already been the subject of parliamentary testimony covered by Hansard Files. This Gazette notice shows the mechanism moving from the abstract to a named proposal. Schedule 1 is no longer just a space in a statute. A 1,250-kilometre oil pipeline is being considered for it.

Consultation has started, but the notice says little about it

Dominic LeBlanc, as President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and the minister responsible under the Act, will consult the governments of Alberta and British Columbia on behalf of the Governor in Council. The notice identifies them as the provinces where the project would be situated.

It separately says consultation with Indigenous rights-holders is already underway. It does not name the rights-holders, describe the format of those talks, give their locations or state when that consultation began.

The public has until September 18 to submit views on considerations that should guide the government’s decision. The notice provides one email address: WCOPComment-CommentaireOCO@mpo-bgp.gc.ca.

It does not specify a required format for submissions. Nor does it say when the Governor in Council will decide whether to place the pipeline on Schedule 1.

For now, the public record is precise where the project can be counted. One million barrels each day. Up to approximately 1,250 kilometres. About 11 pump stations. Three organizations preparing a new jointly owned entity. One proposed loading facility with capacity for Very Large Crude Carrier vessels.

Where the project can be located, financed or timed, the notice is much thinner. Bruderheim is named. Delta is approached only as “near.” Everything between them remains undescribed.

The federal government has published the scale of the pipeline it may declare to be in the national interest. The route that would carry that national interest across two provinces has not yet appeared on the page.

Hansard Files reads the notices where policy becomes machinery. Subscribe for calm reporting from the primary record, before the language disappears into the process.

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Related Hansard Files Articles

Source Documents

• Major Projects Office. (2026, August 1). Notice - West Coast Oil Pipeline. Supplement to Canada Gazette, Part I, 160(31), 2-3.

In September 1835, Susan Turner, Hannah Downes and Hannah Baglen arrived at Kingston Penitentiary to serve sentences of one to two years for larceny. The warden was not ready for them.

The institution had opened that June. Its first six prisoners had been put to work finishing the place that confined them. Women were expected eventually, but Warden Henry Smith had not expected them so soon. He had no separate prison ready.

The three women went into the hospital.

That temporary arrangement lasted until 1839.

The account appears in the Correctional Service of Canada’s 1985 history, Kingston Penitentiary: The First Hundred and Fifty Years, 1835–1985. The book traces a century of women’s imprisonment inside an institution built around men, along with a long sequence of reports saying the arrangement should end.

It took 99 years.

The hospital became the women’s quarters

Turner, Downes and Baglen started work as seamstresses. They stayed in the hospital because the institution needed to keep them apart from the men and had nowhere else to put them.

In 1839, part of the North Wing became the first designated prison for women. That solved the immediate placement problem. It did not produce a suitable institution.

The women moved several times as their numbers grew. By 1858, eight were sleeping in a corridor because there were not enough cells. That year, inspectors stated that female prisons should never be located within the boundary walls of other prisons.

The recommendation was clear. The women stayed.

At Confederation, Kingston held 60 female prisoners. An 1867 inspectors’ report called for a proper women’s prison outside the penitentiary walls. It proposed either buying land to the east or using prison land to the north. No additional land was bought.

The institution continued to put the women to work. In 1872, Matron Mary Leahy reported that their labour had produced 201 aprons, 34 sun bonnets, 406 pillowcases and 1,480 pairs of socks. She recorded earnings of $1,560.20 and cash receipts of $684.40.

The following year, the female population fell to 15. Leahy reported that the women had spent a combined 14 days in solitary confinement on bread and water.

Reports named the problem

The accommodation did not escape official notice.

Inspector James G. Moylan wrote in 1889 that he had always considered the women’s section unfit. He cited its proximity to the men’s prison and described underground cells in a gloomy and dismal compartment.

Four years later, he called the cells and laundry “a wretched makeshift.”

The institution also housed mothers. The history records that several babies were born to women imprisoned at Kingston, though the pregnancies began before admission. In some cases, infants stayed with their mothers in their cells. If the sentence ran too long and a pardon or parole was denied, the child went to an orphanage, a relative or a foster home.

The prison’s disciplinary regime reached girls as well. The 1849 Brown Commission reported that girls as young as 12 were repeatedly lashed for the same minor offences as boys. The 1985 history says corporal punishment continued for female prisoners as long as it did for males.

The conditions were documented. So was the proposed remedy. Still, the women remained inside Kingston’s walls.

A separate block inside the same prison

For most of that period, the senior officer responsible for the women was the matron. She lived with them in the women’s section and was paid less than male officers. Rose Fahey took charge in 1886 and remained through five wardens. In 1914, after nearly 30 years of service, her annual salary was $700. The lowest-paid guard received $800. The warden received $2,800.

The female population was usually small, but it was not stable. Fahey reported 10 women in 1914 and 25 the next year after nine arrived from Edmonton. The history says she never had as many as 40 in her custody at once. Fahey lived with the women in quarters on the upper floor of the Northwest Cell Block.

In 1909, authorities decided to construct a separate prison for women. It was separate in one sense only. The building would still stand inside Kingston Penitentiary.

Male prisoners built it. In February 1913, the women moved into the Northwest Cell Block, just inside the North Gate. The block held 32 regular cells and two double cells for sick prisoners. Within a few years, 40 women were living there.

The new quarters did not settle the matter. In 1914, a royal commission reported favourably on the building, then said everyone’s interests would be better served if the women were transferred to an institution for women. The commissioners suggested that provincial authorities might house female offenders.

That recommendation would recur. Provincial prisons already held women serving sentences of less than two years. The unresolved question was where to confine women serving federal sentences.

In 1920, another report to the minister of justice said women should be confined in a completely separate institution, out of view of the male penitentiary. A later report recommended a prison “outside and away a bit from the male prison.”

By then, the first inspectors’ call to remove the women from inside a men’s prison was more than 60 years old.

Beyond the walls

Construction of the Prison for Women began in May 1925. Convict labour was used again. The site was north of Kingston Penitentiary, behind the warden’s residence.

The building did not immediately become a women’s prison. It first housed an overflow of men from Kingston Penitentiary for about a year.

Women entered it on January 24, 1934.

The move placed them beyond the confines of the male institution for the first time. Ninety-nine years had passed since Turner, Downes and Baglen arrived and were placed in the hospital.

They had been followed by women housed in a wing, an underground section that an inspector called unfit, and a separate cell block that remained inside the men’s penitentiary. Reports in 1858, 1867, 1889, 1893, 1914 and 1920 had identified the accommodation problem or called for a separate institution.

The 1934 move answered the oldest part of that record. Women finally had their own prison.

It stood only a short distance from the hospital where the first three had been placed.

Hansard Files reads the reports behind Canada’s institutions, then follows what happened after the recommendation was filed.

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Source Documents

• Curtis, D., Graham, A., Kelly, L., & Patterson, A. (1985). Kingston Penitentiary: The first hundred and fifty years, 1835–1985. Correctional Service of Canada.

On January 19, 1996, the CRTC put two prices for basic cable in Newmarket, Ontario, into a letter.

If Rogers contributed to the Cable Production Fund, the monthly rate would be $22.65. If it did not, the rate would be $17.61.

The difference was $5.04.

Under the Commission’s description of the regulation, half of the amount that would otherwise have disappeared from the bill went to the production fund. The cable operator retained the other half.

That small table of possibilities sat near the centre of a dispute that would travel through Parliament, an Ontario court, a formal complaint, an unpublished CRTC determination, a destroyed file and, 12 years later, a public hearing where a commissioner disputed whether the determination was a decision at all.

The surviving record establishes that sequence. It does not establish Keith Mahar’s allegation of systemic corruption, or the later claim that cable subscribers were owed more than $1.2 billion. Those remained allegations. What the documents do show is how the regulator handled a complaint about its own authority and notice practices, and what it told subscribers they were entitled to know.

The Money That Did Not Come From Santa Claus

Subsection 18(6.3) of the Cable Television Regulations, 1986 came into force on January 25, 1994. The CRTC later described it this way: a cable operator could retain half of certain capital-expenditure increases beyond their scheduled expiry if it sent the other half to an independently administered fund for Canadian programming.

The effect was not the same everywhere. The January 1996 CRTC letter showed that Rogers subscribers in Newmarket would pay $5.04 more each month if the company chose to contribute.

The source of that money reached Parliament on March 30, 1995. Mahar told Hansard Files that the exchange came the day after he held a joint Parliament Hill press conference with MPs. In Question Period, Reform MP Jan Brown called the mechanism a hidden tax and asked why consumers had not been consulted. The government’s response defended the CRTC’s role in protecting Canadian cultural content but did not answer whether individual subscribers had received notice.

On May 16, Liberal MP Dan McTeague questioned CRTC chair Keith Spicer before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. Spicer said the production fund was intended to steer $300 million to Canadian producers over five years. McTeague asked how cable companies were spending another $300 million they were allowed to retain.

McTeague called the arrangement a hidden tax. Spicer rejected the label. The CRTC had created a system of voluntary contributions, he said, not a tax. The cable companies had a choice.

When McTeague pointed out that the money came from subscribers, Spicer answered: “Every nickel in the broadcasting system comes eventually from ordinary Canadians.”

Spicer also credited Mahar with helping bring the issue before the committee.

The exchange did not settle the legal question. Spicer said the matter would be discussed in court. McTeague replied that Mahar’s case concerned notification, then returned to the question of why subscribers had not received the reduction expected on January 1, 1995.

The Court Points to the CRTC

On October 17, 1995, Justice Robert J. Sharpe ruled in Mahar v. Rogers Cablesystems Ltd. The case concerned whether Rogers had been required to notify subscribers about subsection 18(6.3).

Sharpe did not decide the regulatory issue on its merits. He concluded that it should first go to the CRTC, whose determination could then be taken to the Federal Court of Appeal.

In his decision on costs, Sharpe wrote that Mahar had brought the case on a bona fide basis and that it “raised a genuine issue of law of significance to the public at large.”

The ruling directed the dispute to the regulator. The complaint that became File 1000-121 followed.

On November 28, 1995, lawyer Christopher Leafloor filed that complaint for Cable Watch Citizens’ Association, an organization founded by Mahar. It challenged the CRTC’s authority to enact subsection 18(6.3), alleged inadequate notice to subscribers, and sought refunds, lower rates and a public hearing.

Outside groups supported a closer look. The Public Interest Advocacy Centre took no position on the jurisdictional merits but asked the heritage minister to initiate an independent review. The Consumers’ Association of Canada told the CRTC the issues merited a full review. Three British Columbia organizations, through the B.C. Public Interest Advocacy Centre, supported Cable Watch’s request for a public hearing.

The CRTC did not convene that hearing. Instead, on March 8, 1996, it asked Rogers and the Canadian Cable Television Association to respond in writing. Cable Watch would then have ten days to reply.

The cable association rejected all four elements of the complaint. It argued that the Broadcasting Act gave the CRTC broad authority, that the production fund had emerged from a public process, and that no additional notice to individual subscribers was legally required.

Its rate argument turned on a distinction. Invoking subsection 18(6.3) did not add a new increase to the bill. It kept the monthly fee where it was instead of allowing the scheduled decrease. Because the rate remained unchanged, the association said, no further approval or subscriber notice was warranted.

Cable Watch answered with a 101-page submission. Its argument was that a suspended decrease still changed what subscribers paid. It traced the rate rules, the scheduled expiry of capital charges, the production-fund proposal and the notices sent to customers. It asked again for a public hearing where the evidence and legal arguments could be tested.

The Public Process and the Public

Parliament returned to the notice problem before the CRTC ruled.

On April 25, 1996, MP Jim Abbott quoted a CRTC release headlined “There is absolutely no hidden tax.” He told Spicer that an ordinary cable subscriber would have no idea what the production-fund policy had done to the monthly bill.

“Do the consumers know they are paying that?” Abbott asked.

“Maybe we should spend more time and money telling them this,” Spicer replied.

Abbott then asked the CRTC to show that subscribers had been informed and to direct cable companies to tell customers about their contributions to the fund.

CRTC vice-chair Fernand Bélisle answered that the Commission had issued a public notice, requested comments and held a public process. When Spicer said notice had been given, Bélisle explained, he meant notice to interested parties through that process.

The distinction was now plain. Abbott was asking whether individual subscribers knew. The CRTC was answering that the regulatory process had been public.

Nine Pages Under File 1000-121

On June 25, 1996, the Commission sent Leafloor a nine-page document marked “Our file: 1000-121.”

It sided with the CCTA and Rogers.

The Commission was ruling not only on the conduct of the cable companies, but on the legality of its own regulation and the adequacy of its own notification procedures.

The CRTC concluded that it had authority to enact subsection 18(6.3), had met its statutory notice obligations, and had adequate and effective notification procedures. It was not persuaded that Rogers or another cable company had breached a statutory or regulatory obligation.

On the rate question, the Commission adopted the same distinction advanced by the industry.

Invoking the provision did not increase or decrease the subscriber rate, it said. It “suspend[ed] the decrease in rates that might have otherwise occurred.”

The complaint was dismissed as without merit. The requested public hearing was denied. Cable Watch was invited instead to participate in a broader proceeding on a new approach to regulating broadcasting distribution undertakings.

The document was signed by Secretary General Allan J. Darling. It contained findings, reasons and a conclusion. It was not published as a numbered CRTC decision.

That classification would matter later.

