December 18, 2024
A politician mingles at a private reception with lobbyists, activists, and NGOs. His assistant asks, “How’s it going, sir?”
“Amazing,” the politician replies. “It’s the brightest group I’ve ever met.”
“Really?” the aide asks.
“Yes,” the politician says. “They agree with everything I say.”
*-*-*-*-*
Every year the Macdonald-Laurier Institute chooses a person (like Justin Trudeau or Xi Jinping) or a thing (like COVID or the Freedom Convoy) that has had the greatest impact, for good or ill, on public policy in Ottawa over the year just ending. This year we have again chosen, not a person, but a thing, or more accurately, a process. The winner is the bloated process by which Ottawa controls and manipulates whose opinion counts when it is time to find out whether a proposed policy is “what the public wants.”
This process goes by many names. Manufactured consent is one. Astroturfing is another, where a crude plastic product is offered in the place of an authentic reading of genuine “grassroots” opinion. A third is the “policy echo chamber,” where politicians hear only their own opinions repeated back to them. Here is the story of how the echo chamber has come to dominate the policy process in Ottawa, how it works, how it obscures real public opinion, and how it contributes to the palpable divorce between the policies Ottawa has been pursuing and the clearly expressed views of most Canadians.
*-*-*-*-*
In a democratic society, governments are supposed to be attuned to what people want. Indeed, governments have all kinds of means for testing public opinion against politicians’ policy ambitions: polling is one such tool, for example, and Ottawa, like many other Western governments, spends millions on finding out what people think.
Yet on issue after issue – crime and punishment, gender ideology, immigration, border management, energy policy, economic growth, climate policy, equity, diversity and inclusion, and more – government in Ottawa has rarely seemed more unmoored from the clearly expressed opinions of Canadians. Public disapproval of government policy seems to grow every day, while ministers continue to claim they “have Canadians’ backs.”
How can we account for this egregious mismatch between what Canadians want and what their politicians and public service are delivering?
One little explored explanation is the way that government tightly controls who is heard from when policy is being made, ensuring that only those who support the government’s agenda are consulted and dissenting opinions are marginalized or ignored. This process of “managing” what opinions get heard and noticed officially can extend right up to the government spending taxpayer dollars to conjure up allegedly “independent” or “grassroots” organizations. These groups then get invited before parliamentary committees and other mechanisms by which government claims to “listen to the public” about what form they would like public policy to take.
Eventually, governments become trapped in their own ideological echo chamber. When this occurs, a feedback loop is amplified by party loyalists and echoed by “astroturf” groups: lobbyists, NGOs, and “grassroots movements” with vested interests in pleasing the ruling party.
Since 2015, funding listed as “Other Transfers” in the federal budget, which includes funding for NGOs and special interests, has soared from $35 billion to $89 billion, a rise of nearly 155 per cent. This comes after nine straight years of deficits that have driven the national debt to $2.3 trillion.
Some concrete examples may help to illustrate the point. Take the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. A recent review of witnesses reveals that 13 out of 15 of the apparently independent expert groups that testified in 2024 had received federal funding in some form.
According to the House of Commons website, the purpose of expert testimony is “to hear different views on any matter the committee might be considering.” But many witnesses have strong financial and ideological motivations to sing from the government’s songbook.
At the same time, policy is also shaped by the absence of important voices. For instance, the Standing Committee on the Status of Women recently invited NGOs to speak on “Hate Motivated Violence Targeting the 2SLGBTQI+ Community.” The committee invited testimony from several groups with views in line with the federal government, including Egale Canada, Society for Queer Momentum, and Queertech, all of which receive millions of dollars in government funding, but has frozen out grassroots groups that, for instance, define “woman” as an “adult human female” or a “person with XX chromosomes.”
Here are some further examples of this echo chamber process in action and the policy fallout for Canadians:
Going green at any cost – the Impact Assessment Act
Since 2015, the federal government has imposed laws and restrictions that have deterred investment and harmed the energy and natural resources industries.
