theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Michael Oesch used to walk across countries.

Not metaphorically. Literally. Thousands of kilometres on foot, across Canada, the kind of thing most people put on a bucket list and never do. He did it. He was that kind of man.

In October 2022, he took his fourth COVID dose. Thirty-six hours later he was walking with his granddaughter when his leg stopped working. Just stopped. He couldn’t lift it. The MRI showed a lesion near the top of his spinal cord. He lost the ability to walk. He now lives in long-term care.

He applied to Canada’s Vaccine Injury Support Program. They said no.

No explanation that distinguished his case from the ones they did approve. Just no.

Cameron Hitchcock was 29 when his kidneys started failing after his second Pfizer dose. Nephrotic syndrome. Five months in hospital. Kidney failure. Dialysis six days a week now, still waiting for a transplant. He arranged his treatment schedule around a trip to Ottawa to testify publicly, because in five years no formal Canadian institution had made space to hear him. His VISP claim was approved. He is one of 252.

Same program. Same government promise. One man recognized, still on dialysis. One man denied, no longer able to walk.

To understand how that happened, you have to go back to before the program existed. To a contract clause. And a promise that was never quite what it sounded like.

What the Promise Actually Was

December 2020. Justin Trudeau announced the Vaccine Injury Support Program alongside the beginning of the rollout. What he said was this:

‘By getting vaccinated, we protect one another and our way of life. The chances of this are extremely rare -- less than one in a million -- and we have a duty to help if this occurs.’

It sounded like a commitment born of decency. A government saying: we’re asking this of you, and if it goes wrong, we’ll be there.

It was also, buried in the fine print of a pharmaceutical contract nobody was talking about publicly, a legal obligation.

Pfizer’s advance purchase agreements -- the ones signed with governments around the world in 2020 and 2021 -- contained standard indemnification language. Governments were required to shield Pfizer from lawsuits arising from their vaccines. And as a condition of that indemnification, they were required to create and maintain what the South African version of the contract called ‘a no-fault compensation fund sufficient to undertake and completely fulfil the indemnification obligations.’

VISP wasn’t created because it was the right thing to do. It was created because it was in the contract.

Procurement Minister Anita Anand confirmed the indemnification publicly at the time: ‘All countries, generally speaking, are faced with the issue of indemnification of companies, especially in cases of novel technologies like this. Yes we are, and we are definitely not different than any other country in this world.’

She was right about that. What she didn’t mention was that a 2017 Public Health Agency of Canada document, updated in 2019, had already established that during a pandemic, indemnity clauses should be standard practice to protect supply. This was planned before COVID existed. The promise Trudeau made in December 2020 had a contractual architecture behind it that had been built two years earlier.

Daniel Freiheit is a Toronto lawyer, LSO certified in corporate and commercial law, who has represented multiple VISP claimants and testified about the program at the Allison Inquiry in September 2026. He confirmed that Canada’s advance purchase agreement with Pfizer follows the same indemnification structure as the contracts exposed in other countries. The jurisdiction clause in Canada’s version was redacted.

The program the government announced as a humanitarian commitment was, in contractual terms, a liability management mechanism for a pharmaceutical company.

Sources: Trudeau announcement, December 2020. Anita Anand public statement, December 2020. PHAC 2017/2019 pandemic indemnity policy. South African Pfizer contract, Pretoria High Court 2023, Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Daniel Freiheit, Allison Inquiry September 9, 2026 and interview September 24, 2026.

The Accounting Firm

Here is something the government noticed early on: it had a conflict of interest.

It had approved the vaccines. It had signed the indemnification clause. It had promised to compensate people harmed by those same vaccines. A draft 2023 government report put it plainly -- administering the compensation program itself would create ‘a conflict of interest that would arise from serving as both the approver of the vaccines and the one that compensated people for the harms vaccines caused.’

The solution was not to resolve the conflict. It was to hire someone else.

In February 2021, PHAC put out a call for proposals. Companies had roughly three weeks to apply. Four did. The winner was Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton Consulting Inc., since rebranded as Oxaro.

Four Conservative MPs who later investigated the contract wrote: ‘There was no clear indication that Oxaro had credible experience in healthcare or in the administration of health-related claims.’

That’s understating it. Oxaro’s cited relevant experience was administering a memorial grant program for first responders and liquidating an insolvent life insurance company. They had never run a health claim adjudication program of any kind. The Health Minister pushed them to launch three months ahead of schedule anyway.

The budget was $65.2 million over five years covering operations, administration, and actual claim payments combined. What happened was that Oxaro received $80.8 million total and directed $36.3 million of that -- 67 percent -- to administration. As one former worker told Global News: ‘It’s frustrating. I can’t help these individuals out.’

Freiheit called VISP the only secret tribunal he knows of in Canadian law. The names of the medical professionals reviewing applications were never made public. The appeals process was not explained to claimants -- it had to be obtained through Freedom of Information requests.

Oxaro got paid on time. Every time. While claimants waited 18 months or more for a case manager to be assigned.

Sources: Global News investigation, July 2025. Draft 2023 PHAC/Health Canada VISP review report. Conservative MP letter to Health Minister, July 2025. Daniel Freiheit, interview September 24, 2026.

The Numbers

Trudeau said the chances of serious injury were less than one in a million.

By December 2025, 3,557 Canadians had applied to VISP.

252 were approved.

7.1 percent.

A peer-reviewed comparative analysis of 14 COVID vaccine injury compensation jurisdictions, published in the journal Vaccine in March 2025, found Canada’s review approval rate at 19.92% as of November 2024 -- an improvement, but still well below most comparable countries. Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all operate above 50%. Germany and France higher still.

Thailand’s system runs differently. The National Health Security Office provides mandatory preliminary compensation within 30 days of a claim. Subcommittees must complete their review within 30 days and announce results within five. The amounts per claim are smaller than Canada’s maximum payouts. But by early 2022 -- before Canada had approved barely a handful of claims -- Thailand had already compensated 12,714 people to the tune of roughly $45 million USD.

Cameron Hitchcock is still on dialysis six days a week. Michael Oesch still lives in long-term care. Both went to Ottawa in September 2026 to tell their stories to the Allison Inquiry, a forum built by volunteers, because in five years no government body had created a formal space to hear them.

3,557 Canadians applied. 252 were compensated. The rest were told, in one form or another, to keep waiting.

Among those who did not receive compensation: 225 claimants whose applications were denied not on medical grounds, but because they missed a procedural three-year deadline. Their injuries were never assessed. Under VIAP, those 225 have been reinstated. Whether their claims will now be evaluated on merit -- rather than process -- remains to be seen.

Sources: PHAC VISP program statistics, December 2025. Comparative COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation systems, Vaccine journal, March 2025. Cameron Hitchcock and Michael Oesch, Allison Inquiry public testimony, September 2026.

The Conflict That Came Back

In April 2026, PHAC took over direct administration of the program, now renamed the Vaccine Impact Assistance Program. The conflict of interest that was serious enough to require outsourcing in 2021 was apparently no longer serious enough in 2026. No public explanation was offered for the change.

The person now running VIAP is Nancy Hamzawi, President of PHAC since June 2025. She is not a medical professional. Her background is chemical engineering and public administration. Before becoming PHAC President, she served as Assistant Deputy Minister of Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch -- the branch that authorized COVID-19 vaccines for use in Canada. She moved to PHAC as Executive Vice-President in February 2023, in the middle of the program’s worst period of non-approvals and administrative chaos.

The woman now overseeing compensation for people harmed by vaccines previously helped oversee the authorization of those vaccines. The conflict the government once said it needed to outsource to avoid is now sitting in the office of the person running the program directly.

Nobody has been asked to account for that publicly.

The transition also came with a hard deadline. October 1, 2026, was the cutoff for incomplete VISP applications. Claimants who had started applications but not yet submitted were required to do so by 11:59 p.m. that night -- or they would need to begin again under the new VIAP structure and forms. For people dealing with serious, ongoing health consequences, the administrative pressure of a hard restart cutoff is not a minor inconvenience. It is another barrier dressed in paperwork.

Sources: PHAC organizational structure, canada.ca, April 2026. Nancy Hamzawi biography, phac.gc.ca. CBC News, PHAC takeover announcement, April 2026.

The Legal Maze

When injured Canadians try to go around VISP -- when they try to find some other path to accountability -- they run into what Freiheit calls a maze.

Want to sue Pfizer? You get redirected to VISP. You can technically name Pfizer as a defendant, but Pfizer then brings in Health Canada through a third-party claim. The case bounces. The years pass. The legal costs grow. The injured person waits.

Courts in Canada remain deeply deferential to Health Canada’s regulatory judgment. As Freiheit put it plainly: ‘Courts trust the system, because Health Canada said so.’ The internal ATI documents that show what Health Canada was actually concluding privately -- the possible myocarditis link nineteen days before the public was told no association existed, the CAEFISS data unavailable in real time, the surveillance progressively wound down -- have not yet been tested in a Canadian courtroom. Nobody knows yet what they mean legally.

A class action is working its way through the Alberta courts, naming both the Government of Canada and the Province of Alberta. It alleges negligence, misfeasance in public office, and conduct that amounts to assault and battery on the public. It is in early stages. These things take years.

In the meantime, the maze holds.

Sources: Daniel Freiheit, interview September 24, 2026. CanLII case summaries, vaccine injury litigation. ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 2026.

What the Documents Show

This piece connects to a larger body of work.

The Old Guardian’s What They Knew series, published in September 2026, examined 2,460 pages of Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance records obtained through ATI Release A-2025-001410. Those documents showed that Health Canada’s own reviewers concluded a possible link between the vaccine’s second dose and myocarditis in young males in May 2021 -- nineteen days before the public was told no clear association existed. They showed that fatal report monitoring for the bivalent vaccine was removed from monthly tracking at Pfizer’s request. They showed that adverse event data from CAEFISS was not available to Health Canada in real time as of June 2022, when 58 million doses had already been administered.

The surveillance system that was supposed to catch rare injuries had documented gaps. The compensation system that was supposed to acknowledge them couldn’t get out of its own administrative structure. The legal system redirects anyone who tries to hold someone accountable back into the same failing program.

None of this required malice. That’s the part worth sitting with. The indemnification clause was standard policy written years earlier. The outsourcing decision made a kind of bureaucratic sense. The conflict of interest was real and the government acknowledged it. The surveillance reductions were documented negotiations. Each piece had a reason. Together they built something that left Michael Oesch in long-term care and Cameron Hitchcock on dialysis without adequate explanation, redress, or accountability.

That’s not incompetence. That’s architecture.

The Promise, Five Years Later

Trudeau said the chances were less than one in a million.

3,557 Canadians disagreed -- with their bodies, with their claims, with their presence in an Ottawa committee room in September 2026.

The program that was supposed to be there for them consumed more than half its budget before most of them were heard. It was administered by a firm that had never run a health claim program. Its medical reviewers were kept anonymous. Its appeals process required a Freedom of Information request to find. It paid its administrator on time and in full while claimants waited a year and a half for a case manager.

And when the administrator’s contract ran out, the government quietly brought the whole thing back in-house -- into the same agency that approved the vaccines in the first place.

Michael Oesch walked across Canada. He cannot walk now. The program said no.

Cameron Hitchcock will be on dialysis again tomorrow. The program said yes. He still had to go to Ottawa on his own to be heard.

The promise was less than one in a million.

There were 3,557 of them.

Sources and Notes

Global News, July 2025

Primary mainstream investigation into VISP: Oxaro contract, administrative cost breakdown, worker testimony. globalnews.ca/news/11258737

Vaccine journal, March 2025 (ScienceDirect)

Peer-reviewed comparative analysis of 14 COVID-19 vaccine injury compensation programs. Canada, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand, Germany, France. Approval rate data.

South African Pfizer contract, Pretoria High Court 2023

Standard indemnification language: governments required to indemnify Pfizer and maintain a no-fault compensation fund. Bureau of Investigative Journalism primary reporting.

Procurement Minister Anita Anand, December 2020

Public confirmation of indemnification clauses as standard in all Canadian COVID vaccine contracts.

PHAC 2017/2019 pandemic indemnity policy document

Pre-pandemic policy establishing indemnity clauses as standard practice during pandemics. Predates COVID by two years.

Daniel Freiheit, Lion Law, Toronto

LSO Certified Specialist, Corporate and Commercial Law. Allison Inquiry testimony September 9, 2026. Interview with The Old Guardian September 24, 2026. Confirmed Canadian contract structure, characterized legal landscape as a maze, identified VISP as only secret tribunal in Canadian law he is aware of.

ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

2,460 pages of internal pharmacovigilance records. Myocarditis internal timeline (p.62). CAEFISS real-time data gap (p.198). Surveillance wind-down documentation (BBRS Signal Tracking, May 29, 2023).

PHAC organizational structure, canada.ca, April 2026

Nancy Hamzawi confirmed as PHAC President since June 2025. Previous role: ADM Health Canada Health Products and Food Branch. No medical training.

Cameron Hitchcock and Michael Oesch

Public testimony, Allison Inquiry, September 2026. Both named voluntarily and publicly. Cameron Hitchcock: VISP approved. Michael Oesch: VISP denied.

Conservative MPs letter, July 2025

Four Conservative MPs to Health Minister demanding probe into Oxaro contract and VISP mismanagement following Global News investigation.

The Old Guardian is an independent investigative outlet based in Toronto. The full What They Knew series and ATI Release A-2025-001410 are available on request. Contact: tips@theoldguardian.ca

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca

The death of Brigitte Stegemann at a Belleville-area long-term care home raises two unresolved legal questions. The people positioned to answer them have not.

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 17, 2026

THREE OPPORTUNITIES, THREE SILENCES

Brigitte Stegemann, known to her family as GG, died on July 10, 2026, at The Pearl, a 41-bed long-term care home in Cannifton, Ontario, formerly operated as E.J. McQuigge Lodge. She was 83 years old and had been diagnosed five months earlier with stage IV stomach cancer. Her death was provided under Canada’s medical assistance in dying program.

On August 17, 2026, her granddaughter and Power of Attorney for personal care, Brigitte Kranendonk, filed a formal complaint with Ontario’s Chief Coroner, requesting review by the province’s MAiD Death Review Team. The complaint asks the Coroner to examine whether the process that led to GG’s death complied with the Coroners Act and the Criminal Code.

In the month since, The Old Guardian has given three parties direct, repeated, and specific opportunity to respond to the questions this complaint raises. Pearl Care Homes Inc., which operates the facility, was contacted on August 14 and again on August 24, with a total of six specific questions about the events leading to GG’s death. Neither message received a reply. Dr. Catherine Koester, the physician who provided the procedure, was contacted on August 24 with five specific questions and given until September 5 to respond. That deadline passed without a reply.

On September 9, both parties were sent a final, explicit right-of-reply notice, listing the specific claims that would appear in this report and setting a final deadline of September 16. Pearl Care Homes’ first point of contact returned a delivery failure; the notice was redirected the same day to the facility’s administrator and two other staff members. As of publication, no response has been received from Pearl Care Homes Inc., from Dr. Koester, or from anyone acting on their behalf, at any address, at any point in this five-week window.

That silence does not, on its own, prove anything happened the way GG’s family says it did. It does mean this report proceeds without the benefit of an account from either party positioned to explain what the documented record does not.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS

Some of this is not in dispute.

Pearl Care Homes Inc., Ontario Corporation Number 1634259, was formed by amalgamation on January 1, 2005, from Keay Nursing Homes Inc. and 854822 Ontario Inc. It is licensed by the Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care and managed by UniversalCare Canada Inc. The facility’s Ministry inspection record over the relevant period shows no findings specific to consent. A Critical Incident inspection on January 8, 2026, addressed a complaint about POA communication, logged as intake #00163634, but the complaint was not substantiated at the level of a written notification; that inspection window overlaps with the period the family says MAiD discussions with GG were privately restarted. Ministry inspections of long-term care homes assess compliance with care standards; they are not designed to evaluate the specific process by which MAiD consent is obtained, which is a separate legal and medical framework. The absence of an inspection finding here answers a narrower question than it might appear to.

Dr. Koester has practiced independently in family medicine since June 2008, through her professional corporation, Kate Koester Medicine Professional Corporation, based out of a clinic in Newburgh, Ontario, serving Lennox and Addington County, which includes Cannifton. She holds no hospital privileges and has no prior record of discipline with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario. The coroner’s complaint against her, filed August 17, is the first documented regulatory action of any kind involving her practice.

Her name has appeared inconsistently across public accounts of this case, including in the family’s own written complaint. To be precise: the physician identified here is Catherine Louise Koester, CPSO registration number 84550, confirmed directly against the College’s public register. A separate, unrelated physician registered under the surname Kester, CPSO registration number 72393, practices at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and has no connection whatsoever to this case.

WHAT THE FAMILY SAYS HAPPENED

Everything beyond the documented record above originates with reporting by Kelsi Sheren, a Canadian veteran, author, and MAiD-focused commentator who has published two detailed accounts of this case on her Substack since late July. Her reporting is based on an eighty-minute interview she conducted with Brigitte Kranendonk on July 22, a written statement the family posted publicly to Facebook, and the family’s written complaint to the coroner, which Kranendonk provided to her directly. The Old Guardian’s own contact with Kranendonk began in July and stalled in August after an initial exchange; this report does not have an independent account from her. What follows should be read as exactly that: one family’s account, filtered through one other outlet’s reporting, of events they were not present for in full, made public while a coroner’s investigation remains open.

According to that reporting, staff at The Pearl privately restarted conversations with GG about medical assistance in dying during a roughly ten-day period when Kranendonk was away, and these conversations were not disclosed to her at the time. GG is described in this reporting as profoundly hearing-impaired, completely deaf in one ear with limited hearing in the other, and as experiencing frequent periods of lethargy and unresponsiveness in her final months, a detail relevant to any account of what she could hear or process during this period. Formal eligibility assessments took place on July 6 and 7, attended by GG’s daughter, son-in-law, and Kranendonk herself, and the reporting describes GG as unable to recall basic facts about her own family during at least one of these sessions. On the morning of July 10, Kranendonk reportedly told her grandmother directly that she still had the right to refuse. GG is described as having remained silent through the procedure that followed, giving no verbal confirmation of consent. Separately, the reporting states that paperwork related to the MAiD application was completed by a member of facility management after a provision date had already been scheduled, that the date was then moved forward by one day to accommodate the physician’s schedule without consulting the family, and that GG had, months earlier, explicitly declined MAiD on the basis of her Christian faith.

Each of these claims was put directly to Pearl Care Homes and, where relevant, to Dr. Koester, in the right-of-reply notices sent September 9. Neither responded to any of them. Sheren’s own reporting notes a parallel outcome: she states that she independently requested the death certificate, both required eligibility assessments, the signed MAiD request and its witness, and any waiver of final consent, and that none had been produced as of her July 27 report.

THE TWO QUESTIONS NOBODY WILL ANSWER

Two specific, resolvable facts sit underneath everything else in this case, and both remain unknown because the only two people positioned to answer them have not.

The first is whether a written Waiver of Final Consent existed for GG, under section 241.2(3.2) of the Criminal Code. This matters because the law does not, in every case, require a verbal confirmation of consent immediately before a MAiD provision. A person assessed as eligible under Track 1 can sign a written arrangement in advance, waiving that final verbal step, specifically to cover situations where they may lose the capacity to confirm it later. If such a waiver existed for GG, and was properly obtained, her silence on July 10 would not, on its own, indicate anything went wrong. If no such waiver existed, the law required her active consent that day, and her family’s account describes a procedure that proceeded without it. This is not a peripheral detail. It is close to the entire legal question the case turns on, and it was asked of Dr. Koester directly, in writing, twice. She has not answered.