The File Disappears

On January 5, 2006, lawyer Paul Armarego wrote on Mahar’s behalf to Stephen Harper, Gilles Duceppe, Jack Layton and Jim Harris. The letter alleged corruption at the CRTC, identified File 1000-121 and the June 25, 1996 document, and requested political action.

The surviving correspondence does not turn those allegations into findings. It does establish that the file and the document were specifically identified to four federal party leaders.

The following year, CRTC legal counsel Shari Fisher told Mahar what had happened to the official record. File 1000-121 had closed on July 11, 1996. Under the Commission’s document-retention practices, that type of file had to be kept for at least four years. It was destroyed on March 27, 2006, Fisher wrote, well beyond the minimum period.

“No documents related to the file remain,” she added.

The Commission’s Documentation Centre also had no materials referencing Cable Watch or the Cable Watch Citizens’ Association.

Mahar retained copies.

A Decision That Was Not a Decision

Mahar tried again to put the matter before Parliament. At the end of a February 22, 2007, heritage committee meeting, chair Gary Schellenberger said he had already told Mahar there was no room for another witness. He then asked the committee to confirm that its witness hearings were over, saying he did not want to make that decision alone. The committee agreed. MPs supported continuing to accept written submissions, and Schellenberger said the clerk would forward Mahar’s material to the CRTC.

On February 7, 2008, Mahar appeared at a CRTC hearing with the June 1996 document among his materials. He called it a highly unorthodox, unpublished decision and asked for judicial review of the issue.

A member of the CRTC panel objected to the term.

“An unpublished decision is not a decision,” the panel member said. “A decision is not a decision until it is published.”

Mahar replied that he had placed a copy in the record. “Just because it was destroyed doesn’t mean it never existed.”

The exchange left two descriptions of the same nine pages. In 1996, the document said the Commission had considered the submissions, made findings, dismissed a complaint and denied relief. In 2008, the panel said its unpublished status meant it was not a decision.

The next day, NDP MP Libby Davies raised the matter during Question Period. She said more than $1.2 billion was owed to Canadians and called the production fund a hidden tax. Parliamentary Secretary Colin Carrie referred to a competition panel. Parliamentary Secretary Jim Abbott referred to the CRTC hearings then underway.

Neither response adjudicated the refund claim.

Mahar continued asking for an investigation, including in letters sent to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016. Those letters record the continued request. They do not supply the missing adjudication.

What remains is the paper trail. A regulator created a mechanism that let cable operators avoid scheduled rate reductions if they divided the money with a production fund. An Ontario judge directed a dispute over notice to the CRTC. The Commission considered a complaint about its authority and notice practices through written submissions, denied the requested public hearing, and issued nine pages of reasons that it did not publish as a numbered decision. Ten years later, the file was destroyed under the Commission’s retention practices.

The copies survived outside the file.

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Source Documents

• Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. (1996, January 19). Letter to Keith Mahar concerning information requests.

• House of Commons. (1995, March 30). Debates, No. 180.

• House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. (1995, May 16). Evidence, Meeting No. 84.

• Mahar v. Rogers Cablesystems Ltd., 1995 CanLII 7129 (ON SC).

• Leafloor, C. K. (1995, November 28). Complaint filed by Cable Watch Citizens’ Association pursuant to section 12 of the Broadcasting Act.

• Public Interest Advocacy Centre. (1995, November 30). Letter to the Minister of Canadian Heritage concerning the Cable Watch complaint.

• Canadian Cable Television Association. (1996, March 29). Response to the Cable Watch complaint.

• House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. (1996, April 25). Evidence, Meeting No. 6.

• Cable Watch Citizens’ Association. (1996, May 20). Submission to the CRTC concerning subsection 18(6.3).

• B.C. Public Interest Advocacy Centre. (1996, June 24). Letter supporting a public hearing into the Cable Watch complaint.

• Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. (1996, June 25). Determination concerning the complaint filed by Cable Watch.

• Armarego, P. (2006, January 5). Notice to federal political party leaders concerning File 1000-121.

• Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. (2007, October 11). Email concerning the destruction of File 1000-121.

• House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. (2007, February 22). Evidence, Meeting No. 37.

• Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. (2008, February 7). Public hearing exchange with Keith Mahar.

• House of Commons. (2008, February 8). Debates, No. 047.

• Mahar, K. (2016, February 17). Letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau requesting an investigation into File 1000-121.

The federal contribution toward one purpose-built van was $170,646.

Its assignment was larger. The vehicle would support daily meal deliveries to 1,100 Indigenous students at nine schools in Whitehorse, part of an expansion of the Yukon First Nation Education Directorate Society’s Urban Nutrition Program.

That is how the project appears in the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency’s 2024-25 Departmental Results Report. The agency, known as CanNor, lists the van among the results achieved through a fund for northern food and agriculture businesses.

Then the grammar changes.

The program “will deliver” the meals. The project “will” produce a high return on investment, support local employment and diversify the society’s revenue. The report gives no number for meals delivered during the year, no measure for that return and no employment count attached to the van.

The money was delivered. The results were still written in the future tense.

The Van in CanNor’s Results Column

CanNor reported providing approximately $2.5 million to 13 projects through Northern Isolated Community Initiatives in 2024-25. The fund invests in northern food and agriculture businesses. Its stated purpose joins two problems that Ottawa often places in separate files: economic activity and food security in northern and Indigenous communities.

The Whitehorse van puts both inside one vehicle.

Its immediate job is logistical. A nutrition program serving nine schools needs to move meals to the students. CanNor’s account gives the number of students, the number of schools, the recipient and the federal contribution. It does not describe the van’s design, its route or the date on which deliveries began.

The agency also gives the project a wider economic case. It says the investment will support local employment and diversify revenue for the non-profit operating the program. Those claims matter because CanNor does not report food projects as social spending alone. They sit inside its sole core responsibility, economic development in the territories.

That responsibility consumed $72.2 million in 2024-25. Another $8.7 million went to internal services, bringing actual agency spending to just under $81 million. Within that ledger, the van is a small line. On the ground, it is the physical link between a meal program and 1,100 students.

The report records the purchase. It does not yet record the delivery.

Northern Food Security Runs on Equipment

The other projects CanNor chose to feature follow the same practical logic. Northern food security, as presented in the report, depends on freezers, trucks, farm capacity and the ability to keep more production inside the territories.

In the Northwest Territories, CanNor issued $800,000 to Knutsford Ventures Inc. for a major expansion of the Polar Eggs farm. The stated aim was to increase production and capacity enough to bring the territory’s entire egg quota back within its borders. The agency said the project would create jobs, strengthen food security and reduce the cost of eggs.

Again, the promised outcomes are prospective. The report does not provide an updated production figure, a retail egg price or a completed job count. It establishes the investment and the intended result.

Elsewhere in the same report, a larger transport package appears under a different CanNor program. The agency committed $650,000 to the Naha Dene Development Corporation for a refrigerated truck, a delivery truck and two pickup trucks in the Dehcho Region. Of that amount, $46,000 was allocated for 2025-26.

The equipment is supposed to improve food-supply logistics, establish a delivery service and supply fresh produce to local workers. The trucks are also expected to generate rental revenue and help hospitality businesses expand during potential economic and population growth.

CanNor’s examples share a practical logic. One van moves school meals. One farm expansion tries to keep an egg quota at home. Four trucks create a delivery system where the existing system is not enough.

None of these is described as a temporary food shipment. CanNor’s chosen projects are attempts to build the machinery that moves, stores or produces food after the funding announcement is over.

The Funding Clock Beneath the Projects

The report pairs those investments with a warning about the larger operating environment. CanNor identifies fragile supply chains, narrow construction seasons and missing infrastructure as risks to northern economic development. It describes housing shortages in parts of the North as severe and says major infrastructure is inadequate or absent across the territories.

The agency’s current spending plan also has an expiry problem.

CanNor lists total planned spending of $66.3 million for 2025-26, $61.8 million for 2026-27 and $44.8 million for 2027-28. Planned full-time staffing falls from 124 positions in 2025-26 to 107 in 2027-28.

The agency attributes the decline to temporary programs reaching their scheduled end. The Tourism Growth Program expires first. Larger reductions are anticipated in 2027-28 with the scheduled expiry of Regional Economic Growth Through Innovation funding and an IDEANorth funding top-up. CanNor says 16 positions are attached to the IDEANorth money scheduled to end.

Those figures are not a final decision to remove every dollar. The report states that expiring funds may be renewed, increased or cancelled at the government’s discretion. It also notes that future spending figures include only Main Estimates, not later supplementary estimates or future Treasury Board submissions.

Still, this is the plan the department reported. The projects are expected to build durable capacity. Some of the programs supporting the agency are not yet durable themselves.

What the Report Can Prove

Departmental results reports sit between an appropriation and an outcome. They show where money went, which projects departments chose to feature and how the department describes its own performance. They can also expose the distance between an approved contribution and a finished result.

For the Whitehorse project, CanNor can report that $170,646 was delivered to procure a purpose-built van. It can report the intended reach: 1,100 Indigenous students at nine schools. It can state that daily meals will be delivered.

The document cannot yet tell the reader how many meals travelled in that van during 2024-25. It does not say whether the vehicle entered service before the fiscal year ended. It offers no baseline against which to test the promised expansion.

The same boundary runs through the egg-farm entry. The federal contribution is specific. The anticipated jobs, lower prices and food-security gains are not measured in the report.

This does not erase the investments. It defines what the public record can support.

For now, the cleanest result is also the most modest one. Ottawa funded a van. Its intended passengers are meals, and 1,100 students are waiting at the other end of the route.

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Source Documents

• Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. (2025). Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency 2024-25 Departmental Results Report.

In the freezing waters of Halifax Harbour, an experiment was underway beneath the ship’s hull. The Battle of the Atlantic was escalating, and the Royal Canadian Navy faced German magnetic mines. Ships needed to be “degaussed,” fitted with electrical coils that neutralized their magnetic fields. But the Navy had no instruments to tell whether the coils worked.

Two Dalhousie University physics professors, J.H.L. Johnstone and G.H. Henderson, built their own detector: a rotating coil inside a watertight wooden box. They “keelhauled” the box under Fleur de Lys, dragging it back and forth to map the ship’s magnetic signature.

It worked. The ship was successfully degaussed, the first of many protected by Canadian science.

The experiment also marked the beginning of Operational Research in Canada. The discipline would move from Halifax Harbour to the high seas, using mathematics and physics against German U-boats.

The Physics of Survival

Operational Research did not begin in Canada as a formal military doctrine. It began with a practical problem.

In the early years of the Second World War, the RCN expanded rapidly, often using converted civilian vessels and inexperienced crews. The German Kriegsmarine was deploying magnetic mines and advanced U-boats that threatened the supply line between North America and Britain.

After the degaussing experiments, the National Research Council formalized its arrangement with Dalhousie University. By mid-1942, the scientific staff in Halifax had grown to thirty, mostly young physicists and engineers fresh from Canadian universities.

Their work soon extended beyond defensive coils. The team studied magnetic minesweeping, ship calibration and “noisemakers” designed to distract acoustic torpedoes.

In July 1943, Johnstone became the RCN’s first Director of Operational Research. His task was to apply scientific analysis to naval warfare.

The Mathematics of the Hunt

The RCN’s main wartime objective was convoy protection. Operational Research gave the Navy a way to test tactics against the evidence.

One of the directorate’s first major reports examined 49 anti-submarine hunts conducted by RCN ships in 1942. By studying those engagements, the scientists assessed which tactics worked best for finding and destroying submerged submarines.

They studied how weather affected North Atlantic convoys, how well radar screens worked and where middle-ocean escorts should be placed to protect merchant ships.

The scientists calculated the probability of a kill under different attack patterns. They assessed new weapons such as the Squid mortar and efforts to stabilize Hedgehog anti-submarine projectors. They also analyzed the factors that shaped success in anti-U-boat operations from 1940 to 1944.

The figures became doctrine.

Countering the Acoustic Torpedo

When Germany introduced a torpedo that followed the noise of a ship’s propellers, the RCN needed a countermeasure. The Operational Research team worked with the Naval Research Establishment in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to develop one.

The scientists worked closely with operational staff. A liaison officer at the Admiralty in the United Kingdom sent intelligence about German technology back to Ottawa and Halifax.

When the war ended, the team helped interrogate prisoners from the surrendered U-889 and conducted a technical examination of the submarine.

It also studied threats that never fully materialized. The German Type XXI U-boat, with its high underwater speed, posed what the scientists called a “grave threat.” They began developing countermeasures before Germany could deploy the submarine in significant numbers.

The Cold War Transition

The wartime organization did not survive the return to peace.

In October 1945, the RCN disbanded its operational research unit. Most of its scientists returned to universities coping with an influx of veterans.

In his final report, Johnstone wrote, “Even in peacetime one or more operational research scientists would be found very useful to the Navy”.

The military took two years to agree. The Defence Research Board was created in 1947 to coordinate defence research. A dedicated scientist, Dr. J.A.H. Duffie, was assigned to the Navy in 1949.

The postwar Navy brought different questions. Scientists evaluated anti-submarine weapons by studying hit probabilities and the lethality of systems such as the Mark 32 and Mark 35 torpedoes. They compared 3-inch and 4-inch guns, helicopters and hydrofoils, and studied the threat that mines posed to Canadian ports.

