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The repair job at Immigration

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17 minute read

PAUL WELLS

The department’s top bureaucrat answers a critical report, with rare candour

Seven months ago Neil Yeates, a retired former deputy minister of immigration, submitted a report on the organization of the department of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to the current deputy minister, Christiane Fox.

Yeates’s 28-page report was blunt, plainspoken, critical but constructive. It said “the current organizational model at IRCC is broken.” At a time of global upheaval and dizzying growth in immigration levels, the department that decides who gets into Canada was no longer “fit for purpose,” he wrote. It was time for “major change.” When? “[T]he advice is to proceed now.”

On Thursday, a copy of Yeates’s report landed in my email inbox.

On Thursday night, Christiane Fox told me she is implementing many of Yeates’s recommendations, and described for me her plans for the department with a level of detail and candour I almost never see in today’s Ottawa.


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Copies of Yeates’s February IRCC Organizational Review Report have been floating around Ottawa because the department began implementing big changes this week. Some of the nearly 13,000 people who work in the department have asked for the rationale behind the changes. Yeates’s 28-page report makes the case succinctly.

Yeates was a top civil servant in Saskatchewan before moving to Ottawa in 2004. He held senior positions in three other departments before becoming deputy minister at Citizenship and Immigration Canada, the department now known as IRCC, where he served from 2009 to his retirement in 2013. That means he was Jason Kenney’s deputy minister for all of Kenney’s time at Immigration, but he was also a Trudeau Foundation mentor if you want to get excited about that instead.

His report’s purpose, he wrote, “is to provide strategic advice to the Deputy Minister on how the department can become a more efficient and effective organization.” After interviewing 36 people inside and outside the department, he decided it was a mess.

‘“[T]he current organizational model at IRCC is broken but is being held together by the hard work and dedication of staff,” he wrote. “At IRCC today department-wide planning is limited and some interviewees suggested it has in fact disappeared completely . There is no multi-year strategic plan, annual plans are not in place consistently across the department and consequently reporting is seen by many as haphazard.”

What the department did have going for it was a decent work environment: “In talking to senior managers at IRCC the culture was universally seen as ‘committed,’ ‘collaborative,’ ‘supportive’ and so on.” The senior managers Yeates interviewed saw this culture as “helping to overcome the shortcomings of the current organizational structure and of the weakness of the governance and management systems.”

The immigration department has always been the main portal between a messy world and an anxious nation. Lately the world had grown messier, Yeates noted, and the demands on the department were starting to hurt. “[T]he operating environment, both nationally and internationally, has grown ever more complex, unstable and frenetic,” he wrote.

In response, “the department has grown exponentially,” from 5,217 staff when Yeates left it in 2013 to12,721 this year, an expansion of 144%. The “Ex complement,” the department’s management cadre, grew from 135 to 227 over the same period, a smaller increase of 68%. That might explain why the department’s managers are so stressed, Yeates speculated. At any rate, the department’s structure was conceived for a much smaller staff and caseload.

To catch up, Yeates proposed big reform in four areas: Organizational Structure, Governance, Management Systems and Culture. He cautioned that tinkering with only one or a couple of those areas wouldn’t have the effect that a “Big Bang,” however difficult, would achieve.

The big problem in Organizational Structure was that the department isn’t organized along business lines: that one of the world’s leading destinations for asylum and humanitarian immigration doesn’t have an assistant deputy minister for asylum, for instance. The obvious challenge was that in a hectic world there will certainly be more crises, like those of recent years. “Should IRCC have a permanent ‘response team’ in place? The short answer is no.” Between crises that team of experienced trouble-shooters would just be twirling their thumbs. Instead Yeates proposed better contingency planning, including lessons learned from other crisis-management departments such as National Defence.

Under Governance, Yeates found a proliferation of over-large committees sitting through endless presentations and not really sure, at the end of each, whether they had decided anything. “Most of the actual decision-making occurs in DMO/ADM bilats,” he wrote, referring to meetings between the Deputy Minister’s office and a given Assistant Deputy Minister.