The second is the identity of the second independent assessor. Canadian law requires two separate, independent clinicians to confirm a patient’s eligibility for MAiD. Nowhere in the record, the family’s account, the coroner’s complaint, or anything provided by Pearl Care Homes or Dr. Koester, is that second assessor named. This is not a hypothetical concern. A January 2021 Ministry of Health Decision Briefing Note, obtained separately through a British Columbia freedom of information request, describes an unnamed B.C. physician whose MAiD report lacked a required second assessment confirming eligibility. The Ministry’s own briefing note recommended referring that case to both the police and the physician’s regulatory college. It is not known whether that recommendation was acted on. What it establishes is that a missing second assessment is not a paperwork technicality in the eyes of the system meant to catch it. It is something a Ministry of Health, in at least one other documented instance, has treated as serious enough to warrant a criminal referral.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ISOLATED CASE

GG’s case does not exist in isolation, and the questions it raises are not unique to one facility or one physician.

Ontario’s own MAiD Death Review Committee published a report in 2024 examining waivers of final consent specifically, drawing on a sixteen-member panel of physicians, ethicists, lawyers, and disability advocates whose job is to review these cases after the fact. That committee could not agree on a consistent standard for how capacity should be evaluated before a waiver is signed. In one case it reviewed, a man with dementia gave no verbal response at all during his provision, and the committee found that silence alone, absent any sign of refusal, was sufficient under the law. In another, a financial beneficiary had signed a waiver on the patient’s behalf, which the committee flagged specifically because the signer had a stake in the outcome, and it recommended using independent third parties for exactly that reason. The same report notes that a family’s involvement in a waiver can lapse entirely over time, and that family members may remain unaware such an arrangement exists at all, because a capable adult’s decision to enter into one is legally their own, and provincial privacy law can prevent a facility from disclosing it without that person’s consent. Every element of GG’s case sits inside the exact set of gaps this report already identified, in the province where she died, before she died.

A separate and unrelated set of documents, obtained through freedom of information requests in British Columbia, shows the same underlying incentive at work in a different oversight structure entirely. An internal memo to that province’s Deputy Minister of Health in November 2023, which he approved, recommended building a system to weigh MAiD-related referrals specifically because, in the memo’s own words, referring cases too readily “may discourage physicians or nurse practitioners from providing MAiD despite high demand.” Since 2018, that province has referred only 22 cases to regulatory colleges and two to law enforcement, out of thousands reviewed, a rate under 0.2 percent. In several of those rare referrals, the assessor had declared the patient eligible even though their own written assessment did not find all eligibility criteria were met. British Columbia’s MAiD program and Ontario’s are governed separately, by different oversight bodies, but the documents from both provinces describe a system built primarily to expand access, with review mechanisms that consistently treat caution as a cost to be weighed against volume, not a floor to be enforced regardless of it.

That is the system GG’s case moved through. Whether it worked as intended, or failed her specifically, is a question with a real answer. Three parties who could supply it have been asked directly, repeatedly, and in writing. None of them have.

EDITOR’S NOTE

This report relies on the formal coroner’s complaint filed by Brigitte Kranendonk on August 17, 2026; Ontario Ministry of Long-Term Care inspection records for The Pearl; corporate registry records for Pearl Care Homes Inc.; the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s public register; Ontario’s 2024 MAiD Death Review Committee report on Waivers of Final Consent; and freedom of information documents obtained by The B.C. Catholic (July 2025) and Canadian Catholic News (July 2026) regarding oversight of British Columbia’s MAiD program. The account of events attributed to the Stegemann family in this report is drawn from reporting published by Kelsi Sheren, based on her own interview with Brigitte Kranendonk and documents the family provided to her directly; it is not independent reporting by this outlet, has not been independently verified beyond what is stated here, and the coroner’s investigation into this matter remains open. Pearl Care Homes Inc. and Dr. Catherine Koester were each given multiple, specific opportunities to respond between August 14 and September 16, 2026, and did not.

Leave a comment

theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

Five parts of primary source documentation. Six comparison entries. What Health Canada’s internal records show regulators knew, and what Canadians were told instead. The gap is documented. The documents are public. What happens next is a choice.

Subscribe now

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Primary source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

On November 22, 2022, Anthony Fauci stood at the White House podium for the final time before his planned retirement. A reporter asked about the congressional oversight hearings expected from the incoming Republican majority. Fauci’s response was unambiguous.

‘We can defend and explain and stand by everything that we’ve said. So I have nothing to hide.’

On July 29, 2026, Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under subpoena. He invoked the Fifth Amendment more than one hundred times. He declined to answer what day it was. He declined to answer what colour tie he was wearing. He declined to state what colour the carpet in the committee room was. The Homeland Security Committee voted to hold him in contempt of Congress. He subsequently declined a voluntary appearance before a second Senate panel.

On August 18, 2026, Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser at NIAID, pleaded guilty in federal court to plotting to conceal COVID-19 research records during the pandemic. The Department of Justice alleged he had used his personal email account to intentionally circumvent public records laws and concealed or destroyed records related to COVID-19 research grants.

Fauci was not charged in the Morens case. The guilty plea is Morens’. The contempt proceeding and the text message accountability questions are separate Fauci threads.

Together they form an institutional portrait that does not require editorial comment. A man who said he had nothing to hide. Surrounded, by 2026, by a contempt finding, a guilty plea from his senior adviser, and 34,000 text messages still being reviewed by Senate investigators -- including a January 25, 2021 message in which he privately told the CDC Director that the vaccine ‘theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester’ while publicly saying there were no red flags.

This is the opening of Part 6 not because this series is about Anthony Fauci. It is not. It is about what happened in Canada.

It opens here because Canadian public health policy was downstream of American decisions during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Fauci said masks were unnecessary in February 2020, Canadian public health messaging reflected that. When the six-foot rule became American policy, it became Canadian policy within days. NACI guidance tracked CDC guidance closely. The policy transmission belt between Washington and Ottawa operated in real time.

The architect of the American policy framework that Canadian guidance was downstream of is now the subject of contempt proceedings, while his senior adviser has pleaded guilty to records destruction. Canadian parliamentarians have never been asked to account for what Canadian guidance adopted from that institutional environment.

That question belongs in this piece. So do the documents.

The Comparison: Six Entries

What follows is a direct comparison of specific public statements against specific internal findings from ATI Release A-2025-001410. Each entry is sourced. Each internal finding is verbatim or closely paraphrased from the documents. No editorial conclusion is appended. The comparison speaks.

ENTRY 1 -- MYOCARDITIS

Public -- June 3, 2021 -- Health Canada / PHAC communique to health practitioners:

‘No clear association has been established between myocarditis/pericarditis and mRNA vaccines, and to date, no regulatory action has been taken in Canada or internationally.’

Internal -- May 15, 2021 -- Health Canada SMSR review (ATI p.62):

Health Canada’s internal assessment concluded: ‘A possible link between the second vaccine dose and the onset of myocarditis among young men aged 16 to 30.’ Three deaths in the global case series. 70% of cases within 7 days of second dose. Israel confirmed rate higher than background in young males.

Gap: Internal conclusion of possible link -- May 15, 2021. Public communication that no clear association established -- June 3, 2021. Nineteen days.

ENTRY 2 -- PREGNANCY SAFETY

Public -- Throughout 2021-2022 -- Health Canada and PHAC communications:

COVID-19 vaccination characterized as safe for pregnant people. No prominent public communication that clinical trial data for pregnant women was absent.

Internal -- Health Canada pregnancy ad-hoc review (ATI pp.208, 225, 229, 242, 271):

‘The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been demonstrated in adults across a range of demographics, except on pregnant and lactating women due to the protection by exclusion during the clinical development stages.’ No observed versus expected analysis for Comirnaty pregnancy outcomes. Canada not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at population level. Pregnancy registry request to Pfizer -- declined. Health Canada accepted.

Gap: Pregnant women excluded from trials, vaccinated on extrapolated evidence, no O/E analysis, no population tracking, registry declined -- none of this communicated to pregnant Canadians with the clarity available in the internal documents.

ENTRY 3 -- SURVEILLANCE RIGOR

Public -- Throughout authorization period:

Post-market surveillance described as ongoing and rigorous. No public communication about reduction in monitoring intensity or removal of specific reporting requirements.

Internal -- BBRS Signal Tracking document, multiple entries (ATI Excel file, ATI pp.329, 349, 365):

Fatal reports observed versus expected analysis removed from monthly bivalent reporting at Pfizer’s request. Health Canada accepted. Monthly safety report requirement for all Comirnaty DINs formally closed May 29, 2023 -- internal memo language: ‘Repeal/close the following Ts&Cs: The requirement to submit monthly safety reports for all DINs within the authorized Comirnaty product line.’ Standard drug reporting applied by 2023.

Gap: Surveillance intensity was progressively negotiated down through bilateral exchanges with Pfizer and formally wound down by May 2023. This was not communicated to Canadians as a change in oversight.

ENTRY 4 -- THE DATA GAP

Public -- No public communication on this specific gap:

No Health Canada or PHAC public statement disclosed that real-time CAEFISS adverse event data was unavailable to Health Canada during the rollout.

Internal -- Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 2022 (ATI p.198):

‘A detailed description of the adverse events reported to CAEFISS is not currently available to Health Canada.’ 58,112,512 Comirnaty doses administered in Canada at this date. Two federal agencies. One national adverse event surveillance database. Unavailable to the regulator responsible for vaccine safety assessment in real time.

Gap: This finding was never publicly disclosed. It exists only in the internal document obtained through ATI Release A-2025-001410.

ENTRY 5 -- PEDIATRIC AUTHORIZATION

Public -- Authorization communications for children 6 months to 4 years:

Authorization presented as based on available evidence. No prominent public communication that no primary series clinical trial data existed for this age group.

Internal -- Health Canada internal RMP review memo (ATI p.392):

‘While clinical data for the use of Comirnaty Original and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 vaccine as a primary series is not yet available, based on extrapolation of clinical data from its use as a booster dose.’ Terms and Conditions for this age group were not finalized at the time of authorization -- Pfizer’s response to proposed terms was documented internally as ‘not acceptable,’ content ‘under negotiation.’

Gap: Youngest Canadians authorized on extrapolated data with no primary series clinical trial data, before safety commitments were finalized. Current Comirnaty Product Monograph (August 10, 2026) states safety is ‘inferred primarily’ from older population data. Confirmed in two independent primary sources.

ENTRY 6 -- THE CANADA-US TRANSMISSION BELT

Public -- Throughout pandemic period:

Canadian public health guidance presented as independently derived from Canadian evidence. No public communication that guidance was substantially downstream of American institutional decisions.

Internal -- Multiple primary sources, 2020-2026:

NACI guidance tracked CDC guidance closely throughout the pandemic. The six-foot rule, masking guidance, and vaccine safety communications all reflected American institutional positions with minimal lag. Fauci privately flagged first trimester miscarriage risk January 25, 2021 -- same period Health Canada internally flagged pregnancy as special monitoring category. American policy was made by an official who invoked the Fifth Amendment 100 times rather than defend those decisions under oath. His senior adviser pleaded guilty to records destruction.

Gap: Canadians were never told that the guidance shaping their lives originated substantially from an American institutional environment whose principal decision-maker will not defend his decisions under oath. Canadian parliamentarians have never been asked to account for what Canadian policy adopted from that environment.

The Government’s Response

On September 16, 2026, The Old Guardian sent a formal media request to the Office of Federal Health Minister Marjorie Michel, care of press secretary Emmanuelle Ducharme. The request summarized the five primary findings documented in this series and asked four specific questions:

Whether Health Canada acknowledges the CAEFISS data sharing gap documented in its own June 2022 internal review, and what steps have been taken to address it.

Whether the Minister has a response to the documented internal conclusion of a possible myocarditis link in May 2021 and the public communication that no clear association had been established nineteen days later.

What the Minister’s response is to the testimony of fifty Canadians at the Allison Inquiry, several of whose described injuries are consistent with adverse event categories tracked in Health Canada’s own internal pharmacovigilance records.

Whether the Minister supports a formal parliamentary inquiry into Health Canada’s COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance conduct.

A response was requested by September 25, 2026.

[ This section will be updated with the Minister’s response or with documentation of non-response upon the September 25 deadline. ]

Three Data Points: An Institutional Portrait

The accountability record assembled in this series is Canadian. It is built on Canadian government documents, Canadian regulatory processes, and Canadian compensation program failures. It does not require the American accountability record to stand.

But the American record exists. And because Canadian policy was downstream of American decisions, it belongs in any complete accounting of what happened.

Three documented events. No editorial interpretation required.

November 22, 2022

‘We can defend and explain and stand by everything that we’ve said. So I have nothing to hide.’ -- Anthony Fauci, White House podium, final appearance before retirement. On the record. Unprompted.

July 29, 2026

Fauci appeared under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He invoked the Fifth Amendment more than one hundred times. He declined to answer what day it was. Senator Josh Hawley asked him what colour tie he was wearing. Fifth Amendment. What colour is the carpet. Fifth Amendment. The committee voted to hold him in contempt. He subsequently declined voluntary appearance before a second panel. A man with a sweeping presidential pardon who still would not answer questions on the record.

August 18, 2026

Dr. David Morens, Fauci’s senior adviser at NIAID, pleaded guilty in federal court to plotting to conceal COVID-19 research records. The Department of Justice alleged he used his personal email account to intentionally circumvent public records laws and concealed or destroyed records related to COVID-19 research grants including an effort to revive a controversial coronavirus grant. Source: Associated Press, August 18, 2026.

The man who said he had nothing to hide is surrounded, by 2026, by a contempt finding, a guilty plea from his senior adviser, and 34,000 text messages still under review. Canadian policy was downstream of his decisions. Canadian parliamentarians have never been asked to account for what they adopted from that environment.

The Human Record

The documents in this series are 2,460 pages. The people in this section are not pages. They are Canadians whose experiences are consistent with the documented failures this series has mapped across five previous parts. They testified publicly under their own names at the Allison Inquiry in September 2026. Their accounts are part of the public record.

Cameron Hitchcock

Twenty-nine years old. Active and healthy. Second Pfizer dose, 2021. Diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome. Five months in hospital. Kidney failure. Dialysis six days a week. Waiting for a transplant. He arranged his dialysis schedule around travelling to Ottawa to testify. His Vaccine Injury Support Program claim was approved -- making him one of 252 Canadians the government acknowledged as vaccine-injured out of 3,557 who applied. He is recognized. He arranged dialysis around a trip to Parliament Hill because no formal accountability mechanism existed to hear him publicly.

Michael Oesch

He walked across Canada. Thousands of kilometres on foot. Fourth COVID dose, October 2022. Thirty-six hours later, walking with his granddaughter, his leg began dragging. Eventually he could not lift it. Severe neurological problems and spasms. An MRI revealed a 2.8 centimetre lesion near the top of his spinal cord close to his brain. He lost the ability to walk. He now lives in long-term care. His Vaccine Injury Support Program claim was denied. He walked across Canada. Now he can’t walk. His VISP claim was denied.

Jamie Daniel

She spent her career as a medical professional helping people in emergencies. Following COVID-19 vaccination she developed severe neurological symptoms. She was repeatedly dismissed. Called a drug seeker. Eventually diagnosed with transverse myelitis. While hospitalized, in severe pain, asking for help, a psychologist was brought in to discuss MAiD. She was in her early thirties. She had two young children at home. ‘I was asking for help,’ she told the inquiry. ‘And instead, they offered to euthanize me.’

Scott Gorry

A former parliamentary staffer. He developed myocarditis following COVID-19 vaccination. He wanted to testify at the Allison Inquiry. He died on July 4, 2026 before he could. His sister Dr. Crystal Luchkiw testified in his place. She told the inquiry he had wanted his story told. She was telling it for him.

These four Canadians. Their injuries are consistent with the adverse event categories documented in Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance records obtained through ATI Release A-2025-001410. The surveillance system that was supposed to detect what happened to them had documented gaps before they received their doses. The compensation system that was supposed to acknowledge their injuries produced different outcomes for each of them -- one approved, one denied, one still waiting, one dead before he could testify.

The Accounting

More than thirty democratic countries, including most G7 and Commonwealth nations, have launched major COVID-19 inquiries examining lockdowns, mandates, vaccines, and government decision-making. The United Kingdom. Australia. New Zealand. Ireland. Sweden. Denmark.

Canada has not.

The closest Canada came was four days in September 2026. A privately organized forum. Volunteer effort. No government funding. No subpoena power. No findings of fact. Fifty witnesses out of 1,400 who came forward. Built by a Conservative MP, a constitutional lawyer, and their wives, asking each other whether they were supposed to do this.

When the federal Health Minister’s office was asked for comment on the Allison Inquiry’s testimony, the documented response was: ‘Vaccines are safe and effective and they save lives. We have no comment on the Allison Inquiry.’

That was the Government of Canada’s official response to fifty Canadians testifying publicly about life-altering injuries.

The documents are a different response. They are Health Canada’s own internal records. They show what regulators knew and when. They show what was communicated to the public and when. They show the gap between those two things, documented in the regulator’s own language, never intended for public release.

That gap is not a conspiracy. It does not require bad faith to explain. It requires institutional incentives, regulatory capture, the financial architecture of pharmaceutical development, and the political incentives of pandemic management -- operating in a system that was not designed with sufficient transparency to allow the public to know what its regulators were concluding internally.

The documents are now public. ATI file A-2025-001410. Released July 15, 2026. Available on request.

Canada has yet to undertake any parliamentary inquiry into COVID-19. More than thirty democratic countries have. The Allison Inquiry was four days. The Health Minister had no comment. The documents exist.

Cameron Hitchcock is on dialysis six days a week. Michael Oesch lives in long-term care. Jamie Daniel was offered MAiD while asking for help. Scott Gorry wanted to testify and died before he could.

The documents show what the surveillance system was designed to catch. The documents show what the surveillance system was not designed to catch. The documents show what the compensation system did with the people who fell through the gap.

This is the accounting.

What comes next is a choice that belongs to Parliament, to the Minister of Health, and to the Canadians who read these documents and decide what they mean.

The Old Guardian has documented the record. The record is now public. What happens next is not our choice to make.

It is yours.

About This Series

What They Knew is a six-part investigative series published by The Old Guardian between September 8 and September 2026. The series is built entirely on ATI Release A-2025-001410 -- 2,460 pages of Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance documents and 81 Excel files released by Health Canada on July 15, 2026, in response to a request filed by The Old Guardian under the federal Access to Information Act.

All claims in this series are sourced to named primary documents with specific page references. No claim was published without a primary source anchor. The sourcing standard is documented in each part’s editor’s notes.

The series does not claim that COVID-19 vaccines caused mass harm. It documents the gap between what regulatory records show and what the public was told -- and the data architecture failures that made independent verification of that gap impossible from available public information.

The full ATI release is available to journalists, researchers, and parliamentarians on request. Contact: tips@theoldguardian.ca

Primary Sources

ATI Release A-2025-001410

Health Canada, July 15, 2026. 2,460-page PDF and 81 Excel files. All internal citations in this series reference this release.

Comirnaty Product Monograph (August 10, 2026, Control Number 300388)

Current authorized Canadian product label. Independently corroborates ATI findings on myocarditis labelling (October 2024 update) and pediatric authorization evidence base.

Fauci text messages (August 10, 2026)

Released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul from Fauci’s government iPhone, produced by HHS. Source: ronjohnson.senate.gov. Confirmed by CBS News, The Hill, Newsweek.

Morens guilty plea (August 18, 2026)

Federal court. Source: Associated Press, August 18, 2026. CTV News.

Fauci White House statement (November 22, 2022)

White House press briefing transcript. Public record.

Senate Homeland Security hearing (July 29, 2026)

Fauci Fifth Amendment invocations and Hawley exchange. Confirmed by multiple wire services.

Allison Inquiry public testimony (September 8-11, 2026)

Cameron Hitchcock, Michael Oesch, Jamie Daniel, Dr. Crystal Luchkiw for Scott Gorry. All named witnesses testifying publicly under their own names. Public record.

Schmeling et al. 2023

Batch-dependent safety of BNT162b2. European Journal of Clinical Investigation. DOI: 10.1111/eci.13998.