By the 1950s, the Operational Research Group had become a permanent part of the Navy. Scientists such as E.L. Leese and P.B. Wilson brought experience from the British Admiralty. They attended naval staff meetings, examined weapons procurement plans and tested decisions against evidence.

It began with a rotating coil sealed inside a wooden box and dragged beneath a ship in Halifax Harbour.

From there, Operational Research became part of how the Royal Canadian Navy went to war.

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Source Documents

• Mayne, J.W. (1974, March). History of Operational Research in the Royal Canadian Navy (DRAE Report No. 41). Defence Research Analysis Establishment.

Canada traced Iranian AI propaganda from low-engagement Farsi videos to a global English audience

On March 7, 2026, Explosive Media changed its language and its cast.

The Tehran-based outlet stopped relying on human hosts speaking Farsi and released an English-language video featuring AI-generated Lego-style figures. Russian and Iranian state-controlled media accounts, including RT and Iran Radio PS, promoted it on X within 12 hours.

Then the video travelled without them.

By the end of March, Rapid Response Mechanism Canada estimated that at least 83 million users worldwide had viewed Explosive Media’s videos. Its broader estimate was higher: 200 million users had likely seen at least one clip that month.

The figures appear in a nine-page assessment by Global Affairs Canada. The department assessed the campaign as likely the most widely viewed foreign information operation since the start of 2026, ahead of malign activity attributed to Russia or any other state actor.

It did not begin that way.

The First Version Barely Travelled

Explosive Media opened Telegram and Instagram accounts on June 25, 2025. According to the Canadian assessment, these were the two most popular platforms in Iran. The outlet produced one-minute vertical videos about what the report calls the “12 Day War.” Human hosts spoke in Farsi to a Farsi-speaking audience.

Engagement was low.

The subject did not change when the audience did. The presentation changed. On March 7, English replaced Farsi, generative AI replaced the human hosts, and Lego-style figures carried the message.

The new videos promoted the claim that Iran had “won the propaganda war” in the Persian Gulf. They criticized U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of the hostilities and sometimes targeted Israel and Gulf Arab states.

The format quickly reached Western audiences. Explosive Media opened accounts on TikTok, Rumble, Threads, BlueSky, UpScrolled, Spotify and SoundCloud. It continued producing Farsi material on Telegram, using both AI figures and human presenters, while distributing the English videos worldwide.

TikTok brought the largest audience. Views there exceeded those on every other platform measured in the report. One example reproduced by Global Affairs shows British broadcaster GB News sharing an Explosive Media clip on TikTok and receiving high engagement.

The campaign also drew coverage from the BBC, CNN and The New York Times. The Canadian assessment says that attention extended the videos’ reach.

But the first boost and the later spread came from different sources.

State Accounts Opened the Door, Then the Crowd Took Over

RRM Canada found that Russian and Iranian state-controlled media helped push the first Lego-style video toward mainstream audiences on March 7. Their later role was small.

Of the operation’s 83 million measured views, 4 million came from accounts with internet protocol locations in Russia or Iran. The report puts that share at 4.38 per cent. It concludes that state-controlled outlets introduced the material to new audiences but played little part in sustaining its spread through March.

A network RRM Canada assesses as state-linked received most of its measured views from accounts outside Iran and Russia.

The videos also reached people who might not normally seek out material about a war. Global Affairs cites the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which attributed the campaign’s traction to humour and its appeal to people with little political interest in the conflict. The report also cites 404 Media’s observation that the Lego-style format used a visual language recognized worldwide.

The operation expanded that approach. The report cites an Institute for Strategic Dialogue estimate that broader Iranian AI operations, including videos with Minecraft and Pixar-style characters, accumulated more than one billion views during the first month of the conflict.

Global Affairs says the use of youth-oriented intellectual property made it likely that people under 16 saw the material. It also found a growing number of copycat creators making similar Lego-style videos.

Platforms removed some original clips for violating their terms of service. RRM Canada could not capture every view. The report therefore separates the 83 million users it says viewed the videos from its broader estimate of 200 million.

The campaign’s reach was visible. Its connection to the Iranian state required closer examination.

How Canada Traced the Iran AI Propaganda Network

Explosive Media says it is independent. It denies links to the Iranian state and asks its audience for cryptocurrency donations.

RRM Canada reached a different assessment through open-source analysis. The report does not claim that the outlet has acknowledged state direction. It follows a recurring human presenter through the outlet’s own posts and into the political network around Saeed Jalili.

The presenter, identified as “Individual 1,” appeared in more than 20 Farsi-language videos on Explosive Media’s Telegram channel. He had appeared there since the outlet’s first posts in June 2025. RRM Canada assesses that he was likely involved in producing its content.

On March 17, 2026, an AI Lego-style video on Explosive Media’s Instagram account named “M. Taha Ansari Mohseri” as a collaborator. The report says Mohseri strongly resembles Individual 1. It also notes that Meta requires a named collaborator to approve the designation.

The trail then returns to June 2024.

Mohseri worked on Jalili’s social media team during Jalili’s unsuccessful campaign for the Iranian presidency. He continued to appear frequently on Jalili’s official Telegram and Instagram accounts. Jalili represents Iran’s Supreme Leader on the Supreme National Security Council.

In June 2025, Mohseri appeared on Jalili’s “aqave_president” Telegram account and directed users to follow him at Explosive Media. RRM Canada assesses that Jalili or his associates likely consented to using the account to direct subscribers toward the outlet.

On that evidence, the department assesses that Explosive Media is likely linked to Jalili.

The wording matters. The report says “likely linked.” It identifies a collaborator, documents his role in Jalili’s political media operation and records the promotion of Explosive Media through Jalili’s account. It also records the outlet’s denial.

What it does not dispute is the scale.

The Small Outlet Was No Longer Small

Explosive Media began with human presenters, one-minute Farsi videos and low engagement. Eight months later, a change in format put its work before a global audience.

The outlet spread across nearly every major social platform. Other accounts reproduced its Lego-style clips. Major news organizations covered them. Platforms removed them. New creators copied them. RRM Canada says many Canadian users likely encountered the videos between March and June 2026.

State-controlled media helped with the first boost. Most measured views did not come from accounts located in Iran or Russia. Researchers cited by Global Affairs credited the videos’ humour, appeal to politically uninvested viewers and widely recognized style for carrying them beyond the Farsi-language audience Explosive Media had struggled to reach.

On June 25, 2025, the outlet was speaking mainly to Farsi users through human hosts.

On March 7, 2026, it switched languages and gave the screen to Lego-style figures.

In March, Canada counted at least 83 million users.

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Source Documents

• Global Affairs Canada. (2026, July 10). Explosive Media: Iranian state-linked AI Lego-style videos claiming that Tehran has “won the propaganda war.”

On July 15, 2026, injectable ibuprofen lysine for premature infants became eligible for a new regulatory process in Canada.

Under a federal list published that day, a manufacturer seeking Canadian approval may ask Health Canada to treat parts of the drug review as complete if regulators in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom or Switzerland have authorized the same medicine.

The list covers more than one injection. It includes child-focused tuberculosis medicines, certain epilepsy treatments, bile acids, colony-stimulating factors, albendazole, hydroxyurea and glucarpidase. Each entry names the foreign regulators whose work Health Canada may rely on for that drug class.

This is not automatic approval. It changes who must review which parts of the file.

The Order Providing for Reliance on Decisions of, or Documents Produced by, Foreign Regulatory Authorities in Respect of Certain Drugs allows the federal health minister to deem parts of a Canadian drug review complete based on work done abroad. Clinical evidence, non-clinical evidence, and chemistry and manufacturing information may all qualify.

Health Canada expects some review times to be up to 40 per cent shorter by the end of 2028.

The Review Health Canada No Longer Has to Repeat

Before a new drug can be sold in Canada, its manufacturer must file a submission. The minister reviews evidence of safety, effectiveness and quality, then decides whether to issue a notice of compliance and a drug identification number.

That system remains. The filing requirements remain. The minister still makes the Canadian decision.

What changed is the examination within that process.

A manufacturer can now request “deeming.” If every condition is met, Health Canada treats specified parts of its examination as complete because a listed foreign authority has already made a decision or produced review documents covering that material.

The order creates three routes. General deeming applies after a foreign regulator has authorized the corresponding drug. A 120-day route allows a manufacturer to file in Canada within 120 days of filing abroad, before the foreign decision. Joint review allows Health Canada and one or more foreign regulators to divide the work and rely on documents produced by the others.

The first human-drug list is narrower than the legal framework.

General deeming for new human drugs focuses on treatments with pediatric indications. The 120-day section contains no eligible human-drug classes. The joint-review section covers most major therapeutic groups, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency are not named as joint-review partners. The listed partners are regulators in Australia, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Generic drug applications and their supplements are also absent from the first human-drug phase. So are public-health-emergency drugs and extraordinary-use submissions. Health Canada says generics and biosimilars may be considered later.

The order took effect immediately. The list can change without rewriting the order.

A Canadian Decision Built on a Foreign File

“Foreign approval” comes with detailed conditions.

The proposed Canadian medicine must have the same medicinal ingredient, strength, dosage form and route of administration as the foreign drug. Its proposed conditions of use must fall within those authorized abroad. If the Canadian version differs in any part of the submission that the manufacturer wants deemed complete, the manufacturer must disclose the difference and show that it would not affect safety or effectiveness.

Health Canada reviews those differences. It also continues to examine Canadian-specific material, including labelling. If the department concludes that a difference could affect safety or effectiveness, deeming does not apply to that part of the file. A full Canadian examination follows.

The manufacturer must also disclose foreign refusals or withdrawals involving corresponding drugs when it has access to that information. It must provide the foreign decision, explain why the reasons would not affect the Canadian drug, and supply current foreign labels and descriptions of post-market measures.

A foreign decision generally cannot support deeming in Canada if the listed regulator based its authorization on another regulator’s examination. The exception is a recognized joint review involving another regulator listed for the same drug class.

Once Health Canada authorizes the drug, the usual Canadian post-market requirements apply.

The system permits reliance under set conditions, not recognition by default.

The First List Is About Children

The human-drug list makes the government’s first priority clear.

It names medicines for children whose dosage forms or indications may not already be approved in Canada. The tuberculosis entry, for example, covers pediatric powders, granules, chewable products, liquids, mini-tablets, capsules, inhaled preparations, nasal preparations, rectal preparations, skin preparations, patches and injections. Certain antiepileptic products receive similar treatment.

Other entries are more specific. Injectable ibuprofen lysine qualifies only when intended to close a clinically significant patent ductus arteriosus in premature infants. A fish-oil fat emulsion qualifies when administered intravenously for parenteral nutrition-associated cholestasis in pediatric patients. Hydroxyurea qualifies in specified oral forms when the indication includes children.

The record explains why this matters. Some drugs approved in Canada for adults are used off label in children. Moving a pediatric use from off label to an approved indication could reduce uncertainty about dosage and potentially reduce adverse reactions in children, according to Health Canada’s regulatory analysis.

But the order does not authorize any medicine by itself. Manufacturers must still decide to file in Canada. Health Canada must still determine that the order’s conditions are met. The regulatory analysis identifies federal pricing oversight, health-technology assessment, and provincial or territorial reimbursement decisions as separate parts of the drug-access process.

Canada’s market size is part of the problem the order is meant to address. The regulatory analysis says some gaps in drug availability arise from manufacturers’ business decisions in a country that represents a relatively small share of the global market. The new route is designed to make a Canadian filing less repetitive and less expensive.

The Savings Are Precise. The Uptake Is Not.

Health Canada could not reliably estimate how many manufacturers will use the order.

An earlier analysis considered a minimum of 19 submissions a year. The final version dropped an annual total because the drug classes and eligible regulators can change, and manufacturers remain free to use the ordinary review route.

Instead, the government calculated the effect on a single submission.

Industry told Health Canada that deeming could eliminate an average of 1.5 information requests per submission. One response can require up to 20 hours of expert and regulatory work and cost an average of $18,450. The estimated saving is $27,675 per submission.

Qualifying is expected to cost manufacturers an average of $9,600. That includes demonstrating eligibility and explaining differences between the Canadian and foreign drugs. The estimated net saving is $18,075 per submission.

The department’s savings are less certain. Health Canada will have to verify eligibility, assess differences, maintain the incorporated list, alter its submission-tracking system and keep pace with changes to the international electronic filing format. The record says the required effort will become clearer only after the department gains experience.

The file identifies another trade-off. Manufacturers whose drugs are sold only in Canada may not possess a foreign decision or foreign review documents they can use. The government acknowledges that greater reliance on foreign work could put these domestic firms at a disadvantage against multinational companies.

For now, Health Canada is proceeding in stages.

The legal framework is broad. The first human-drug list is not. It begins with selected pediatric medicines and joint reviews, leaves several routes empty, and allows the department to add or remove drug classes and regulators later.

The Canadian decision remains in Ottawa. Parts of the reading have moved abroad.

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Source Documents

• Health Canada. (2026, July 15). Order Providing for Reliance on Decisions of, or Documents Produced by, Foreign Regulatory Authorities in Respect of Certain Drugs. Canada Gazette, Part II, 160(14), 2721–2790.

• Health Canada. (2026, July 15). List of classes of drugs and foreign regulatory authorities for the purposes of reliance on decisions or documents: Human drugs.

