By Donald Morton | North Frontenac News Media | NFNM | Friday April 3, 2026
In March 2026, the federal government passed a law that lets any Cabinet minister exempt anyone from almost any federal law on the books, with three named exceptions: the Criminal Code, the Conflict of Interest Act, and the Access to Information Act. The same week, the only party that fought the provision on the floor of the House of Commons held a national convention where delegates argued about colour-coded speaking cards and a speech about war was interrupted to correct a pronoun. And in Ontario, the Premier tabled retroactive legislation to exempt himself and his cabinet from Freedom of Information, killing a court order that would have forced him to release personal cellphone records tied to the Greenbelt Scandal. He cited China.
Three fronts. Three attacks on the machinery that lets citizens see what power does, challenge what it passes, and hold it to the laws that are supposed to apply to everyone. All in the same month.
The tools are different. The result is the same. When the law is optional, when the opposition is absent, and when transparency is retroactively destroyed, there is nothing left between Canadians and the unaccountable exercise of power.
The Law Is Now Optional
Bill C-15, the Budget 2025 Implementation Act, received Royal Assent on March 27, 2026. It is 603 pages long. Most of the coverage focused on housing money, tax credits, and the digital services tax repeal. The provision that should have led every newscast was buried in Part 5, Division 5.
It amends the Red Tape Reduction Act to give any federal Cabinet minister the power to exempt any person, business, or organization from virtually any federal law except the Criminal Code. The Conflict of Interest Act and the Access to Information Act were added to the protected list only after Conservative amendments in February. The exemption lasts up to three years, with a three-year extension. The only threshold is that the minister must declare the exemption serves “the public interest” and would “encourage innovation, competitiveness or economic growth.” A summary of the reasons. A signature. No parliamentary vote.
The NDP’s interim leader, Don Davies, called them “Henry VIII powers” during debate. The comparison is to the Tudor king’s 1539 Statute of Proclamations, which allowed the Crown to legislate by decree. The mechanisms differ: Henry’s statute applied to royal proclamation, while C-15 works through ministerial order with procedural guardrails the Conservatives added in February. But the structural concern is the same. Executive authority to override statutes passed by Parliament, without going back to the legislature. “Parliament is supreme,” Davies said. “That is a foundation of our system.”
The breadth of opposition to Division 5 crossed every line that normally divides Canadian public life. The Canadian Bar Association submitted that the powers are “overly broad and risk undermining constitutional principles.” The Canadian Constitution Foundation’s Josh Dehaas said Section 12 would allow ministers to “act like dictators” and “greenlight exemptions to laws for their friends.” The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published its analysis under a headline that required no interpretation: “Bill C-15 would allow corporations to be exempt from most Canadian laws.” Human Rights Watch, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Fair Vote Canada each issued public warnings. The Bloc Quebecois called the omnibus bill “undemocratic, poorly drafted, and a grab bag.” Green Leader Elizabeth May said she could not support it without major changes.
The Conservatives introduced amendments. The Liberals accepted them. The amended law now requires dual approval from the responsible minister and the Treasury Board president, mandatory public consultation, and parliamentary reporting. These are real guardrails. But a minister can still exempt a mining company from the Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act. A minister can still waive provisions of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act for a preferred corporation. Labour standards, workplace safety rules, environmental protections, and privacy laws all remain within reach of a ministerial order, provided the minister writes “competitiveness or economic growth” on the form. The guardrails added process. They did not remove the power.
Bill C-15 passed the House of Commons on February 26 “on division.” In parliamentary procedure, that means no recorded vote. No member of Parliament had to put their name beside a yes or a no. The CBA, the CCF, the CCLA, Human Rights Watch, the NDP, the Greens, the Bloc, and Fair Vote Canada all raised alarms. It passed anyway. The Senate passed it. Royal Assent followed. It is now part of the Statutes of Canada (2026, c. 3). It is the law.
The Opposition That Wasn’t
Davies gave the strongest speech against Bill C-15 on the floor of the House. It did not matter. He leads a party with six seats, no official party status, $13 million in debt, and national polling between seven and eight percent. The NDP could not stop Division 5 because the NDP cannot stop anything.
The same week the bill became law, the party held its leadership convention in Winnipeg. It was supposed to be a reset. After the April 2025 federal election reduced the NDP from 24 seats to seven (then six, after Nunavut MP Lori Idlout crossed to the Liberals one day after voting opened), the party needed to show Canadians it could be taken seriously again. An Angus Reid survey found that 25 percent of the NDP’s own past voters now call the party “irrelevant.” Forty percent say its best days are behind it. Nearly half could not recognize a single one of the five leadership candidates.