Minister Michel media request (September 16, 2026)

Sent to emmanuelle.ducharme@hc-sc.gc.ca. Response requested by September 25, 2026. This section will be updated with response or documented non-response.

The Old Guardian -- theoldguardian.ca -- is an independent investigative outlet based in Toronto, Ontario. What They Knew was researched, reported, and written by Chris Allen.

Tips, corrections, and source contact: tips@theoldguardian.ca

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca | ATI File: A-2025-001410 | What They Knew -- Complete

Leave a comment

theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

The implicit contract of emergency authorization is that rigorous post-market surveillance compensates for what compressed trials cannot capture. Health Canada’s own internal documents show that surveillance was negotiated down, progressively dismantled, and in at least one documented instance unavailable in real time between the two federal agencies responsible for it. The contract was not kept.

Subscribe now

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Primary source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

In June 2022, Health Canada produced an internal pharmacovigilance review of Comirnaty. By that point Canada had administered 58,112,512 doses of the Pfizer vaccine. The review was a comprehensive internal assessment of what the regulator knew about the safety of the product it had authorized.

On page 198 of that review -- obtained by The Old Guardian through federal Access to Information request A-2025-001410 -- appears a single sentence that stops the reader.

‘A detailed description of the adverse events reported to CAEFISS is not currently available to Health Canada.’

CAEFISS is the Canadian Adverse Events Following Immunization Surveillance System -- the national vaccine safety surveillance database administered by the Public Health Agency of Canada. It is the primary mechanism through which adverse events following vaccination are collected, stored, and analyzed in Canada.

Health Canada is the federal regulator responsible for authorizing vaccines and monitoring their post-market safety.

By June 2022, 58 million doses into the largest vaccination campaign in Canadian history, these two federal agencies were not sharing complete adverse event data with each other in real time. The regulator responsible for vaccine safety assessment was making decisions based on incomplete information from the surveillance system it was supposed to be relying on.

That sentence -- written by Health Canada’s own internal reviewers, in a document never intended for public release -- is the thesis of this piece. Not a conspiracy. Not deliberate concealment. Something more structural and in some ways more troubling: a documented failure of the data architecture that was supposed to tell Canadian regulators what was happening to Canadians.

It was not the only failure. It was not even the largest one. But it was the one Health Canada acknowledged in its own words.

The Contract of Emergency Authorization

When Health Canada authorized Comirnaty on December 9, 2020 under an Interim Order -- a mechanism that allowed faster authorization than the standard drug approval pathway -- it was making a specific implicit promise to Canadians.

The promise was not that the vaccine was perfectly safe. It was that the evidence available at the time supported authorization, and that rigorous ongoing monitoring would catch anything the compressed pre-authorization timeline could not.

That is the contract of emergency authorization. Speed in, compensated by vigilance after. The pre-authorization timeline was compressed from years to months. The post-authorization surveillance was supposed to be the safety net that justified that compression.

The documents in this series tell the story of what happened to that safety net.

Parts 2 and 3 documented how Health Canada’s internal signal assessments used materially different language than public communications during the same period, and how surveillance requirements were progressively negotiated down through bilateral exchanges with Pfizer. Part 4 documented the specific data architecture failures in the pregnancy monitoring system -- no observed versus expected analysis for Comirnaty, no population-level tracking of vaccination by pregnancy status, a pregnancy registry request declined by Pfizer and accepted by Health Canada.

Part 5 assembles the complete picture. Four documented surveillance failures operating simultaneously. A safety net with multiple holes, at a moment when millions of Canadians were relying on it to catch what the trials had not.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 2022, page 198.

Failure One: The CAEFISS Gap

The Public Health Agency of Canada administers CAEFISS. Health Canada administers Canada Vigilance -- a separate adverse event reporting database. During the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, these two systems were supposed to function as complementary pillars of Canada’s vaccine safety surveillance architecture.

The ATI documents show they were not functioning as a unified system. Health Canada’s internal reviewers were conducting weekly Canada Vigilance database searches and receiving monthly Summary Safety Reports from Pfizer. They were monitoring international regulatory signals through the Article Tracking Sheets documented in the 81 Excel files released alongside the main ATI package. They were producing internal signal assessments and issuing advisement letters to Pfizer when signals warranted action.

What they did not have -- as their own June 2022 internal review explicitly states -- was a detailed description of the adverse events reported to CAEFISS.

The practical consequence of this gap is significant. CAEFISS and Canada Vigilance captured overlapping but not identical populations and event types. Healthcare providers submitted reports to one system or the other based on their reporting pathway. Individual patients and families submitted reports through different mechanisms. The two databases together were supposed to give Health Canada and PHAC a complete picture of what was happening in Canada. Instead they were each giving their respective agencies a partial picture, and those partial pictures were not being systematically integrated in real time.

Two federal agencies. Two databases. 58 million doses administered. The regulator responsible for vaccine safety assessment acknowledged in its own internal documents that it did not have access to the national adverse event surveillance data in real time.

This is not an allegation that data was hidden or deliberately withheld. Institutional data gaps between co-existing federal agencies are a structural problem that predates COVID. The significance of this particular gap is its timing -- occurring during the largest and fastest vaccination campaign in Canadian history, at the precise moment when real-time surveillance data was most consequential.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 2022, page 198. BBRS Signal Tracking document, multiple entries referencing Canada Vigilance database searches.

Failure Two: The Pregnancy Tracking Gap

Part 4 of this series documented this failure in detail. Its inclusion here is brief but necessary because it belongs in the complete picture of the surveillance architecture.

Canada was not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at the population level. The internal documents confirm this on page 229: ‘this information is not tracked in Canada.’

The 290 pregnancy-related adverse event reports recorded in Canada to May 2022 -- including 127 classified as serious and 72 spontaneous abortion reports -- existed in a denominator vacuum. The total number of pregnant Canadians who were vaccinated during this period was not precisely known. The rate of adverse pregnancy outcomes in vaccinated versus unvaccinated pregnant Canadians was not calculable from available data.

Health Canada’s request for a pregnancy registry -- which would have created the denominator -- was declined by Pfizer in August 2021. Health Canada accepted that answer. The denominator gap remained throughout the entire rollout period.

A surveillance system that cannot calculate rates cannot detect signals. A signal detection system without a denominator is a passive collection mechanism, not an active monitoring architecture. That is what Canada had for pregnancy outcomes during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, pages 229, 271, 273-274.

Failure Three: The Batch Variability Gap

In 2023, a peer-reviewed study published in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation examined 971,021 reports of suspected adverse effects in the EU and European Economic Area. The study, by Schmeling and colleagues, analyzed Danish national health data and found something that has significant implications for how population-level vaccine safety surveillance is interpreted.

Adverse event rates varied dramatically by vaccine batch lot number. Batches representing approximately 4% of total doses administered were associated with dramatically higher adverse event reporting rates than other batches, with R-squared values between 0.78 and 0.89 -- indicating strong statistical correlation between batch identity and adverse event reports. The remaining 96% of doses showed much lower and more uniform adverse event rates.

The mechanism for this finding is manufacturing variability. Different production runs, different manufacturing sites, and different production batches can produce vaccines with differing mRNA concentrations and lipid nanoparticle characteristics. This is a known pharmaceutical manufacturing challenge. It is why lot release testing exists as a regulatory requirement.

The Canadian connection to this finding is documented in the ATI release. The BBRS Signal Tracking spreadsheets reference manufacturing site changes for Comirnaty including the approval of a WuXi Biologics production site in Germany during the authorization period. Multiple manufacturing sites, multiple production runs, multiple potential sources of batch-level variability -- all operating simultaneously during the Canadian rollout.

The surveillance architecture implication is significant. Canada Vigilance tracked adverse events by vaccine product and dose number. The BBRS monitoring documents reviewed for this series do not reference lot-level analysis as a standard surveillance tool. If adverse event rates varied significantly by production batch -- as the Schmeling study documents in European data -- then population-level surveillance that did not systematically track lot numbers would miss a signal that lot-level analysis would detect.

If some batches produced dramatically higher adverse event rates than others, a surveillance system tracking product-level data rather than lot-level data would average those rates together -- diluting the signal from the high-adverse-event batches into the background noise of the low-adverse-event batches.

This is not a claim that Health Canada knew about specific dangerous batches and concealed them. It is a documented surveillance architecture limitation: the monitoring system was not designed to detect lot-level variation in adverse event rates, and peer-reviewed European data suggests that lot-level variation was real and significant.

Source: Schmeling M et al., Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. European Journal of Clinical Investigation, 2023. DOI: 10.1111/eci.13998. ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, WuXi Biologics manufacturing site references.

Failure Four: The Surveillance Wind-Down

Parts 2 and 3 documented the progressive reduction of surveillance intensity through the authorization period. Its inclusion in Part 5 as a fourth surveillance failure is deliberate: it belongs in the complete picture of what the safety net looked like by the time most Canadians received their doses.

In December 2020, when Comirnaty was first authorized, the surveillance architecture was intensive. Daily Canada Vigilance database searches. Monthly Summary Safety Reports from Pfizer. Active signal monitoring across all authorized DINs. Observed versus expected analyses for fatal reports. Article Tracking Sheets monitoring international regulatory signals in real time.

By May 29, 2023, Health Canada had issued a formal memo closing the monthly safety report requirement for all Comirnaty DINs. The internal language: ‘Repeal/close the following Ts&Cs: The requirement to submit monthly safety reports for all DINs within the authorized Comirnaty product line.’ Standard COVID-19 specific reporting had been replaced with standard drug reporting requirements -- the same framework governing routine medications that had been on the market for decades.

The surveillance architecture went from maximum intensity to routine post-market monitoring in approximately three years. During that same period, the youngest age group authorization was still relatively recent. Long-term safety data remained incomplete. The batch variability question documented above had not been resolved. The pregnancy tracking gap had not been filled. The CAEFISS data sharing gap had not been publicly disclosed.

The contract of emergency authorization -- speed in, compensated by vigilance after -- had a time limit that was not disclosed to Canadians. The vigilance ended while the questions remained open.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, May 29, 2023 entry. ATI p.329, p.365.

What the Gaps Mean Together

Four surveillance failures. Each documented in Health Canada’s own internal records or in peer-reviewed literature using national health data. Each individually significant. Together, they describe a monitoring architecture that was systematically less capable of detecting rare adverse events than the public was led to believe.

The CAEFISS gap meant the regulator was working from an incomplete picture of domestic adverse events in real time. The pregnancy tracking gap meant rare adverse pregnancy outcomes could not be detected even if they were occurring. The batch variability gap meant lot-level adverse event signals were invisible to product-level surveillance. The surveillance wind-down meant the monitoring that was supposed to compensate for compressed authorization timelines was progressively dismantled before the long-term safety picture was complete.

None of these failures required bad faith to produce. They are the predictable outcomes of institutional design choices -- a federal data architecture that kept surveillance databases separate between PHAC and Health Canada, a regulatory framework that relied on manufacturer cooperation for post-market commitments, a surveillance methodology built for population-level signal detection rather than lot-level analysis, and a risk-based approach to reducing monitoring intensity that prioritized administrative efficiency over comprehensive long-term surveillance.

The cumulative effect of these design choices was a safety net that was less capable than it appeared -- and than the public was told.

Emergency authorization compressed the pre-authorization timeline. Post-market surveillance was supposed to compensate. The documents show that surveillance was itself compromised by data gaps, negotiated reductions, and progressive wind-down before the safety picture was complete. The contract was not kept.

Cameron Hitchcock: What the Gap Looked Like

Cameron Hitchcock was 29 years old, active and healthy, when he received his second Pfizer dose in 2021. His health deteriorated soon after. His body began swelling. His kidneys were losing protein at an alarming rate. He was eventually diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome. What followed was approximately five months in hospital and, ultimately, kidney failure.

Today Cameron requires dialysis six days a week. He is waiting for a kidney transplant. He arranged his dialysis schedule around travelling to Ottawa so he could testify publicly at the Allison Inquiry in September 2026.

His Vaccine Injury Support Program claim was eventually approved -- making him one of the 252 Canadians whose claims cleared the compensation threshold out of 3,557 who applied.

The government’s own compensation program acknowledged a connection between Cameron’s vaccination and his kidney failure serious enough to warrant payment. He is, by the program’s own determination, a vaccine-injured Canadian whose injury met the evidentiary standard for recognition.

And yet in September 2026, five years after his second dose, he was arranging dialysis around a trip to Ottawa to testify at a privately organized forum because no formal parliamentary inquiry, no government-commissioned review, and no institutional accountability mechanism had ever existed to publicly hear his account.

The surveillance system that was supposed to detect what happened to Cameron had documented gaps before he received his second dose. The CAEFISS data was not available to Health Canada in real time. Lot-level adverse event analysis was not a standard surveillance tool. The monitoring architecture was already being negotiated down. The data infrastructure that would have caught a signal like his -- if his experience was part of a pattern -- was less capable than the public knew.

Whether the gaps contributed to Cameron’s specific outcome cannot be established from available evidence. What can be established is that the safety net was less complete than it appeared, that its limitations were documented internally and not publicly disclosed, and that a man who arranged dialysis around a trip to Ottawa to be heard is still waiting for a kidney while the institutions that were supposed to be watching received a VISP cheque in acknowledgment of what they missed.

Editor’s Notes and Primary Sources

All findings in this piece are drawn directly from ATI Release A-2025-001410, released by Health Canada to The Old Guardian on July 15, 2026, and from peer-reviewed scientific literature. Specific documents cited:

ATI p.198

Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 2022 -- ‘A detailed description of the adverse events reported to CAEFISS is not currently available to Health Canada.’ Verbatim internal language.

ATI p.229

Canada not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at population level -- ‘this information is not tracked in Canada.’ Verbatim internal language.

ATI p.271

August 3, 2021 pregnancy registry request to Pfizer -- declined, Health Canada accepted, no further action taken.

BBRS Signal Tracking (ATI Excel file)

Complete internal project tracking log 2020-2023. May 29, 2023 entry documents formal closure of monthly safety report requirements for all Comirnaty DINs. WuXi Biologics manufacturing site approval referenced. Weekly Canada Vigilance database search protocols documented.

ATI p.329

Health Canada formal documentation of reduced monitoring intensity -- ‘adopting a risk-based approach...reducing oversight on indications where the safety profile has been better characterized.’

ATI p.365

By 2023 -- standard COVID-19 specific reporting framework replaced with standard drug reporting requirements.

Schmeling et al. 2023

Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. European Journal of Clinical Investigation. DOI: 10.1111/eci.13998. Danish national health data. 971,021 EU/EEA adverse event reports analyzed. Batch lot identity correlated with adverse event rates at R2 0.78-0.89. Approximately 4% of batches associated with dramatically elevated adverse event reporting.

Cameron Hitchcock

Public testimony, Allison Inquiry, September 2026. Nephrotic syndrome following second Pfizer dose 2021. Kidney failure. Dialysis six days weekly. VISP claim approved. One of 252 approved claims from 3,557 applicants.

The Old Guardian’s six-part series What They Knew examines Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance records. Part 6 -- The Accounting -- publishes shortly. ATI file: A-2025-001410.

If you or a family member experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination, contact The Old Guardian at tips@theoldguardian.ca. Source confidentiality is protected. Verification is required.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca | ATI File: A-2025-001410

Leave a comment

theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

Pregnant women were excluded from Pfizer’s COVID-19 clinical trials. Then they were vaccinated on extrapolated evidence while Health Canada internally flagged their population for special monitoring. The gap between what was known and what was tracked is documented in federal records -- and in the lives of Canadian women who were never told.

Subscribe now

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Primary source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

Three words appear in Health Canada’s own internal pharmacovigilance review of Comirnaty. They appear on page 208 of a 2,460-page document obtained by The Old Guardian under federal Access to Information request A-2025-001410.

The words are: protection by exclusion.

The full sentence reads: ‘The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been demonstrated in adults across a range of demographics, except on pregnant and lactating women due to the protection by exclusion during the clinical development stages.’

Protection by exclusion. It is a phrase from the regulatory world meaning that a population is protected from the risks of a clinical trial by not being included in it. It is a standard practice in early-stage drug development for good reasons -- pregnant women are a vulnerable population and trial risks are unknown.

But protection by exclusion is not the same as evidence of safety. It means the opposite. It means no data exists. It means the question was not answered in the controlled setting that would answer it definitively. It means that when those same excluded women were subsequently vaccinated -- in the millions, across Canada, under varying degrees of social and institutional pressure -- they were vaccinated on the basis of extrapolation, not evidence.

Health Canada’s own internal documents say so directly. The product monograph authorized August 10, 2026 says so publicly. And the consequences of that gap -- between what was studied and what was assumed, between what was tracked and what was communicated -- are documented in the lives of Canadian women who were never told that the protection extended to them was not evidence. It was an absence of data dressed as reassurance.

The Clinical Trial Exclusion: Confirmed in Internal Documents

Health Canada’s internal pregnancy ad-hoc review, conducted in 2022, is explicit on this point. Beyond the page 208 passage already quoted, page 225 of the same ATI release states:

‘Despite their higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, pregnant and lactating women were not included in any initial COVID-19 vaccine trials.’

Higher risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes. Excluded from the trials designed to establish safety. Then vaccinated as part of the population for whom vaccination was recommended.

This sequence -- exclusion, then authorization, then vaccination -- is not a secret. It was acknowledged in regulatory language at the time. What was not communicated with equivalent clarity was what exclusion actually meant for the evidence base. The public messaging in Canada characterized COVID-19 vaccination as safe for pregnant people. The internal documents confirm that characterization was made in the absence of the controlled clinical data that would have supported it.

The current authorized Comirnaty Product Monograph, dated August 10, 2026, independently confirms this. Section 7.1.1 states: ‘There are limited clinical study data from the use of COMIRNATY (Original) in pregnant women.’ For the variant-adapted formulations that Canadians received in 2022 and beyond: ‘No clinical study data are available regarding the use of variant-adapted COMIRNATY during pregnancy.’

No clinical study data. For the formulations that pregnant Canadians received. That language is on the official product label right now.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal pregnancy ad-hoc review, pages 208, 225. Comirnaty Product Monograph, August 10, 2026, Section 7.1.1, p.14.

No Observed Versus Expected Analysis: The Missing Calculation

When Health Canada monitors post-authorization adverse events for a vaccine, one of its primary tools is the observed versus expected analysis. It compares the rate of adverse events actually reported against the rate that would be statistically expected in a comparable unvaccinated population of similar size and demographics. A rate above the expected range is a signal. A signal triggers investigation.

For the myocarditis signal documented in Part 2 of this series, an observed versus expected analysis existed. It was the tool that allowed Health Canada’s internal reviewers to conclude a ‘possible link’ between the second dose and myocarditis in young males.

For Comirnaty pregnancy outcomes, no such analysis existed.

Page 242 of the ATI release states it directly: ‘Comirnaty: No observed versus expected analysis.’

For comparison, Spikevax -- Moderna’s mRNA vaccine -- had an observed versus expected analysis for pregnancy outcomes during the same period. For Pfizer’s product, which was the primary vaccine administered to the majority of Canadians, it did not exist.

Without an observed versus expected analysis, Health Canada’s internal reviewers were working without the primary statistical tool that would have allowed them to detect whether adverse pregnancy outcomes were occurring at a rate above background. They were monitoring a population they had no baseline to compare against, for a drug they had no primary trial data for, using a surveillance system that -- as documented elsewhere in these records -- was itself operating with incomplete data.

No observed versus expected analysis existed for Comirnaty pregnancy outcomes. The primary statistical tool for detecting adverse signals was absent for the vaccine most Canadians received.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal pregnancy ad-hoc review, page 242.

Canada Was Not Tracking: The Population-Level Data Gap

Beyond the absence of an observed versus expected analysis for Comirnaty specifically, there was a more fundamental data gap documented in these records.

Page 229 of the ATI release states: ‘This was not restricted to pregnancy status of the females as the data for this subpopulation is not available; this information is not tracked in Canada.’