In the early 1970s, the Canadian dream of homeownership faced a silent, existential threat. While construction cranes dotted the skylines of Toronto and Vancouver, the financial plumbing beneath them was rusting out. Inflation was beginning its climb, threatening to lock millions of families out of the housing market as lenders, fearful of rising costs, tightened their grip on capital. The system was rigid, illiquid, and dangerously exposed to the volatility of the decade to come.

Enter the “Special Project Team.”

Assembled in 1970 by the Minister of State for Urban Affairs and the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), this elite task force was given a mandate that sounds bureaucratic but was, in reality, a rescue mission: rewrite the rules of the Canadian residential mortgage market. Led by academic heavyweight J.V. Poapst, the team produced a sprawling, three-volume manifesto in 1973 titled Developing the Residential Mortgage Market.

Their report was not merely a technical analysis; it was a blueprint for survival. It proposed three radical mechanisms—a “central bank” for mortgages, a mutual fund for housing debt, and the controversial variable-rate loan—that would fundamentally alter how Canadians pay for their homes.

The Liquidity Trap: A Central Bank for Mortgages?

The first billion-dollar problem identified by the Poapst report was “liquidity.” In 1973, a mortgage was a heavy, immovable asset. Once a bank or trust company lent money to a homeowner, that money was gone—locked up for 25 years. If the bank needed cash to lend to a new borrower, it had few options.

The team’s solution, detailed in Volume I, was the creation of a Residential Mortgage Market Corporation (RMMC).

The RMMC was envisioned as a colossus that would stand between private lenders and the capital markets. Its function was to buy and sell mortgages just as a stockbroker buys and sells shares, creating a “secondary market”. By purchasing mortgages from banks, the RMMC would inject fresh cash back into the system, allowing those banks to lend again.

Poapst argued that without a “market maker”—an entity always willing to buy or sell—the mortgage market would remain “transitory, changing erratically in breadth and incapable of producing confidence”. The report outlined a sophisticated machinery where this Corporation would be backed by the federal government but act with the agility of a private trader, ensuring that even when money was “tight,” the flow of funds to homebuyers would never completely dry up.

The stakes were clear: without this mechanism, the report warned, the efficiency of the entire capital market would suffer, dragging down national economic growth and living standards.

The MIC Innovation: Democratizing the Mortgage Market

If the RMMC was the heavy artillery, Volume II of the report introduced the infantry: Mortgage Investment Companies (MICs).

The Special Project Team identified a glaring inefficiency in the Canadian system: small investors were shut out. If you had $1,000 to invest in 1973, you could buy stocks or bonds, but you couldn’t invest in the booming mortgage market. That privilege was reserved for massive institutions like life insurance companies and banks.

The MIC proposal was designed to smash this barrier. Modeled partially on Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) in the United States, the MIC was a “flow-through” investment vehicle. It would allow thousands of small investors to pool their money, which professional managers would then lend out as mortgages.

The report’s authors were meticulous in their design. They argued that MICs needed “conduit” tax treatment, meaning the company itself paid no tax as long as it distributed its profits to shareholders. This would prevent double taxation and make mortgage investing competitive with other assets.

The vision was democratization. By allowing the average Canadian to profit from the mortgage market, the MIC would unlock a vast new pool of private capital for housing. The report even anticipated the “timing problem”—noting that while high rates in 1970 made mortgages attractive, the market could shift quickly, requiring MICs to be nimble and well-regulated to survive.

The Variable Gamble: Breaking the Fixed-Rate Shackle

Perhaps the most prescient—and controversial—volume of the trilogy was Volume III: Variable Term Mortgages (VTMs).

In the early 1970s, the fixed-rate mortgage was king. But in an inflationary environment, the fixed rate was a trap. Lenders “borrowed short” (taking deposits from savers) and “lent long” (giving 25-year mortgages). If interest rates rose, lenders would be paying more to depositors than they were earning from homeowners—a recipe for insolvency known as the “matching problem”.

Poapst’s team proposed a shift that seems standard today but was revolutionary then: the Variable Term Mortgage.

The VTM would allow the interest rate on a mortgage to float, tied to an “anchor rate” such as the yield on short-term government bonds or the bank prime rate. The report offered a stark trade-off: in exchange for assuming the risk of rising rates, borrowers could access funds even when lenders were too terrified to offer fixed terms.

The analysis went deep into the psychology of the borrower. The team debated whether the monthly payment should change when rates rose, or if the amortization period should simply extend, keeping the payment constant to protect family budgets. They even conducted surveys of house builders to gauge market readiness, revealing a hesitant industry unsure if Canadians would accept the uncertainty of a floating rate.

The Legacy of the Poapst Report

The Special Project Team’s work culminated in the introduction of Bill C-135, the Residential Mortgage Financing Act, in February 1973. The legislation aimed to turn these theoretical volumes into the law of the land.

Reading the Poapst report five decades later is like unearthing the schematics for the modern Canadian housing economy. The Mortgage Investment Companies (MICs) they proposed are now a staple of the alternative lending landscape. The Variable Rate Mortgage (VRM) became a dominant product, carrying millions of Canadians through the low-rate era of the 2010s and the hiking cycles of the 2020s.

But the report is also a warning. It documents a financial system frantically trying to innovate its way out of an inflationary crisis. The authors understood that housing finance is not just about numbers; it is about “efficiency” in its highest sense—ensuring that the capital of a nation is available to put roofs over the heads of its people. In the volatile economic climate of 1973, they built the levees that were meant to withstand the flood.

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Source Documents

• Poapst, J. V. (1973). Developing the Residential Mortgage Market: Volume I - A Residential Mortgage Market Corporation. Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

• Poapst, J. V. (1973). Developing the Residential Mortgage Market: Volume II - Mortgage Investment Companies. Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

• Poapst, J. V. (1973). Developing the Residential Mortgage Market: Volume III - Variable Term Mortgages. Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

On July 3, 2025, a person close to Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne received a senior executive job offer from Alto. That person was his wife. According to the account later put before the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, the offer prompted immediate verbal consultation with the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.

The company was not a minor contractor. Alto is the wholly owned VIA Rail subsidiary building the federal high-speed rail initiative along the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, roughly 1,000 kilometres of planned line. It was incorporated in March 2022 under Orders in Council directing VIA Rail to create the subsidiary. Champagne’s wife would join it as a Senior Vice-President.

On September 10, 2025, Champagne formalized an internal conflict-of-interest screen. He sent a copy of his recusal letter to the Prime Minister and to the Ethics Commissioner. The screen was his own instrument. It was non-public. It was not, on the record he later presented, a finding against him by the Commissioner.

What opposition MPs later counted was simpler. Despite that self-imposed screen, Champagne participated in 13 parliamentary votes on the file and promoted the high-speed rail implementation bill that would carry the network into law.

What the Ethics Commissioner said about the Alto ethics screen

On April 7, 2026, the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner answered Champagne in writing. Champagne put the message on the committee record: the Commissioner said there was no risk of conflict of interest, and a screen was not required.

The formal logic, as it appears in the synthesis of that hearing, runs through portfolio lines. Alto sits under Transport. The Finance Minister has no human-resources authority over the subsidiary. On that basis, the Commissioner closed the risk question. Champagne’s September screen, read against the April letter, becomes a voluntary extra he chose to keep, not a requirement the Commissioner imposed.

Champagne presented that sequence as diligence. He had consulted when the job offer arrived. He had put a screen in writing. He had asked for, and received, a written confirmation that no official screen was needed.

Opposition members heard a different story in the same facts. They criticized Champagne for casting thirteen votes and promoting the implementation bill after building a screen the Commissioner later said was not required. The committee room did not close that gap. It recorded it.

The ledger opposition members put beside the votes

The Ethics file did not stay limited to household employment. Opposition members also put two Alto-related money items into the same scrutiny.

They noted that Alto executives had received $2.8 million in performance bonuses without laying any track. Separately, they noted that the Department of Finance had paid $12,168 to an Alto employee who had already left the company months earlier, to write Champagne’s budget speech.

Those figures do not establish criminal wrongdoing. On the record available here, they are line items raised in committee as part of the political case against Champagne’s handling of the file. They sit beside the household fact, not in place of it: the minister’s spouse held a senior post at Alto; Finance had paid a former Alto hand for speechwriting; Alto had paid performance bonuses while the corridor, in those committee accounts, still had no track.

The clean legal answer remained the Commissioner’s. No risk. No required screen. The political answer remained the opposition’s: thirteen votes and public promotion after a self-imposed recusal instrument.

Why the file carried weight beyond one household

The reason Alto is not a quiet corporate footnote is already partly on the Hansard Files site, in prior pieces on corridor expropriation history and on Bill C-15’s breadth. This article does not re-litigate that ground. It needs only enough of it to explain why thirteen votes matter.

Bill C-15, the budget implementation vehicle tabled in November 2025, embeds the High-Speed Rail Network Act. Critics told Agriculture and related hearings that the Act removes traditional rights of redress for expropriated landowners under the Expropriation Act, leaves farmers with a nominal $1,500 offer and a three-month eviction notice, and allows aerial drone survey if landowners refuse entry. Those claims remain critics’ descriptions in the synthesis. They are not verified here against the statute text.

Producer groups, including Grain Farmers of Ontario and Quebec’s Union des producteurs agricoles, opposed the corridor design for a separate reason already in the committee material: potential fragmentation of farmland, including over 500 pieces of land in Quebec alone, with consequences for crop rotation, drainage, and land efficiency. Daniel Farrelly and Jacques Gourde also put cost overruns on the record, saying high-speed rail projects worldwide have exceeded budget by at least 50 percent, and that a $90 billion figure could rise to $150 billion or $200 billion.

None of that farmland dispute is the ethics ruling. It is the reason the implementation bill was never a free vote on a symbolic logo. When Champagne cast thirteen votes after building a screen the Commissioner later said was unnecessary, he was casting them on a file that already carried land-power allegations, producer opposition, and a multi-billion-dollar cost envelope.

The timeline the Ethics committee could not unwrite

The sequence the Ethics material supports is short and dated.

March 2022: Alto is incorporated as VIA Rail’s wholly owned subsidiary for the high-speed initiative.

February 2025: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announces multi-billion-dollar federal funding for the project.

March 2025: Champagne is appointed Minister of Finance and National Revenue.

July 3, 2025: his wife receives a senior executive job offer from Alto; Champagne seeks immediate verbal consultation with the Ethics Commissioner.

September 10, 2025: Champagne implements an internal, non-public ethics screen and sends the recusal letter to the Prime Minister and the Commissioner.

November 2025: Bill C-15, incorporating the High-Speed Rail Network Act, is tabled.

April 7, 2026: the Commissioner writes that there is no risk of conflict of interest and a screen is not required.

Across that arc, opposition members count thirteen parliamentary votes and public promotion of the implementation bill after the September screen.

Champagne’s answer is the portfolio wall and the Commissioner’s letter. Opposition members’ answer is the household post, the screen he chose, the votes he still cast, the speechwriting payment, and the bonuses without track.

The record, limited to the synthesis behind this piece, does not show the Commissioner ordering a recusal from those votes. It shows Champagne building a screen the Commissioner later said was not required, then facing criticism for voting and promoting the bill anyway.

Thirteen votes after a screen nobody required

The sharpest sentence in the file is the Commissioner’s. There is no risk of conflict of interest. A screen is not required.

The sharpest number in the opposition case is thirteen.

Between them sits the gap the hearing leaves open: a voluntary ethics screen for Alto, a later Commissioner message saying no screen was required, and thirteen votes plus bill promotion after the September recusal letter.

The synthesis does not close that gap. It only fixes the dates, the household fact, the Commissioner’s April message, the vote count opposition members used, and the money items they placed next to it. Readers who want the expropriation and Bill C-15 architecture can find that fight elsewhere on this site. The Ethics room, on this material, was narrower: a voluntary screen, a clean formal ruling, and thirteen votes that still happened.

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For more great reporting on this topic visit:

The Canadian High-Speed Rail Files

An attempt to assemble publicly available information on the Alto High-Speed Rail project.

By Erin Durant

Source Documents

• • House of Commons, Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. Evidence (ETHIEV47-E).

• • House of Commons, Standing Committee on Agriculture and Agri-Food. Evidence (AGRIEV42-E; AGRIEV43-E).

Annette Verschuren sat as Chairperson of Sustainable Development Technology Canada when the emergency board meeting opened on March 23, 2020. Thirteen directors were present. COVID-19 had been declared a pandemic twelve days earlier. The Canada-U.S. border was already closed to non-essential travel. Portfolio companies, many of them pre-revenue, were facing lockdowns without a federal support program yet on the table for firms that were not generating income.

The proposal on the table was blunt. Increase disbursements for every company with an active project by 5 percent of its previously approved contribution, with a floor for Seed-stream projects so the top-up would not be too small to matter. Staff materials put the package at roughly $18.6 million across about 126 projects, an average of about $148,000 per company. Most of the money was meant to go out before the end of March.

According to the minutes, Verschuren, as Chair, proposed Motion 94-B-01: that the board increase disbursements for all companies currently in the active portfolio by 5 percent, “to appropriate de minimis considerations, in particular for Seed Companies.” The decision was unanimous.

She has confirmed she knew that if the motion passed, NRStor Inc. would receive an additional payment. She is Chair, CEO, and majority shareholder of NRStor, the energy-storage company she founded. Documentary evidence later showed NRStor’s COVID-19 emergency relief payment for the Goderich project was $106,176.

She did not know the exact figure that day. Board materials did not break out individual company amounts. Staff would do the arithmetic after the vote.