Among them was the Impact Assessment Act (Bill C-69), colloquially known as the “no more pipelines act,” which required major projects to meet social-justice inspired requirements, including “Gender-Based Analysis Plus,” which the government describes as “a way of thinking, as opposed to a unique set of prescribed methods.” Opponents warned that the IAA would kill the economy and make resource extraction uncompetitive in Canada. Of course, for the government and its activist supporters, that was the point.
The Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development invited numerous eco-groups as expert witnesses, many of them well-funded by Ottawa. During its testimony, Nature Canada urged Ottawa to make the bill even harsher by restricting the role of energy regulators in the review process. The eco-group Stand.earth directly attacked industry’s right to voice any concerns at all: “I am here today to urge you to resist the pressure from the oil and gas industry to weaken or outright kill Bill C-69,” testified Tzeporah Berman, the group’s founder. “Canadians want a say in how their lives are impacted – be it from how a mine impacts where they live, or how a major oil and gas project affects the climate.”
Contrary to these radical beliefs, there is widespread support for Canadian energy: a Nanos Research poll, conducted in early 2024, found that 74 per cent of Canadians consider oil and gas development to be “important” to Canada’s economy, while 52 per cent believe the industry should be expanded.
Despite intense industry opposition, the IAA became law in June 2019. According to MLI Senior Fellows Jack Mintz and Philip Cross, the act’s maze of social-justice-inspired regulations “delayed completion of projects by up to eight years, adding 20 per cent to the potential tax burden on projects.”
In October 2023, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the Impact Assessment Act to be unconstitutional for overreaching into provincial jurisdiction. MLI Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment Director Heather Exner-Pirot says Canada could have been an “energy superpower” but has instead lost billions of dollars in potential investments thanks to Ottawa’s misguided green policies.
Indeed, federally funded environmental NGOS like the Pembina Institute and others are effectively dictating green policies such as Bill C-12, which set an unrealistic and costly net-zero emissions target by 2050.
Eco-groups also influenced the addition of last-minute changes to Bill C-59, which amended the Competition Act to crack down on so-called “greenwashing” by energy, natural resources, and other major industries in Canada. In this case, the NGOS influenced the Bloc Quebecois’s decision to advance late-stage “greenwashing” amendments to the Competition Act during an April 30, 2024, Standing Committee on Finance meeting, after the 546-page omnibus bill had already passed second reading in the House of Commons. The BQ’s last-minute amendments, supported by the NDP and Liberals, quickly passed.
Outside the Ottawa echo chamber, the “greenwashing” provision has been widely panned by industry as well as by moderate progressives, including the Alberta NDP, which has called the amendment “not only unneeded, but fundamentally unjust.”
Ottawa’s determination to “go green” at any cost has clearly been detrimental to taxpayers. For a cautionary tale, consider the scandal surrounding the government’s Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund – also known as the “green slush fund.”
Between 2021 and 2024, Ottawa funnelled around $1 billion to more than 420 green technology projects. According to the fund’s mission statement, its purpose was to “support companies attempting to do extraordinary things.” It turns out, the most extraordinary thing about the fund was the level of alleged mismanagement.
In November 2022, a whistleblower alleged serious problems with the program. After reviewing 58 of the 420 projects, Auditor General Karen Hogan discovered at least 90 conflict of interest violations, with around $59 million awarded to ineligible projects. She also found that many of the projects greatly overstated their results.
The federal government has since defied an order from House Speaker Greg Fergus to turn over all documentation on the 420 projects to Parliament for investigation by the RCMP, paralyzing Parliament.
“Gender-affirming care” for minors – ignoring the science
The government is also out of step with public opinion on extreme gender ideology. A 2024 National Post/Leger poll found that 45 per cent of Canadians support a complete ban on “gender reassignment” surgeries for minors, while 30 per cent believe parental consent should be required.