The section of Yeates’s report that deals with Management Systems reads like a parable of contemporary Ottawa: a “series of periodic crises” that somehow nobody anticipated, “descend[ing] into ‘issues management.’” What’s needed is much better planning and reporting, he wrote. When he was running the department barely a decade ago, every part of the department was reporting on progress against targets every three months. That system has fallen by the wayside. A department that’s obsessed with its “priorities” or with the to-do items in “a minister’s mandate letters” is “inherently limited” and guaranteed to be side-swiped by events intruding from the real world, he wrote.

The upshot of all this tunnel vision was that the department was expecting to “lapse,” or leave unspent, $368 million in projected spending for the year underway, even as passport-related spending was projecting a $238 million deficit.

Yeates’s report closed with the sort of plea that’s traditional in this sort of exercise, essentially pleading not to be ignored. “IRCC is at a crossroads and as Yogi Berra famously quipped ‘when you come to a fork in the road, take it,’” he wrote. Change is hard, but a “substantial majority” of the people he interviewed told him it was overdue.

Neil Yeates and Christiane Fox.

And that’s where the report ends. I had to decide what to do with it. First, always consider the possibility that you’ve been handed a fake report, or the first draft of something that was later amended beyond recognition. I emailed the office of Immigration Minister Marc Miller looking for comment. They handed me off to the civil servants in the department’s communications staff. But I also emailed Christiane Fox, the deputy minister, offering her a chance to comment. This is the sort of chance that people in Ottawa usually don’t touch with a barge pole.

But Fox called me on Thursday night and responded in detail. I asked: was the conversation on the record? She thought out loud for a few seconds, working her way up to a “Yes.” I don’t want to belabour this, but that answer is very rare these days.


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Christiane Fox had been the DM at Indigenous Services for all of 22 months when she was sent to run IRCC in July of 2022. The new job “felt like crisis”: the department was sending weekly updates to an ad hoc committee of ministers whose job was to fix months of chaos in airports and passport offices.

“They felt like they were under duress,” Fox said. “Everyone was exhausted.” New staff were just “tacked on when there was a problem,” including the creation of an entirely new sector for Afghanistan. Fox talked about this with some of the most experienced public servants in town, including Yeates and Richard Dicerni, Fox’s former DM from her days as a young public servant at Industry, who passed away this summer and whose contribution to public life in Canada is hard to measure.

“I kind of said, ‘We’ve got to make some changes. And I don’t want to do it overnight. But I also don’t want to spend two years figuring out what a new model could look like.’” Yeates, whom she didn’t know well but who knew the department’s history, seemed like solid outside counsel.

While Yeates was doing his thing, Fox and the previous immigration minister, Sean Fraser, were consulting — with “business leaders, academics and clients” — about the department’s future. By June of this year, she had a plan, based on Yeates’s report and those consultations. She’s been rolling it out since then, from top managers on down, and on Wednesday, by way of explanation for the changes that are coming, she sent the Yeates report to enough people that I got a copy. A department-wide meeting is scheduled for this coming week.

What’s changing? “The model is now just more of a business-line model,” she said, reflecting Yeates’s first big recommendation.

So there’ll be a stronger crisis-planning sector. In a world that keeps producing humanitarian crises, the goal is to learn lessons for next time from Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Most importantly, we’ll have a group dedicated to thinking about these issues, planning for crisis.” It won’t eliminate the need to “surge,” or quickly add new staff when something flares up. “But in the past, we ended up surging so much that all of our other business lines suffered every time there was a crisis.” The goal now is to get better at anticipating so the department’s regular work doesn’t suffer.

“Asylum and Refugee. There was no Asylum ADM,” she said, reflecting another Yeates critique. “This is probably the thing that causes me the most heartache, in terms of, how are we going to deal with this as a country, globally? What are some of the tools that we have? How do we support the most vulnerable? How do we have a system that is fast and fair? So Asylum and Refugee will now be a sector within the department.”