What the board was told about conflict

Leah Lawrence, SDTC’s President and CEO from 2015 to 2023, had already telephoned Ed Vandenberg, the board’s recording secretary and a lawyer whose firm provided legal services to SDTC. She described, in broad strokes, the idea of a bridge payment to funded companies and asked how the board should handle directors’ conflicts.

According to Lawrence, Vandenberg told her that because every project would be treated equally, separate motions for directors with perceived or direct conflicts were not required. Vandenberg testified that he understood the proposal as a general application of additional funding without exemptions, and that no particular decision was being made about a specific company. On that basis, he said, conflicts already declared when the original project funding was approved did not need to be reopened. Both he and Lawrence testified that the Conflict of Interest Act itself was not mentioned on the call. Neither of them, they said, considered whether quorum might fail if conflicted directors left the room.

That advice was put to the board. The minutes recorded that because projects had already been approved under normal processes, the proposal was framed as operational, companies would be treated equally, and no company was being singled out, no director had a real or perceived conflict related to the proposal.

Guy Ouimet was in the room. He had been appointed to the SDTC board by the Governor in Council on November 8, 2018. Before that appointment he had advised on a business and finance strategy for Lithion Recycling Inc., a lithium-ion battery recycling company later renamed Lithion Technologies. As partial payment he held an option to buy up to 1 percent of Lithion founders’ shares. He exercised that option in November 2020 for $1,250.

He voted for the March 2020 motion. He confirmed he knew Lithion would get the 5 percent top-up if the board approved it. He did not know Lithion’s exact figure at the time. Documentary evidence later put Lithion’s 2020 relief payment at $192,100. Across 118 companies that received a March 2020 payment, the board’s approach had held.

A year later, a second envelope

On March 9, 2021, fourteen directors, including Verschuren and Ouimet, met for a special board session on pandemic recovery. Staff materials warned that Canadian climate-tech ideas, jobs, manufacturing capacity, and private capital might leave the country under continued lockdowns and global investment pressure. Management proposed another top-up for companies with active contracts still working toward completion: up to 10 percent for revenue-positive Scale-up projects closer to market, up to 5 percent for other eligible projects, and up to $100,000 for certain “graduate” companies without an active project. Seed projects were out of this package.

Unlike March 2020, conflicts of interest were not raised. Lawrence testified she did not call Vandenberg for advice before this meeting. Neither the prior legal opinion nor conflicts discussion reappeared in the record of the room.

Verschuren, as Chair, proposed Motion 100(B).01: that the board approve a recommendation to provide $25 million to support companies developing domestic supply-chain partners and customers. The motion received unanimous approval.

Ouimet voted yes. He knew Lithion would receive supplementary funding. He did not know whether staff would apply 5 percent or 10 percent to Lithion; that allocation sat with management. Staff documents after the meeting show 102 companies received additional funding. Lithion received $201,705.

NRStor received $111,485 on the 2021 envelope. Combined with the 2020 payment, NRStor’s COVID relief total on the Goderich file was $217,661. Total SDTC contribution to that project, including original funding approved in 2017 and the two emergency payments, reached $2,341,187.42.

What SDTC Conflict of Interest rules required in the room

Michael Barrett, Member of Parliament for Leeds-Grenville-Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, asked the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner in November 2023 to examine Verschuren’s conduct, then Ouimet’s. The examinations were conducted under the Conflict of Interest Act. In July 2024, Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein published both reports: the Verschuren report 2024 and the Ouimet report 2024.

The Act’s rules are specific. Subsection 6(1) bars a public office holder from making or participating in a decision if they know or reasonably should know they would be in a conflict of interest. Section 21 requires recusal from any discussion, decision, debate, or vote on a matter in which they would be in a conflict. Section 4 defines conflict as exercising an official power, duty, or function that provides an opportunity to further private interests, or those of relatives or friends, or to improperly further another person’s private interests.

The Commissioner’s reports state the recusal standard in plain language. Recusal is more than abstaining from a vote. The public office holder must physically leave the room, or be moved to a separate virtual waiting room, so their mere presence cannot influence others.

That distinction mattered for Verschuren on more than the COVID votes.

After her June 2019 appointment as SDTC Chair, she continued to serve on the boards of two not-for-profit accelerators: the Verschuren Centre for Sustainability in Energy and the Environment, which she founded, and MaRS Discovery District. Between May 2020 and June 2023, twelve projects nominated by those organizations came through SDTC’s Seed stream. Seed funding is a one-time non-repayable contribution of $50,000 to $100,000 for early-stage companies.

On four board meetings covering five applicant companies nominated by MaRS or the Verschuren Centre, Verschuren declared a conflict and abstained from the consent-agenda vote on Seed funding. She did not recuse herself by leaving. The Commissioner found that because of her simultaneous roles at MaRS, the Verschuren Centre, and SDTC, she improperly furthered the interests of beneficiaries of SDTC funding to companies associated with those accelerators.

The abstention practice, he wrote, “regrettably deviated from SDTC’s Conflict of Interest Policy and fell short of the Act’s requirements.” He found she contravened subsection 6(1) and section 21 of the Act on those Seed decisions.

On the COVID relief votes, the findings cut the same way. Her financial interest in NRStor was a private interest under the Act. She participated in the March 2020 and March 2021 decisions knowing NRStor would benefit. The decisions furthered her private interests. She should have recused herself. The Commissioner found she again contravened subsection 6(1) and section 21.

He did not find that she used her position to seek to influence other directors by moving the motions, the separate prohibition in section 9. The evidence, he wrote, showed the COVID relief idea was not hers, she was not involved in setting eligibility criteria or funding proportions, and beyond participating in the discussions and moving the motions, there was no evidence she attempted to influence colleagues. Section 9 was not breached.

He also rejected the argument that the COVID decisions were matters of “general application” excluded from private interest. The decisions applied to an identifiable group of already-approved projects, not to an undetermined class of persons. The 2021 package, with different percentage tiers, only underscored that point.

The same votes, a different outcome

Ouimet’s examination reached a different destination on the same emergency envelopes.

The Commissioner accepted that Ouimet had a private interest in Lithion when he participated in the March 2020 and March 2021 decisions. Lithion was an active funded project. The relief payments of $192,100 and $201,705 furthered the company’s interests. Ouimet participated in both decisions.

The Commissioner then applied the principle of de minimis non curat praetor: the decision-maker is not concerned with small things. He read that principle into the Act’s treatment of certain minimal-value assets for reporting public office holders who are not ministers or parliamentary secretaries. The same minimal-value test, he concluded, should apply to a public office holder’s ownership interest in a company when the interest is trivial.

Ouimet’s stake at the time of each vote was a 1 percent interest acquired for $1,250. The Commissioner determined that interest was so small that there was no risk of conflict of interest. He dismissed the allegations against Ouimet.

On other Lithion matters, the record in the same report shows Ouimet regularly declaring the conflict and, according to his sworn evidence and Lawrence’s corroboration, leaving the room when Lithion-specific files came up. The COVID votes were the exceptions he did not treat that way, relying in good faith, he submitted, on the board’s universal-application framing and the March 2020 legal advice.

What the paper trail leaves on the table

The two July 2024 reports do not re-litigate every public argument about SDTC. They do something narrower.

They record, in the Commissioner’s own analysis, what happened inside two specific board decisions when the room was told conflicts did not apply because the money was moving “equally,” and what the Conflict of Interest Act required anyway.

For the Chair who founded the energy company in the portfolio, moved both relief motions, and remained majority shareholder, the Commissioner found contraventions. For the director whose 1 percent of a portfolio company cost $1,250, the same Act, applied to the same votes, produced a dismissal under a trivial-interest analysis.

SDTC’s own Conflict of Interest Policy already told directors to exit the room. The board’s ordinary practice for project-by-project approvals allowed that. The emergency packages were not handled that way. The Commissioner noted that inconsistencies in the board’s decision-making processes were a factor in the contraventions: the board did not always follow its standard practice of reviewing and approving funding applications individually, the practice that would have let conflicted directors leave for the relevant portion of the meeting.

The residual record is the pair of examination reports themselves. The votes. The motions. The payments. And the line the Act draws between sitting in the chair and leaving the room.

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Source Documents

• Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. (2024, July). Ouimet report 2024. Parliament of Canada. https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2026/ccie-ciec/ET3-26-2024-eng.pdf

• Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. (2024, July). Verschuren report 2024. Parliament of Canada. https://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2026/ccie-ciec/ET3-31-2024-eng.pdf

On the moonless night of January 29, 1944, sixteen Allied airmen and two British agents waited inside a small stone farmhouse near the village of Plouha. They had gathered after dark, moving in small groups to avoid notice. A radio in the farmhouse carried the BBC French Service. Right after the news broadcast, the set crackled with the agreed signal: Bonjour tout le monde à la Maison d’Alphonse.

The phrase meant the pickup was on. The men filed out into the cold and began the steep climb down the cliffs to the narrow beach below. A single flashlight blinked toward the sea. German patrols walked the coastline, alert for any sign of the coming invasion. For long minutes the group stood in silence on the dark shingle. Then three small rubber rafts appeared out of the blackness. Arms, money and supplies came ashore. The airmen and the two outward-bound agents climbed aboard. The rafts slipped back into the night toward a British gunboat waiting 140 kilometres across the Channel.

Canadian secret agents had made every step of that journey possible.

From Dieppe Captives to MI.9 Volunteers

Four French-Canadian soldiers captured during the August 1942 Dieppe raid managed to escape German hands and reach England. Conrad LaFleur, Robert Vanier, Guy Joly and Lucien Dumais had all volunteered for the army in 1939. Once free, all four chose to return to occupied France as agents for MI.9, the British organization responsible for helping Allied prisoners and downed airmen escape.

Lucien Dumais of Montreal was thirty-eight, a tough sergeant with the Fusiliers Mont-Royal. After his escape he trained for four months with the British First Army in North Africa, then volunteered for MI.9 work because routine camp life no longer suited him. Tall, dark-haired Raymond LaBrosse had gone overseas in 1940 as a signalman with the Royal Canadian Corps of Signals. The British services needed fluent French wireless operators. LaBrosse became MI.9’s first Canadian agent. His first mission ended when the Gestapo infiltrated the network and he had to flee. He was eager to go back.

The two men trained together in everything from ju-jitsu to building and operating wireless sets. They received fountain pens that fired tear gas, buttons that hid compasses, stacks of francs and forged identity papers. Each carried his own code, unknown to the other. In November 1943 a Lysander aircraft landed them at night in a meadow roughly eighty kilometres north of Paris. Dumais became Lucien Desbiens, a mortician from Amiens. LaBrosse became Marcel Desjardins, a salesman of electrical medical equipment. Their task was to locate Allied airmen shot down over France and move them safely out of the country.

Building the Shelburne Line

The operation was called Bonaparte and formed the heart of the larger Shelburne escape network. Safe houses had to be found where airmen could wait. Food and clothing were strictly rationed, so both had to be obtained quietly. Doctors willing to treat wounded men and printers ready to produce false papers at short notice had to be recruited. Local volunteers had to be trusted without certainty. One careless word could bring the Gestapo.

To move openly by train from Paris to the coast, the airmen had to learn to pass as French labourers, right down to the way they held and smoked their cigarettes. LaBrosse travelled the countryside locating places from which he could exchange coded messages with MI.9 headquarters in London. German radio-detection vans were always a threat. After careful search, a small isolated beach near Plouha was chosen as the pickup point. The nearby stone farmhouse belonging to a Resistance worker became known as the House of Alphonse.

Post-war German records later showed the Gestapo never came close to destroying the network. The security held.

The First Pickup and the Numbers That Followed

The January 29 evacuation succeeded. Sixteen airmen and two agents reached England. By the end of March 1944 the Dumais and LaBrosse team had escorted 128 airmen and seven agents to safety. In total, 307 Allied airmen owed their liberty to Shelburne and its key operation, Bonaparte.

The network never lost one of its human cargo. The only physical casualty was the House of Alphonse itself, later burned by the Germans who suspected it was a Resistance site. After the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, rail travel became nearly impossible for civilians. No further sea evacuations were mounted, yet both Canadians chose to remain in France. They organized, equipped and fought alongside Resistance units attacking German convoys moving toward the invasion front.

After liberation Dumais stayed on to help root out German stay-behind agents. LaBrosse was posted to the Paris section of British intelligence. Both received the Military Cross as well as French and American decorations. Both returned to their families in Canada and resumed ordinary lives. A plaque honouring the Canadian secret agents who worked with the French Resistance was unveiled at Plouha in June 1984 during ceremonies marking the fortieth anniversary of D-Day.

The Saboteur Who Earned an SS Guard of Honour

Other Canadian agents operated on different terms. Gustave Daniel Alfred Biéler, originally from France, had emigrated to Montreal at twenty and become a Canadian citizen in 1934. In 1942, at thirty-eight, he volunteered for the Special Operations Executive. He parachuted into France southwest of Paris, injured his back severely on landing, and spent months recovering. While convalescing he recruited agents for a sabotage network that eventually ran twenty-five armed teams. They blew rail lines, switching boxes and derailed German troop trains across northern France.

In January 1944 the Gestapo closed in on radio transmissions from St. Quentin. Biéler and his radio operator, thirty-two-year-old Yolande Beekman, were arrested in a small café. For months he was tortured. The Gestapo learned nothing from him except respect for his courage and dignity. In September he was taken to his execution. An SS guard of honour accompanied him. Instead of being gassed or hanged, he was shot, the only known case of an officer in these circumstances executed by firing squad. Another Canadian agent who survived, Gabriel Chartrand, later called Biéler “the great Canadian war hero.”

