FIRST READING: Ottawa just lost $32 billion; that's worse than every other Canadian spending scandal combined
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TOP STORY
A recent Auditor’s General’s report found that a “minimum” of $27.4 billion in COVID benefits may have been paid out to people who were either ineligible or actively scamming the system. Add this to $4.6 billion in confirmed government overpayments, and that’s more than $32 billion in misappropriated COVID money.
It may not seem like much given the awesome scale of government spending in recent years; $32 billion is only one tenth of the $325 billion deficit that Canada racked up in 2020. But if the Auditor General’s suspicions are correct, this constitutes the largest misappropriation of government funds in the history of Confederation. And frankly, none of Canada’s other boondoggles, accounting flubs or spending scandals since 1867 even come close.
Below, a guide to just how unbelievably unprecedented it is for a Canadian government to lose $32 billion.
It’s enough missing cash to build the Canadian Pacific Railroad 18 times over
Easily the most corrupt era in Canadian history was the decade surrounding the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In the words of historian R.T. Naylor, “the level of corruption in the Canadian political process of the period … is truly astounding even to the cynic.” As an example, Sir John A. Macdonald was caught brazenly trading sole-sourced railroad contracts for kickbacks, and all it really did was prompt a temporary pause to his political career. And yet, even the uber-corrupt Canadian political establishment of the late 19th century couldn’t dream of coming close to misappropriating $32 billion – the size of government just wasn’t big enough. For context, the total cost of the completed Canadian Pacific Railroad (even with all the corruption) came to the 2022 equivalent of about $1.7 billion — about one eighteenth of $32 billion.
It’s enough to run the entire government of Nova Scotia for two years
Nova Scotia isn’t a huge place, but it’s still got a million people, several universities, a few hundred schools, countless hockey arenas and thousands of kilometres of roads to maintain and keep cleared of snow. In 2019, the total provincial expenditures came to $15.5 billion; about $41 million per day. So if we suddenly handed $32 billion to Halifax, they could take a two-year tax holiday and still have $1 billion left over.
It could pay for an entire month of Canadian health care
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canada spent $331 billion on health care in 2022 — that’s about one tenth of our entire GDP. Which means that $32 billion could run the entire health system for about 32 days and 20 hours. Across all 10 provinces and three territories — from the Tuktoyaktuk Health Centre to Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital — every single doctor, nurse, flu shot, blood test, surgery, medivac and ambulance ride gets covered for more than a month.
It’s enough to operate the Canadian Armed Forces for more than a year
Canada is notorious for operating its armed forces on a shoestring, but it’s still not cheap to run a modern military. Squadrons of aircraft, fleets of ships, search and rescue operations, Arctic signals bases, 68,000 total employees. For the 2021/2022 fiscal year, all of this came to a final price tag of $24.3 billion. So, that $32 billion in allegedly misplaced COVID money could have paid every soldier, fuelled up every CF-18 and reloaded every C7 rifle for about 16 months.
It’s equivalent to the feds misplacing most of Loblaws
Loblaw Companies is not only Canada’s largest grocery chain, but it’s one of the largest grocery distributors on the entire planet. Superstore, No Frills, Shopper’s Drug Mart, Provigo, T&T Supermarket, Freshmart; these are all Loblaw properties, not to mention their No Name, President’s Choice and Joe Fresh in-house brands. As of the most recent tally, the market capitalization for Loblaw Companies was $39.7 billion. So, the feds potentially losing $32 billion is roughly equivalent to their misplacing 81 per cent of Loblaws.
It could build the most egregious boondoggle in Canadian history 12 times over
When historians assemble lists of the worst civil engineering mistakes in Canadian history, Montréal-Mirabel International Airport almost always gets top billing. Constructed in advance of Montreal’s 1976 Summer Olympics, it was North America’s largest airport of the time, and had a total footprint roughly equivalent to Montreal itself. Despite projections that it would handle 100 million passengers a year, it never cracked three million, and now the largely abandoned Mirabel is used mostly as a cargo airport. And still, pointlessly building one of the world’s largest airports only ended up wasting about $2.5 billion.
It could even buy every pipeline Alberta’s ever wanted
It’s no secret that Alberta has largely failed in its eternal mission to build pipelines connecting its oil fields to tidewater. So what if the federal government had a sudden change of heart and just decided to build every pipeline Alberta’s ever asked for? Running Northern Gateway to Kitimat would cost about $8.5 billion in 2022 dollars. Energy East had been projected to cost $15.7 billion. Even tacking on the $10 billion cost of the just-cancelled Keystone XL pipeline and we’re in the ballpark at a total figure of $34.2 billion.
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Auditor general finds a 'minimum' of $27.4 billion in suspicious COVID benefit payments
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Battle brews between CRA and the auditor general over COVID program payments
IN OTHER NEWS
The Alberta Sovereignty Act is not sitting well with the province’s First Nations. The Indigenous rights of prairie First Nations are set by treaty, which are guaranteed and administered by the Government of Canada. It’s obviously not a perfect system, but it does mean that Indigenous groups are generally quite leery of provincial governments suddenly declaring that federal power (and thus their own treaty rights) is irrelevant. And thus did The Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations and the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations put out a Wednesday statement condemning the Sovereignty Act (and the similar Saskatchewan First Act) as “without rigour” and “alarmingly open for interpretation.” “Through Treaty, we agreed to share the land, not give exclusive jurisdiction to the Government of Alberta or the Government of Saskatchewan,” they wrote. “We will not allow these provinces to assert their control over Treaty lands.”
And opposition continues to mount against the expanded Bill C-21, which proposes to criminalize whole swaths of Canadian hunting arms. Here’s a sampling of voices who have come out against the bill in just the last 24 hours …
The Conservatives are the only party to have opposed Bill C-11, the Liberal plan to subject whole swaths of the Canadian internet (including social media) to CRTC regulation. But as bill wends its way through Senate, the Tories did find one corner of the internet they think requires more government control. Several Conservative senators backed an amendment to require “age-verification methods” on any website “devoted to depicting, for a sexual purpose, explicit sexual activity.” Given the sheer ubiquity of internet porn, this could potentially require sign-ins on everything to Google to Twitter to Library and Archives Canada (it has some explicit content if you know where to look).
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