Canada was not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at the population level. The country administered millions of doses to women of reproductive age without a systematic mechanism to identify which of those women were pregnant at the time of vaccination, what their pregnancy outcomes were, and whether those outcomes differed from the unvaccinated pregnant population.

The 290 pregnancy-related adverse event reports recorded in Canada to May 31, 2022 -- including 127 classified as serious and 72 spontaneous abortion reports -- came from a passive surveillance system. Passive surveillance means healthcare providers and patients submit reports voluntarily. The literature consistently documents that passive surveillance systems capture a fraction of actual adverse events -- estimates typically range from five to ten percent of events being reported.

The 72 spontaneous abortion reports in the Canadian database were assessed against Brighton Collaboration case definitions. The median time to onset was eleven days. The range was two hours to sixty-three days.

But those reports existed in a denominator vacuum. The total number of pregnant Canadians who were vaccinated during this period was not precisely known. The rate of spontaneous abortion in vaccinated pregnant Canadians compared to unvaccinated pregnant Canadians was not calculable from available data. Health Canada’s own evaluators noted in their review that Canadian AEFI reports ‘lacked clinical evaluation and medical confirmation’ -- that the data quality was insufficient to draw conclusions even from the reports that were submitted.

The surveillance system was passive, incomplete, and operating without a population-level denominator. That is not a conspiracy. It is a documented failure of data architecture that predates COVID. But it is a failure that had direct consequences for the ability of Canadian regulators to detect rare adverse events in pregnant women even if those events were occurring.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, pages 229, 273-274, 281. Health Canada internal pregnancy ad-hoc review.

Pfizer Declined the Registry: A Request on the Record

Health Canada identified this gap. On August 3, 2021, Health Canada sent a formal request to Pfizer-BioNTech asking the company to implement a pregnancy registry for Canada and reference it in the Canadian Product Monograph.

A pregnancy registry would have allowed prospective tracking of vaccinated pregnant Canadians and their outcomes. It would have created the denominator that passive surveillance lacked. It would have generated the data that would have made an observed versus expected analysis possible.

Pfizer declined. The company cited existing post-authorization studies already underway internationally. It stated it had no plans to update the Canadian Product Monograph to include information on pregnancy registries.

Health Canada accepted this response. The internal BBRS Signal Tracking document records the exchange without editorial comment. The request was made. The response was received. No further action was taken.

The data gap that prompted the request remained. The absence of an observed versus expected analysis for Comirnaty pregnancy outcomes remained. Canada remained unable to track vaccination status by pregnancy at the population level. And the public messaging continued to characterize COVID-19 vaccination as safe for pregnant people -- a characterization made in the absence of the registry data that would have actually supported it.

Health Canada asked Pfizer to build the data infrastructure that would have allowed proper pregnancy safety monitoring. Pfizer said no. Health Canada accepted that answer. The data gap remained.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, August 3, 2021 entry. ATI page 271.

What Fauci Texted Walensky: A Cross-Border Parallel

On January 25, 2021 -- seven months before Health Canada formally requested and was denied a Canadian pregnancy registry -- the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases sent a text message to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The text was from Anthony Fauci to Rochelle Walensky. It was released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul on August 10, 2026, from Fauci’s government-issued iPhone, produced by HHS.

Fauci wrote: ‘Since many people have significant cytokines storm and fever after the 2nd dose, this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.’

Walensky’s response called it ‘definitely a good point, especially after dose two.’

Days later, Fauci publicly stated that thousands of vaccinated pregnant women had shown ‘no red flags.’ Seven months later, Health Canada was still trying to get Pfizer to build the data infrastructure that would have allowed detection of rare adverse pregnancy events.

The Fauci text does not prove vaccines caused miscarriages. It establishes that the senior American public health official who was the dominant voice of the pandemic response privately acknowledged a theoretical first trimester miscarriage risk at the same time his public messaging said no red flags existed. That gap -- between private concern and public reassurance -- ran on both sides of the border simultaneously.

Canadian public health messaging was downstream of American guidance. When Fauci said no red flags, Canadian health authorities reflected that position. The internal documents on both sides of the border show the picture was more complicated than the public was told.

Source: Fauci text messages, released by Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul, August 10, 2026. Primary source: ronjohnson.senate.gov. CBS News confirmation August 10, 2026.

The Breastfeeding Gap: Six Years Later

There is one line in the current authorized Comirnaty Product Monograph -- the document that governs how Canadian healthcare practitioners advise patients on this vaccine right now, in September 2026 -- that captures the scope of what remains unknown.

Section 7.1.2, under Breastfeeding, states: ‘No data are available yet regarding the use of COMIRNATY during breast-feeding.’

No data are available yet. Six years after initial authorization. Six years after Canadian nursing mothers made decisions about vaccination based on the reassurance that it was safe. The word ‘yet’ implies the data is coming. After six years, it has not arrived.

This is not a claim that vaccination harmed nursing mothers or their infants. It is a documented fact that six years after Comirnaty was first authorized in Canada, the product label still acknowledges the absence of breastfeeding safety data. The public messaging during the vaccination campaign did not communicate equivalent uncertainty. Nursing mothers were not routinely told that the safety data for their specific situation did not exist.

Source: Comirnaty Product Monograph, August 10, 2026, Control Number 300388. Section 7.1.2, p.14.

The Human Cost: Two Ontario Women

The data gaps documented in this piece are not abstract. They have faces.

Kayla Pollock is an Ontario woman who received a Moderna booster shot in February 2022. Within days she developed acute transverse myelitis -- inflammation of the spinal cord -- that left her paralyzed from the chest down with limited function in her arms. While hospitalized, she was offered MAiD twice. She refused both times. Her VISP claim remained unfinalized as of the most recent available reporting. Her case was reported by CBC News in April 2026.

Jamie Daniel spent her career as a medical professional helping people in emergencies. Following COVID-19 vaccination she developed severe neurological symptoms. She was repeatedly dismissed by healthcare providers. Called a drug seeker. Eventually diagnosed with transverse myelitis. While hospitalized, in severe pain, asking for help, a psychologist was brought in to discuss MAiD. She was in her early thirties. She had two young children at home. She testified publicly at the Allison Inquiry on September 11, 2026.

‘I was asking for help,’ Jamie told the inquiry panel. ‘And instead, they offered to euthanize me.’

Transverse myelitis is documented in Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance records as one of the neurological adverse events tracked in Canada. The ATI documents show 759 neurological events recorded for Comirnaty in Canada by June 2022. The surveillance system tracked the category. It did not have the data architecture to track the denominators that would have allowed detection of a population-level signal.

Whether vaccination caused Kayla Pollock’s or Jamie Daniel’s transverse myelitis is not a question this series can answer. What this series can document is that the data infrastructure that might have answered that question -- the pregnancy registry Pfizer declined to build, the observed versus expected analysis that didn’t exist for Comirnaty, the population-level tracking that Canada didn’t do -- was absent. And in that absence, two women were left without answers. One was told to start her compensation claim over after three years of waiting. The other was offered death while asking for help.

The data infrastructure that might have detected rare adverse events in vulnerable populations was documented as absent. Two Ontario women were left in that absence without answers.

Source: Kayla Pollock case -- CBC News, April 2026. Jamie Daniel -- public testimony, Allison Inquiry, September 11, 2026. Neurological adverse events -- ATI Release A-2025-001410, page 198.

What This Means

This piece does not argue that COVID-19 vaccines harmed pregnant women, nursing mothers, or women of reproductive age as a population. The evidence does not support that claim and TOG does not make it.

What the evidence supports is precise and documented. Pregnant women were excluded from the clinical trials that established Comirnaty’s safety profile. They were subsequently vaccinated on extrapolated evidence while Health Canada internally flagged their population for special monitoring. No observed versus expected analysis existed for Comirnaty pregnancy outcomes. Canada did not track vaccination status by pregnancy at the population level. Pfizer declined to build the registry that would have filled that gap. Health Canada accepted that answer. The public was not told that the evidence base for vaccination in pregnancy rested on extrapolation rather than direct clinical data.

Three words in Health Canada’s own internal documents describe what happened to pregnant women in the clinical development of Comirnaty. Protection by exclusion.

The protection of exclusion from a trial is real. It means pregnant women were not exposed to the risks of an experimental drug in a controlled setting. That is a genuine form of protection.

But exclusion from a trial is not the same as evidence of safety. And in the gap between those two things -- between the protection of not being studied and the assumption of safety that followed -- millions of Canadian women made decisions about vaccination that the evidence base, honestly communicated, would have allowed them to make differently.

That gap is the accountability record this piece documents.

Editor’s Notes and Primary Sources

All findings in this piece are drawn directly from ATI Release A-2025-001410, released by Health Canada to The Old Guardian on July 15, 2026, and from the current authorized Comirnaty Product Monograph dated August 10, 2026. Specific documents cited:

ATI p.208

Health Canada internal pregnancy ad-hoc review -- ‘protection by exclusion during the clinical development stages.’ Verbatim internal language.

ATI p.225

‘Despite their higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, pregnant and lactating women were not included in any initial COVID-19 vaccine trials.’ Verbatim internal language.

ATI p.242

Comirnaty: ‘No observed versus expected analysis’ for pregnancy outcomes. For Spikevax, an O/E analysis existed.

ATI p.229

‘This information is not tracked in Canada.’ Canada not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at population level.

ATI p.271

August 3, 2021 pregnancy registry request to Pfizer -- Pfizer declined, Health Canada accepted, no further action taken.

ATI p.273-274

290 pregnancy-related adverse event reports in Canada to May 31, 2022. 127 serious. 72 spontaneous abortion reports. Median onset: 11 days. Range: 2 hours to 63 days.

ATI p.281

Health Canada evaluators -- Canadian AEFI reports ‘lacked clinical evaluation and medical confirmation.’ Data quality insufficient to draw conclusions.

ATI p.198

759 neurological events tracked in Canada for Comirnaty by June 2022.

Comirnaty Product Monograph (August 10, 2026, Control Number 300388)

Section 7.1.1: ‘limited clinical study data’ for COMIRNATY Original in pregnant women. ‘No clinical study data’ for variant-adapted formulations in pregnancy. Section 7.1.2: ‘No data are available yet regarding the use of COMIRNATY during breast-feeding.’

Fauci text messages (August 10, 2026)

January 25, 2021 text to Walensky: ‘this theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the 1st trimester.’ Source: ronjohnson.senate.gov. Confirmed by CBS News, The Hill, Newsweek.

Kayla Pollock

CBC News, April 2026. Transverse myelitis following Moderna booster, February 2022. MAiD offered twice during hospitalization.

Jamie Daniel

Public testimony, Allison Inquiry, September 11, 2026. Transverse myelitis following COVID-19 vaccination. MAiD offered while hospitalized with two young children at home.

The Old Guardian’s six-part series What They Knew examines Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance records. The series publishes in September 2026. ATI file: A-2025-001410.

If you or a family member experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination, contact The Old Guardian at tips@theoldguardian.ca. Source confidentiality is protected. Verification is required.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca | ATI File: A-2025-001410

Leave a comment

theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

WHAT THEY KNEW | PART 3 OF 6

The Negotiation

Health Canada asked Pfizer for a pregnancy registry. Pfizer declined. Health Canada accepted. That exchange -- documented in internal records -- is one of four negotiated decisions that shaped what Canadians were and were not told about their COVID-19 vaccines.

Subscribe now

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Primary source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

On August 3, 2021, Health Canada sent a formal request to Pfizer-BioNTech.

The request was specific. Given that serious pregnancy outcomes were being reported to Canadian surveillance databases following Comirnaty vaccination -- 64 spontaneous abortion reports by that point, 290 pregnancy-related adverse events total -- Health Canada asked Pfizer to implement a pregnancy registry for Canada and reference it in the Canadian Product Monograph.

Pfizer declined. The company cited existing post-authorization studies already underway. It stated it had no plans to update the Canadian Product Monograph to include information on pregnancy registries.

Health Canada accepted this response. No further action was taken.

That exchange -- a regulator asking, a manufacturer declining, the regulator standing down -- is documented in 2,460 pages of internal Health Canada pharmacovigilance records obtained by The Old Guardian under federal Access to Information request A-2025-001410.

It is not the only exchange of its kind in those documents.

Post-market vaccine surveillance is not a passive monitoring system sitting quietly in the background recording what happens. It is an active negotiation between regulator and manufacturer -- over what gets studied, what gets labeled, what gets reported, and when. The ATI documents provide a granular record of that negotiation for Comirnaty across multiple formulations and age group extensions.

Several findings in that record are not consistent with the public description of rigorous independent oversight.

The Pregnancy Registry: A Request Declined

The August 3, 2021 pregnancy registry request did not emerge from nowhere. It was the product of months of internal monitoring that Health Canada had been conducting since early 2021.

By August 2021, Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance reviewers had already flagged pregnancy as a special monitoring category. The internal documents show that MHPD -- the Marketed Health Products Directorate -- had been tracking pregnancy outcomes since the earliest SMSR review periods.

The monitoring was warranted. The documents confirm that Canada was not tracking vaccination status by pregnancy at the population level. The internal review stated explicitly: ‘this information is not tracked in Canada.’ The 64 spontaneous abortion reports in the Canadian database were from a passive surveillance system with acknowledged underreporting. The denominator -- how many pregnant Canadians were actually vaccinated -- was not known with precision.

Against that backdrop, Health Canada made a reasonable request. A pregnancy registry would have allowed prospective tracking of vaccinated pregnant Canadians and their outcomes -- filling the data gap the internal documents acknowledged existed.

Pfizer said no.

Health Canada’s internal BBRS Signal Tracking document records the exchange without editorial comment. The request was made. The response was received. No further action was taken. The data gap that prompted the request remained unfilled.

Canada was not tracking vaccination by pregnancy status at the population level. Health Canada asked Pfizer to help fill that gap. Pfizer declined. Health Canada accepted that answer.

The public communication during this same period continued to characterize COVID-19 vaccination as safe for pregnant people. The internal documents confirm that characterization was made in the absence of the registry data that would have actually supported it.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, August 3, 2021 entry. ATI p.271. ATI p.229.

Bell’s Palsy: A Label Negotiation on the Record

The pregnancy registry was not the only documented negotiation between Health Canada and Pfizer in this period.

Running parallel to the pregnancy monitoring thread was a signal Health Canada internally tracked across multiple Summary Monthly Safety Report review periods: Bell’s Palsy and facial paralysis cases following Comirnaty vaccination.

By the fifth and sixth SMSR review periods, 434 serious facial paralysis cases had been recorded in a single reporting interval. Health Canada formally disagreed with Pfizer’s assessment that this signal could be closed. The internal documents record Health Canada’s position in writing: the signal warranted product monograph -- label -- updates. Health Canada requested Pfizer make those updates.

Pfizer resisted including Bell’s Palsy in the clinical trial section of the product monograph. The internal BBRS Signal Tracking document records the disagreement explicitly. An advisement letter was issued to Pfizer on July 14, 2021. Pfizer’s response characterized the evidence as inconclusive.

Health Canada’s documented position: ‘Health Canada’s position remains the same and the need for further risk mitigation will be discussed with our pre-market colleagues.’

This is not a regulator passively accepting whatever a manufacturer provided. Health Canada pushed back. The disagreement is in writing. What is also in writing is that the resolution of that disagreement -- what ultimately appeared on the label, and when -- took place in a process that the public had no visibility into.

434 serious facial paralysis cases. A documented negotiation between regulator and manufacturer over whether and how to disclose them. The outcome of that negotiation determined what Canadian healthcare practitioners read on the product label when advising their patients.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, SMSR review pages 62-63. BBRS Signal Tracking document, July 12-14, 2021 entries.

Children Six Months to Four Years: Authorized Before Terms Were Final

The authorization of Comirnaty for children six months to four years old is where the internal documents produce their most significant finding in this negotiation record.

Health Canada proposed Terms and Conditions to Pfizer governing post-market safety commitments for this age group. Pfizer’s response to those proposed terms was documented internally as ‘not acceptable.’ The content of the Terms and Conditions was described as ‘under negotiation.’

A meeting was held September 8, 2022 to work through the disagreement.

The authorization for children six months to four years proceeded before the Terms and Conditions were finalized. Comirnaty was authorized for the youngest Canadians before the safety commitments governing post-market monitoring for that age group were fully agreed upon between the regulator and the manufacturer.

A separate internal memo makes a related finding explicit. For the Comirnaty Original and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 bivalent vaccine authorized as a primary series for children six months to under five years, the internal review states: ‘While clinical data for the use of Comirnaty Original and Omicron BA.4/BA.5 vaccine as a primary series is not yet available, based on extrapolation of clinical data from its use as a booster dose.’

The youngest Canadians eligible for Comirnaty were authorized on extrapolated data from booster dose studies in older populations. No primary series clinical trial data existed for this age group at the time of authorization. That is documented in Health Canada’s own internal review memo.

Comirnaty was authorized for children six months to four years before the Terms and Conditions governing their safety monitoring were finalized. The internal documents say so directly.

The public communication around pediatric authorization did not reflect this. Parents making decisions about vaccinating their youngest children were not told that the authorization preceded finalization of safety commitments, or that it rested on extrapolated rather than primary series data.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, ATI p.296. ATI p.392. Internal RMP review memo, pediatric extension.

Product Monograph corroboration: The current authorized Comirnaty Product Monograph (August 10, 2026, Control Number 300388) independently confirms this finding. Section 8.1.3 states that the safety of the bivalent primary series for children 6 months to 4 years is “inferred primarily from the safety profile of COMIRNATY at 3 mcg” -- the same extrapolation language documented in ATI p.392. The product label itself uses the word “inferred” to describe the evidentiary basis for authorizing the youngest Canadians. That is now on the public record in two independent primary sources.

Fatal Reports Removed: The Bivalent Surveillance Reduction

As successive bivalent formulations were authorized -- BA.1, then BA.4/BA.5, then XBB.1.5 -- the surveillance architecture that had governed the original Comirnaty authorization progressively relaxed.

The most significant documented reduction involved fatal reports.

For the original Comirnaty formulation, monthly safety reports included observed versus expected analyses of fatal adverse events -- a systematic comparison of reported deaths against the statistical baseline that would be expected in a population of similar size and demographics. That analysis was the core tool for detecting whether vaccine-associated death rates exceeded background rates.

For the BA.4/BA.5 bivalent vaccine, Pfizer proposed removing the fatal reports observed versus expected analysis requirement from monthly reporting. The internal BBRS Signal Tracking document records what happened next: ‘Accepted as removed by MAH.’

Health Canada accepted Pfizer’s proposal. Fatal report tracking for the bivalent vaccines was moved from monthly reports to the less frequent six-monthly Periodic Safety Update Reports.

The frequency of fatal report monitoring was reduced at the manufacturer’s request, and the regulator agreed.

Health Canada’s internal documentation frames this as a risk-based approach: ‘adopting a risk-based approach in the post-market surveillance strategy by reducing the oversight on indications where the safety profile has been better characterized.’

Whether the bivalent vaccine’s safety profile had been sufficiently characterized to warrant reducing fatal report monitoring frequency is a question the public was never asked. The decision was made internally, documented in the BBRS tracking log, and not communicated as a change in surveillance intensity to Canadians who continued receiving bivalent doses.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, BA.4/BA.5 bivalent entries. ATI p.349. ATI p.329.

The Surveillance Wind-Down: A Documented Timeline

The four negotiations documented above did not occur in isolation. They occurred within a broader trajectory of declining surveillance intensity that the ATI documents allow reconstruction of with precision.

In December 2020, when Comirnaty was first authorized, the surveillance architecture was intensive. Daily Canada Vigilance database searches. Monthly summary safety reports. Active signal monitoring across all authorized DINs. Observed versus expected analyses for fatal reports.

By late 2021, the scope of required analyses was under active negotiation between Health Canada and Pfizer. By 2022, bivalent authorizations began proceeding with Terms and Conditions negotiated post-authorization. Fatal reports observed versus expected analysis was removed from monthly bivalent reporting.