The Wider Record

Of roughly 1,800 SOE agents sent into occupied France, only twenty-five were Canadians. Seven of those twenty-five were captured and executed. The ratio says little about the individual courage required to jump at night into enemy territory. Similar small numbers of Canadians served with SOE in Yugoslavia, Italy and, as Force 136, in Japanese-occupied Asia. Chinese-Canadians played a particularly large role in the Asian operations because they could often speak local languages and move more freely among local populations. The dedication list in the official record names dozens more whose stories remain only partly known.

These men and women worked without public recognition, without rousing send-offs, and with the certain knowledge that capture meant no protection under the Geneva Convention. Their battles left no captured ground and no body counts for newspapers. What they left was a record of individual acts that helped thousands reach safety and weakened the enemy’s hold from within.

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Source Documents

• Veterans Affairs Canada. (1985). Uncommon courage: Canadian secret agents in the Second World War. Ottawa: Public Affairs Division, Veterans Affairs Canada.

A senior in Orillia, Ontario, put nearly a million dollars into an investment that did not exist. The pitch came with a familiar face attached to it, a trusted public figure moving and speaking in a short video. The face was fake. The money was real, and it was gone.

That is the shape of the problem the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry and Technology sat down to examine on June 8, 2026: online fraud, deepfakes, and who is legally on the hook when a scam runs on a platform built to sell ads. Somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area, another victim was out $100,000 the same way. These are individual cases, but they trace a pattern the committee kept circling, investment and romance scams sharpened by artificial intelligence and aimed squarely at older Canadians. The investment pitch and the romance pitch run on the same machinery, and both end with the victim sending the money themselves.

The scams work because the faces are convincing. Manipulated videos have put words in the mouths of Mark Carney, Doug Ford, and François Legault, each pulled without consent into an ad built to bait a viewer into wiring money. A recognizable politician endorsing a can’t-miss return is an old con. What is new is that the endorsement can be manufactured in an afternoon and served to exactly the people most likely to act on it.

What Meta’s scam ads are actually worth

The hard question in the room was not whether scams exist on Meta’s platforms. It was how much of Meta’s money comes from them.

Leaked internal documents from 2024 gave one answer. In those documents, Meta’s own estimate was that roughly 10 percent of its global advertising revenue came from ads tied to scams, banned goods, or otherwise misleading content. That figure was generated inside Meta, before any regulator came asking.

Meta’s representatives gave the committee a different figure. The real number, they said, was between 3 and 4 percent, and the company had cut that in half again over the course of 2025. So the range the committee was left to reconcile ran from the company’s public account, 3 to 4 percent, to the company’s own internal estimate, 10.

Rachel Curran, Meta Canada’s Director of Public Policy, told the committee the company has spent $30 billion globally on safety, security, and anti-fraud work over the past decade. She drew a hard line when a member put the sharper allegation to her, that Meta runs a deliberate cost-benefit calculation and keeps scam ads because they pay.

“I’m going to disagree wholeheartedly with that,” she said. “That’s bullshit.”

The record does not settle which number is right. It settles that both came from Meta.

A regulator across the ocean already ran the math

Canada’s committee was not the first body to try to size the problem. A late-2024 report from the United Kingdom’s Payment Systems Regulator found that Meta’s platforms were the origin point for 54 percent of all authorized push payment scam incidents in the UK in 2023. Authorized push payment fraud is the category where the victim is tricked into sending the money themselves, which is exactly what a deepfake investment ad is built to make someone do.

More than half of a country’s tracked scam-payment incidents, traced to one company’s platforms. The Orillia loss and the Greater Toronto Area loss are Canadian entries in that same column. That independent benchmark sat behind the Canadian hearing, next to the 3-to-4-percent account.

The fix almost everyone in the room wanted

On one point there was agreement, and the parties agreeing are the notable part. The Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange and Meta itself both asked Parliament to pass what they called safe harbour legislation.

The idea is narrow. Privacy and competition law currently makes it legally risky for a bank, a telecom, and a platform to share real-time fraud signals with one another, things like a malicious domain or a phone number that has just surfaced in a scam. Safe harbour rules would give those institutions legal cover to trade those signals fast enough to stop a fraudulent transaction before the money moves. Because the fraud completes in a single transfer, the signals only help if they arrive before the money does. Meta already runs private versions of this, through what it calls its Fraud Intelligence Reciprocal Exchange with banks and a Global Signal Exchange. The request to Parliament was to make the wider practice legally safe.

That is an unusual alignment for a committee room: the company under scrutiny and a threat-intelligence body pressing for the same rule.

The other fight Meta brought with it

Meta arrived carrying a second dispute, and it shapes what Canadians can even see when a scam surfaces. Under the Online News Act standoff, Meta continues to block all Canadian news articles from Facebook and Instagram. Its position is that the value in the old arrangement ran the other way, toward publishers, who by Meta’s estimate received about $300 million a year in free distribution across the two platforms.

The consequence is quiet. A platform that a UK regulator ties to more than half of that country’s scam-payment incidents is also the platform where Canadian users no longer see Canadian journalism about those scams. The record does not argue the point. It sets the two facts side by side.

What Meta put on the table for 2026

Meta gave the committee a forward-looking commitment. By the end of 2026, the company said, 90 percent of its advertising revenue will come from verified advertisers, up from 70 percent at the end of 2025. Verification is the mechanism Meta pointed to as its answer, on the theory that a scammer willing to submit to identity checks is a scammer more easily caught.

Whether that closes the distance between 3 percent and 10 percent is not something the committee resolved, and not something the record claims. What the record establishes is smaller and firmer. A senior in Orillia lost close to a million dollars to a face that was not real. A UK regulator placed more than half of its national scam-payment incidents on Meta’s platforms. And Meta’s own 2024 files carried a number the company spent the hearing arguing down.

The committee has the evidence. The number is still in dispute. The money is still gone.

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Source Documents

• House of Commons Canada. (2026, June 8). Evidence. Standing Committee on Industry and Technology, 45th Parliament, 1st Session.

Federal fisheries regulations currently give a lobster or crab harvester on the Atlantic coast exactly 72 consecutive hours to check a string of traps before the law says the gear counts as abandoned. In Newfoundland and Labrador waters, the window is three days, not counting the day the gear went in. Miss it, and a harvester risks a $500 fine under the Contraventions Regulations. The rule sounds like a minor bit of bookkeeping. In practice, Fisheries and Oceans Canada says it has been quietly pushing crews out onto the water in weather they would otherwise sit out, just to keep the clock from running out on a trap line.

That’s the problem the department laid out in a Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Made Under the Fisheries Act (Unattended Fishing Gear), published in the July 4 Canada Gazette. The fix is almost bureaucratic in its simplicity: strip the fixed soak time limits out of three separate regulations and let DFO set them instead through conditions of licence, the same legally binding paperwork that already governs trip limits and gear allocations for a given season.

A rule built for a different fleet

The soak time requirement was never really about safety when it was written. The Atlantic Fishery Regulations, 1985, the Maritime Provinces Fishery Regulations and the Newfoundland and Labrador Fishery Regulations all impose the same flat tending window on every fixed gear fishery in their territory, whether that’s a small inshore trap fishery close to a harbour or an offshore fleet running gillnets and longlines far past sight of land. According to the regulatory impact analysis published alongside the amendment, the underlying goal was to limit spoiled catch, incidental catch, entanglement of marine mammals, turtles and sea birds, gear conflict and gear loss. Those are reasonable things to want. The trouble, DFO says, is that a single number applied to every fishery in the region “isn’t practical or economical” for offshore fleets that hold large trap allocations and face trip restrictions of their own, and can end up pressuring crews into hauling gear in conditions they’d rather avoid.

DFO didn’t need Parliament to fix this. Under the Fishery (General) Regulations, the department can already set soak times through conditions of licence, the same mechanism it uses for nearly everything else that has to flex with the season. The department has, in fact, been doing exactly that on the Pacific coast since 1999, when the soak time provisions in the Pacific Fishery Regulations, 1993 were repealed. This amendment brings the Atlantic and Newfoundland and Labrador fisheries into line with a system the west coast has run for a quarter century.

What the soak time repeal actually changes

The mechanics are narrow but specific. Section 115.2 of the Atlantic Fishery Regulations, section 27 of the Maritime Provinces Fishery Regulations and section 8 of the Newfoundland and Labrador Fishery Regulations are all repealed outright. In their place, DFO will prescribe soak times fishery by fishery, or fleet by fleet, through licence conditions, the same tool fisheries managers already use to set trap allocations and season dates. Because the old soak time rules also applied to licences issued under the Aboriginal Communal Fishing Licences Regulations, those licences move to the new system too.

There’s a wrinkle worth noting. A licence condition is not a lighter obligation than a regulation. Breaking one carries a $750 set fine, compared with $500 for the current soak time contraventions under the Newfoundland and Labrador and Atlantic regulations, or $250 under the Maritime Provinces regulations. DFO’s own cost-benefit analysis calls this change cost-neutral for harvesters, on the theory that compliance costs don’t shift just because the rule moved from one legal instrument to another. Whether a harvester agrees likely depends on how the new, more flexible limits get set fishery by fishery once the regulation takes effect on registration.

What the industry told DFO

DFO ran its consultation between January and February 2026, sending letters to commercial licence holders, industry representatives and environmental groups, and presenting the proposal at two regional advisory meetings, the Eastern Arctic Groundfish Stakeholders Advisory Committee and the Scotia Fundy Roundtable. The online survey drew 133 responses. Support was lopsided: 119 respondents backed repealing the fixed soak times, and the regulatory impact analysis says many of them cited safety, not economics, as the main benefit of the change.

Not everyone agreed. Twelve respondents, including environmental non-governmental organizations and inshore licence holders, worried that longer or more variable soak times could raise the risk to marine mammals, particularly in net fisheries, or that pulling the limit out of regulation altogether could invite neglect from harvesters who simply leave gear in the water longer than they should. DFO’s response, laid out in the same document, was that most harvesters have no incentive to leave gear unattended for long stretches in the first place, since it raises their own costs and risk, and that the department will keep soak time requirements consistent across overlapping or similar fisheries unless there’s a clear reason to diverge.

Indigenous consultation ran on a separate track. DFO wrote to coastal and inland First Nations and Indigenous organizations, and received 11 survey responses from Indigenous licence holders along with one written response from a consultation body. No meetings were requested. Every response DFO logged from Indigenous stakeholders supported the amendments, with safety, and not having to be at sea in bad weather, coming up repeatedly as the reason. An assessment conducted under the Cabinet Directive on the Federal Approach to Modern Treaty Implementation found a low risk that the change would affect the rights, interests or self-government provisions of Canada’s modern treaty partners, since the restrictions never applied to Indigenous harvesters fishing under communal licences to begin with.

Who’s watching for the fine print

Nothing about how DFO enforces the water changes here. Fishery officers will still lean on patrols, gear inspections, logbooks and vessel activity data, the same tools they use now, and DFO says it will publish operational guidance to keep soak time conditions consistent from region to region once licence conditions take over. What does change is who gets to move the number, and how fast. A regulation takes a formal amendment process to adjust. A licence condition can be updated at the start of a season, or mid-season if the science or the weather calls for it, which is precisely the flexibility DFO says the old system never had.

The amendment applies to fixed gear fisheries in the tidal waters of the Atlantic provinces and Quebec, coastal and offshore marine fisheries in Nunavut, Canadian fishery waters off Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and the waters of Newfoundland and Labrador. Interested parties have 30 days from July 4 to file comments with DFO before the regulation is finalized.

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Source Documents

• Government of Canada. (2026, July 4). Canada Gazette, Part I (Vol. 160, No. 27), Regulations Amending Certain Regulations Made Under the Fisheries Act (Unattended Fishing Gear), pp. 1904–1912.

In 1968, while the United States looked to the Moon and the Soviet Union scrambled to perfect its orbital approach, the Canadian government turned its gaze toward a different kind of void: the silence of its own North.

For a century, the “tyranny of geography” had defined the Canadian experience. The Shield, the Rockies, and the vast frozen archipelago of the Arctic were natural fortresses that isolated communities and fractured the national consciousness. To speak from Montreal to Vancouver required a miracle of engineering—thousands of microwave towers strung like pearls across a hostile landscape. But to speak to Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit) or the remote mining camps of the Yukon? That was nearly impossible.

Enter the Honourable C.M. Drury, Minister of Industry. On March 28, 1968, he tabled a document that would fundamentally alter the physics of Canadian sovereignty. Titled simply White Paper on a Domestic Satellite Communication System for Canada, it was a blueprint for an audacious technological gamble. It proposed that Canada—a middle power with a fraction of the budget of its superpowers neighbors—should become the first nation in the Western world to launch a domestic geostationary satellite system.

The plan was not merely about telephone calls or television. It was a strategic maneuver to stitch together a fraying confederation, secure the Arctic against American cultural encroachment, and prove that a country spanning 3.8 million square miles could finally talk to itself.

The Microwave Limit

To understand the audacity of the 1968 White Paper, one must first understand the limitations of the era’s cutting-edge technology: microwave relay.