In April 2024, Britain’s Cass Report recommended against such surgeries for minors and urged restrictions on puberty blockers, leading the United Kingdom to restrict these treatments. Other European countries have similarly begun to roll back their earlier uncritical embrace of such policies. And, MLI Senior Fellow Mia Hughes achieved worldwide recognition for her work documenting the contentious and unscientific approach of WPATH to these issues, despite WPATH being widely cited in Canada as providing scientific credibility to its gender policy.
Ottawa has largely ignored these developments, thanks to the influence of LGBTQ+ groups (including Ottawa-funded NGOs) and medical organizations like the federally funded Canadian Paediatric Society, which instead calls for an “affirming approach.”
Another federally funded LGBTQ+ group, Egale Canada has had a major impact on the government’s gender ideology policies. For instance, despite strong opposition from prominent critics such as psychologist Jordan Peterson, Egale Canada and other LGBTQ+ groups successfully fought for legislation like 2017’s Bill C-16, which added gender identity and expression as prohibited grounds of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Despite an increasingly cautious approach in the rest of the industrialized world, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and members of his Cabinet have attacked premiers for limiting gender-related treatments for minors.
Punishing victims with a soft-on-crime agenda
MLI’s 2024 Urban Violent Crime Report revealed a shocking Canada-wide rise in violent and property crimes as well as sexual assault. Meanwhile, a recent Leger survey found that 81 per cent of Canadians supported tougher penalties for violent criminals, and 65 per cent felt crime has worsened since the pandemic.
Police organizations and victims’ rights groups have urged Ottawa to take a tougher stance by tightening parole rules, and fixing the revolving-door bail system, among other measures.
Ottawa appears to prefer the advice of social justice groups that encourage a soft-on-crime approach, including the Canadian Association of Social Workers, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the John Howard Society, which received nearly $4.4 million in federal funding in 2024 and has lobbied against victim-friendly measures like victim impact statements.
The end result is a host of unpopular policies like reduced mandatory sentencing, expanded supervised drug injection sites, and attempts to address “systemic inequalities” and “disproportionality” in justice policy via Gladue reports and other racial impact assessments that divert “racialized” criminals away from prison and release hardened criminals back into the streets.
Escaping the echo chamber
There are many more examples of harmful echo-chamber-influenced policies that go against public opinion but are vocally supported by allegedly community-based organizations that would scarcely exist without Ottawa’s largesse, including:
- Open-door immigration policies that sparked a housing and affordability crisis and threaten security. More than 40 per cent of Canadians now agree that “there is too much immigration to Canada.”
- Identity politics that influence the federal government’s refusal to crack down on the explosion of antisemitism in Canada in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel.
- A $700-million federal bailout of private media organizations – with significant funding earmarked for EDI initiatives – that ignores the objections of leading journalists who fear it will lead to biased coverage and undermine public trust in journalism.
- The imposition of EDI policies (especially in the civil service and academia) that sow division and create a hostile environment for opponents of the ideology. EDI is also contrary to public opinion: a recent Leger study shows that most Canadians – including a majority of visible-minority citizens – oppose EDI policies like affirmative-action.
- Gender “self-ID” policies in the Correctional Service of Canada that permit male prisoners to suddenly claim “prison-onset gender dysphoria” and then be housed with female inmates – a practice opposed by 70 per cent of Canadians.
Federal governments have a host of other procedural tricks at their disposal to manufacture consent and push their agendas through the House of Commons – some of which are particularly useful for minority governments. They can enter into “confidence and supply agreements” with other parties to ensure support, employ time allocation and closure motions to limit debate, and bury controversial measures in omnibus bills. But eventually, time – and the public’s patience – runs out for every government.
Canadians are clearly fed up with policies that undermine national unity, endanger their safety, and impoverish their pocket books. It’s not too late to steer the country in a better direction. But for that to happen, Canada’s rulers will need to leave their ideological echo chamber, defund the handsomely subsidized choir that gives their policies a meagre patina of grassroots approval, and start seeking out and then listening to the views of everyday Canadians.
