A Minister, $1.7 Billion, and No Receipt
How Bill C-26 grants the federal government unprecedented power to spend $1.7 billion on Canada's housing crisis without parliamentary oversight, metrics, or clawbacks.
On June 17, Gregor Robertson stood in the Senate chamber to defend Bill C-26. There is no allocation formula. No reporting mandate. No clawback if the money is misspent.
The Minister at the Bar
On the evening of June 17, 2026, the Senate of Canada resolved itself into a Committee of the Whole, a rare procedural setting that pulls a sitting cabinet minister out of the House and into the upper chamber to answer questions directly, under no script, with no department briefing note between him and the senators asking. Gregor Robertson, the Minister of Housing and Infrastructure, took the chair to be examined on Bill C-26, a bill that would let his ministry draw money straight from the Consolidated Revenue Fund and transfer it to provinces and territories for housing supply, no parliamentary appropriation vote required for each transfer.
The number on the table was $1.7 billion.
Robertson’s defense, according to the record, rested on a single word: agility. The mechanism, he told the chamber, was designed to be flexible enough to move fast when a province or territory was ready to build. Speed was the point. Waiting for the normal appropriations cycle, in his framing, was the enemy of getting homes built while the housing crisis worsened.
The senators on the other side of the chamber were not interested in speed. They were interested in what happens to $1.7 billion once it leaves Ottawa.
Senator Leo Housakos put it in the plainest terms the record contains.
“When a government goes to a discretionary fund, pulls out $1.7 billion with no checks or balances and sends that money across the country on a hope and a whim, we call that a political slush fund.”
It is not a casual line. It is a direct allegation, made by a sitting senator on the floor of the chamber, that the bill as written hands a minister discretionary control over public money without the structural guardrails Parliament normally insists on. The record does not show Robertson disputing the substance of what Housakos described, the absence of an allocation formula, a reporting mandate, performance metrics, or a clawback provision. His answer was that the flexibility was deliberate.
Senator Denise Batters pressed the same gap from a different angle, according to the brief: if a province takes the money and does not build, what happens to it? The record does not show Robertson offering a recovery mechanism in his answer.
What “Good Faith” Means When the Number Is a Billion
The phrase that recurs in the Committee of the Whole record, the one Robertson kept returning to, is good faith. The minister characterized C-26 as a tool built on the assumption that provinces and territories receiving federal housing money will use it for housing. There is no enforcement architecture in the bill that would compel that outcome. There is no mechanism in the record for the federal government to claw the money back if a jurisdiction takes its share and spends it on something else, or spends it slowly, or does not spend it at all.
This is not a small bill operating in isolation. The housing context senators brought into the chamber that week was stark. Canada’s stated target is to move annual housing starts from roughly 258,000 units to 480,000, nearly doubling production. In Nova Scotia specifically, the record cites a figure showing that 32 percent of post-secondary students are experiencing what is termed hidden homelessness, couch surfing, sleeping in cars, the kind of housing precarity that does not show up in a shelter count. Against that backdrop, the case for moving fast is not abstract. But the record shows the opposition senators arguing that speed and accountability are not actually in tension, that a transfer mechanism can move quickly and still require a province to report back on what the money built.
C-26 sat inside a broader pattern flagged separately during the same sitting week. Senator Claude Carignan, debating the government’s spending bills, noted that 23 of 38 government bills introduced in this Parliament expand discretionary or regulatory power held by ministers or Cabinet, rather than narrowing it.
“Trust can’t be commanded by order-in-council,” Carignan told the chamber. “It has to be earned.”
He was not speaking directly about C-26, his remarks were tied to separate appropriation legislation, but the throughline in the week’s debates was the same: a Senate increasingly tracking how much unilateral spending authority is moving toward the executive branch, bill by bill, with the housing transfer mechanism as one entry in that ledger.
C-26 passed Third Reading on division on June 18 and received Royal Assent that evening at 7:49 p.m. The objections Housakos and Batters raised in committee were never resolved on the floor. They are simply part of the permanent record now, attached to a bill that became law unchanged.
Also This Week: The Write-Off the CRA Won’t Explain Anymore
On June 15, Senator Percy Downe returned to a fight he has been running for years: why the Canada Revenue Agency pursues domestic tax debtors aggressively while going quiet on what it recovers from the wealthy overseas. In 2018-19, the CRA confirmed under questioning that 196,268 legal entities had debts written off, with the single largest write-off totaling $133 million. By 2025, when Downe asked for comparable figures, the agency declined, citing confidentiality provisions. The record shows no explanation for why data the CRA was willing to disclose in 2019 became unavailable six years later.
A Nine-Year Window to Override Health Canada’s Scientists
Buried inside Bill C-30, the spring economic update bill, is Division 8, an amendment to the Pest Control Products Act that drew sustained objection from Senator Rosa Galvez. The change, debated without testimony from the Health Minister, would let Cabinet override Health Canada’s own scientists and extend approval for pesticides Health Canada has flagged as dangerous, for up to nine years, based on undefined “economic” or “food security” grounds. Galvez’s framing of the stakes was direct:
“Science does not make political decisions. It is a capacity. If approvals take too long, the answer is not to weaken science; it is to strengthen the system.”
C-30 passed Third Reading on division on June 18 alongside C-26, with Division 8 intact.
A Leak, a Question of Privilege, and a Report on MAID
On June 16, Senator Pamela Wallin rose on a Question of Privilege over the unauthorized leak of in-camera deliberations from the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, details reaching media before the committee’s report was formally tabled. The report itself, addressing access to MAID for those whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, was tabled the next day, June 17. On June 18, the Speaker ruled Wallin’s complaint a prima facie breach of privilege, and the Senate referred the matter to the Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament for further investigation.
A Send-Off for the Mountie Who Broke the Glass Ceiling
Before the chamber turned to its final votes on June 18, senators paused for a retirement tribute to the Honourable Bev Busson, the former RCMP Commissioner and the force’s first woman to hold the post. The Senate then adjourned for the summer at 8:26 p.m., not scheduled to return until September 28, 2026, after a sitting day that saw Bills C-20, C-30, C-16, C-25, and C-26 all pass Third Reading and receive Royal Assent within hours of each other.
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.
Related Hansard Files Articles
Source Documents
Senate of Canada. (2026, June 15). Debates of the Senate (Hansard), 1st Session, 45th Parliament, Issue 083.
Senate of Canada. (2026, June 16). Debates of the Senate (Hansard), 1st Session, 45th Parliament, Issue 084.
Senate of Canada. (2026, June 17). Debates of the Senate (Hansard), 1st Session, 45th Parliament, Issue 085.
Senate of Canada. (2026, June 18). Debates of the Senate (Hansard), 1st Session, 45th Parliament, Issue 86.
I wasn't aware "Trust me, brah!!" was an accepted explanation and defense for gubbermint spending. Very interesting.
"Senator Claude Carignan, debating the government’s spending bills, noted that 23 of 38 government bills introduced in this Parliament expand discretionary or regulatory power held by ministers or Cabinet, rather than narrowing it."
*sigh*
So much noise from Canadians about "Trump", and never enough watching the process of centralization that crosses the entire of the tiny Overton window of US and Canadian politics. These are systemic issues, not problems with individuals.
I consider all the parties with seats in both the US and Canada to be "right wing" when it comes to centralization-vs-decentralization of power).
https://imnotyourechochamber.substack.com/p/what-left-and-right-actually-mean
It seems the words "Liberal" and "Democrat" in corporate party branding confuses people as much as the word "Progressive" and "Fidelity" in other corporate names. I mean, clearly Progressive Insurance is a left-wing activist group, right???