Opinion
The federal government wants Canadians to eat bugs.

A few (very few) media outlets have picked up on this recent news release from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation regarding the human consumption of.. Bugs!
Yuck right? Well don’t panic. They’re not quite ready to swap your bowl of Count Chocula for cocoa-flavoured crickets just yet. However it does appear the Liberal government is hoping to put bugs on your menu. The article from the CTF is included below so I urge you to read on because it’s really interesting (and for those with a queasy stomach, just a tad disturbing).
But before you do that, a couple of observations.
First. This is NOT another win for the annoying conspiracy theory people. Sure they may have been spouting off about forcing us to eat bugs, but that doesn’t make this a classic conspiracy theory.
When it comes to conspiracy theories, most of us have always concluded there are just two types of people. There are the KOOKS. And then there are the people who do their best to avoid the kooks. Let’s call the first group the Flat Earthers, and the second group, Everyone Else (or the Rest of Us if you please).
Flat Earthers use evidence no one can verify to draw ridiculous conclusions and make strange accusations. Governments insisting we eat bugs may sound like a ridiculous conclusion formed by evidence no one can verify, but it turns out this is not the case at all.
Why is it that “The Liberal Government Wants Us To Eat Bugs” is not a ‘classic’ conspiracy theory?
Well it’s because of the words ‘conspiracy’ and ‘theory’. They just don’t apply.
The Oxford Dictionary defines conspiracy as “a secret plan by a group of people to do something harmful or illegal.” For one thing there’s nothing illegal about adding bugs to our diet. We’ve never had to make a law about it. Politicians like getting elected, and so it never occurred to them to force bugs onto our plates. Sure you’ll see them flipping pancakes and picking hot dogs off a bbq, but that’s about as ‘harmful’ as they’re willing to get. So there’s nothing illegal and nothing harmful going on. That leaves the part about being a secret.
To prove this isn’t a secret I’m afraid I’m going to have to put 2 and 2 together because we have to talk about the World Economic Forum. They might not be shouting it from the mountaintops, but the World Economic Forum isn’t hiding the fact they’d like us to replace meat protein with bugs. It’s only a secret if you’ve never taken the time to read “Why we need to give insects the role they deserve in our food systems“, or “5 reasons why eating insects could reduce climate change“.
You might think our trusted sources of information would look into this because food is something their readers tend to eat almost every day. Sometimes more than once. They might not even have to go to Davos to check it out. News reporters bump into Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland in the hallways on Parliament Hill all the time. Chrystia Freeland is on the World Economic Forum Board of Trustees If you click the link you can see her there, third person down on the right. If Deputy PM Freeland doesn’t know where to find these articles on the WEF website, as a Board of Trustee member she’ll know who to ask. So this certainly isn’t illegal or particularly harmful, and it’s only a secret to those who don’t read these things or have these things read to them by the information sources we’ve always trusted. The Liberal government might not talk about sharing goals with the WEF every day, but when Canada’s Deputy PM is on the WEF’s Board of Trustees let’s just say it would be odd to think they’re at odds.
The other word in play here is “theory”. When it comes to “conspiracy theory”, the word theory means “theoretical”, as in a theory, but not really happening. Again with the Oxford, second meaning applies here, “that could possibly exist, happen or be true, although this is unlikely”.
One could make a weak argument that Canada’s Deputy PM only goes to Davos to exchange stories with the rich and famous about how ridiculously hard it is to drive the speed limit in Alberta. One ‘theory’ is that she had to make it all the way back to Ottawa in an EV before it got cold. Regardless. Canada’s Deputy PM is a member of the WEF Board of Trustees. So although it could be a coincidence, it is not a theory that the federal government is funding bug – food research. As you’ll see below, the liberals are paying companies to ” promote the consumption of “roasted crickets” or “cricket powder” mixed-in with your morning bowl of cereal. ”
The fact the WEF has been talking about this for years now, the fact our Deputy Prime Minister is on the WEF Board of Trustees, and the fact the federal government is now funding research meant to change Canadians from people who stomp on bugs into people who chomp on bugs.. Well that pretty much takes the theoretical part right out of it.
Now that you’re hungry for more, here is the news release from a new trusted information source, the CTF.
By Ryan Thorpe of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
Taste the crunch: cricket corporate welfare cost $420K
Bon apétit.
The federal government spent $420,023 since 2018 subsidizing companies that turn crickets into human food.
“Canadians are struggling as inflation pushes up grocery bills, but subsidizing snacks made out of bugs doesn’t sound like the right solution for taxpayers,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “If Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to take a bite out of crunchy crickets, he can do it without taking a bite out of taxpayers’ wallets.”
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation gathered the list of cricket corporate welfare deals by reviewing the federal government’s proactive disclosure of grants and contributions.