By December 2022, the monthly reporting requirement was removed for most DINs and replaced with six-monthly Periodic Safety Update Reports.

By May 29, 2023, Health Canada issued a formal memo to BRDD closing the monthly safety report requirement entirely and amending Terms and Conditions across all Comirnaty DINs. The exact internal language: ‘Repeal/close the following Ts&Cs: The requirement to submit monthly safety reports for all DINs within the authorized Comirnaty product line.’

By 2023, standard COVID-19 specific reporting was replaced with standard drug reporting requirements -- the same framework that governs routine medications that have been on the market for decades.

Comirnaty went from the most intensively monitored pharmaceutical product in Canadian regulatory history to a standard marketed drug in approximately three years. That transition was managed through a documented negotiation process. It was not publicly communicated as a reduction in oversight.

In three years, Comirnaty went from the most intensively monitored pharmaceutical in Canadian regulatory history to a standard marketed drug. The transition was negotiated. It was not announced.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document, May 29, 2023 entry. ATI p.329. ATI p.365.

What This Means

The negotiation record documented in these ATI files does not describe a corrupt regulator or a dishonest manufacturer. It describes something more systemic and in some ways more difficult to address: a post-market surveillance architecture that operated as a bilateral negotiation between regulator and manufacturer, largely invisible to the public it was designed to protect.

Health Canada asked for a pregnancy registry. Pfizer said no. Health Canada accepted that.

Health Canada disagreed with Pfizer’s assessment of the Bell’s Palsy signal. The disagreement was documented. The resolution happened behind closed doors.

Pfizer’s response to proposed Terms and Conditions for the youngest Canadians was ‘not acceptable.’ Authorization proceeded while the negotiation continued.

Pfizer proposed removing fatal report monitoring from monthly bivalent reporting. Health Canada accepted.

None of these decisions were communicated to Canadians as decisions. They were administrative determinations made within a regulatory process that operates without public visibility. Canadians receiving subsequent doses, making decisions for their children, asking their doctors whether the vaccines were still being monitored with the same rigour as when they were first authorized -- none of them had access to the negotiation record that would have answered that question.

The documents do not tell us what the right decisions were. Reasonable regulatory experts could disagree about whether each of these outcomes was appropriate given the evidence available at the time. What the documents tell us is that these decisions were made, that they were documented, and that the public was not told they had been made.

That gap -- between the documented internal negotiation and the public’s assumed understanding of rigorous independent oversight -- is the accountability record this series is building.

One further dimension of context is worth noting. The company Health Canada was negotiating with over safety monitoring requirements, label language, and surveillance obligations is the same company that, by 2026, had obtained a Belgian court judgment of approximately 1.9 billion euros against Poland and Romania for COVID-19 vaccine doses those governments refused to take delivery of in 2022 as pandemic demand collapsed -- and was enforcing that judgment by garnishing air traffic control funds through the Eurocontrol system. The Wall Street Journal reported on September 13, 2026 that Poland’s air navigation services agency had received notification from Eurocontrol about the freezing of route charge transfers as Pfizer enforced its court award. The EU-Pfizer contract -- negotiated through personal text messages between Commission President von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, subsequently the subject of transparency investigations -- was structured as a take-or-pay agreement heavily favorable to the manufacturer. Member states that did not successfully negotiate exits were held to their full purchase commitments regardless of whether doses were accepted or administered.

This is not a finding about Canada’s specific procurement arrangements, which had their own advance purchase agreements whose terms have not been fully disclosed publicly. It is context for understanding the institutional power asymmetry within which Health Canada’s documented negotiations over safety monitoring requirements, pregnancy registry requests, and surveillance obligations were taking place. The company that declined to build a Canadian pregnancy registry when Health Canada asked, and successfully negotiated the removal of fatal report monitoring from monthly bivalent reporting, operates within a commercial framework that its pandemic-era contracts with sovereign governments demonstrate in full.

Editor’s Notes and Primary Sources

All findings in this piece are drawn directly from ATI Release A-2025-001410, released by Health Canada to The Old Guardian on July 15, 2026. Specific documents cited:

ATI p.271

August 3, 2021 pregnancy registry request to Pfizer -- Pfizer declined, Health Canada accepted, no further action taken.

ATI p.229

Health Canada internal review confirming vaccination status by pregnancy not tracked at population level in Canada.

ATI p.62-63

Bell’s Palsy/facial paralysis -- 434 serious cases in one reporting interval, documented Health Canada / Pfizer disagreement on signal closure and label language.

ATI p.296

6-month to 4-year authorization -- Pfizer response to Terms and Conditions ‘not acceptable,’ content ‘under negotiation,’ authorization proceeded.

ATI p.392

Internal memo confirming bivalent authorized as primary series for 6-month to 4-year age group on extrapolated booster data -- no primary series clinical trial data available.

ATI p.349

BA.4/BA.5 bivalent -- fatal reports O/E analysis requirement removed from monthly reporting at Pfizer’s request, ‘Accepted as removed by MAH.’

ATI p.329

Health Canada formal documentation of reduced monitoring intensity -- ‘adopting a risk-based approach...reducing oversight on indications where safety profile has been better characterized.’

ATI p.365

By 2023 -- standard COVID-19 specific reporting framework replaced with standard drug reporting requirements.

BBRS Signal Tracking (ATI Excel file)

Internal project tracking log 2020-2023 -- complete chronological record of all advisement letters, memos, Terms and Conditions negotiations, and surveillance changes across the full Comirnaty authorization period. May 29, 2023 entry documents formal closure of monthly safety report requirements.

Comirnaty Product Monograph (August 10, 2026, Control Number 300388)

Section 8.1.3 -- Safety of bivalent primary series for children 6 months to 4 years is “inferred primarily from the safety profile of COMIRNATY at 3 mcg.” Independently corroborates ATI p.392 finding on extrapolated pediatric authorization. Section 7 Cardiovascular -- Myocarditis and pericarditis warning added, October 2024. Independently corroborates ATI p.62 myocarditis signal timeline.

The Old Guardian’s six-part series What They Knew examines Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance records. The series publishes in September 2026 in conjunction with the Allison Inquiry hearings at Parliament Hill. ATI file: A-2025-001410.

If you or a family member experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination, contact The Old Guardian at tips@theoldguardian.ca. Source confidentiality is protected. Verification is required.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca | ATI File: A-2025-001410

Leave a comment

Long before a provincial supervisor walked into TDSB headquarters, the board’s own systems were already failing the people they were supposed to protect. Ontario’s privacy watchdog has now said so directly.

What Happened

In December 2024, hackers breached PowerSchool, the vendor TDSB and thousands of other school districts across North America relied on to store student information. By January, TDSB confirmed the scope for its own students: roughly 1.49 million current and former students had addresses, health card numbers, emergency contacts, and in some cases medical information exposed. Some of the records dated back decades.

PowerSchool paid the hackers to delete the stolen data. It didn’t work. In May, the same attacker came back, this time demanding ransom directly from the affected school boards using data from the original breach.

This wasn’t TDSB’s only cybersecurity failure that year. A separate 2024 breach hit a test environment the board was using, one that, against basic security practice, contained real production data instead of synthetic test data. Roughly 280,000 students and staff had their information exposed through that incident alone. Then in 2025, a social engineering attack compromised a vice-principal’s login credentials, giving an outside actor access to systems across several schools.

The Regulator’s Verdict

Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner investigated. In November 2025, the office found that TDSB and other GTA boards did not have “reasonable measures” in place to prevent the breach, pointing specifically to insufficient oversight of the vendor entrusted with the data in the first place.

That’s not a hacker outsmarting a well-defended system. That’s a regulator concluding the defence wasn’t adequate to begin with.

Why This Belongs in the Supervision Conversation

Every one of these incidents happened before the province placed TDSB under supervision. The board’s defenders, and this outlet has made the same point, have argued that supervision was justified by a real, documented pattern of governance failure: no long-term capital plan, the worst facility conditions in the province, safety incidents underreported to the Ministry. Add vendor oversight to that list. A board responsible for the personal information of 1.49 million students didn’t have the controls in place to protect it, and needed a regulator to say so before anything changed.

None of that means everything that has happened since supervision began is justified by it. Those are separate questions, and this outlet has been careful to keep them separate. But anyone arguing TDSB’s pre-supervision record was fine, or that the Ministry’s intervention had no real basis, has to explain this file too.

Where TDSB Actually Fell Short, and Where It Didn’t

TDSB’s own letters to families tell a different story than the one that might seem obvious here, and it’s worth getting the distinction right. PowerSchool notified the board on January 7, 2025. TDSB sent a preliminary letter to families the very next day. By January 20, a far more detailed follow-up, signed by then-Interim Director of Education Stacey Zucker, laid out exactly which categories of data were exposed, broken down by date range, down to the specific detail that Social Insurance Numbers and financial information were never stored in the system and were never at risk. In May, a third letter, this one signed by Clayton La Touche, informed families that the ransom PowerSchool paid to have the stolen data deleted had failed, and that a threat actor was now using the same data to demand payment directly from school boards.

That’s a fast, specific, repeatedly updated communication record. Whatever else TDSB got wrong here, keeping families informed once the breach was discovered isn’t it.

The failure the IPC identified sits earlier in the chain. Notifying people quickly after a breach is not the same as having the vendor oversight to prevent one. TDSB handled the aftermath of this incident about as well as an aftermath can be handled. The question that actually matters, the one the Commissioner answered, is why a board responsible for 1.49 million people’s personal information didn’t have controls in place strong enough to stop the breach from happening at all.

Sources: CBC News, Global News, CP24, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and TDSB’s public letters to families dated January 8, January 20, and May 7, 2025.

Leave a comment

theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

WHAT THEY KNEW | PART 2 OF 6

The Signal They Saw

Health Canada’s internal documents show a myocarditis signal was detected in February 2021, confirmed as a probable link by May, and present in 657 Canadian cases by June 2022. The public was told something different.

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | September 2026

Primary source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada, July 15, 2026

On February 15, 2021, Israel’s Ministry of Health flagged something to Pfizer. Eight weeks after the world’s most aggressive vaccine rollout began, Israeli health officials had noticed a pattern in young men. They called it myocarditis -- inflammation of the heart muscle. They believed the vaccine was connected. They wanted answers.

In Ottawa, Health Canada was listening.

What happened over the next four months -- what regulators concluded internally, what they told Pfizer, what they told each other, and what they told the Canadian public -- is now documented in 2,460 pages of internal Health Canada pharmacovigilance records obtained by The Old Guardian under federal Access to Information request A-2025-001410.

The documents reveal a gap. Not a conspiracy. Not a cover-up in the dramatic sense. Something more bureaucratic and in some ways more troubling: a documented difference between the strength of what regulators knew internally and the strength of what they communicated publicly, on a question that affected millions of Canadians who were rolling up their sleeves and trusting that the full picture was being shared with them.

It was not.

February to May 2021: What the Internal Record Shows

The myocarditis signal moved quickly through the regulatory system once Israel raised it. According to internal Health Canada documents, Pfizer was formally notified of the Israeli concern on February 15, 2021. Health Canada began its own internal review.

By May 15, 2021 -- three months after the Israeli flag -- Pfizer provided Health Canada with a cumulative global safety review of the myocarditis and pericarditis signal. The numbers in that review were significant. As of that date, 108 myocarditis cases and 92 pericarditis cases had been reported in the post-authorization database globally. Three deaths were recorded in the case series.

Seventy percent of the myocarditis cases occurred within seven days of the second dose. The pattern was consistent: young males, second dose, within a week.

Health Canada’s internal assessment concluded: ‘A possible link between the second vaccine dose and the onset of myocarditis among young men aged 16 to 30.’

That conclusion -- a possible link -- was dated May 2021. It was documented in Health Canada’s internal Summary Monthly Safety Report review. It was not a fringe concern from an anti-vaccine researcher. It was the working assessment of Canada’s federal drug regulator, derived from its own review of Pfizer’s global safety data.

Israel had already confirmed a rate higher than background in young males. Health Canada’s internal reviewers agreed the signal was real enough to characterize as a possible causal relationship with the second dose.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal SMSR review, May 2021. Page 62.

June 3, 2021: What the Public Was Told

On June 3, 2021 -- nineteen days after Health Canada’s internal reviewers had documented a possible link between the vaccine and myocarditis in young men -- the Public Health Agency of Canada and Health Canada issued a communique to health practitioners across Canada.

The communique stated that ‘no clear association has been established between myocarditis/pericarditis and mRNA vaccines, and to date, no regulatory action has been taken in Canada or internationally.’

That statement was technically accurate in a narrow regulatory sense. A possible link documented in an internal review is not the same as a formally established causal association. Health Canada had not yet issued a formal advisory. No regulatory action had been formally taken.

But consider what practitioners reading that communique on June 3 would have understood: that the relationship between myocarditis and mRNA vaccines was unclear, that it had not been established, that no action had been taken.

What they were not told: that Health Canada’s own internal reviewers had, nineteen days earlier, characterized the relationship as a possible link. That 108 myocarditis cases and 92 pericarditis cases had been recorded globally. That three deaths were in the case series. That 70 percent of cases occurred within seven days of the second dose in young males.

The public language and the internal language described the same signal in materially different terms.

Source: Health Canada / PHAC communique to health practitioners, June 3, 2021. ATI Release A-2025-001410, page 62.

June 25, 2021: The Advisement Letter

Ten days after the June 3 communique characterized the myocarditis relationship as unclear, Health Canada issued a formal Advisement Letter to Pfizer on June 25, 2021. The letter was triggered by what the internal BBRS Signal Tracking document describes as ‘local and international signal’ on myocarditis and pericarditis.

The advisement letter is significant for two reasons. First, it confirms that Health Canada had moved from internal assessment to formal regulatory action within weeks of the May 15 cumulative review. Second, it establishes a precise institutional timeline: Health Canada knew enough to formally advise Pfizer on June 25, but the public communique on June 3 had characterized the signal as unclear.

The sequence matters. The internal clock was running faster than the public clock.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, BBRS Signal Tracking document 2020-2023, June 25, 2021 entry.

The Bell’s Palsy Parallel: A Documented Negotiation

The myocarditis story does not stand alone in these documents. Running parallel to it is the Bell’s Palsy signal -- facial paralysis cases following vaccination -- which illustrates how the relationship between Health Canada and Pfizer operated in practice when a safety signal was contested.

By the fifth and sixth Summary Monthly Safety Report review periods, 434 serious facial paralysis cases had been recorded in a single reporting interval. Health Canada formally disagreed with Pfizer’s assessment that this signal could be closed. The internal documents show Health Canada requested that Pfizer update the product monograph -- the label -- to reflect the facial paralysis signal.

Pfizer resisted including it in the clinical trial section of the product monograph. The internal documents record this disagreement explicitly. Health Canada’s position, documented in writing: ‘Health Canada’s position remains the same and the need for further risk mitigation will be discussed with our pre-market colleagues.’

This is not a regulator passively accepting whatever a manufacturer provided. Health Canada pushed back. The negotiation is documented. What is also documented is that the resolution of that negotiation -- what ultimately appeared on the label, and when -- took place in a process that the public had no visibility into.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, SMSR review pages 62-63. BBRS Signal Tracking document, July 12-14, 2021 entries.

By June 2022: 657 Canadian Cases

Health Canada’s internal pharmacovigilance review dated June 24, 2022 provides the most comprehensive Canadian-specific adverse event data in the entire ATI release.

As of that date, across 58,112,512 Comirnaty doses administered in Canada, Health Canada’s internal tracking recorded 657 confirmed myocarditis and pericarditis cases in Canada for the Pfizer vaccine specifically.

To put that number in context: this is not a VAERS-style passive surveillance figure where anyone can submit a report. This is Health Canada’s own internal count of confirmed cases from its pharmacovigilance monitoring -- the most rigorous counting methodology available in Canada’s regulatory system.

657 confirmed Canadian myocarditis and pericarditis cases. Three deaths in the global case series. A signal detected in February 2021, internally characterized as a possible link by May 2021, formally acted upon in June 2021.

The public communication during this same period consistently used language like ‘rare,’ ‘mild,’ and ‘resolves quickly.’ Those characterizations may have been accurate on average. But ‘rare’ for an individual case is not the same as 657 confirmed Canadian cases in a regulatory database that the public had no direct access to.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 24, 2022. Page 198.

The Ad-Hoc Review and the Benefits-Outweigh-Risks Conclusion

The ATI documents contain a dedicated ad-hoc myocarditis review memo produced by Health Canada’s internal reviewers. The memo’s conclusion is the one that became Health Canada’s public position: the benefits of vaccination outweigh the risks of myocarditis.

That conclusion may well be correct. The evidence on COVID severity, hospitalization rates, and vaccine effectiveness in reducing both -- particularly in the early pandemic waves -- supports the benefits side of that ledger for most age groups.

But the memo reaches that conclusion while simultaneously documenting three deaths in the myocarditis case series, a 70 percent rate of cases within seven days of second dose in young males, and an Israeli confirmation of a rate higher than background.

The question this document raises is not whether the conclusion was wrong. The question is whether Canadians who were being asked to receive a second dose -- particularly young males between 16 and 30 -- were given the same information that Health Canada’s internal reviewers were working from when they reached that conclusion.

The internal memo had the numbers. The public advisories had the conclusion.

Source: ATI Release A-2025-001410, ad-hoc myocarditis review memo. Page 97.

The Label That Took Three and a Half Years

The myocarditis signal documented in Health Canada’s internal records in May 2021 eventually made it onto the Comirnaty product monograph -- the official label that healthcare practitioners read when advising patients. It took three and a half years.

The Recent Major Label Changes section of the current authorized Comirnaty product monograph -- dated August 10, 2026 -- shows a single entry for the cardiovascular warnings section: October 2024. That is when Health Canada updated the label to reflect the myocarditis and pericarditis signal that internal documents show was characterized as a possible link in May 2021.

The current label now states that myocarditis and pericarditis cases “occurred more commonly after the second dose or first booster dose in adolescent and young adult males” and that “fatal events have been very rarely reported.” It acknowledges that “information on long-term sequelae is lacking.”

That language -- young adult males, second dose, fatal events very rarely reported -- mirrors precisely what Health Canada’s internal reviewers concluded in May 2021. The conclusion existed internally for three and a half years before it appeared on the label that Canadian healthcare practitioners and their patients were supposed to read.

Every Canadian who received a second dose between May 2021 and October 2024 did so without that information on the label. Every healthcare practitioner advising a young male patient during that period was working from a label that did not reflect what Health Canada’s own internal assessment had concluded.

Source: Comirnaty Product Monograph, Health Canada, authorized August 10, 2026. Control Number: 300388. Recent Major Label Changes section, page 2. Section 7 Warnings and Precautions -- Cardiovascular, page 13.

What This Means

The myocarditis signal was real. Health Canada knew it was real. Health Canada eventually said so publicly -- in language that came later and landed softer than the internal assessment.

The gap documented in these records is not fabricated, not inferred, and not speculative. It is a dateable sequence of internal documents and public communications that used materially different language to describe the same signal at the same time.

February 15, 2021: Israel flags the signal.

May 15, 2021: Health Canada’s internal reviewers conclude ‘possible link.’

June 3, 2021: Health Canada’s public communique says ‘no clear association established.’

June 25, 2021: Health Canada issues a formal advisement letter to Pfizer.

June 2022: 657 confirmed Canadian cases in the internal pharmacovigilance database.

This is not a story about malicious intent. It is a story about institutional communication standards -- what regulators owe the public they serve when the internal picture and the public picture diverge.

657 Canadians with confirmed myocarditis or pericarditis in Health Canada’s own database. Each of them made a decision about a second dose while the public language said no clear association had been established. Each of them deserved to know what Health Canada’s internal reviewers already knew.

The internal memo had the numbers. The public advisories had the conclusion. Canadians were given one but not the other.