What Canada got was three days of equity card disputes, pronoun corrections, and points of privilege about closed captioning delays and translation device sign-out processes.
A dockworker named Rob Ashton stood at the microphone on March 28. Thirty years on the docks, president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Canada. He told the party to “eat the damn rich.” Thunderous applause. Then delegates voted. Ashton finished fourth with 5.91 percent. The winner, on the first ballot with 56 percent, was Avi Lewis: activist, filmmaker, university lecturer, grandson of federal NDP leader David Lewis, son of Ontario NDP leader Stephen Lewis. A third-generation dynasty candidate who has never won an election and has no seat in Parliament, no riding, and no announced path into the House of Commons.
The crowd cheered the worker. The party chose the heir.
On the convention floor, a delegate wearing a keffiyeh delivered an impassioned speech about Iran. Mid-sentence, she addressed the chair as “Madame Chair.” Convention chair Adrienne Smith halted proceedings. Not to address the crisis. To correct the pronoun. A speech about war was stopped for a point of personal address. CPAC broadcast it live. Social media carried it worldwide within minutes.
Meanwhile, five of Lewis’s six remaining MPs represent ridings in British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba. Resource provinces. Lewis opposes all new fossil fuel development. Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi released a competing energy policy, made federal NDP membership optional for provincial members, and said publicly that “the direction of the federal party under this new leader, someone who openly cheered for the defeat of the Alberta NDP government, is not in the interests of Alberta.” Saskatchewan NDP Leader Carla Beck refused Lewis’s invitation to meet and called his positions “ideological and unrealistic,” citing $13.6 billion in provincial economic activity at risk. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew supported Lewis, but two of the three prairie NDP brands are now distancing themselves from their federal counterpart. The tent is not growing. It is splitting at the foundations.
Lewis declared in his victory speech that “our debates are another sign that our party is back and our tent is growing.” Six seats. No party status. Seven percent in the polls. Thirteen million in debt. A leader outside Parliament. The only federal party that fought C-15 on the floor has no power and just showed Canada why.
Transparency Is Now Optional
On March 27, 2026, the same day Bill C-15 received Royal Assent in Ottawa, the Ontario government tabled Bill 97, the Plan to Protect Ontario Act. Inside the omnibus budget bill, Schedule 7 amends the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to exempt the Premier, all cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and their staff from FOI requests. The changes apply retroactively. Every outstanding request targeting those offices, including requests backed by court rulings, will be wiped out.
The target is specific. In December 2025, three judges on the Ontario Divisional Court upheld an order by the Information and Privacy Commissioner requiring Ford to release personal cellphone records he used for government business during the Greenbelt decision period. Ford’s government-issued work phone showed no calls during that period. The IPC determined he was using his personal cellphone. Global News filed the FOI request. The IPC ruled in favour of disclosure. Three judges agreed. The records had to come out. Bill 97 is designed to make sure they never do.
The Greenbelt file is worth remembering. In November 2022, the Ford government removed 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt land. The Auditor General found that 92 percent of the removed land had been suggested by developers who met with the Housing Minister’s Chief of Staff, Ryan Amato, in what the AG described as a “biased, secret, three-week process.” Developers who benefited had donated more than $572,000 to the Ontario PC Party since 2014. The estimated value of the removed land rose from roughly $240 million to north of $8.5 billion. The RCMP criminal investigation, announced October 2023, remains open. No charges have been laid.
Ford justified the FOI exemptions by citing China. At a Queen’s Park news conference on March 16, he said: “We got to protect ourselves against the Communist Chinese that are infiltrating our country, Canada, the U.S., everything, into our education system, into high tech companies. That’s who we have to protect from.”
Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim said Ford’s reasons “are not grounded in fact.” She issued a detailed rebuttal. Of 27,344 provincial FOI requests filed in 2024, only four percent came from media. Over 95 percent came from individuals, businesses, researchers, and community organizations. The existing 1990 FIPPA already contains mandatory protections for records that would genuinely compromise security. Kosseim pointed out that Ontario’s current FOI approach aligns with British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and the Yukon. The proposed changes would make Ontario an outlier in Canada.
“By changing the law retroactively, the government’s message is plain,” Kosseim wrote. “If oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules.”
