Liberals to spend $200M+ on new censorship bureaucracy, new PBO report finds

Proposed Liberal spending on Bill C-63 has a high opportunity cost.

This morning, Parliament's fiscal watchdog released an astonishing analysis of how much the Liberal government's much-maligned "Online Harms Act," Bill C-63, will cost Canadian taxpayers. In a report posted to their website, the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) found it will cost a staggering $200M to establish a whopping 330-person, brand-new bureaucracy to create and enforce yet-to-be-defined regulations regarding the use and management of social media platforms.

I asked the PBO to investigate the costs of Bill C-63 after a deluge of cross-partisan concerns were raised about the bill's inability to both prevent online harassment and its likeliness to impinge upon the rights and freedoms of Canadians. In but two examples of the latter, renowned Canadian author Margaret Atwood called, the bill "Orwellian," and The Atlantic published an article about the bill entitled "Canada's Extremist Attack on Free Speech". Also, opposition to the bill has increased after the federal Liberal government appointed a man who reportedly made statements appearing to rationalize terrorism into a role that would have oversight over some of the bill's most concerning provisions. 

And the mind-blowing cost of the bill could grow. I was told in a briefing by the PBO that department officials suggested the data given to their office were only preliminary estimates of the new bureaucracy's cost. Further, Bill C-63 also doesn't directly set out any structure which would allow for the recoupment of administrative expenses. This omission means that Canadian taxpayers will likely be stuck footing the bill for a massive bureaucracy that will allow big tech companies to negotiate favourable terms with non-elected regulators behind closed doors. 

Worse still, the figures included in today's PBO report would be in addition to a still-to-be-costed increase to the workload of the Canadian Human Rights Commission (CHRC), which, under the scope of bill, would be tasked with policing a flood of extra-judicial "prosecutions" over individual user social media posts. It’s logical to assume that in today’s day and age of cancel culture, the CHRC would be flooded with complaints under the process Bill C-63 enables. But in their briefing with me, the PBO suggested that the government was not able to give their analysts any estimates on the number of complaints they anticipated the CHRC would receive if the bill came into force. So it’s reasonable to assume today’s $200M PBO analysis is just the tip of Bill C-63’s spending iceberg.

For the sake of comparison, the PBO numbers show that the new bureaucracy created by Bill C-63 will be roughly one-third larger than the agency in charge of keeping Canadians safe in the air and on roads, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada (!). The PBO's analysis also suggests that on a per-capita basis, this bureaucracy will be many orders of magnitude greater than any other similar agency in peer countries. 

The opportunity cost of bill C63 alone should be enough to send it to the Minister’s shred pile. This fact is particularly true when considering the impact of the Liberal's chronic under-resourcing of the RCMP on Canadian public safety. In one recent example of this issue, the federal Auditor General recently estimated that almost one-third of positions across its cybercrime investigative teams were vacant. It's unconscionable that the Liberal government would consider dumping $200M and over 300 new staff into an ill-defined new bureaucracy that does little to materially protect Canadians from online harassment when Canada's existing law enforcement officials are begging for support to deal with the crime waves sweeping across our nation.

To put the magnitude of this issue in perspective, Bill C-63’s new unnecessary bureaucracy will cost roughly the equivalent of 204 police officers. (My math for that figure: the total compensation for a police officer was, on average, $186,268/year in 2018-19. Inflation-adjusted, that number is $225,504.36. For police, compensation historically represents 81% of the cost of a police officer, meaning the total cost is $278,400 for 2024-25 (plus inflation). By fiscal year 2028-29, according to the PBO figures for that year, this would mean for an equivalent expenditure to the C63 bureaucracy (less inflation that can't be projected going forward), 204 more police officers could be hired.)

The ridiculousness of spending over $200M on Bill C-63’s new bureaucracy becomes even more absurd when considering what the bill won’t do.

Bill C-63 doesn’t prescribe a much needed duty of care for social media platforms in legislation, particularly as it pertains to minors. Instead, it entirely relegates that responsibility at some distant point in the future to the ill-scoped, massive new bureaucracy which was the subject of today's PBO analysis. By the admission of the bill's cheerleader-in-chief, federal Justice Minister Arif Virani, it would take years for this new bureaucracy to create and enforce new regulations. So, according to Mr. Virani's own logic, today’s PBO's estimates suggest that millions of tax dollars would be poured down the toilet before any actual enforcement work was done. 

Bill C-63 also doesn't provide any alterations to the criminal code to make it easier for police to stop legitimate online threats and harassing behaviour, which frequently escalates into physical violence. This glaring omission to the bill’s scope comes despite victims rights advocates pleading with the government for these types of changes for years. Nor does the bill criminalize emerging areas of online harassment like the non-consensual distribution of deepfaked intimate images, a glaring loophole in the law that vulnerable Canadians are already falling victim to. So today's PBO analysis must raise alarm bells over the amount of money the Liberals are proposing to spend to create a bureaucracy that isn't likely to protect Canadians, but that is likely to dramatically impinge upon their civil liberties.

Overall, Bill C-63 delivers both a massive disservice to victims of online harassment and an embarrassing affront to Canadian civil liberties. The PBO’s discovery that the federal Liberals will be asking Canadians to pay $200M+ for this crap is a preposterous waste of precious tax resources. That this bill made it through the public service and through cabinet is yet another proof point of a government with no compass or anyone with a modicum of common sense in charge. The bill must be stopped, and better, more common-sense solutions that utilize existing structures and actually protect Canadians from online harassment must be adopted.

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