Watchdog Asks Whether RCMP Brass Shielded Lobbyists in Ottawa’s Influence Scandals

From ArriveCAN to SNC-Lavalin, new scrutiny of Ottawa’s regulators raises questions about whether the RCMP and federal oversight bodies have become politically neutered.

Canada’s federal lobbying commissioner and the RCMP are under new scrutiny from a national transparency watchdog demanding to know whether the lobbying regulator has concealed rulings in nine violations that were referred to the Mounties — and later quietly sent back without prosecution — in a wide range of cases from the ArriveCAN procurement imbroglio to the explosive SNC-Lavalin affair, in which a former attorney general told the RCMP they could look at criminal obstruction charges.

The allegations relate to testimony now before a Parliamentary ethics committee, which has revived long-standing concerns from critics about Canada’s politically appointed watchdogs — and about the RCMP itself.

Framing his most pointed suggestion — that the RCMP may be politically neutered — in the form of questions, Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch, a witness before the committee, asked in a release Thursday:
“Did former RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki let off the lobbyists because she was appointed by and served at the pleasure of former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? Did … current RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme let off the lobbyists so Trudeau would appoint him first as Interim Commissioner in March 2023 and then as Commissioner in April 2024?”

Conacher’s statement presses for the release of nine rulings by Lobbying Commissioner Nancy Bélanger — cases referred to the RCMP and later returned to her office without charges. He accuses Bélanger’s office of failing to release those rulings for more than a year, despite access-to-information requests dating back to 2023.

In Conacher’s October 30 release, Democracy Watch accused both the RCMP and the Commissioner’s office of “blatantly violating” the Access to Information Act. The hidden cases, the watchdog said, may involve unregistered or unethical lobbying by major corporations including Facebook, WE Charity, SNC-Lavalin, and Imperial Oil.

“By continuing to hide her rulings on nine lobbying violations, Commissioner Bélanger is covering up scandalous situations, protecting the lobbyists and the public officials they were lobbying,” Conacher said. “It’s shameful that the RCMP, whose top officers are chosen by and serve at the pleasure of the ruling-party Cabinet, continue to take so long to investigate lobbyists who violate the law — and that they fail to prosecute almost all violations.”

Renewing his attack on RCMP leadership, Conacher added: “Their negligently bad enforcement record is more clear evidence that a new, fully independent anti-corruption federal police and prosecution force is needed.”

Conacher cites hearing evidence that Bélanger testified before the House Ethics Committee on April 16, 2024, acknowledging that her office had referred 15 cases to the RCMP since 2018 — and that the Mounties had “let off” the lobbyists in nine of them. In her most recent appearance on October 6, 2025, she updated that total to 18 cases referred, with 10 returned without charges, two prosecutions completed, two “in discussion,” and two still under investigation, Conacher said.

Conacher pointed to Bélanger’s confrontational exchange over the ArriveCAN procurement scandal with Conservative MP Michael Barrett during the April 2024 hearings.
“I wrote you about a month ago regarding GC Strategies. This is the Liberal government’s hand-picked favourite IT firm. They don’t do work on the applications but collect a commission for connecting the government with unknown firms,” Barrett said. “Can you tell us today if you’re investigating GC Strategies or its principals for contravening the Lobbying Act?”
“As I told you in the letter, I’m very much aware of the facts of that case, and I cannot confirm whether I’m investigating. You know that I do that because I do not want to jeopardize a possible RCMP investigation,” Bélanger answered.

Barrett then listed the company’s reported meetings with senior officials across government, including former Chief Information Officer Paul Girard and a series of departmental directors.

While contracting rules were breached, no criminal charges have been laid. In June 2025, Public Services and Procurement Canada barred GC Strategies from federal contracts for seven years. The government also barred two other firms involved in the ArriveCAN project — Dalian Enterprises and Coradix Technology Consulting — from future federal tenders.

The ArriveCAN app was launched in April 2020 as a digital tool to track traveller health information and customs declarations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Auditor General Karen Hogan later reported that poor record-keeping and excessive reliance on outside contractors caused the project’s cost to balloon from an initial $2.35 million to about $60 million, exposing what she called “a breakdown of basic management controls.” According to her report, GC Strategies alone was awarded more than $19 million for its share of the contracts.

An independent audit by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada found that the federal government awarded 106 contracts valued at approximately $92.7 million between April 2015 and March 2024, many without competition.

Conacher’s most recent demand for disclosure dovetails with the committee’s ongoing probe of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner, following testimony by former Privy Council Clerk Michael Wernick. In that tense hearing earlier this week, Wernick was pressed on whether prime ministers’ conflicts of interest should be policed internally through “ethics screens,” or whether blind trusts and full public disclosure are required. Wernick defended the current system as “one tool in a broader toolbox,” while Conservative MPs Michael Barrett and Michael Cooper countered that it leaves Canadians relying on “hope and trust.”

The hearings also raised concerns about Prime Minister Mark Carney’s extensive Brookfield holdings, now shielded by an ethics screen covering about 100 files — what Wernick called “the most extensive private-sector record since Paul Martin.”

The parallels between the Bélanger and Wernick hearings highlight the same structural concerns: officials accountable to the Prime Minister are also responsible for policing the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s conflicts. For Democracy Watch, that circular system — extending from the Lobbying Commissioner and Ethics Commissioner to the RCMP Commissioner — represents not oversight, but insulation.

