# The Configuration Grows: Notes on Canadian Digital Governance > Speech law, opaque labour-market systems and a captured information environment all follow one pattern: easy additions, rare removals, shrinking tenant control. - Published: 2026-10-23 - Reading time: 3 min - Source: original - Canonical: https://reverb256.ca/posts/canada-config-grows/ - Markdown: https://reverb256.ca/posts/canada-config-grows.md --- ## Bill C-9 and Speech Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, received Royal Assent, the step that turns a passed bill into law, on June 18, 2026. Its reforms come into force on July 18, 2026 ([LEGISinfo](https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/45-1/c-9); [Justice Canada](https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/c9/index.html)). The Act widens the state's power to define and punish "hate". It writes a definition of "hatred" into the Criminal Code, adds a hate-crime offence, adds intimidation and obstruction offences covering places of worship and other listed places, and adds a fifth hate-propaganda offence for publicly displaying listed symbols. It also repeals the "good faith religious opinion" defence that applied to certain hate-propaganda offences ([text of the bill](https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/bill/C-9/royal-assent)). The mechanism is simple, which is why it works. A category of speech is declared harmful. The definition of the category is written by the same people who enforce it. The old defence that let a person answer on religious grounds is gone. Contesting the definition becomes evidence of the offence. I want to be exact here: that is the argument, not the letter of the statute. The text fixes the definition and removes one answer; it does not make argument an element of the offence. The practical effect is close enough. My ability to evaluate the claim for myself is treated as a defect rather than a right, and the tenant, the person who has to live under a rule they cannot edit, cannot amend it, cannot roll it back, and cannot opt out without risking a courtroom. This is the same pattern in every administrative domain I have looked at: the office that adds a rule easily and almost never takes one back. Additions are cheap. Removals are exceptional. The baseline cost of participation climbs, and the person who pays it does not hold the configuration. ## LMIA and Labour Opacity A Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA), the paper that says a Canadian employer looked for a local hire first, is what an employer needs before hiring a temporary foreign worker. Selling one is illegal. A 2024 undercover investigation by CBC and the Investigative Journalism Foundation still found online ads offering jobs and LMIAs for up to $45,000 ([CBC/IJF](https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/cbc-ijf-lmia-ads-investigation-1.7350596)). Employment and Social Development Canada reports that from April 2025 to March 2026 it finalized 1,488 compliance inspections, found 12% of inspected employers non-compliant, issued more than $10.2 million in penalties, and banned 30 employers from the program ([ESDC, July 9, 2026](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/news/2026/07/the-government-of-canada-highlights-doubling-of-compliance-monetary-penalties-under-the-temporary-foreign-worker-program.html)). Read those numbers twice and a shape appears. The labour-market test, the claim that no Canadian was available for the job, is an assertion the employer makes and the department checks internally. The reports and approvals are built for the institutions, not for me, the worker or taxpayer who funds the program and cannot inspect the decision in real time. What I get afterward is an annual total and a list of the employers who got caught ([non-compliant employers](https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/work-canada/employers-non-compliant.html)). That opacity is not an accident of scale. It is what a non-declarative arrangement produces: a setup that is not written down in a form the people who pay for it can read, audit, and rebuild. When the configuration is unreadable to its funders, the operators can add processes, exceptions and intermediaries without adding one unit of visibility. I see the outcome. I do not see the line that produced it. ## Canada Spends and Spending Visibility Canada Spends ([canadaspends.com](https://canadaspends.com/)) is a [Build Canada](https://www.buildcanada.com/) project that gathers published federal data in one place: grants and contributions, contracts, research funding databases, Global Affairs Canada projects, and First Nations financial statements. It shows its sources, which is rarer than it should be. Before this, the same numbers sat in PDFs and databases most Canadians did not know existed ([about](https://canadaspends.com/about)). It is a window, not a repair. It sits inside the same system where additions are easy and removals are exceptional. Seeing the current state does not give me back the ability to rebuild from a smaller known baseline, does not make subtraction normal, and does not hand the configuration to the people who fund it. The pattern holds. A state is a long-running machine that accumulates programs and almost never uninstalls one. The configuration grows, and my ability to inspect the process that grew it, or roll it back, stays about where it was. Related: [State as Operating System: Citizens as Tenants](/posts/state-as-operating-system/) · [Zero-Trust: Never Trust Black Boxes](/posts/zero-trust/) · [Solutions Over Problems](/posts/solutions-over-problems/) · [The Malicious Interpreter](/posts/malicious-interpreter/) · [The Bare-Metal Nation](/posts/bare-metal-nation/) Further reading: [Build Canada](https://www.buildcanada.com/) and its [projects](https://www.buildcanada.com/projects), including the spending dashboards this section is answering.