In addition, there’ll be a sector focused on Economic Immigration and Family. “The business community didn’t really feel like we were actually talking to them about labour shortages, about skills missions, about what is the talent that the country needs.” And a sector on francophone immigration, identifying French-speaking sources of immigration and taking into account the needs of French-speaking newcomers.

“Other sectors remain kind of consistent. Like, we’ve always had a focus on border and security, but we will now have a team that’s really migration integrity, national security, fraud prevention, and looking at case management in that context.”

Fox said she’s working on more of a “client focus” in the department’s work. “When I joined the department I remember, my first few weeks, thinking, ‘Everybody talks about inventory and backlog and process.’ But I didn’t feel clients and people were at the forefront.” This may sound like a semantic difference. But anyone who’s been treated as inventory and backlog can testify to the potential value in any reform that restores a measure of humanity to recipients of government service.

I’ve been arguing for months here that simply acknowledging problems and identifying possible solutions is better communications than the happy-face sloganeering that passes for so much of strategic comms these days. Here, quite by accident, I’d stumbled across somebody who seems to have had similar thoughts. (There’s an irony here, because Fox’s CV includes a long stint as a director of strategic communications in the Privy Council Office.)

“There will be things that will come up,” Fox said, “that may not be as smooth a transition as we thought, or maybe a bit clunky, that we need to rethink. What we’ve told the employees is, it won’t be perfect. We needed to change, we’re going to change, but there’s going to be room for conversation around issues that arise as we go through this process.”

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103 Conflicts and Counting Unprecedented Ethics Web of Prime Minister Mark Carney

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The Opposition with Dan Knight  Dan Knight's avatar Dan Knight

Brookfield. The PMO. Eurasia Group. One Green Agenda, Billions in Conflicts.

Well, it finally happened. After months of dodging questions and hiding behind vague platitudes about “climate leadership,” Prime Minister Mark Carney’s official conflict-of-interest screen has been released by the Ethics Commissioner—and what it reveals is nothing short of staggering. Not five entities. Not a dozen. One hundred and three. That’s how many corporate and financial interests Carney has quietly acknowledged are too conflicted for him to touch.

At the center of this web? Brookfield Asset Management, the $1 trillion global investment firm where Carney was Vice-Chair before walking straight into Canada’s top political office. The very same Brookfield that owns energy projects, pipelines, nuclear companies, real estate empires, carbon offset schemes you name it, they’ve got a piece of it. And now, they’ve got a former executive running the country.

We’re told it’s all perfectly legal. We’re told Carney has “recused himself.” But what this disclosure actually shows is something much bigger: a government captured by finance, a prime minister with deep, ongoing entanglements in the very sectors his policies now enrich, and a climate agenda that’s beginning to look a whole lot like a money-printing operation for the global elite.

The deeper one digs into Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ethics disclosure, the clearer the picture becomes: what’s been framed as a climate leadership story is, in reality, a tightly wound web of commercial interest wrapped in green rhetoric. The 103-entity conflict-of-interest screen, ostensibly a shield against impropriety, instead serves as a road map of how thoroughly Canada’s top political office is entangled in the global green finance complex centered around Brookfield Asset Management.

As of Q1 2025, Brookfield reports $125 billion in assets under management (AUM) in its Renewable Power & Transition segment, a figure representing 12.5% of its overall $1 trillion portfolio. This segment alone encompasses most of the entities on Carney’s ethics screen: nearly 60 out of 103, even after accounting for duplicates. These aren’t passive holdings they’re the very projects, technologies, and subsidy-eligible vehicles Carney once oversaw directly as vice-chair of Brookfield and as co-lead of its $15 billion Global Transition Fund.