By the late 1960s, Canada had achieved an engineering marvel in the Trans-Canada Microwave system. But as the White Paper meticulously detailed, this terrestrial network had a fatal flaw: the curvature of the Earth. A microwave signal travels in a straight line. For a network to function, every transmitting tower must be in the “line of sight” of at least two others.

The report laid out the brutal mathematics of this limitation: “Because of the curvature of the earth and the practical demands of the towers, the distance between stations is limited to thirty or forty miles.”. To bridge a gap of just one thousand miles, engineers had to construct, power, and maintain thirty separate relay stations.

In the populated southern corridor, this was expensive but manageable. In the North, it was a logistical nightmare. Building a chain of towers across the tundra, where permafrost shifted the ground and winter temperatures snapped steel, was economically impossible. The result was a “communications gap” that left huge swaths of the country in a pre-electronic age, relying on erratic high-frequency radio that faded with the aurora borealis.

The White Paper argued that Canada could not wait for terrestrial technology to catch up. The country needed a “jump” in capacity—a technological leapfrog that would render distance irrelevant.

The Synchronous Solution

The solution proposed by Drury and his Task Force lay exactly 22,300 miles above the equator.

The White Paper devoted significant space to explaining the concept of the “synchronous” or geostationary orbit to a parliament and public still new to the space age. It explained that while low-orbit satellites like the early Telstar or Canada’s own scientific Alouette circled the globe every two hours, a satellite pushed to an altitude of 22,300 miles would take exactly 24 hours to complete an orbit.

If launched directly above the equator, this satellite would match the Earth’s rotation perfectly. To an antenna on the ground in Winnipeg or Whitehorse, the satellite would appear “parked” in the sky, a fixed star in an invisible constellation.

The implications for Canada were revolutionary. A single “parked” satellite could act as a relay station with a view of the entire continent. “Instead of thirty relay stations to traverse one thousand miles only one relay is necessary: the satellite,” the report stated. Even more crucially for a nation obsessed with East-West unity, the satellite offered a new geometry: “Nor is it any more difficult to span North-South distances than those East-West: it does both at the same time.”.

The technical specifications outlined in the document were precise. The satellite would be positioned between 80°W and 120°W longitude—roughly the longitude of Winnipeg. From this vantage point, its antenna footprint would cover the entire landmass, reaching as far north as 78° latitude.

However, the physics of this orbit introduced new challenges. The satellite would not remain perfectly stationary on its own. The gravitational tug of the sun and moon, along with the “irregularities of the earth’s shape,” would cause it to drift. The White Paper detailed the need for onboard “jets” to fire periodically, keeping the satellite within one-half degree of its slot. This station-keeping requirement defined the satellite’s lifespan: five to seven years, determined solely by how long the gas tanks lasted.

The Northern Imperative

While the engineering was impressive, the political heart of the White Paper was its focus on social equity. The document framed the satellite system not just as a business venture, but as a tool of national inclusion.

In 1968, the isolation of the Canadian North was profound. The White Paper explicitly identified the “sparsely populated and remote areas” as the primary beneficiaries of the new system. It argued that the satellite was the only economic means to bring reliable telephone service and television to the Arctic.

This was more than a convenience; it was a matter of citizenship. The government argued that Canadians, regardless of where they lived, had a right to participate in the national dialogue. “It provides dramatic and far reaching opportunities to increase the distribution of French and English TV programmes from coast to coast,” the report noted.

This bilingual mandate was crucial. The late 1960s were a volatile time for Canadian unity. The rise of Quebec nationalism and the coming Official Languages Act made the distribution of French-language content a priority for the federal government. The satellite offered a way to beam Montreal-produced content directly into Francophone homes in Northern Ontario, Manitoba, and beyond, bypassing the anglophone-dominated terrestrial networks. The White Paper promised that the system would allow Canadians “wherever they are, to benefit from the simultaneous transmission of television programmes in both languages.”.

The Sovereignty of the Spectrum

Beneath the technical and social arguments lurked a quieter, more urgent anxiety: American dominance.

The White Paper reviewed the “Current World Picture,” noting that the United States had already seized the lead with Telstar, Relay, and Syncom. The Soviet Union, facing similar geographic challenges, was building its Molniya system using elliptical orbits.

But the real threat wasn’t military; it was commercial and cultural. The International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT) had been formed in 1964 to handle global traffic. Canada was a charter member, owning 3.5% of the organization. However, INTELSAT was focused on international links—connecting continents, not provinces.

The fear was that if Canada did not build its own domestic highway in the sky, it would eventually be forced to rent lanes on American satellites. This would surrender control over Canadian telecommunications infrastructure to a foreign entity. The White Paper stressed that the number of “parking spots” in the geostationary orbit was limited by the need to avoid radio interference—satellites had to be spaced about six degrees apart.

By launching its own system, Canada was staking a claim to orbital real estate. It was a declaration that the space above Canada was an extension of Canadian soil.

A New Corporate Species

How would a middle power finance such a futuristic endeavor? The White Paper rejected the idea of a purely government-run agency, but it also deemed the project too critical to be left entirely to the private sector.

Instead, the government proposed a unique hybrid: a “satellite communication corporation”. This entity—which would eventually become Telesat Canada—was designed to pool the resources of the federal government and the major telecommunications carriers.

The document acknowledged the immense costs. It estimated the need for a system comprising “one active satellite in orbit, one spare in orbit, and one spare on the ground”. The infrastructure required a network of earth stations, ranging from massive receive-transmit terminals near major cities to smaller, “modest receiving stations” for remote villages.

The government’s conclusion was blunt: the system was “of vital importance for the growth, prosperity, and unity of Canada, and should be established as a matter of priority.”.

The Legacy of 1968

The 1968 White Paper was not just a report; it was the firing pistol for a race Canada actually won. The urgency expressed in Drury’s text—”The time for action”—translated into rapid legislation. Telesat Canada was incorporated in 1969.

Just four years after this White Paper was tabled, a Delta rocket roared away from Cape Canaveral carrying Anik A1. When it reached that magic altitude of 22,300 miles, Canada became the first country in the world to operate a domestic geostationary communications satellite system.

The “jump” predicted by the White Paper had been achieved. The North was connected. The silence was broken. And for the first time, a nation that had always been defined by the formidable barriers of its landscape used the vacuum of space to bring its people together.

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Source Documents

• Drury, C.M. (1968, March 28). White Paper on a Domestic Satellite Communication System for Canada. Government of Canada, Department of Industry.

On April 4, 1966, a letter arrived at the desk of Mr. R.F. Davey, the Director of Indian-Educational Services in Ottawa. The correspondence, typed on the letterhead of The Canadian Welfare Council, carried a seemingly modest price tag of just under thirty-five thousand dollars. Attached to it was a document that would attempt to peel back the layers of an institution that was slowly changing its shape but not its walls. This document was the 1966 Residential School Study, a comprehensive proposal designed to evaluate the physical, social, and psychological conditions of nine schools in Saskatchewan.

The proposal emerged at a pivotal moment in Canadian history. By the mid-1960s, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs was overseeing 10,000 Indigenous children in residential schools. While the population in these institutions had dropped significantly from twenty-five years prior, the absolute number of children had actually risen by over 1,000 since 1940. The government needed to know if the system was working, and specifically, if it was meeting the “emotional and social needs” of the students. The resulting proposal offers a stark, high-resolution snapshot of the bureaucratic machinery attempting to measure the human cost of assimilation.

The Shift from Education to Social Welfare

By 1966, the function of the residential school was undergoing a quiet but radical transformation. The Canadian Welfare Council noted that the schools were shifting from a primary focus on education to a role defined by “child welfare”. Admissions were no longer solely about schooling; priority was now being given to children from “family breakdown,” including cases of desertion, neglect, or the death of a parent.

The proposal outlined a study that would focus on 1,650 children across nine schools in Saskatchewan—seven operated by the Oblate Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church and two by the Anglican Church of Canada. The objective was qualitative research to evaluate whether these facilities could truly replace a home. This was not merely an academic exercise. Mr. R.F. Battle, the Assistant Deputy Minister, explicitly requested the study to plan resources “required immediately and on a long term basis for the education and care of Indian children outside their homes”.

The study proposed to act as a segment of an “overall evaluation” of the Indian Affairs Branch services. It was a recognition that the integration of educational services required a deeper look at the “effect of the residential school environment on the child”. The government acknowledged that traditionalism and parental preference might still be driving admissions, but they needed hard data to understand the shifting demographics inside the dormitories.

The 1966 Residential School Study and the Twelve Questions

Perhaps the most revealing section of the proposal is the list of twelve specific questions posed by R.F. Davey, the Director of Educational Services. These questions strip away the veneer of policy and ask directly about the quality of life for the children. Davey asked: “To what extent are residential schools admitting pupils who are not institutional cases?”. He wanted to know how many children were orphans or from “poor homes” in the sense of neglect.

But the questions went deeper, probing the psychological impact of the system. Question ten asked: “How well are the schools satisfying the emotional and social needs of the students?”. Question eleven was even more pointed: “Is the residential school atmosphere and the disciplinary methods employed compatible with the development of good mental health?”.

These inquiries demonstrate that as early as 1966, the federal government was actively questioning whether the discipline and atmosphere of these schools were detrimental to the mental health of Indigenous children. The study was designed to answer these questions by assessing the children’s “adaptation to the school and to the white culture” alongside their “personal and social adjustment”. The proposal aimed to scrutinize the rationale for selecting children and even the guardianship status of orphans who dropped out of the system.

Measuring Adaptation to White Culture

The methodology proposed for the 1966 Residential School Study was rigorous and revealing of the era’s assimilationist goals. The researchers planned to use the “California Test of Personality” to measure the personal and social adjustment of children from Grade 5 and up. This standardized test was intended to evaluate “self-reliance,” “sense of personal worth,” and “nervous symptoms”.

However, the study also included a specific analytic outline for measuring “Adaptation to the White Culture”. The researchers intended to query children on their values regarding work, possessions, and family structure. They asked if the child valued “life on the Reserve exclusively” or if they saw themselves adapting to the demands of work in wider society.

The proposal broke this down into granular detail. Researchers would ask children about their idea of a “good sized family” and the kind of house they wanted, checking to see if they were committed to “Indian values” or if they would “strive for some change from their background”. They even planned to measure the child’s preference for associating with Indians versus Whites, and the location of those interactions. The “Dependent Variable” was explicit: the child’s adaptation to a specific set of cultural norms defined by the state.

Auditing the Institution: From Food to Discipline

The Canadian Welfare Council proposed a forensic audit of the daily life inside the schools. The analytic outline for the institutional study covered everything from “sleeping arrangements” to “methods of discipline”. The researchers planned to count the number of children per room and assess the “night supervision arrangements”.

Clothing was another critical metric. The study sought to determine if children wore “individually owned” clothes of their personal choice, or if they were subjected to “mass purchase” uniforms or, worse, “interchangeable clothing” shared among the student body. In the dining halls, they would observe if food was served family-style or cafeteria-style, whether snacks were available, and if children were used as labor in the kitchen.

The section on discipline was particularly clinical. The proposal included a “Discipline Score” that would categorize methods such as physical punishment, isolation, deprivation of privileges, and the “deprivation of meals”. The researchers also planned to document “group punishment” and the student reaction to these measures. This data was to be cross-referenced with school records of behavior symptoms deemed indicative of maladjustment, such as “stealing” or “running away”.

Tracking the Graduates and the Budget

To understand the long-term effects of the system, the study proposed tracking down “graduates” who had left the schools in the previous five years. The researchers acknowledged the difficulty of finding a random sample, noting that Department officials advised that “most former students are still on reserves”. They aimed for a quota sample of fifty cases to assess their “success” based on employment and social situation.

The interviewers planned to ask these former students about their work patterns, their reliance on “relief” (welfare), and their living conditions. They explicitly sought to determine if the graduates had “followed the traditional Indian patterns” or adopted “more of the white patterns” regarding family size and housing.

The cost for this exhaustive inquiry into the lives of 1,650 children and fifty graduates was estimated at $34,956. This budget included $6,000 for the Project Director, George Caldwell, and funds for research assistants recruited from universities in Montreal and Saskatoon. The timeline was tight: Phase I, the field work, was scheduled for April to June 1966, with the final report due by January 1967.

This 1966 document serves as a blueprint of government intent. It reveals a system that was self-conscious enough to ask if it was damaging children’s mental health, yet committed enough to its assimilationist goals to measure success by how well a child rejected their own culture’s values for another’s.

This report is part of the Hansard Files, an independent project dedicated to unearthing the pivotal, overlooked documents that shaped our history. If you value this kind of deep-dive investigative archival work, please consider subscribing.

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Source Documents

• Canadian Welfare Council. (1966, April 4). Proposal prepared by The Canadian Welfare Council for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs regarding a Study of Indian Residential Schools in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Parliament was nearly empty on the afternoon of Friday, July 9, 1982. Most MPs had already left Ottawa. The ones who stayed were watching the clock. At roughly 4:30 p.m., a private member’s bill called Bill C-201 came up on the order paper. It proposed one change to the Holidays Act: replace the words “Dominion Day” with “Canada Day.” Three words out, two words in. And in less than five minutes, with thirteen members present in a chamber that required twenty for a legal quorum, Canada’s national holiday got a new name.

One MP asked, “What is going on?”

Nobody answered him.