Editor’s Notes and Primary Sources

All findings in this piece are drawn directly from ATI Release A-2025-001410, a 2,460-page PDF and 81 Excel files released by Health Canada to The Old Guardian on July 15, 2026, under the federal Access to Information Act. The release covers Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance records from 2020 through 2023.

Specific documents cited in this piece:

ATI p.62

Internal SMSR review documenting Israel signal (Feb 15, 2021), Pfizer cumulative review (May 15, 2021), Health Canada internal conclusion of ‘possible link,’ 70% within 7 days of second dose, three deaths in case series.

ATI p.62-63

Bell’s Palsy/facial paralysis signal -- 434 serious cases in one reporting interval, documented disagreement between Health Canada and Pfizer on signal closure and label language.

ATI p.97

Ad-hoc myocarditis review memo concluding ‘benefits outweigh risks’ -- reached while three deaths were in the case series.

ATI p.198

Health Canada internal pharmacovigilance review, June 24, 2022 -- 657 confirmed myocarditis/pericarditis cases in Canada for Comirnaty across 58.1 million doses.

BBRS Signal Tracking (ATI Excel file)

Internal project tracking log (2020-2023) -- June 25, 2021 advisement letter to Pfizer on myocarditis/pericarditis; July 12-14, 2021 Bell’s Palsy memo and advisement letter entries documented.

Public record

Health Canada / PHAC communique to health practitioners, June 3, 2021 -- ‘no clear association has been established between myocarditis/pericarditis and mRNA vaccines.’

Comirnaty Product Monograph (authorized August 10, 2026)

Recent Major Label Changes section confirms cardiovascular warning updated October 2024 -- three and a half years after the internal ‘possible link’ conclusion. Section 7 cardiovascular language confirms myocarditis occurred more commonly after second dose in adolescent and young adult males. Fatal events acknowledged. Long-term sequelae data lacking. Control Number: 300388.

The Old Guardian’s full series What They Knew examines Health Canada’s internal COVID-19 vaccine pharmacovigilance records across six parts, publishing in September 2026 in conjunction with the Allison Inquiry hearings at Parliament Hill.

If you or a family member experienced a serious adverse event following COVID-19 vaccination, contact The Old Guardian at tips@theoldguardian.ca. Source confidentiality is protected. Verification is required.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca | tips@theoldguardian.ca | ATI File: A-2025-001410

Editor’s Note -- September 2026 Update

Since publication of this piece, The Old Guardian obtained and reviewed the current authorized Comirnaty Product Monograph, dated August 10, 2026 (Control Number 300388). That document independently corroborates the central finding of this piece.

The Recent Major Label Changes table in the product monograph records that Section 7 -- Warnings and Precautions, Cardiovascular -- was updated in October 2024. That update added explicit language acknowledging myocarditis and pericarditis occurring “more commonly after the second dose or first booster dose in adolescent and young adult males” and that “fatal events have been very rarely reported.”

Health Canada’s internal ATI documents show the “possible link” conclusion was reached in May 2021. The product label was not updated to reflect that language until October 2024. The gap between internal knowledge and label disclosure is now documented across two independent primary sources: ATI Release A-2025-001410 and the official Comirnaty Product Monograph.

Source: Comirnaty Product Monograph, Authorization Date 2026-08-10, Control Number 300388. Recent Major Label Changes p.2. Section 7 Cardiovascular p.13. Health Canada.

Leave a comment

Investigative Journalism for the Public Interest

Guy Paul Morin lost a decade of his life to a murder he didn’t commit. The man who did was in the case file the whole time. Nobody was ever made to answer for either fact.

By Christopher Allen

The Old Guardian • September 2026

I. The Weird Guy

Christine Jessop got off the school bus near her home in Queensville, Ontario, on October 3, 1984. When her parents got home that evening, her school bag was on the counter. Christine wasn’t. She turned up three months later in a farmer’s field fifty-five kilometres away, sexually assaulted and stabbed to death.

Within months, police had a suspect: Guy Paul Morin, the twenty-four-year-old who lived next door. Not because of anything he’d done. Christine’s mother, Janet Jessop, had described him to investigators as a “weird-type guy” who played the clarinet and kept bees. An FBI profile suggested an intelligent white male, nineteen to twenty-six, living locally — vague enough to fit half the young men in Queensville. It was Janet Jessop’s discomfort with her neighbour, not any actual evidence, that turned a wide net into a name.

From there, everything ambiguous got read as guilt. Morin stared blankly through a police interview, and that became a telling reaction. He skipped Christine’s funeral, and that became “consciousness of guilt” — a category of evidence a later inquiry would call close to worthless, since staying away from a funeral is just as consistent with innocence as showing up. The Jessops’ own memory of what time they got home that day shifted between their first statement to police and Morin’s second trial, conveniently opening a window in the timeline the original account had closed. Two jailhouse informants, angling for shorter sentences of their own, testified that Morin had confessed to them behind bars. Hair and fibre analysis went in front of the jury sounding like a match, without anyone mentioning that the technique could only rule sources out — never actually identify one.

Morin was arrested April 22, 1985. A jury acquitted him less than a year later, on February 7, 1986.

II. The Verdict Nobody Believed

Acquittal didn’t end it. Not in the town, not in the press, not with the Jessops — all three denounced the verdict. A conviction had already taken hold, built heavily on psychiatric evidence introduced at trial, that Morin was guilty no matter what twelve jurors decided. The Crown did something unusual: it appealed a not-guilty verdict all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, arguing the trial judge had botched his instructions to the jury. The Crown won. A new trial was ordered.

That trial, in 1992, delivered the conviction the first one hadn’t — first-degree murder. Morin went to prison, then was released eighteen months later on bail while his appeal made its way through the courts.

What actually ended it was a technology that hadn’t existed in usable form when any of this started. On January 23, 1995, DNA testing excluded Morin as the source of genetic material recovered from Christine’s clothing. The Court of Appeal entered an acquittal. The Crown apologized. Ontario struck a public inquiry under retired judge Fred Kaufman and eventually paid Morin’s family $1.25 million.

Kaufman’s report ran 1,380 pages and made 119 recommendations. Its finding wasn’t that anyone had acted in bad faith. It was that police and prosecutors had developed, in his words, tunnel vision “in the most staggering proportions” — the condition where every new piece of ambiguous evidence gets folded in as proof of a theory instead of tested against it.

It is truly remarkable the extent to which the memories of a number of Crown witnesses improved as the proceedings progressed. — Commissioner Fred Kaufman, Report of the Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin, 1998

The real killer, when Kaufman wrote those words, was still unknown — and had been sitting in the file since 1984.

———

III. The Notebook Nobody Read

When Christine disappeared, the missing-persons file belonged to York Regional Police. Once her body turned up outside York’s territory, the homicide investigation passed to Durham Regional, under Inspector Robert Brown. Brown split his detectives into two competing teams and let them race for the strongest suspect. One team — Bernie Fitzpatrick and John Shephard, known around the file as Fitz and Shep — inherited York’s boxes of accumulated leads. Inside one notebook: the name and address of a family friend named Calvin Hoover.

They didn’t follow it up. By Fitzpatrick’s own account years later, he and Shephard wrote off York’s work as amateurish and not worth their time, and chased other leads instead — a family friend prone to dark remarks, a local teenager who carried a knife, even Janet Jessop herself. None of it held. Hoover, a cable installer who’d worked alongside Christine’s father and whose family had grown close with the Jessops, was never seriously looked at. Never asked for a DNA sample. His alibi for October 3, 1984, was never tested.

He took his own life in 2015 — five years before anyone connected him to what happened to Christine.

It took genetic genealogy — a technique that didn’t exist for any investigator working this case in 1984, or 1992, or even 1998 — for Toronto’s cold case unit to match semen recovered from Christine’s underwear to Calvin Hoover, in October 2020. Police said he would have been charged had he still been alive. He wasn’t. No trial. No cross-examination of that untested alibi. Nobody left to charge.

Morin’s wrongful conviction and the decades nobody looked twice at Hoover aren’t two failures that happen to share a case file. They’re one failure, showing up twice. The same tunnel vision that turned an odd neighbour into a murder suspect on the strength of a mother’s discomfort is what let two homicide detectives write off a notebook with the real killer’s name in it as amateurish. Once Morin was the theory, nobody was actually weighing leads on their merits anymore. They were just confirming what they’d already decided.

———

IV. The Review That Was Promised and Never Delivered

Within days of Hoover’s identification, Innocence Canada — the organization that grew directly out of the volunteer committee that had fought for Morin’s exoneration — publicly called for an independent review of how both Durham Regional Police and Toronto Police Service missed him for three decades. Janet and Kenneth Jessop joined that call themselves, describing the case in their own words as a double miscarriage of justice: an innocent man convicted, and an innocent family left without answers for thirty-six years.

Innocence Canada wasn’t asking for another Kaufman-scale public inquiry. No hearings. Just a scoped, targeted review of two specific police failures — nothing more.

Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General, through a spokesperson, called a review premature while the investigation into Hoover was still active. Innocence Canada’s answer was simple: commit now to a review once that investigation wraps up.

There wasn’t much investigation left to wrap up. Hoover was dead. No prosecution was possible. Within weeks, Toronto Police said publicly they were mostly just tracing his history and checking for other unsolved cases he might be tied to — due diligence, not an open question about charges.

This is where the public record goes quiet. No announcement that a review happened. No statement explaining why one didn’t. Innocence Canada raised it again publicly at least once more, years later. Janet Jessop died in March 2024 — six years after Hoover’s name became public, with nothing on record to say the review her family asked for was ever convened.

That silence is a finding, not a verdict. An absence in the searchable public record doesn’t prove Ontario, Durham Regional Police, and Toronto Police never did the review, or never will — internal reviews don’t always come with a press release, and a 2020 commitment can just as easily fade through a change or two in leadership without anyone formally killing it. What can be said plainly is narrower, and still worth saying: as of this writing, there’s no public confirmation that the condition Ontario itself set — a review once Hoover’s case concluded — has ever been met. It’s been roughly six years since that condition was satisfied.

———

V. What the File Doesn’t Measure

Morin is in his mid-sixties now. For three decades he’s done something almost nobody in his position manages: he’s stayed quiet. He married, built a family, worked as a private contractor. During his eighteen months locked up, he refused protective custody and stayed in general population — a detail his sister points to as proof of who he actually is, not what he was accused of. When police showed up at his home in October 2020 to tell him Hoover had finally been identified, Morin confirmed only that they’d apologized. He didn’t say much else. One brief statement went out through his lawyer — relief for Christine’s mother, gratitude that investigators had stayed on it.

He’s said one more thing publicly, at hearings on wrongful convictions, that outweighs everything else in this file:

I was proven innocent, but people still think of me as a killer. — Guy Paul Morin, cited by Innocence Canada

There’s no inquiry finding for what that costs. Kaufman’s report catalogued tunnel vision, jailhouse informants, and forensic overreach across 1,380 exhaustive pages, because those are the kind of institutional failures you can document — they have a start, an end, eventually a correction. What Morin’s describing isn’t that kind of failure. No hearing covers it. No compensation formula reaches it. And because the original suspicion was never actually built on evidence, there’s no clean way to rebut it either — you can quash a wrongful conviction, but you can’t DNA-test your way out of a town’s settled opinion of you, formed before any evidence existed and hardened over a decade of headlines and two trials. Ontario’s apology and $1.25 million fixed the legal record. Neither one was built to reach whatever Morin still runs into on an ordinary day, walking through his own town.

———

VI. The Reckoning

Two institutions failed the same family, in the same case, twenty years apart, the same way — treating a theory as settled fact and never testing it against the one sitting in their own paperwork. The first failure at least has a name attached to it: 1,380 pages, 119 recommendations. The second doesn’t have any of that. Just a promise from 2020 that nobody can currently confirm was kept.

There’s a harder truth worth sitting with alongside that, not instead of it. Hoover’s death shut the door on the only reckoning that could have actually functioned as justice — a trial, a cross-examination, a moment where he’d have had to answer for what he did in front of the people he did it to. But it also shut the door on what getting there would have cost the Jessops: years more of motions and appeals, Christine’s death picked apart again in open court, a living man free to deny or minimize it under cross-examination. Janet Jessop never got a verdict. She got a name, and she got it while she was still alive to hear it. That isn’t justice. It might, in its own limited way, have been an ending — the only kind she was ever going to get by the time one finally arrived.

Christine Jessop has been dead forty-two years. Her mother died with that name, if not the accounting Innocence Canada asked for on her behalf. Calvin Hoover was never made to answer for what he did. Guy Paul Morin is alive, and by every account still says as little about any of it as he can get away with.

The walls only work if everyone agrees they exist.

Sources and Methodology

Report of the Kaufman Commission on Proceedings Involving Guy Paul Morin, The Honourable Fred Kaufman, C.M., Q.C., April 9, 1998 (Government of Ontario).

Innocence Canada, case file and public statements on Guy Paul Morin, including statements attributed to Mr. Morin at Canadian parliamentary hearings on wrongful conviction reform.

“Inside the Hunt for Christine Jessop’s Real Killer,” Toronto Life, published in expanded form circa January 2022, including on-record comment from retired Det. Bernie Fitzpatrick.

Innocence Canada / Newswire press releases, October 26 and October 28, 2020, including statements from Innocence Canada co-president Kirk Makin and from Janet and Kenneth Jessop.

CHCH News and Law Times News reporting on Innocence Canada’s call for an independent review and the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General’s response, October 2020 and April 2024.

CBC News reporting on the identification of Calvin Hoover, October 2020, including comment from Morin’s sister Denise Kowalski and from Hoover’s former wife, Heather Hoover.

The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Guy Paul Morin Case” and “Morin Freed by DNA,” Kirk Makin.

Wrongful Convictions in Canada (wrongfulconvictions.ca), case summary and inquiry findings on hair and fibre evidence, jailhouse informants, and consciousness-of-guilt testimony.

Leave a comment

Ontario’s teachers are back in their buildings this week, prepping classrooms before students return. Their contracts expire tomorrow. How they got here matters more than the deadline itself.

Contracts for every major education union, ETFO, OSSTF, OECTA, AEFO, and CUPE’s OSBCU, expire August 31. Education contracts have run on this cycle for at least a decade, under governments of both major parties, since the agreements cover the full employment year rather than just the months students spend in class. Nobody picked this date to make a point.

The fight so far has nothing to do with wages, class sizes, or any of the issues that normally define a round of education bargaining. All five unions are stuck arguing over which issues get negotiated centrally, at the provincial table, and which stay local, board by board. That question has gone to the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and nobody involved can say when a ruling will come. Talks on everything else sit frozen in the meantime.

A Tool That Sat Unused

Under the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act, the Minister of Education can open central bargaining up to 180 days before contracts expire. All five unions asked the government, publicly and months in advance, to use that window. They named the exact risk that’s now playing out at the start of the school year.

Nothing came of the request. Bargaining only started after unions formally served notice in June, well inside the stretch that would have given both sides real time to settle before September.

Decades of precedent set the August 31 deadline. Declining a six-month head start the unions asked for directly was a decision made this year, by this government, and nobody else.

Public Money, Private Firm, Attack Ads

While talks sat stalled, The Trillium obtained a leaked draft script for government-produced advertisements targeting teacher unions, built around actors playing “concerned parents.” One line reads: “I read that Ontario teachers are already the highest paid in Canada.” Another responds: “I hope that teacher unions don’t walk out on students over salaries.”

ETFO president David Mastin called the ads “a deliberate distraction” and said the government is spending public money, through a public relations firm, to produce them. A reporter asked Calandra directly why he chose ads over the bargaining table. His answer: “I will use every means at my disposal to ensure that students, parents and teachers understand what my position is.”

Read that quote again. A government with a strong hand at the table rarely needs to hire a PR firm to win the argument outside it.

The Union Response Has Escalated Sharply

OSSTF has now called for the outright repeal of the School Boards Collective Bargaining Act itself, the 2014 law that governs the entire central and local bargaining structure. Union president Martha Hradowy said members are “waiting for a legal process to tell us which table is even permitted” to discuss workload and class sizes, the issues that actually affect students day to day.

Unions rarely ask to tear down the framework itself. When they do, it usually means they’ve stopped believing the problem is just who’s sitting across the table this round.

Rallies were held in dozens of Ontario municipalities on August 29. At one, in Toronto’s east end, MPP Peter Tabuns summed up the mood: “The failure of the government to do that, to me is a sign that they’re not serious about actually trying to find a resolution.”

This Has a Precedent, and It’s Worth Knowing

In 2012, Ontario’s government imposed contracts directly on teachers through Bill 115, freezing wages and restricting the right to strike. Courts later ruled the law violated collective bargaining rights protected under the Charter. A separate strike by CUPE education workers ended only once the government promised to repeal a law that had imposed contracts on its members, banned them from striking, and invoked the notwithstanding clause to override those Charter rights.

Real standoffs put both sides at equal risk if neither one moves. This one hasn’t worked that way in the recent past. When bargaining stalled or a strike hit, Ontario’s government had an option unions never had: legislate a settlement into being, Charter objections included.

Maybe this round breaks that pattern. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, judging who wins a drawn-out fight only makes sense once you account for the side that’s historically had a way to end it without losing.

What This Actually Is

Strip away the framing on both sides. A government with the legal tools to shorten this standoff chose not to use them, then spent public money on ads aimed at the people it wasn’t reaching through those tools. Where this lands, a real settlement, a strike, an imposed contract, is still open. “Nobody’s negotiating” and “the process is broken by design” sound similar but claim different things. Right now the evidence backs the first one solidly. Whether it backs the second is the question worth watching this fall.

Sources: The Trillium, CBC News, CP24, CTV News, Global News, and public statements from ETFO, OSSTF, and the Ministry of Education.

Leave a comment

Independent Investigative Journalism

How a decade of decisions left Iryna Zarutska with no one standing between her and Decarlos Brown.

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | August 2026

Decarlos Brown Jr. was on the Lynx Blue Line for more than an hour before he killed Iryna Zarutska.

He had no ticket. He was exhibiting visible behavioral disturbance captured on surveillance cameras. At 8:18 PM, two Charlotte Area Transit System security personnel passed him on the train. There was no interaction. No ticket check. No intervention. No removal.

At 9:46 PM, Iryna sat down in the row in front of him. Four minutes later she was stabbed three times from behind.

What happened in those four minutes was a crime committed by one man. What happened in the years, months, and hours before them was a policy outcome. This piece is about the policy.

Section 1: The Cuts

In 2018, the Charlotte Area Transit System contracted with G4S Secure Solutions to provide security across its network. Under that contract, CATS had between 68 and 88 armed security personnel on duty.

By August 22, 2025, that number was 39.

The reduction -- confirmed at a minimum of 40% by the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor -- did not happen in a single decision. It happened across a sequence of contract changes, procurement choices, and institutional priorities that stretched across seven years. Each step, in isolation, had a rationale. Taken together, they left a system of 48 light rail cars with fewer armed guards than it had when the network was smaller.

The math is straightforward. Thirty-nine armed personnel cannot cover 48 train cars simultaneously. The auditor said so explicitly. CATS acknowledged it publicly. And yet, as of August 22, 2025, no policy had been enacted to address it.

The security contract timeline tells the story with unusual clarity. In July 2022, as the city was working toward a new contractor, CATS split its security request for proposals into two separate tracks: one for armed services, open to any qualified vendor, and one for unarmed services restricted exclusively to firms certified under the Charlotte Business Inclusion program -- a city initiative for minority, women, and small business enterprises.

Professional Security Services, a CBI-certified firm, won the unarmed contract in 2023. In June 2024, CATS canceled its armed security contract with Strategic Security Corporation for failing to meet requirements. Rather than issuing a competitive bid for a new armed security provider, CATS expanded Professional Security Services’ contract to cover both armed and unarmed services -- sole-sourcing the expansion without seeking other vendors.

The contract value tells a parallel story. CATS’s security spending tripled from $5.9 million in 2022 to $18.4 million by 2025. More money. Fewer armed guards. The auditor did not characterize this as a coincidence.

