The Configuration Grows: Notes on Canadian Digital Governance

Bill C-9 and Speech

Bill C-9, the , received , the step that turns a passed bill into law, on June 18, 2026. Its reforms come into force on July 18, 2026 (LEGISinfo¹; Justice Canada²). The Act widens the state’s power to define and punish “hate”. It writes a definition of “hatred” into the , 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 bill³).

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 (), 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 still found online ads offering jobs and LMIAs for up to $45,000 (CBC/IJF⁴). 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, 2026⁵).

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 employers⁶).

That opacity is not an accident of scale. It is what a non- 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

(canadaspends.com⁷) is a Build Canada⁸ 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 (about⁹).

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.

Further reading: Build Canada⁸ and its projects¹⁰, including the spending dashboards this section is answering.

LEGISinfo — Bill C-9. Parliament of Canada. Status of Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act. ↩
Justice Canada — Bill C-9. Justice Canada's page on Bill C-9. ↩
Bill C-9, royal assent text. The text of Bill C-9 as passed. ↩
CBC / Investigative Journalism Foundation — LMIA ads. Their 2024 investigation into ads selling jobs and LMIAs. ↩
ESDC — Temporary Foreign Worker Program penalties. Employment and Social Development Canada, 9 July 2026, on inspections and penalties. ↩
Non-compliant employers. The public list of employers found non-compliant. ↩
Canada Spends. A public dashboard of federal spending data. ↩
Build Canada. Their own site. Linked, not rewritten. ↩ ↩²
Canada Spends — About. How the dashboard explains its own sources. ↩
Build Canada — Projects. Their project list, including the public spending dashboards. ↩

Bill C-9 and Speech

LMIA and Labour Opacity

Canada Spends and Spending Visibility

References