The day the Commons adjourned a country’s identity

The MP who spoke up was David Baker, Conservative member for Nepean-Carleton. His question appears in the Hansard record of that afternoon, a transcript that takes up only one page of the Commons Debates. Baker had barely finished the sentence before the Deputy Speaker, Liberal MP Cyril Lloyd Francis, asked the House for unanimous consent to send the bill to Committee of the Whole. Somehow, the record shows, consent was granted. Francis then chaired that committee himself, moving through the bill with the speed of a man who knew the clock was against him: “Clause 1 agreed to. Preamble agreed to. Title agreed to. Bill reported, read the third time and passed.”

The bill’s sponsor, Liberal MP Hal Herbert of Vaudreuil, Quebec, wasn’t even in the chamber when his own bill passed.

After it cleared, New Democratic MP Mark Rose made a brief speech celebrating the occasion. “I think this is a day on which to develop and to celebrate our new holiday,” Rose said. “It is only appropriate that, in celebrating our new holiday called Canada Day, we should at least take a holiday of 55 minutes for the afternoon.” Then, according to Conservative Senator David Walker’s later account in the Senate, a member asked for unanimous consent that the clock be deemed to read five o’clock, so the House could adjourn immediately and preclude any further objection to the vote that day. The House promptly adjourned.

By that evening, Trudeau was in Kingston, Ontario. “The national Holidays Act was changed,” he told the crowd, “so that the first of July forevermore would be called Canada Day.” A cheer went up. The following Monday, July 12, CBC reported that Conservative MPs who had missed the vote complained loud and long. Deputy Whip Gordon Taylor called it “a sneaky, arrogant way of governing the country.”

What the name meant, and what it cost

The word “Dominion” was not arbitrary. When the Fathers of Confederation gathered in London in 1866 to finalize the country’s name, John A. Macdonald’s preferred choice, “The Kingdom of Canada,” was vetoed by the British Foreign Secretary over concern it would provoke the American republic. The replacement came, according to the Parliamentum account of the record, from Sir Samuel Leonard Tilley of New Brunswick, who looked to Psalm 72:8: “And he shall have dominion also from sea to sea, from the rivers unto the ends of the earth.” The word carried both a monarchical and a geographic meaning, evoking sovereignty over a continent.

Parliament formally recognized July 1 as Dominion Day through the Dominion Day Act of 1879. The preamble of that bill was specific about what the day was meant to commemorate: the entry of the original provinces into Confederation, and the subsequent joining of Rupert’s Land, British Columbia, and Prince Edward Island, all in the month of July, all under the name of Canada. The day existed to mark a precise historical sequence.

By the late 1940s, the Parliament of Canada and the Canada Gazette had both quietly stopped using the term “Dominion” on official letterhead. The phaseout was institutional, not legislative. For decades after, various governments tried and failed to change the holiday’s name through proper channels. A Gallup poll from November 1981 showed 70 per cent of Canadians supported the change to Canada Day. The political will was there. The parliamentary process kept resisting.

‘A horrible little bill’

The Trudeau government had wanted the name change done before July 1, 1982, the first Canada Day after the Constitution was patriated. That didn’t happen. A late-night session in the House on June 22 fell apart when the Progressive Conservatives walked out over a procedural dispute, with NDP House leader Ian Deans telling the Speaker that proceeding without the Official Opposition “would not be an appropriate move this evening.” July 1 came and went with the old name technically still on the books.

Three weeks later, on a hot Friday afternoon with the House nearly empty, it happened anyway.

The Senate received the bill on July 22, 1982. Liberal Senator Florence Bird moved second reading, defending the name change as an overdue break from British colonial nomenclature. She described Dominion Day as a holdover chosen “at the insistence of the British Foreign Office,” and suggested those who preferred the old name suffered from an “inferiority complex” about Canadian identity. Alberta Senator Ernest Manning pushed back hard, according to the record of those July debates. He found it difficult to believe the House had treated a national symbol so casually. “It is the type of thing that creates serious divisions and alienation among Canadians,” he said, and argued the entire rationale for the change rested on a misunderstanding of what “Dominion” actually meant.

Liberal Senator George McIlraith didn’t object to Canada Day as a concept. But he described the bill itself as “a horrible little bill” and pressed the government to proceed in a more “dignified way.” Conservative Senator David Walker, who had clearly read the Hansard carefully, told the Senate chamber exactly what had happened in the Commons: thirteen MPs, a faked clock, an instant adjournment, and a change to the nation’s oldest statutory holiday. He was describing what the constitution said should not have been possible.

Section 48 of the British North America Act, 1867, requires that at least twenty members be present for the House of Commons to exercise its powers. Thirteen is not twenty.

Liberal Senator Ann Bell gave the final speech before the vote. She acknowledged that Dominion Day reflected a tradition that was, in her words, “dying.” She did not celebrate this. “We have a political concept,” she said. “We have a geographical concept. But I am afraid we are losing the spiritual concept of Canada.”

Forty-four senators voted in favour on October 25, 1982. Royal Assent followed two days later, on October 27. The name became official in time to plan the first Canada Day celebrations for July 1, 1983.

The quorum nobody called

There’s a procedural detail buried in this story that hasn’t gone away in forty-three years. The constitutional quorum of 20 members existed precisely to prevent a handful of MPs from making consequential decisions while the rest of the chamber was absent. On July 9, 1982, that protection failed. Not because the rules weren’t there. They were. But because quorum in the House is only enforceable at the start of a sitting or when a member specifically calls attention to it during proceedings. Baker asked what was happening, but he never formally moved that the House lacked quorum. By the time anyone understood what had just occurred, the House had adjourned.

The bill that cleared the Commons that afternoon was, Moscovitz reported for CBC, just three paragraphs long, compared to the three-page government bill that had failed earlier in the year. Three paragraphs, thirteen MPs, five minutes. A name that had been on the statute books for 103 years was gone.

The 1982 Constitution had taken Canada’s founding document home. The patriation was the big story that year. Bill C-201 was the quiet footnote, except it wasn’t entirely quiet. The Senate record of those debates in late July and early August runs much longer than the Commons transcript. Senators from both parties spent hours on the floor parsing a word, a procedure, a concept of nationhood. They knew what they were voting on. They passed it anyway.

Canada Day has now been the country’s official national holiday for longer than Dominion Day was, in its final form, recognized as such. The name nobody voted to change in a full session of Parliament has outlasted the name that 280 elected members might have debated for weeks.

Forty-three years on, what’s in a name is still contested in some corners of the historical record. What’s in the Hansard is not.

Hansard Files goes back to the original record so you don’t have to. If this kind of primary-source accountability journalism matters to you, consider subscribing to keep it going.

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Related Hansard Files Articles

Source Documents

• House of Commons of Canada. (1982, July 9). Debates (Hansard), 32nd Parliament, 1st Session. [https://parliamentum.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/commons-debates-9-july-1982.pdf]

• Senate of Canada. (1982, July 22; August 3). Debates (Hansard), 32nd Parliament, 1st Session. [https://dennisryoung.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Death-of-Dominion-Day-by-Robert-Sibley.pdf]

• Bowden, J.W.J. (2014, July 2). From Dominion Day to Canada Day: From Historical Significance to Banality. Parliamentum. https://parliamentum.org/2014/07/02/from-dominion-day-to-canada-day-from-historical-significance-to-banality/

• CBC Archives. (2022, September 21). Why Canada’s national holiday is no longer Dominion Day. CBC. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/canada-day-1982-1.6496279

There’s a detail buried in the Senate Fisheries Committee evidence from the 45th Parliament that stops you cold once you understand what it means. In British Columbia, a person can hold a commercial fishing licence, never leave the dock, never get their hands wet, never catch a single fish, and still pocket a tidy profit every season. They do it by renting the licence out to an actual fisher who does all the work, takes all the risk, and then hands over a substantial cut of everything they land just for the privilege of going to sea.

Rick Williams put it directly when he testified before the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans.

“In Atlantic Canada,” he told senators, “a fishing licence is a licence to catch fish. In British Columbia, it’s a licence to control fish prices and to make big profits, renting out the privilege at exorbitant rates to the people who do the fishing.”

That sentence is not hyperbole. It’s a description of how the Pacific Coast commercial fisheries licensing regime actually functions.

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A Tale of Two Coasts

On the Atlantic side, the owner-operator model is federal policy. If you hold a licence, you fish it. You can’t park it in a portfolio and collect rent from someone who actually works the water. Fleet separation rules reinforce this by keeping processing companies out of the harvesting side. The protections aren’t perfect, and enforcement has its own problems, but the principle is clear: the licence belongs to the person doing the fishing.

British Columbia never had those rules. What it got instead was a system where licences became tradable financial assets, decoupled from the act of fishing itself. Over decades, the committee heard, those licences concentrated in the hands of processing conglomerates, corporate buyers, and investors with no operational connection to the fishery. The people who actually fish in BC now routinely lease those licences back from the owners, often paying between 50 and 80 percent of their landed value before they’ve covered fuel, gear, or crew.

The average fishing income in BC was $23,000 to $24,000 in 2019. A fishery that’s been part of the provincial economy for over a century, that stocks Canadian tables and export markets, where the person doing the work brings home less than $24,000 a year.

The employment numbers follow the money. Since 1990, the fishing fleet on the Pacific has dropped by 60 percent. Employment in the commercial fishery has dropped alongside it. Communities along BC’s coast that built themselves around the fishery have watched it hollow out not because the fish disappeared, but because the economics of who controls the right to fish made actual fishing unviable for anyone without outside capital.

Who the Fishery Is Actually For

Williams wasn’t the only voice the committee heard. The evidence session drew testimony from multiple perspectives on the Pacific licensing regime, and they converged on the same structural diagnosis. The current system doesn’t just disadvantage active fishers. It systematically transfers wealth from coastal communities, where the fishing actually happens, to outside investors, where the financial returns actually accumulate.

The committee heard that this isn’t an accident of history, exactly. It’s the downstream consequence of a policy architecture that treated fishing licences as property to be owned rather than a public resource right to be exercised. Once that happened, market forces took over. Licences became expensive. Expensive licences became attractive investments. Investment money pushed licence values higher, pricing out working fishers who might otherwise buy their way into the industry. The result is a class structure inside the fishery: people who own the right to fish, and people who pay for the right to use that right.

For young people trying to enter the industry, the committee heard, the economics are simply prohibitive. You can’t build a fishing operation from scratch when your first obligation every season is a lease payment that consumes the majority of your revenue before expenses.

The Atlantic Model as the Counterargument

The comparison Williams drew to Atlantic Canada isn’t incidental. The Senate committee is studying the Pacific regime partly because the contrast with Atlantic policy is so stark, and partly because what happened in Atlantic Canada’s owner-operator fishery offers a working example of how different rules produce different outcomes.

Atlantic inshore fishing communities have their own pressures. Enforcement of fleet separation rules has been criticized as inconsistent. Corporate consolidation in the processing sector continues to squeeze harvester incomes. But the underlying principle, that a licence is an entitlement to fish, not an investment vehicle, has kept income flowing to active harvesters in a way the BC regime has not replicated.

The question the committee left hanging is what it would take to reorient the Pacific system. Williams framed it as a policy choice, not an inevitability. The rules that allow BC licences to be held and leased by non-fishing entities exist because no one changed them. Atlantic Canada made different choices. The Pacific didn’t.

What the Numbers Say

The income figure is worth sitting with. Twenty-three to twenty-four thousand dollars a year is what the average BC commercial fisher brought home in 2019. That’s before the full weight of the pandemic, before the supply chain disruptions of subsequent years, before whatever the current season looks like. It’s a number that puts the policy question into human terms quickly.

A 60 percent decline in fleet size since 1990 means the people still fishing in BC are the survivors of a decades-long economic squeeze that has driven thousands of their predecessors out of the industry. It means coastal communities that once supported thriving independent fishing operations are now supporting far fewer of them, with far less money circulating locally.

The committee also heard testimony about what the concentration of licence ownership looks like when you follow it through the supply chain. Because processing companies and corporate investors control significant licence holdings, they have structural leverage over the harvesters who lease from them. In some cases, lease agreements come with conditions that effectively direct harvesters to sell their catch through a specific processor, compounding the income pressure.

None of that is illegal under the current regime. That’s the point Williams was making, and that the committee’s study is positioned around. The problem isn’t that someone broke the rules. The problem is that the rules produce these outcomes by design.

An Answer the Record Doesn’t Have Yet

The Senate Fisheries Committee is still in the study phase on Pacific commercial licensing. No recommendations have been tabled. No legislative changes are on the table. What the committee has done, through sessions like this one, is build a detailed record of how the system works and who it works for.

That record matters. It’s the foundation for any future policy response, and it makes the problem hard to deny. The income numbers, the fleet decline figures, the direct comparison to Atlantic policy, the structural description of how lease arrangements function, all of it is now formally in the parliamentary record.

Whether the study produces a report that moves federal policy on Pacific fishing licences, or whether it joins the long archive of Senate studies that document a problem without changing it, is not something the current evidence can answer. What the evidence does answer is the question Rick Williams put to the committee in plain language: in BC, the people who fish the Pacific are not, in any meaningful sense, the people who own the right to do it.

That’s the problem. The committee heard it. The record has it. What comes next is the government’s choice.

Hansard Files spends weeks in the archives so you don’t have to. If stories like this matter to you, subscribe to keep this work independent.

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Related Hansard Files Articles

Source Documents

• Senate of Canada, Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans. (2026). Evidence (33ev-57776.pdf). 45th Parliament, 1st Session.