Brookfield’s renewables portfolio is vast: over 41.8 GW in installed capacity globally across wind, solar, hydro, and storage, with a 200+ GW development pipeline. A significant portion of this is owned or operated through the same SPVs and subsidiaries now appearing on the conflict list. Notable entries include Scout Clean Energy ($1B), Urban Grid ($650M), and Standard Solar ($540M). These acquisitions were all completed while Carney was at Brookfield, and they continue to generate revenue from U.S. and Canadian subsidy frameworks programs now shaped by the very government he leads.

Brookfield Renewable Partners L.P., the sector flagship, holds approximately $95 billion in total assets and generated $315 million in funds from operations in Q1 2025 alone. The firm is planning to add another 8 GW in capacity this year expansion that is, in part, subsidized through the same green transition policies Carney has promoted both in office and as a climate finance advocate.

The line between public and private interest blurs even further when examining the entities categorized under the “energy transition” banner; nuclear, CCS (carbon capture and storage), and so-called e-fuels. Carney’s screen includes Brookfield’s recent $8 billion acquisition of Westinghouse Electric Company, a nuclear power behemoth now positioned to benefit from Canada’s federal nuclear incentives and SMR (small modular reactor) program. Other flagged investments like Entropy and Carbon TerraVault fall directly into carbon credit and offset schemes—markets heavily influenced by federal regulation and incentive design.

Let’s stop pretending. What we’re witnessing here isn’t just conflict of interest, it’s a complete merger of state power and corporate ambition, all dressed up in the language of moral urgency. The Ethics Commissioner’s so-called “screen” for Mark Carney? It’s a joke. A checklist. A bureaucratic fig leaf meant to reassure you that everything’s above board. But it’s not.

Because here’s the truth: Carney is policing himself. He’s supposed to recuse himself from decisions that benefit the 103 entities he’s tied to many of which he helped create or oversee as Vice-Chair of Brookfield Asset Management. But who decides if he’s in conflict? He does. Or more accurately, the PMO does. The same PMO now drafting Dominion Barton-style focus groups to figure out how best to sell you the green grift. There’s no third-party oversight, no transparency on what’s actually in his so-called blind trust, and no disclosure of the carried interest he may still be entitled to from Brookfield’s billions in funds.

Meanwhile, the policy levers of government are being pulled in exactly the direction Brookfield bet on. Wind, solar, carbon capture, nuclear, every so-called “transition” sector that Brookfield spent years buying into is now flush with green subsidies, ESG guarantees, and taxpayer-backed investment shields. This isn’t the free market at work, it’s a strategic payoff, engineered by someone who’s now running one of the most powerful G7 economies.

And again, none of it is illegal. That’s the most damning part. Because legality isn’t the standard here. The standard is integrity, and that’s nowhere to be found. The scale of this overlap isn’t just large. It’s systemic. It’s built into the very foundation of the Carney government’s climate policy. The same man who structured these funds is now the man signing off on the policies that make them profitable.

Diana Fox Carney’s Quiet Role in the Climate Cash Machine

And just when you thought the web of influence stopped at the Prime Minister himself, along comes Diana Fox Carney, economist, climate consultant, and spouse of the most well-connected man in Canadian politics. While Mark Carney’s direct financial entanglements with Brookfield Asset Management are now public record, his wife’s career trajectory paints an equally troubling picture of how the same elite networks driving Canada’s green spending are profiting in parallel, behind the curtain.

Diana Fox Carney currently holds a senior advisory role at Eurasia Group, the New York-based geopolitical risk consultancy that’s become a quiet powerhouse in shaping global ESG narratives. It’s also the same firm where Gerald Butts—Trudeau’s longtime fixer and architect of the federal climate playbook—now serves as vice chair. Add in former journalist Evan Solomon and even Conservative stalwart John Baird, and you’ve got a bipartisan consultancy stacked with Canadian political operators. Convenient? Maybe. Coordinated? You decide.