While the CATS’s security contract value has increased from $5.9 million in 2022 to $18.4 million in 2025, the number of armed security has decreased by at least 40% over that time.

NC Office of the State Auditor, Preliminary Special Report on CATS Security, September 30, 2025.

CATS defended the shift publicly, arguing that total security personnel had more than doubled -- from 108 under G4S to 219 under PSS -- though the majority of the new positions were unarmed. The city characterized the change as a move toward a more mobile and responsive security model.

The Federal Transit Administration characterized it differently. In a letter to Mayor Vi Lyles dated September 10, 2025 -- eighteen days after Iryna Zarutska’s murder -- FTA Administrator called the tragedy preventable and documented that the rate of crimes against CATS riders had reached three times the national average, and that assault on transit workers had jumped to five times the national average.

Preventable. That word appears in a federal letter, signed by the administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, sent to the mayor of Charlotte. It was written before any lawsuit was filed, before any legislative hearing was convened, and before any reform was enacted. It is a primary document and it says the system failed.

Section 2: The Night of August 22

The following timeline is drawn exclusively from the CMPD Computer-Aided Dispatch report obtained by The Old Guardian through Public Records Request PRR-6565-2025, and the CMPD Incident Report filed under Complaint #20250822-2155-02. These are primary documents on file with this publication.

At 8:18 PM, PSS security personnel passed Decarlos Brown Jr. on the Blue Line. He had no ticket. Surveillance footage showed him exhibiting erratic behavior. No action was taken.

At 9:46 PM, Iryna Zarutska boarded at Scaleybark station and sat in the row directly in front of Brown.

At approximately 9:50 PM, Brown stabbed her three times from behind, including at least once in the neck. Fellow passengers fled the car and attempted to help her. Iryna was conscious or semi-conscious for under a minute before she collapsed.

What follows is the CAD record, entry by entry.

21:55:06 -- First call received. A female has been stabbed. Just occurred.

21:56:01 -- Dispatch confirms: female is on the ground in the train.

21:56:21 -- Dispatch confirms: female does not appear to be responsive.

21:59:05 -- Caller advises: male subject is on scene, standing on the opposite platform.

22:00:07 -- Officers arrive.

22:02:25 -- Platform shutdown ordered.

22:04:26 -- Crime scene requested.

22:15:57 -- Tourniquet applied.

22:23:40 -- Medic transport to CMC Main.

Four minutes elapsed between the first call confirming a woman was stabbed and officers arriving on scene. By 21:56:21 -- seventy-five seconds into the call -- dispatch knew she was on the ground and unresponsive. Officers did not arrive until 22:00:07.

Brown’s location was known before officers arrived. At 21:59:05, eight seconds before officers reached the scene, a caller confirmed the subject was standing on the opposite platform. The system had his location. There was no one there to act on it.

The platform was not shut down until 22:02:25 -- seven minutes and nineteen seconds after the first call. A crime scene was not requested until 22:04:26. A tourniquet was not applied until 22:15:57, twenty minutes and fifty-one seconds after the first call reporting a stabbing.

There was no armed security on the car when Brown attacked Iryna. There was no security response to his presence during the hour he rode the train before she boarded. The platform was open. The system had no mechanism to stop what happened.

Section 3: The Enforcement Collapse

The failure on August 22 did not begin with Brown boarding without a ticket. It began with a system that had effectively abandoned fare enforcement as operational policy before anyone died.

The North Carolina State Auditor’s second comprehensive report, released August 17, 2026, documents the scale of what had become institutional tolerance for non-payment across the CATS network.

60% of light rail riders did not pay to ride in the period examined.

45% of total bus and light rail ridership did not pay -- roughly half the system.

Fare evasion citations dropped from 4,763 in 2023 to 2,018 in 2025.

Total fare evasion fines collected on the light rail in all of fiscal year 2025: $550.

Estimated annual revenue loss from fare evasion: $5 million to $6.5 million.

The citation drop was not accidental. CATS informed the auditor’s office that bus drivers had been instructed not to enforce fares in order to protect themselves from altercations with passengers. The agency made a deliberate operational decision to stop enforcing its own rules, and told its auditor so.

Five hundred and fifty dollars. In a full fiscal year. On a light rail network that CATS estimates loses between five and six and a half million dollars annually to non-payment. That number is not a rounding error. It is a policy outcome.

Brown did not have a ticket the night he killed Iryna Zarutska. He had not paid when he boarded earlier in the evening either. The system he was riding had collected $550 in fare enforcement fines across the entire preceding year. There was no functional barrier between him and that train.

Section 4: The Money

While CATS was collecting $550 in fare enforcement fines across fiscal year 2025, it was spending $3.4 million on a Washington, D.C. public relations firm contracted to enhance public perception of the transit system.

The second state auditor’s report also found that CATS had $1.7 million in unspent safety and security funding sitting idle at the time of the audit. The agency that could not fill its authorized security positions, that instructed drivers not to enforce fares, that reduced armed guards by 40% while tripling its security contract value -- that agency had safety money it did not spend.

These are not allegations. They are findings from the Office of the North Carolina State Auditor, published in two separate reports -- September 30, 2025 and August 17, 2026 -- both conducted in response to Iryna Zarutska’s death.

The pattern is not complicated. CATS spent more on managing its image than it collected enforcing its rules. It had safety funds it did not deploy. It cut armed security while increasing contract value. It sole-sourced an armed security contract without competitive bidding. And on the night of August 22, it had 186 of 219 authorized security positions filled -- a gap of 33 unfilled roles -- while a man with a documented psychiatric history rode its trains for over an hour without a ticket.

After the murder, in the three weeks that followed, PSS filled zero of those 33 open positions.

Section 5: What the FTA Said

On September 10, 2025 -- eighteen days after Iryna Zarutska was murdered -- the Federal Transit Administration sent a formal letter to Mayor Vi Lyles. It was not a suggestion. It was a demand.

This tragedy was preventable, and it reflects systemic failures in leadership and accountability that cannot be ignored.

FTA Administrator, Letter to Mayor Vi Lyles, September 10, 2025. transit.dot.gov. [Primary document -- publicly available.]

The letter identified the rate of crimes against CATS riders as three times the national average. It identified transit worker assault as five times the national average. It told the mayor of Charlotte in writing, on federal letterhead, that her transit system had failed and that the failure was foreseeable.

The FTA subsequently launched a full audit of CATS, identifying 18 areas of non-compliance and establishing a federally supervised corrective action process. That process is ongoing.

CATS has since increased its security contract from $5.8 million to $23.1 million. It reports that Part 1 offenses fell 61% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025, and 73% in the second quarter. Off-duty law enforcement has provided more than 46,000 hours of coverage. A fare inspection team is scheduled to launch in late 2026.

These are real changes. They are also changes that were not made until after Iryna Zarutska was dead.

The question this series has not yet answered is not whether the system failed.

The FTA answered that in writing on September 10, 2025. The state auditor answered it twice. The family’s attorney is about to argue it in civil court.

The question this series will answer in Part III is who made the decisions that produced this outcome, when those decisions were made, and what they knew at the time they made them. Institutional failure does not happen in the abstract. It happens in meetings, in budget approvals, in contract awards, and in memos that someone signed.

Editor’s Notes and Source Documentation

All factual claims in this piece are sourced to primary documents, state auditor reports, or federal agency communications. Documents marked [ON FILE - TOG] are held by The Old Guardian.

1. CMPD Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) Report -- Event Z0822215502. PRR-6565-2025. [ON FILE - TOG] Primary source for all timeline entries in Section 2. Timestamps cited verbatim from redacted CAD log.

2. CMPD Incident Report -- Complaint #20250822-2155-02. PRR-6565-2025. [ON FILE - TOG] Primary source for classification, victim confirmation, weapon, and case status.

3. NC Office of the State Auditor, Preliminary Special Report on CATS Security Contracts, September 30, 2025. auditor.nc.gov. Primary source for: 40% armed security reduction, 68-88 armed guards under G4S vs. 39 under PSS, contract value tripling ($5.9M to $18.4M), sole-source contract expansion, 186 of 219 positions filled at time of murder, zero positions filled in three weeks post-murder, CBI program influence on procurement.

4. NC Office of the State Auditor, Rapid Response Special Report on CATS, August 17, 2026. auditor.nc.gov. Primary source for: $550 in fare fines collected in SFY 2025, 60% light rail non-payment rate, 45% total system non-payment, citation drop from 4,763 to 2,018, instruction to drivers not to enforce fares, $1.7M in unspent safety funding, $3.4M PR contract.

5. Federal Transit Administration, Letter to Mayor Vi Lyles, September 10, 2025. transit.dot.gov. [Publicly available primary document.] Source for: ‘preventable’ characterization, 3x national average passenger crime rate, 5x national average transit worker assault rate, demand for immediate corrective action.

6. U.S. Department of Justice / Western District of North Carolina, Federal Grand Jury Indictment, October 22, 2025. justice.gov. Source for federal charge, surveillance footage description, attack sequence.

7. WBTV / WCNC / Carolina Journal / Axios, September-October 2025: Corroborating coverage of state audit findings, PSS contract history, CATS response statements. Used for corroboration only; all institutional claims traced to auditor primary documents.

8. CATS Integrated Security and Public Safety Plan, September 24, 2025. charlottenc.gov. Source for CATS’s own account of security changes made post-murder.

9. CATS official communications, 2025-2026. charlottenc.gov. Source for CATS’s stated security improvements: 61%/73% crime reduction figures, 46,000 off-duty officer hours, contract increase to $23.1M.

In September 2018, on the last day of candidate registration for Toronto’s municipal election, Premier Doug Ford introduced legislation cutting Toronto City Council nearly in half — from 47 seats to 25 — mid-campaign, without warning, without public consultation.

It went to court. Ford invoked the notwithstanding clause to override the ruling. The cuts stood.

Most people filed it as a political fight about Toronto. A power grab, sure — but a local one. Move on.

That was 2018. It is now August 2026. And when you lay out everything that has happened since, the Toronto council cuts don’t look like a one-off anymore. They look like the opening move.

The full list. Read it slowly.

2018 — Municipal democracy Toronto City Council cut from 47 to 25 seats mid-election, without public input. Regional municipality chairs in Peel, York, Niagara, and Muskoka converted from elected to appointed — by the province. Democratic representation at the local level, reduced by provincial decree.

2022–2023 — The Greenbelt 7,400 acres of protected Greenbelt land quietly removed from environmental protection — in ways the Auditor General found would increase connected developers’ land values by $8.3 billion. The Auditor General also found government officials used code words in communications about the Greenbelt plan, violating legal record-keeping obligations. Ethics violations found. Two cabinet ministers resigned. Ford reversed under public pressure. The RCMP opened a criminal investigation in October 2023 that remains active. The mandatory decade review of the Greenbelt, required by law, is now more than a year overdue. Asked for an update at Queen’s Park in March 2026, the responsible minister said “No, thanks” and walked away.

2022 — Strong mayor powers Ford granted strong mayor powers to Toronto and designated municipalities — allowing mayors to pass bylaws with one-third of council support and override local planning decisions. Local democratic councils weakened further by provincial legislation.

2025 — Fixed election dates eliminated Ontario repealed its fixed election date legislation on November 27, 2025. Elections must now be held within the constitutional five-year maximum — but the Premier controls the timing. The mechanism introduced specifically to remove political considerations from election timing was removed by the politician who benefits most from controlling it.

November 2025 — Public water The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act, buried in omnibus Bill 60, was rushed through the legislature without public consultation — debate held at night, committee comment bypassed. The legislation authorizes the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing to remove water and wastewater services from local governments and transfer them to arm’s-length corporations structured under the Business Corporations Act — the same legal framework as private, for-profit companies. The government insists private ownership is prohibited. A UBC law professor commissioned to review the legislation called it “stealth privatization,” noting the “agent” loophole could enable private investment through entities like the Canada Infrastructure Bank. The financial structure is the tell: infrastructure built over decades with public funds transfers to the new corporation. The municipal debt stays behind. Assets move. Liabilities don’t. Ontarians have seen this before. In 2000, the privatization of water testing in Walkerton killed seven people and left over 2,300 ill. Many survivors still live with permanent health consequences.

2025–2026 — School boards: phase one Provincial supervisors appointed to take over eight Ontario school boards. Bill 33 expanded ministry power over boards directly. Follow-up legislation reduced the number of elected trustees, changed their responsibilities, and created a new CEO position appointed above the elected board. The most grassroots form of democratic representation in Ontario subordinated to a provincial appointee. Supervisors — with no educational background required — earn up to $350,000 a year. Surprise cuts made by supervisors that would normally have been debated in open school board meetings began happening without public notice.

April 2026 — Freedom of information, retroactively eliminated Bill 97 passed April 23, 2026 — 57 to 33, no public hearings, buried in an omnibus budget bill. The Premier, all cabinet ministers, parliamentary assistants, and their staff are permanently exempt from FOI requests — retroactively to 1988. Dozens of active requests wiped out. Multiple court orders voided — including the order for Ford’s November 2022 phone records, the month his government announced the Greenbelt removals. Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner urged the government not to pass it. She was ignored. Google Docs used for government business were simultaneously declared outside the law entirely. The doubling of FOI processing times for all other requests was buried in the same bill.

May 19, 2026 — Three courts. One IPC order. Zero records. The Ontario Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s final appeal on Ford’s personal phone records — records a court had ordered produced, records the IPC had ordered released, records three levels of court had now upheld. Ford’s office said it was “reviewing next steps.” The records have not been produced. Bill 97’s retroactive shield is still in effect. The sequence: IPC orders records released. Ford refuses. Court sides with IPC. Ford appeals. Court dismisses. Ford appeals again. Court dismisses again. Ford passes Bill 97 retroactively shielding records. Court orders records again. Ford’s office says “reviewing next steps.” Three courts. One IPC order. One retroactive law. Zero records. That is not a legal strategy. That is a documented, sequential dismantling of judicial accountability in real time.

2026 — Regional governments The Better Regional Governance Act 2026 gives the province power to appoint chairs and wardens in Peel Region, Durham, Waterloo, and York. More elected regional leadership positions converted to provincial appointments.

May 14, 2026 — The TTC Bill 98 passed May 14, 2026. The Fare Alignment and Seamless Transit Act gives the Minister of Transportation total control over TTC fares, service levels, route designations, and revenue distribution by regulation — with no input required from Toronto residents or the elected TTC board. For the first time in over a century, TTC riders may be required to pay to transfer within the system. TTC fare revenue can now be redirected to subsidize transit systems elsewhere in the province. Distance and zone-based fares — which would fall hardest on riders in Scarborough, Etobicoke, North York, and Rexdale who take the longest trips because they cannot afford to live beside work — are now legally available to the minister by regulation, with no vote required. The TTC Board, the City of Toronto, transit unions, and rider advocacy groups all opposed the bill. It passed anyway.

2026 — Billy Bishop and the Toronto Islands Legislation passed to expropriate the City of Toronto’s 20% stake in Billy Bishop Airport and override the tripartite agreement banning jet traffic. Ford declared the area a special economic zone where provincial and municipal laws can be suspended. The legislation’s property identification numbers cover not just the airport — but almost all city-owned land on the Toronto Islands, including beaches and parkland. The terminal is owned by Nieuport Aviation, controlled by J.P. Morgan Asset Management since 2019. Nieuport’s registered Ontario lobbyist is Mark Lawson of Anthem Advisory — a former PC government chief of staff who also lobbied for the Therme Ontario Place spa. No business case, no environmental assessment, and no capital cost estimate has been made public. The Toronto Port Authority estimates expansion costs at up to $5 billion. Ford said “one way or another, jets are coming.” The city has no legal recourse. The federal government launched a public consultation on June 8, 2026 — deadline July 24.

August 2026 — School boards: phase two At the Association of Municipalities of Ontario conference on August 19, 2026, Education Minister Paul Calandra told hundreds of municipal politicians that elected school trustees are “outdated” and confirmed he is open to eliminating them entirely. “If the province determines they can deliver a better product without trustees, they will,” he said. Public school trustees have no constitutional protection — Calandra has confirmed this explicitly. Catholic and French trustees have limited protection. English public school trustees have none. Municipal elections are scheduled for October 2026. Ford has refused to say whether trustee elections will be on the ballot. Municipal clerks responsible for running those elections have formally written to Calandra asking whether to include trustees. He has not answered. Calandra has disabled public comments on his Facebook page. He cannot be FOI’d. His AMO delegation meeting notes are not public record.

The privatization receipt

This pattern has been tested before at smaller scale — and the results are documented.

In 2011, the Rob Ford administration privatized garbage collection west of Yonge Street. Projected savings: $10 million annually. The savings were real — initially. Toronto’s own Auditor General eventually found that in-house collection east of Yonge is now roughly the same cost per household as the privatized west-end service. The promised savings evaporated over time as the private operator — GFL — became too embedded to replace without significant disruption, and competition disappeared.

In January 2026, GFL — the same company, now with the province-wide recycling contract — failed to collect post-holiday recycling across two entire Toronto districts within days of the new privatized system launching. Days. Not months.

This is the documented cycle: initial savings produced by wage suppression and underbidding, followed by embedded monopoly, eroding service, rising costs at renewal, and no viable path back to public delivery because the institutional capacity to do it has been dismantled. The evidence existed before the water legislation. Before Bill 98. Before the school board supervisors. The decision-makers had access to it. They proceeded anyway.

The savings argument is the packaging. Revenue access and embedded private operators are the product.

What this pattern actually means

Each item on that list was reported as a separate story. A budget bill here. A transit policy there. A school board supervisor nobody noticed. Water corporations buried on page 47 of an omnibus bill debated at night.

Look at the full list and ask one question: what do all of these have in common?

Every single one transfers power away from an elected, accountable body — and toward the Premier’s office or a corporate structure insulated from public accountability. Every single one removes or weakens a mechanism that existed to check what the provincial government does with your money, your land, your transit, your children’s schools, your water, and your right to ask questions.

Municipal councillors. Regional chairs. School trustees. TTC boards. Conservation authorities. The Information and Privacy Commissioner. The courts. Fixed election dates. The Freedom of Information system that exposed the Greenbelt. And now the pipes that bring water to your tap, and potentially the last elected school trustees in Ontario’s English public system. All of it. Systematically. Over eight years.

This is not what conservatism means

There is a version of conservatism with a coherent philosophical core. Reagan and Thatcher didn’t agree on everything, but they shared a foundational conviction: that concentrated state power is the enemy of individual freedom, that markets distribute decision-making better than governments do, and that the role of the executive is to govern within constraints — not to dismantle them.

Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, built his entire political philosophy around one idea: that institutions, traditions, and distributed power structures protect ordinary people from the overreach of any single authority. Classical conservatism is, at its root, a doctrine of restraint. Restraint of government. Restraint of executive power. Restraint of the state’s reach into local communities.

A genuine fiscal conservative would be downloading power to municipalities, not uploading it to Queen’s Park. A genuine conservative would be strengthening accountability mechanisms, not retroactively legislating them away. A genuine conservative would not run Ontario’s debt from $337 billion to $485 billion, spend $112 million on taxpayer-funded government advertising, appoint provincial loyalists above every elected local body in the province, or buy a $28.9 million private jet and refuse to release the procurement documents.

What Ford practices is not conservatism. It is populist nationalism with clientelist economics. He uses conservative cultural signalling — the common man, cutting red tape, stopping the gravy train — while practicing the structural opposite. Power flows up, not down. Money flows to connected interests, not taxpayers. Accountability mechanisms are removed, not strengthened.

A genuine Thatcherite looking at Ford’s Ontario would see exactly what Thatcher spent her career fighting: an overreaching executive using state power to pick winners, eliminate institutional competition, and insulate itself from accountability.

You don’t have to rig an election to make one matter less

Let’s be precise, because precision matters here. Ontario is not a one-party state. Elections still happen. Opposition parties still win seats. Doug Ford does not have 80% of the vote.