On two separate occasions, the feds cut cheques to a Montreal-based company called NAAK Inc., for a combined cost to taxpayers of $171,695.
The co-founders of NAAK were “introduced … to the benefits of adding insects to (their) diet” by a friend and describe their mission as “democratizing insect consumption.”
NAAK specializes in “cricket energy bars,” but a portion of its corporate welfare money was earmarked for developing other cricket products, including “steaks, sausages and falafels.”
NAAK is one of five companies producing crickets for human consumption that have received corporate welfare deals from the feds in recent years.
Table: Corporate welfare deals, 2018-2022
Company |
Number of subsidies |
Total cost of subsidies |
NAAK Inc. |
2 |
$171,695 |
Entologik Inc. |
2 |
$88,979 |
Prairie Cricket Farms |
2 |
$78,349 |
Gaia Protein |
1 |
$42,000 |
Casa Bonita Foods |
1 |
$39,000 |
Casa Bonita Foods wants to “manufacture high protein snacks made with cricket flour,” while Prairie Cricket Farms promotes the consumption of “roasted crickets” or “cricket powder” mixed-in with your morning bowl of cereal.
The founder of Entologik claims insects are the “protein of the future” and wants to grow the company into “the largest producers and processor of edible insects in Canada.”
“The feds are having their ‘let them eat crickets’ moment,” Terrazzano said. “If someone can sell crickets as food, we wish them the best of luck, but taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for it.”
An additional $8.7 million in subsidies went to Aspire Food Group, which operates a cricket processing plant in London, Ont. In total, the company received four separate handouts.
While the company is primarily geared toward pet food production, its owner said about 10 per cent of its business uses crickets for human food.
Business
Mark Carney’s Fiscal Fantasy Will Bankrupt Canada

By Gwyn Morgan
Mark Carney was supposed to be the adult in the room. After nearly a decade of runaway spending under Justin Trudeau, the former central banker was presented to Canadians as a steady hand – someone who could responsibly manage the economy and restore fiscal discipline.
Instead, Carney has taken Trudeau’s recklessness and dialled it up. His government’s recently released spending plan shows an increase of 8.5 percent this fiscal year to $437.8 billion. Add in “non-budgetary spending” such as EI payouts, plus at least $49 billion just to service the burgeoning national debt and total spending in Carney’s first year in office will hit $554.5 billion.
Even if tax revenues were to remain level with last year – and they almost certainly won’t given the tariff wars ravaging Canadian industry – we are hurtling toward a deficit that could easily exceed 3 percent of GDP, and thus dwarf our meagre annual economic growth. It will only get worse. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates debt interest alone will consume $70 billion annually by 2029. Fitch Ratings recently warned of Canada’s “rapid and steep fiscal deterioration”, noting that if the Liberal program is implemented total federal, provincial and local debt would rise to 90 percent of GDP.
This was already a fiscal powder keg. But then Carney casually tossed in a lit match. At June’s NATO summit, he pledged to raise defence spending to 2 percent of GDP this fiscal year – to roughly $62 billion. Days later, he stunned even his own caucus by promising to match NATO’s new 5 percent target. If he and his Liberal colleagues follow through, Canada’s defence spending will balloon to the current annual equivalent of $155 billion per year. There is no plan to pay for this. It will all go on the national credit card.
This is not “responsible government.” It is economic madness.
And it’s happening amid broader economic decline. Business investment per worker – a key driver of productivity and living standards – has been shrinking since 2015. The C.D. Howe Institute warns that Canadian workers are increasingly “underequipped compared to their peers abroad,” making us less competitive and less prosperous.
The problem isn’t a lack of money; it’s a lack of discipline and vision. We’ve created a business climate that punishes investment: high taxes, sluggish regulatory processes, and politically motivated uncertainty. Carney has done nothing to reverse this. If anything, he’s making the situation worse.
Recall the 2008 global financial meltdown. Carney loves to highlight his role as Bank of Canada Governor during that time but the true credit for steering the country through the crisis belongs to then-prime minister Stephen Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty. Facing the pressures of a minority Parliament, they made the tough decisions that safeguarded Canada’s fiscal foundation. Their disciplined governance is something Carney would do well to emulate.
Instead, he’s tearing down that legacy. His recent $4.3 billion aid pledge to Ukraine, made without parliamentary approval, exemplifies his careless approach. And his self-proclaimed image as the experienced technocrat who could go eyeball-to-eyeball against Trump is starting to crack. Instead of respecting Carney, Trump is almost toying with him, announcing in June, for example that the U.S. would pull out of the much-ballyhooed bilateral trade talks launched at the G7 Summit less than two weeks earlier.