And what has this firm staffed with Liberal-era insiders received in return? Millions in untendered government contracts, including a $446,210 deal from Natural Resources Canada in 2024 for vaguely defined “geopolitical research.” That’s nearly half a million dollars in taxpayer money handed out without competition, to a firm employing the sitting Prime Minister’s wife—and his former colleagues. Just coincidence, right?

But Eurasia Group is only the start. Diana’s reach extends far beyond advisory calls. She’s connected to:

  • BeyondNetZero, a climate equity fund backed by U.S. private capital giant General Atlantic.
  • Helios CLEAR, investing in African climate “resilience.”
  • ClientEarth U.S. and the Shell Foundation, both pushing aggressive environmental litigation and policy influence.
  • Canada 2020, a Trudeau-aligned think tank that’s pocketed over $1 million in federal grants.

Throw in indirect ties to Gates Foundation funding, Save the Children, and research networks influencing African agriculture, and you’re looking at a network of transnational climate consultants with deep, ongoing influence over the exact climate policies the federal government is now implementing under her husband’s leadership.

Now, legally, Diana is in the clear. She’s not a public office holder. But that’s the point. The rules weren’t designed for this new class of political operator—the dual-career globalist power couple, where one side signs the climate cheques while the other cashes them. No formal disclosure is required. No recusals. No transparency. Yet the influence is there. The access is there. The money is flowing.

Opposition Reaction: Pierre Poilievre Slams Carney’s Hidden Conflicts, Demands Real Transparency

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wasted no time responding to the bombshell ethics screen showing Prime Minister Mark Carney is recusing himself from dealings with over 100 companies, many tied to his former employer, Brookfield Asset Management. In a pair of direct and widely shared posts, Poilievre accused Carney of concealing critical financial entanglements from voters during the 2025 election, and warned that the Liberal leader is now either positioned to profit from federal decisions or paralyzed from making them.

“Mark Carney must explain why he kept these conflicts secret from voters until after the election,” Poilievre wrote. “Now he will be in a position to profit from big decisions or will be forced to sit out those decisions altogether. Either way, Canadians will pay the price.”

In a second post earlier that morning, Poilievre challenged the credibility of Carney’s so-called blind trust, urging the Prime Minister to liquidate his holdings entirely and hand the cash to a trustee who can invest it without Carney’s knowledge or influence:

“Otherwise, he will always know how political decisions can affect his personal wealth.”

These statements mark the strongest opposition rebuke yet of the Carney government’s financial entanglements. Poilievre’s message echoes growing public criticism that the ethics screen is little more than window dressing, lacking third-party oversight, and that it fails to address indirect benefit through carried interest, deferred compensation, or spousal affiliations.

While Carney has claimed he is in full compliance with federal ethics laws, the fact that the disclosures were released only after the election is fueling outrage—not just among Conservatives but from broader accountability watchdogs. With over 100 entities flagged, many of them tied to green energy, infrastructure, and climate finance—the same sectors receiving billions in federal spending—the Conservative leader has positioned himself as the voice of those demanding a full forensic audit of the Prime Minister’s interests.

The message from the opposition is clear: if this were a Conservative leader, the media would be calling it a scandal. But because it’s Carney—the global banker, the climate envoy, the Liberal savior—the establishment is looking the other way. Poilievre’s Conservatives aren’t. And they’re turning this into a defining issue of integrity and accountability in Canadian politics.

Let’s Call This What It Is

This isn’t subtle. This isn’t nuanced. This is what a grift looks like—on paper, in public, in black and white. Over one hundred conflicts of interest tied directly to Mark Carney. Entire portfolios of foreign and domestic holdings, billions in green investments, shell companies in Bermuda—and that’s before we even get to his wife’s global consultancy work, advising firms that quietly gobble up federal contracts without a single public tender.

And here’s the thing: we weren’t told any of this during the election. There was no press conference, no headline, no public vetting of the sprawling web of corporate and climate interests now tied to the highest office in the country. Why? Because it would have compromised the Liberal grip on power. Because the last thing this party wanted Canadians to know was that their new leader wasn’t just a banker—but a banker with a boardroom’s worth of financial strings still attached.

