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Election interference: eye on the ball, please

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David Johnston, who should be beside the point

People living in Canada are having their democratic rights undermined. Fixing that should be everyone’s goal.

Back from vacation, I’m delighted to see nothing has changed. It’s David Johnston this and David Johnston that and David Johnston the other. That last link is about how Johnston has hired Navigator, which is reliably identified as a “crisis-communications firm” in stories like this, to help him figure out what to say. To which one possible answer, given the current storm of excrement, is: My God, wouldn’t you?

I prefer not to pile onto stories that absolutely everyone else is writing about. Today constitutes a bit of an exception to that policy. I’m working on a bunch of stories on topics that will stray very far abroad from this one. But while those other stories percolate, here are a few thoughts on Canada’s response to election interference.

First, we’re in the phase of the story where everyone digs in. Johnston has a mandate from the Prime Minister of Canada which extends to October. He plans to keep working until then. I never thought he was right for this job. But nobody should be surprised that, having taken it, he intends to keep doing it.

But, we are told, Parliament has voted to demand that he stand down! Indeed, that’s how I’d have voted too. Yet Johnston persists. This too is hardly surprising. Ignoring Parliament is easy enough, and it often feels great, as when Parliament voted to express profound sadness over a cover illustration in a magazine where I used to work. Johnston could have taken Parliament’s counsel, but since we are, as I’ve noted, in the phase of the story where everyone digs in, he’s digging in instead.

There is a school of thought that believes this sort of situation must lead straight to a confidence vote and an election. Brother Coyne is that school’s headmaster. I’m always in favour of the largest possible number of elections too, especially since I now make a living selling political analysis. I fondly hope the next campaign will be excellent for business. But I seem to recall that the last time Parliament followed its convictions all the way to a forced election, Canadians responded by sending the Parliament-flouters back with reinforcements. I don’t know whether that would happen now. But the opposition parties are allowed to make such calculations. No surprise, then, that they too are digging in — but not all the way.

Where does this leave us? First, with a process terribly compromised by lousy design. Justin Trudeau sought to outsource his credibility by subcontracting his judgment. The credibility transfusion was supposed to flow from Johnston to Trudeau. Instead it has gone the other way. The PMO hoped they’d found somebody whose credibility nobody would challenge, because he comes from the sort of precincts that impress them. Now they’re stuck insisting that challenging Johnston’s fitness or his conclusions is uncouth. The number of Canadians who decline to take etiquette tips from the PMO continues to surprise the PMO.

So far I have discussed all of this in terms of the usual Ottawa obsessions: Parliament, status, tactics, winners and losers. This sort of scorekeeping comforts Ottawa lifers, soothes us because we have been doing it most of our lives.

But there is another audience here.

It is Canadians and permanent residents who live here and experience intimidation all the time. Most are members of diaspora communities, Chinese and other. They have been saying for years that their freedoms of speech and assembly and their right to security of the person — their Charter rights — are being targeted, infringed and impinged by agents of Beijing’s thug regime. What Cherie Wong, executive director of the Alliance Canada-Hong Kong, says every time she is asked, is that it’s time for action. ACHK’s latest report reads a lot like its earlier reports, like the reports from the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians that Trudeau admits he ignored. There’s not much new here, just as there would not be much new after Johnston’s process, or after a theoretically better process launched by some future government.

So Ottawa’s current process obsession, while understandable, is not at all helpful.

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The ACHK report includes recommendations that could be implemented before the next election, if parties were less obsessed with using foreign interference to win the next election. The Trudeau government is indeed moving ahead on some elements of ACHK’s recommendations, including a foreign-influence registry. That’s a fraught process that presents real pitfalls — overreach and stigmatization at one extreme, and at the other, a once-over-lightly framework that would not capture the sort of clandestine activity that’s the problem. As indeed the political scientist Stephanie Carvin discusses in the ACHK report. So it’s not something to be rushed. But all due dispatch would be welcome.

(For a discussion of the complexities of foreign-influence registries, readers could do worse than to look at the proceedings of a February meeting of a joint committee of both chambers of the Australian Parliament, considering amendments to Australia’s own foreign-influence registry six years after it was implemented. The comparison with our own debate does not flatter Canada’s Parliament. Australian politics can be raw and tough, and Beijing’s influence is, if anything, a more pressing issue there than here. But members from all parties in Australia discuss the issue calmly. They treat witnesses as sources of useful information, not as sticks to beat their political opponents with. I’m not sure how Canada can get there from here, but it’s refreshing to be reminded it’s possible.)

I suppose what I’m proposing here is a dose of pragmatism informed by a sense that Parliament can be something more than an endless pissing match. I was an early member of the skeptics’ club on David Johnston’s suitability for this particular task. I don’t feel chastened by subsequent events. But that ship has rather spectacularly sailed. Trying to turn the next five months of his work into a bigger fiasco won’t help the people living in Canada in fear and worry. Neither will adding another commission with grander pretensions for a report sometime after the next election. The question facing parliamentarians now is to work on solutions instead of trying to win arguments. There’ll be plenty of arguments later.