Ordinary Canadians will foot the bill for Carney’s fiscal mess. The dollar has weakened. Young Canadians – already priced out of the housing market – will inherit a mountain of debt. This is not stewardship. It’s generational theft.
Some still believe Carney will pivot – that he will eventually govern sensibly. But nothing in his actions supports that hope. A leader serious about economic renewal would cancel wasteful Trudeau-era programs, streamline approvals for energy and resource projects, and offer incentives for capital investment. Instead, we’re getting more borrowing and ideological showmanship.
It’s no longer credible to say Carney is better than Trudeau. He’s worse. Trudeau at least pretended deficits were temporary. Carney has made them permanent – and more dangerous.
This is a betrayal of the fiscal stability Canadians were promised. If we care about our credit rating, our standard of living, or the future we are leaving our children, we must change course.
That begins by removing a government unwilling – or unable – to do the job.
Canada once set an economic example for others. Those days are gone. The warning signs – soaring debt, declining productivity, and diminished global standing – are everywhere. Carney’s defenders may still hope he can grow into the job. Canada cannot afford to wait and find out.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who was a director of five global corporations.
Opinion
Charity Campaigns vs. Charity Donations

Over the past few years, I’ve had canvassers coming to my home in Toronto on behalf of a wide range of non-profits – including hospitals and mental health and homeless support organizations. The fundraisers all “wear” a noticeable post secondary student vibe. That’s hardly news.
But curiously, no matter what they’re collecting for, every last one of them uses the exact same methodology. That is, they refuse to take a one-time donation, instead insisting I sign up for six (not seven, and definitely not five) monthly payments. They don’t want me donating online through the organization’s website (explaining that they wouldn’t get credit for that). They do expect me to enter my basic information on a high-end tablet they’re carrying. When that’s done, they’ll use their smartphones to make a call to a remote agent who would take my financial information.
I only completed the process once – for the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto. But that was mostly because, at the time, they were in the middle of quite literally saving my granddaughter’s life. I couldn’t very well say no.
Because of the paranoia that comes with my background in IT systems administration, I generally don’t participate, explaining that I never share financial information on a call I didn’t initiate. At the same time, these campaigns are not fraudulent and, with the possible exception of UNICEF, they all represent legitimate organizations. Nevertheless, they all come with the clear fingerprints of a third-party, for-profit company. Which makes me curious.
After a little digging, it became clear that a company called Globalfaces Direct was the most likely employer of the face-to-face (F2F) canvassers I’m seeing. It’s also obvious that those canvassers are paid at least partially through revenue-based commissions.
Estimating how much of your donations are actually used for charitable work can be difficult. For once thing, in the case of SickKids, it’s not even clear which organization the money is going to. There at least three related non-profit accounts registered with CRA: The Hospital for Sick Children, The Hospital for Sick Children Foundation, and the SickKids Charitable Giving Fund.
But even where there isn’t such ambiguity we have only limited visibility into an organization’s finances. Covenant House, for instance, issued receipts for $26 million in donations for 2024, but there’s no way to know how much of that came through Globalfaces Direct F2F campaigns. And there’s certainly no public record indicating how much of that $26 million was spent on commissions and overhead. CRA filings for Covenant House do report fundraising costs of $9.4 million in 2024, which was 22 percent of their total spending and 32 percent of all donations.
It’s likely that their $9.4 million in fundraising costs includes Globalfaces Direct’s canvasser commissions and overhead costs. But those are only some of the costs – which likely include events, direct mail, and other in-house efforts. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to assume that only 20-30 percent of each dollar raised through F2F canvassing is actually spent on charity work.
From the perspective of the non-profit, hiring F2F companies can generate new sources of stable, long-term income that would have been otherwise unattainable. Especially if the F2F agreement specifies withholding a percentage of what’s collected rather than charging a flat fee, then a non-profit has nothing to lose. Why wouldn’t SickKids or Covenant House sign up for that?
Of course, a lot of that will depend on how you think about the numbers. Taken as a whole, an organization that spends just 32 percent of their donations on fundraising activities is well within CRA guidelines: “Fundraising is acceptable unless it is a purpose of the charity (a collateral non-charitable purpose).” But if we just looked at the money raised through a F2F campaign, that percentage would likely be a lot higher.
Similarly, CRA also expects that: “Fundraising is acceptable unless it delivers a more than incidental private benefit.” In other words, if a private company like Globalfaces Direct were to realize financial gain that’s “more than incidental”, it might fail to meet CRA guidelines.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way for donors to assess the numbers on those terms. So regular people who prefer to direct as much of their donation as possible to the actual cause will generally be far better off donating through an institution’s website or, even better, through a single CRA-friendly aggregator like CanadaHelps.org.
But it would be nice if CRA reporting rules clearly broke those numbers down so we could judge for ourselves.
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