Now imagine—just for a moment—if it had been Pierre Poilievre. Or Andrew Scheer. Or any Conservative leader with over a hundred screened entities, global finance ties, offshore SPVs, and a spouse employed by a company collecting millions in government money. The press would be in a frenzy. The CBC would be running specials. They’d be calling him compromised, unfit, a foreign agent.

But because it’s their guy—because it’s the Liberal elite’s banker-in-chief—we’re told it’s fine. It’s all above board. Move along, nothing to see here.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

This is not leadership. This is ideological grifting at the highest level. The Liberal Party, once the party of national unity and democratic accountability, has become a hollowed-out machine for elite interests. They’re not liberals. They’re grifters—grifting for green subsidies, globalist contracts, and personal access to power. They have no principle left. Just consultants, contracts, and a taxpayer-funded narrative to keep the game going.

Enough. Canadians didn’t vote for this. They weren’t told the truth. And now the entire climate agenda, the whole “just transition,” looks more like a get-rich scheme for the political class than any serious public mission.

It’s time for an election. Time to clear house. Time to drain this toxic, green-glossed swamp once and for all.

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Most Canadians say retaliatory tariffs on American goods contribute to raising the price of essential goods at home

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  • 77 per cent say Canada’s tariffs on U.S. products increase the price of consumer goods
  • 72 per cent say that their current tax bill hurts their standard of living

A new MEI-Ipsos poll published this morning reveals a clear disconnect between Ottawa’s high-tax, high-spending approach and Canadians’ level of satisfaction.

“Canadians are not on board with Ottawa’s fiscal path,” says Samantha Dagres, communications manager at the MEI. “From housing to trade policy, Canadians feel they’re being squeezed by a government that is increasingly an impediment to their standard of living.”

More than half of Canadians (54 per cent) say Ottawa is spending too much, while only six per cent think it is spending too little.

A majority (54 per cent) also do not believe federal dollars are being effectively allocated to address Canada’s most important issues, and a similar proportion (55 per cent) are dissatisfied with the transparency and accountability in the government’s spending practices.

As for their own tax bills, Canadians are equally skeptical. Two-thirds (67 per cent) say they pay too much income tax, and about half say they do not receive good value in return.

Provincial governments fared even worse. A majority of Canadians say they receive poor value for the taxes they pay provincially. In Quebec, nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of respondents say they are not getting their money’s worth from the provincial government.

Not coincidentally, Quebecers face the highest marginal tax rates in North America.

On the question of Canada’s response to the U.S. trade dispute, nearly eight in 10 Canadians (77 per cent) agree that Ottawa’s retaliatory tariffs on American products are driving up the cost of everyday goods.

“Canadians understand that tariffs are just another form of taxation, and that they are the ones footing the bill for any political posturing,” adds Ms. Dagres. “Ottawa should favour unilateral tariff reduction and increased trade with other nations, as opposed to retaliatory tariffs that heap more costs onto Canadian consumers and businesses.”

On the issue of housing, 74 per cent of respondents believe that taxes on new construction contribute directly to unaffordability.

All of this dissatisfaction culminates in 72 per cent of Canadians saying their overall tax burden is reducing their standard of living.

“Taxpayers are not just ATMs for government – and if they are going to pay such exorbitant taxes, you’d think the least they could expect is good service in return,” says Ms. Dagres. “Canadians are increasingly distrustful of a government that believes every problem can be solved with higher taxes.”

A sample of 1,020 Canadians 18 years of age and older was polled between June 17 and 23, 2025. The results are accurate to within ± 3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

The results of the MEI-Ipsos poll are available here.

* * *

The MEI is an independent public policy think tank with offices in Montreal, Ottawa, and Calgary. Through its publications, media appearances, and advisory services to policymakers, the MEI stimulates public policy debate and reforms based on sound economics and entrepreneurship.

 

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