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Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

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From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

It’s now more than four years since the federal Liberal government pledged $30 billion in spending over five years for $10-per-day national child care, and more than three years since Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government signed a $13.2 billion deal with the federal government to deliver this child-care plan.

Not surprisingly, with massive government funding came massive government control. While demand for child care has increased due to the government subsidies and lower out-of-pocket costs for parents, the plan significantly restricts how child-care centres operate (including what items participating centres may purchase), and crucially, caps the proportion of government funds available to private for-profit providers.

What have families and taxpayers got for this enormous government effort? Widespread child-care shortages across Ontario.

For example, according to the City of Ottawa, the number of children (aged 0 to 5 years) on child-care waitlists has ballooned by more than 300 per cent since 2019, there are significant disparities in affordable child-care access “with nearly half of neighbourhoods underserved, and limited access in suburban and rural areas,” and families face “significantly higher” costs for before-and-after-school care for school-age children.

In addition, Ottawa families find the system “complex and difficult to navigate” and “fewer child care options exist for children with special needs.” And while 42 per cent of surveyed parents need flexible child care (weekends, evenings, part-time care), only one per cent of child-care centres offer these flexible options. These are clearly not encouraging statistics, and show that a government-knows-best approach does not properly anticipate the diverse needs of diverse families.

Moreover, according to the Peel Region’s 2025 pre-budget submission to the federal government (essentially, a list of asks and recommendations), it “has maximized its for-profit allocation, leaving 1,460 for-profit spaces on a waitlist.” In other words, families can’t access $10-per-day child care—the central promise of the plan—because the government has capped the number of for-profit centres.

Similarly, according to Halton Region’s pre-budget submission to the provincial government, “no additional families can be supported with affordable child care” because, under current provincial rules, government funding can only be used to reduce child-care fees for families already in the program.

And according to a March 2025 Oxford County report, the municipality is experiencing a shortage of child-care staff and access challenges for low-income families and children with special needs. The report includes a grim bureaucratic predication that “provincial expansion targets do not reflect anticipated child care demand.”

Child-care access is also a problem provincewide. In Stratford, which has a population of roughly 33,000, the municipal government reports that more than 1,000 children are on a child-care waitlist. Similarly in Port Colborne (population 20,000), the city’s chief administrative officer told city council in April 2025 there were almost 500 children on daycare waitlists at the beginning of the school term. As of the end of last year, Guelph and Wellington County reportedly had a total of 2,569 full-day child-care spaces for children up to age four, versus a waitlist of 4,559 children—in other words, nearly two times as many children on a waitlist compared to the number of child-care spaces.

More examples. In Prince Edward County, population around 26,000, there are more than 400 children waitlisted for licensed daycare. In Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton County, the child-care waitlist is about 1,500 children long and the average wait time is four years. And in St. Mary’s, there are more than 600 children waitlisted for child care, but in recent years town staff have only been able to move 25 to 30 children off the wait list annually.

The numbers speak for themselves. Massive government spending and control over child care has created havoc for Ontario families and made child-care access worse. This cannot be a surprise. Quebec’s child-care system has been largely government controlled for decades, with poor results. Why would Ontario be any different? And how long will Premier Ford allow this debacle to continue before he asks the new prime minister to rethink the child-care policy of his predecessor?

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute
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Canada Caves: Carney ditches digital services tax after criticism from Trump

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From The Center Square

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Canada caved to President Donald Trump demands by pulling its digital services tax hours before it was to go into effect on Monday.

Trump said Friday that he was ending all trade talks with Canada over the digital services tax, which he called a direct attack on the U.S. and American tech firms. The DST required foreign and domestic businesses to pay taxes on some revenue earned from engaging with online users in Canada.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the president said. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

By Sunday, Canada relented in an effort to resume trade talks with the U.S., it’s largest trading partner.

“To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States,” according to a statement from Canada’s Department of Finance.

Canada’s Department of Finance said that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump agreed to resume negotiations, aiming to reach a deal by July 21.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday that the digital services tax would hurt the U.S.

“Thank you Canada for removing your Digital Services Tax which was intended to stifle American innovation and would have been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America,” he wrote on X.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Carney had different concepts for trade between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

“It’s not so much holding up, I think we have different concepts, I have a tariff concept, Mark has a different concept, which is something that some people like, but we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it today.”

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs for allowing fentanyl and migrants to cross their borders into the U.S. Trump later applied those 25% tariffs only to goods that fall outside the free-trade agreement between the three nations, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump put a 10% tariff on non-USMCA compliant potash and energy products. A 50% tariff on aluminum and steel imports from all countries into the U.S. has been in effect since June 4. Trump also put a 25% tariff on all cars and trucks not built in the U.S.

Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports them. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs give U.S.-produced goods a price advantage over imported goods, generating revenue for the federal government.

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