Federal intelligence assessments do confirm that China targets provincial governments. The method is network compromise, cyber intrusion, and insider recruitment. PRC actors hack into government systems, maintain persistent access, and steal data. Nowhere in the federal intelligence record does a single assessment identify FOI requests as a Chinese espionage vector. China does not file FOI requests. It hacks networks. Two months before Ford named “the Communist Chinese” at Queen’s Park, Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Beijing signing what he called “a new strategic partnership that builds on the best of our past.” That is the federal government’s position: China is a partner. Ford’s position: China is enough of a threat to retroactively destroy Ontario’s transparency law. Both positions were taken in the same quarter of the same year.
FOI journalist Dean Beeby called Ford’s argument “a straw man” and added: “That’s so much bull” (National Observer, March 17). NDP Leader Marit Stiles said: “These are ridiculous excuses. The premier isn’t worried about China, he is worried about what the people of Ontario will see when his phone records are released. This is democratic backsliding, plain and simple” (CTV/CP24, March 16). NDP MPP Lisa Gretzky noted on her Facebook page that cabinet discussions were already protected under the existing law and that the new exemptions go far beyond cabinet confidences to cover “any interactions” in ministerial offices, including routine correspondence and communications with lobbyists and developers.
A Leger poll reported March 25 found that 73 percent of Ontarians oppose making the FOI changes retroactive. Bill 97 has been tabled. It still needs committee review and legislative readings before it takes effect.
This Is Your Country
Three stories. One pattern. The federal government passed a law that makes the rules optional for anyone a minister decides to favour. The only party that fought it on the floor is a six-seat wreck that just spent its national convention on procedural infighting while the country burned. And Ontario’s Premier is rewriting the transparency law, retroactively, to bury his own phone records while an RCMP investigation remains open.
These are not separate problems. They are the same problem at different addresses. The machinery Canadians rely on to see what their governments do, to challenge what gets passed, and to hold power to the law is being taken apart. Not by one party. Not on one front. On all of them, simultaneously.
The Liberals made the law negotiable. The NDP made opposition irrelevant. Ford is making transparency disappear. And most of this happened in a single month, in March 2026, while the country was looking somewhere else.
This is not a partisan argument. NFNM has no party. We have no interest in which colour of tie wins the next election. What we have is a public record that shows, in documentary detail, that the tools Canadians built to keep power honest are being dismantled by the people who find them inconvenient. A minister can now exempt a corporation from the law. A premier can retroactively destroy a court order requiring him to hand over his phone records. And the party that was supposed to fight both of those things spent its convention correcting pronouns while a delegate tried to talk about war.
This is the part where someone is supposed to say what you should do about it. So here it is, plain.
Pay attention. Read the bills. Read the budgets. Read the minutes of your town council. File FOI requests while you still can. Show up at public meetings. Ask the questions that make officials uncomfortable. Talk to your neighbours about what is happening in your province and your country, not what is trending on your phone. Vote, and know what you are voting for. Support the journalists and watchdogs who drag documents into daylight, because that work does not fund itself and the people in power are counting on you not to bother.
The people who passed C-15 without a recorded vote are counting on you not to notice. The people who spent a national convention on equity cards are counting on you not to care. The Premier who cited China to bury his own phone records is counting on you to move on.
Do not move on. This is your country. These are your laws. These are your records. The only people who can stop this are Canadians, and the only time that matters is now.
Sources: Bill C-15 (Statutes of Canada 2026, c. 3), Parliament of Canada LEGISinfo, Canadian Bar Association submission, Canadian Constitution Foundation analysis, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives analysis, Human Rights Watch open letter (Feb 24, 2026), Canadian Civil Liberties Association open letter (Feb 20, 2026), Fair Vote Canada analysis, NDP convention proceedings (CPAC convention broadcast footage), Angus Reid Institute, Elections Canada, CTV News, CP24, National Observer, Globe and Mail, Global News, The Walrus, Ontario Legislative Assembly (Bill 97), Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner statements (March 13 and March 25, 2026), Ontario Auditor General reports (2023), Ontario Integrity Commissioner reports, Canadian Centre for Cyber Security National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026, CSIS Public Report 2024, Leger poll (March 25, 2026), PM.gc.ca.
NFNM is an independent watchdog operation publishing at nfnm.tv. We have no party affiliation, no corporate sponsors, and no interest in protecting anyone’s brand.