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Canada’s economic performance cratered after Ottawa pivoted to the ‘green’ economy

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jason Clemens and Jake Fuss

There are ostensibly two approaches to economic growth from a government policy perspective. The first is to create the best environment possible for entrepreneurs, business owners and investors by ensuring effective government that only does what’s needed, maintains competitive taxes and reasonable regulations. It doesn’t try to pick winners and losers but rather introduces policies to create a positive environment for all businesses to succeed.

The alternative is for the government to take an active role in picking winners and losers through taxes, spending and regulations. The idea here is that a government can promote certain companies and industries (as part of a larger “industrial policy”) better than allowing the market—that is, individual entrepreneurs, businesses and investors—to make those decisions.

It’s never purely one or the other but governments tend to generally favour one approach. The Trudeau era represented a marked break from the consensus that existed for more than two decades prior. Trudeau’s Ottawa introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the government termed the “green” economy.

The scope and cost of the policies introduced to actively pick winners and losers is hard to imagine given its breadth. Direct spending on the “green” economy by the federal government increased from $600 million the year before Trudeau took office (2014/15) to $23.0 billion last year (2024/25).

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects (Bill C-69), banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia (Bill C-48), proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs.

Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the “green” sector, a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1 per cent. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6 per cent of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating.

And Ottawa’s initiatives did not deliver the green jobs promised. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, and the sector now represents less than 2 per cent of total employment.

Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Simply put, rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation. Consider that Canadian living standards, as measured by per-person GDP, were lower as of the second quarter of 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, we’re poorer today than we were six years ago. In contrast, U.S. per-person GDP grew by 11.0 per cent during the same period.

Median wages (midpoint where half of individuals earn more, and half earn less) in every Canadian province are now lower than comparable median wages in every U.S. state. Read that again—our richest provinces now have lower median wages than the poorest U.S. states.

A significant part of the explanation for Canada’s poor performance is the collapse of private business investment. Simply put, businesses didn’t invest much in Canada, particularly when compared to the United States, and this was all pre-Trump tariffs. Canada’s fundamentals and the general business environment were simply not conducive to private-sector investment.

These results stand in stark contrast to the prosperity enjoyed by Canadians during the Chrétien to Harper years when the focus wasn’t on Ottawa picking winners and losers but rather trying to establish the most competitive environment possible to attract and retain entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and high-skilled professionals. The policies that dominated this period are the antithesis of those in place now: balanced budgets, smaller but more effective government spending, lower and competitive taxes, and smart regulations.

As the Carney government prepares to present its first budget to the Canadian people, many questions remain about whether there will be a genuine break from the policies of the Trudeau government or whether it will simply be the same old same old but dressed up in new language and fancy terms. History clearly tells us that when governments try to pick winners and losers, the strategy doesn’t lead to prosperity but rather stagnation. Let’s all hope our new prime minister knows his history and has learned its lessons.

Jason Clemens

Executive Vice President, Fraser Institute

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Business

Canadians paid $90 billion in government debt interest in 2024/25

Published on October 31, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss, Tegan Hill and William Dunstan

Next week, the Carney government will table its long-awaited first budget. Earlier this year, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched a federal spending review to find $25 billion in savings by 2028. Even if the government meets this goal, it won’t be enough to eliminate the federal deficit—projected to reach as high as $92.2 billion in 2025/26—and start paying down debt. That means a substantial amount of taxpayer dollars will continue to flow towards federal debt interest payments, rather than programs and services or tax relief for Canadians.

When a government spends more than it raises in revenue and runs a budget deficit, it accumulates debt. As of 2024/25, the federal and provincial governments will have accumulated a total projected $2.3 trillion in combined net debt (total debt minus financial assets).

Of course, like households, governments must pay interest on their debt. According to our recent study, the provinces and federal government expect to spend a combined $92.5 billion on debt interest payments in 2024/25.

And like any government spending, taxpayers fund these debt interest payments. The difference is that instead of funding important programs, such as health care, these taxpayer dollars will finance government debt. This is the cost of deficit spending.

How much do Canadians pay each year in government debt interest costs? On a per-person basis, combined provincial and federal debt interest costs in 2024/25 are expected to range from $1,937 in Alberta to $3,432 in Newfoundland and Labrador. These figures represent provincial debt interest costs, plus the federal portion allocated to each province based on a five-year average (2020-2024) of their share of Canada’s population.

For perspective, it’s helpful to compare debt interest payments to other budget items. For instance, the federal government estimates that in 2024/25 it will spend more on debt interest costs ($53.8 billion) than on child-care benefits ($35.1 billion) or the Canada Health Transfer ($52.1 billion), which supports provincial health-care systems.

Provincial governments too spend more money on interest payments than on large programs. For example, in 2024/25, Ontario expects to spend more on debt interest payments ($15.2 billion) than on post-secondary education ($14.2 billion). That same year, British Columbia expects to spend more on debt interest payments ($4.4 billion) than on child welfare ($4.3 billion).

Unlike other forms of spending, governments cannot simply decide to spend less on debt interest payments in a given year. To lower their debt interest payments, governments must rein in spending and eliminate deficits so they can start to pay down debt.

Unfortunately, most governments in Canada are doing the opposite. All but one province (Saskatchewan) plans to run a deficit in 2025/26 while the federal deficit could exceed $90 billion.

To stop racking up debt, governments must balance their budgets. By spending less today, governments can ensure that a larger share of tax dollars go towards programs or tax relief to benefit Canadians rather than simply financing government debt.