What he has is 43% of the vote — and 80 of 124 seats. That’s not a supermajority of Ontarians. That’s a supermajority of seats produced by a first-past-the-post system splitting the opposition vote between two parties that collectively outpoll him but can’t coordinate.

But here is what he has built around that electoral system. He controls when elections happen. He has shielded his government’s records so opponents can’t build a paper-trail case against him between elections. He has weakened every layer of local democratic accountability that might generate alternative power centres. He has moved to control Toronto’s transit system, restructure public water delivery, and seize an airport through a special economic zone that can suspend the law itself. He raised the personal donation cap to political parties. He has placed loyalists on the judicial appointments committee. And he governs a province where the opposition has been structurally divided for nearly a decade.

You don’t need to rig an election if you control when it’s called, what records your opponents can access, and which institutions are capable of challenging you in the years between votes.

Political scientists have a name for this. It’s called executive aggrandizement — a documented global phenomenon where democratically elected leaders use legal mechanisms to concentrate power in the executive while leaving the formal architecture of democracy superficially intact. Hungary under Orbán is the textbook case. Ontario is not Hungary. But the pattern of behaviour belongs to the same documented category. That is not an accusation. It is a classification.

Ford told the Star the Greenbelt is something people don’t give two hoots about. He may be right that most people aren’t following the details. That’s exactly how this works. The details are boring. The pattern is not.

Could a future government undo this?

Some of it, yes. Fixed election dates, donation limits, strong mayor powers, regional chair appointments — all reversible by legislation. A new government could restore them in a single term with sufficient political will.

Some of it is harder. Water infrastructure transferred to new corporate structures before a reversal would require unwinding corporate transactions, not just repealing laws. TTC revenue redistributed under the new framework leaves gaps that need filling. School board governance restructured around provincial appointees takes time to restore through election cycles — assuming trustee elections happen at all in October 2026.

And some of it is effectively permanent. The FOI retroactivity is the most consequential. A new government could re-extend FIPPA coverage going forward. But the records that were never produced under existing court orders are gone. Ford’s November 2022 phone records — the ones three courts ordered him to produce, the ones Bill 97 retroactively shielded — are almost certainly lost as an evidentiary matter regardless of what any future legislature does. The Greenbelt-era communications conducted on personal devices and deleted or wiped are gone. The legal proceedings those records would have supported don’t automatically revive.

The most important permanent damage isn’t any single law. It’s the evidentiary record that was suppressed while those laws were being passed. A future government trying to hold Ford accountable would find the doors already locked and the keys already destroyed.

That’s not an accident either.

The one accountability mechanism left

The Provincial Auditor General retains independent authority to access government records — including ministerial records — for audit purposes under the Auditor General Act. Bill 97 didn’t touch it. The Opposition has already filed an audit request on the jet procurement. That mandate needs to be protected in every future budget — and expanded to cover what is documented above.

The next election must be held by March 2030. Ford controls when it happens. He has eliminated fixed dates, shielded his records, placed loyalists above elected bodies at every level of government, and may eliminate the last directly elected education representatives in Ontario’s English public school system before October’s municipal vote. The template for what comes next is already written in the bills already passed. The only question is whether enough Ontarians are paying attention before the next window closes.

What you can do right now

Contact your MPP — government and opposition alike. Demand the Auditor General’s mandate be protected in the next budget. Demand the Greenbelt review that is legally overdue be completed and made public. Demand an answer on whether trustee elections will be on the October ballot — before it’s too late to run. Ask your MPP where they stand on public water, on TTC accountability, and on restoring FOI coverage to ministerial offices.

Find your MPP at ola.org/en/members

These institutions belong to you. They are being taken, one bill at a time, in language designed to make you look away. Don’t.

The Old Guardian is an independent accountability journalism outlet covering Ontario provincial and municipal governance. We follow money, power, and the public record — not party lines. If this piece matters to you, share it.

Chris Allen | The Old Guardian | August 2026

On June 24 and 25, 2026, Toronto City Council adopted By-law 650-2026. It passed without amendment. It incorporated 201 low-rise residential properties across all six Scarborough wards into the city-wide zoning framework — extending parking minimum removal to each of them in the process.

The residents on those streets were not in the room. Most had no idea the vote was happening. The ward councillor for Scarborough Centre had written a letter asking for deferral two weeks earlier. It was logged, filed, and ignored.

Everything that led to that vote — the provincial legislation, the two-year planning process, the community motions, the unanswered questions — is what this piece is about.

What Bill 98 Actually Does

Bill 98 — the Building Homes and Improving Transportation Infrastructure Act, 2026 — received Royal Assent on June 2, 2026. It is nine schedules of amendments to Ontario’s Planning Act, City of Toronto Act, Building Code Act, Municipal Act, and Development Charges Act, passed as a single omnibus bill in under three months from introduction to law.

For Toronto, the direct legislative hits are documented in the bill itself:

• Removal of “sustainable design” as a basis for site plan control — effectively ending the Toronto Green Standard as an enforceable planning tool.

• Prohibition on the City requiring EV charging equipment in connection with parking facilities.

• Municipalities can no longer address climate change or greenhouse gas reduction in their official plans.

• The province will impose a standardized official plan template — replacing locally-developed plans built through years of public process with a prescribed 12-designation structure.

Toronto’s official plan was built through public process over decades. Bill 98 requires it to be replaced by a provincial template. The ERO consultation window closed May 14th. Royal Assent came June 2nd.

These are specific, enumerated legal changes — now in force — that reduce the scope of what Toronto’s planners are legally permitted to do, regardless of what city councillors vote for.

Environmental Defence described Bill 98 as stripping municipalities of the power to use site plan control to promote sustainable design. The Canadian Environmental Law Association noted it would fundamentally undermine Ontario’s ability to address the impacts of climate change. The Pembina Institute called it the latest attempt to curtail the authority of municipalities to set requirements for new developments that reflect the needs of the community.

None of these organizations are fringe. All three submitted formal public comments during the ERO consultation window. Their concerns did not change the outcome.

Toronto’s own planning staff confirmed the damage in their June 11 report to PHC on Bill 98’s implications. The scale and pace of the reforms, staff wrote, “have created a degree of uncertainty regarding how the various stages of planning review and approvals function as an integrated system in practice.” That is staff language for: we no longer know the full scope of what we can do. Several Toronto Green Standard requirements — including GHG emissions limits, building energy performance, green roofs, and EV charging infrastructure — were shifted from mandatory to voluntary as a direct result.

Scarborough Is the Test Case

Scarborough’s councillors saw the parking problem coming. On April 30th, Scarborough Community Council unanimously adopted motion SC31.19. City Council adopted it on May 20-21, 2026, passing 19 to 3. Ron Parkinson and SUN submitted a support letter on the record. Marina Tadenc and the CSVSWRA did the same.

The motion asked three things: review the feasibility of pausing the elimination of minimum parking requirements for new developments in Scarborough until transit infrastructure is in place; review a bylaw framework to prohibit new condo and multiplex developments from petitioning for on-street residential parking permits in Scarborough; and review options to restore and expand public parking at Scarborough TTC stations.

Scarborough councillors passed a motion asking city staff to study whether parking minimums could be paused. Then Queen’s Park passed a law that constrains what city staff can legally recommend. The study is now being written inside constraints that didn’t exist when the motion passed.

But PH31.3 — the Scarborough zoning item that moved through PHC on June 11 and City Council on June 24-25 — tells the longer story. The January 2024 preliminary staff report that launched this process stated explicitly that bringing these lands into the city-wide by-law would “ensure the consistent and equitable application of important city-building initiatives such as recent housing regulations for missing middle housing and the removal of parking minimums.” That language is in the summary. Page one. The parking minimum removal was a stated purpose from the beginning, not an incidental outcome of administrative housekeeping.

City staff reviewed approximately 379 properties in the Scarborough district. The final report recommended incorporating 201 of them into Zoning By-law 569-2013. The affected addresses span Asterfield Drive, Birchmount Road, Dale Avenue, Jeremiah Lane, Kingston Road, Pidgeon Street, Pin Lane, Scarborough Golf Club Road, Sheppard Avenue East, and more than a dozen other streets across all six Scarborough wards. Scarborough was the last of four city districts to go through this process — staged behind Toronto East York, North York, and Etobicoke York, with the parking minimum removal framework already locked in from the earlier phases before Scarborough residents had their turn.

What the Ward Councillor Said — and What Happened Next

On June 10, 2026 — the day before the PHC hearing — Councillor Michael Thompson submitted a letter to the Planning and Housing Committee requesting deferral of PH31.3.

The letter is worth reading in full. Thompson wrote that the proposal “moves too quickly without adequately considering the unique circumstances of Scarborough’s residential neighbourhoods, particularly those within Ward 21.” He raised transportation, noting that many low-rise communities in Scarborough “do not have the same level of transit service available in other parts of Toronto” and that residents “often depend on personal vehicles to access employment, education, healthcare, recreation, and shopping.” He raised infrastructure capacity, noting that “Ward 21 is already experiencing substantial development activity” and that residents deserve confidence that infrastructure planning is keeping pace. He raised neighbourhood character. And he raised the one-size-fits-all critique directly: “planning policies should be responsive to local context rather than applying a one-size-fits-all framework across communities with very different needs and challenges.”

Growth should be accompanied by infrastructure improvements, not implemented in anticipation of improvements that have yet to materialize. — Councillor Michael Thompson, June 10, 2026

Thompson asked PHC to defer approval and direct staff to undertake further review of transportation impacts, parking implications, infrastructure capacity, neighbourhood compatibility, and Ward 21-specific considerations.

PHC adopted PH31.3 without amendments on June 11. City Council adopted it without amendments on June 24-25. By-law 650-2026 is now in force. The deferral request was not granted. No additional review was directed.

The arguments in Thompson’s letter are substantively identical to the arguments in SC31.19 — the motion Thompson voted against at City Council in May. That vote is on the public record. So is this letter. Residents of Ward 21 are entitled to weigh both.

The Question Still Waiting for an Answer

The SC31.19 feasibility report — directed by a 19-3 City Council vote — has not been delivered. The Chief Planner was asked to review the feasibility of pausing parking minimum elimination in Scarborough and report back. That report is being written inside a Bill 98 legislative framework that did not exist when the motion passed.

Does Bill 98, as now enacted, prevent the City of Toronto from acting on the parking pause requested in SC31.19? And if so, which specific provisions prevent it?

That question has not been answered publicly. When the SC31.19 feasibility report arrives, it will either confirm that the pause is legally viable, confirm that Bill 98 has foreclosed it, or dodge the question entirely. Each of those outcomes tells Scarborough residents something important about where the real fight has to happen.

Residents who showed up to speak at PHC on June 11 — or who intended to — deserved to know whether the decision-making body in front of them had the legal authority to give them what they were asking for. That answer was not provided. By-law 650-2026 passed anyway.

What Comes Next

Part 2 of this piece will be published when the SC31.19 feasibility report lands. It will assess what staff say about the parking pause’s legal viability under Bill 98, what Scarborough’s councillors do with that answer, and what residents and community organizations can actually do next — including the provincial track.

The Etobicoke parking parallel is already on the record — Councillor Holyday moved a mirror motion for his district at consecutive council meetings. The suburban coalition is wider than Scarborough. That matters heading into October.

The honest answer to “what can we do?” may require looking past City Hall entirely. That’s not defeat. That’s map-reading.

The Old Guardian applies a structured evidentiary standard to all claims. The legislative provisions cited are drawn from Bill 98 (Chapter 8, Statutes of Ontario 2026). The PH31.3 record, SC31.19 adoption, By-law 650-2026, the June 3 PH31.12 staff report, and the Thompson letter (June 10, 2026) are all public documents on the Toronto City Clerk’s record. The tension between SC31.19’s parking pause request and Bill 98’s planning constraints remains at Evidence level pending the SC31.19 feasibility report. The contradiction between Thompson’s May vote against SC31.19 and his June letter opposing PH31.3 is documented at Evidence level pending any explanation on the public record. No claim in this piece has been advanced beyond its verified source.

Chris Allen is a Ward 21 Scarborough resident and investigative journalist. The Old Guardian covers civic accountability in Scarborough and at Queen’s Park.

Leave a comment

In November 1993, a twenty year old woman flew from Vancouver to Winnipeg. Peter Nygård had told her it was a modelling opportunity. Instead, she was held against her will at his Notre Dame Avenue warehouse and sexually assaulted.

She got out. She called a friend, who came and drove her away. She stayed there for about a week, working out what to do next.

Two Winnipeg police officers came to check on her, along with a social worker. Whatever she was carrying privately, what she told them out loud was careful. “I am safe. I am fine. I will be fine.”

When she got home to Vancouver, an RCMP officer followed up. He would later say he suspected there was more to it than what she was telling him. He took no formal statement.

Nothing happened. Somewhere in the years that followed, the file was cleared out. Twenty seven years passed.

In 2020, she came forward again, and Winnipeg police reopened the case. Investigators went looking for the 1993 file. It was gone. When they went back to the two officers who had been there in person, neither one had kept anything. Two different police forces, two different retention rules, and nobody left who could fully explain why either set of records no longer existed.

In October 2025, a Manitoba judge stayed the charges. Destroyed records, she found, do not meet the standard a fair trial requires. The case that came closest to holding Nygård accountable in the province where he built his empire ended not on the facts, but on paperwork that no longer existed.

The woman asked, afterward, that the publication ban protecting her identity be lifted. She wanted her name attached to what she had survived. Her name is April Telek.

That much of the story you have likely already heard, in pieces, across three years of headlines. What is harder to see, because it is scattered across five decades and three cities, is that 1993 was not the beginning.

The Pattern Before Her

In 1968, a young Winnipeg police detective named Des Depourcq took a report from a teenager who worked in Nygård’s factory. He arrested Nygård and laid a charge. The young woman later declined to testify, and the charge was withdrawn. Nygård was in his twenties. Depourcq had never told the story publicly until a CBC investigation found him decades later.

In 1980, it happened again. Another rape charge in Winnipeg. The outcome was the same: the woman would not testify, and the case died before it reached a courtroom.

By 1984, the pattern already had a paper trail, and at least one Winnipeg police officer knew it. An eighteen year old Nygård employee, being sexually harassed at work, went to an officer she knew to ask about pressing charges. He told her he had looked into Nygård’s file. It ran about ten inches thick, he said. “Nothing sticks to this man,” she remembers him telling her, and that she should get out while she could. She gave her notice. Before her last day, she says Nygård raped her at his apartment, and one of his employees handed her two weeks pay in an envelope and told her to collect her things and go. She never told police any of it. CBC is protecting her identity.

Sometime in the 1990s, a fourteen year old girl told her family Nygård had raped her. They turned to Joy Smith, then a schoolteacher working with trafficking victims and later a member of Parliament, for help deciding what to do. According to Smith, Nygård offered the family money to stay quiet and eventually paid them 250,000 dollars. The family never went to police. That case does not appear in any court file, because it was never allowed to become one.

That same year, 1993, a different fourteen year old girl named Nadine Moostoos was living on the street in Winnipeg when she says Nygård picked her up and assaulted her. Unlike the others, her case eventually reached the system, just decades late. In 2020, Winnipeg police reopened their investigation into Nygård and took her statement along with seven others, Telek’s among them. Police referred all eight cases to Manitoba prosecutors, who declined to charge in every one except Telek’s. “It’s like a slap in the face,” Moostoos said of how it ended. Her case and Telek’s ran through the exact same investigation, reviewed by the exact same prosecutors, referred to the exact same outside province, and came out the other side with two different results.

That is a lot of different women, hitting a lot of different points where the system could have stopped him, and watching it fail every time in a different way. A witness recanting. A witness recanting again. A family paid to stay silent before police ever got involved. An officer waving a woman away from her own complaint. A fully investigated case that still didn’t survive contact with prosecutors. Different mechanisms. Same result, for twenty-five years, before Telek ever got on a plane to Winnipeg.

A note on sourcing, because this series holds itself to the same standard it applies to everyone else: everything before 2020 in this section traces back to one investigative source, a Fifth Estate documentary broadcast in December 2021. That reporting checks out against everything obtained independently for this series so far. Moostoos’s case sits inside the same eight file review as Telek’s, a detail confirmed separately through the Manitoba court record. It has not yet been corroborated by a second outlet or a surviving police file, which for events this old may simply no longer exist to find.

None of that changes the argument. It just means you should hold the 1968, 1980, and 1990s accounts as strongly sourced but not yet doubly confirmed, while the 1993 through 2025 record, everything from Telek’s case forward, rests on primary court documents this series has in hand.

That is the argument the rest of this series is going to make in detail: that what protected Peter Nygård for half a century was not the absence of complaints. It was a system, corporate and institutional at once, reliable enough that complaints kept failing to become convictions.

Built For It

The pattern in the last section was a pattern across time. This one has an address.

At 1 Niagara Street in Toronto, the headquarters of his fashion company, Nygård kept a private suite on an upper floor. Employees had their own name for it: the Finland Suite. Two of the women who later testified against him said pornography was playing there. The building itself was never zoned for residential use. Whatever Nygård treated that room as, on paper it was something else entirely.

The same arrangement shows up again in Winnipeg, at the same address where Telek says she was held in 1993. A court examining the Nygård companies’ finances years later looked for any record connecting him to 1340 Notre Dame Avenue as a residence and found nothing: no lease, no rent paid, no renewal terms, nothing in writing at all. The court’s own description was blunt. Whatever existed there was a temporary accommodation, not a tenancy. Two cities, two private rooms inside two commercial buildings, and in neither case does anything on paper say either room was ever meant to be lived in.

When prosecutors in Toronto later asked a court for permission to let one complainant’s account support another’s at trial, part of what persuaded the judge wasn’t just that the stories sounded alike. It was that getting into that private space followed the same design each time: a meeting, a tour of the building, then a room built so that who could get in, and who could get out, was never really up to the person who’d just walked through the door.

There was a second structure running alongside the physical one, and it was built out of money. A family was paid 250,000 dollars to keep a fourteen year old’s assault away from police entirely, according to Joy Smith. In 1968 and again in 1980, cases collapsed when the women involved chose not to testify. And years later, in his own police interview, Nygård confirmed a version of the same mechanism himself: he had paid 20,000 dollars to each woman who filed a human rights complaint against him in Manitoba. That’s not an allegation. It’s an admission, on the record, to the people investigating him.

None of this was the work of one man improvising. At its peak the company employed roughly 1,550 people across an operation that spanned continents. A room with no lease. A payment ready before anyone had to ask twice. Set those two structures beside the twenty five years of pattern from the last section, and “machine” stops sounding like a figure of speech. It starts sounding like a description of an actual design: get someone into the room, and two separate systems were already standing by to make sure whatever happened there never became anyone’s problem but hers.

Part Two of this series goes inside a different system: the police, the prosecutors, and the records that kept disappearing at the exact moments they mattered most.

Leave a comment

This piece is a companion to The Shield, The Reviewer, and Not Your Mother’s Roundup -- The Old Guardian’s ongoing investigation into glyphosate, Roundup, and the regulatory architecture surrounding both. All pieces are available at theoldguardian.ca. This piece stands on its own and focuses entirely on the Canadian regulatory record.

One Sentence

On August 8, 2025, Jason Flint, Director General and Chief Registrar of Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency, sent an email. A federal court had ordered his agency to reassess its approval of a glyphosate-containing pesticide product called Mad Dog Plus, taking into account 61 new scientific studies identifying new or elevated risks. The court gave PMRA six months to deliver a scientifically justified response. The email was the response.

It contained one sentence.

“Overall, for the reasons articulated in Table 1, and taking into account global research findings from the additional studies referred to in Table 2, the existing reference values for glyphosate do not need to be revised, and the current risk assessment on file for the active ingredient glyphosate is valid.”

Two tables were attached. One addressed a single forest study. The other referenced the Global Glyphosate Study published by the Ramazzini Institute on June 10, 2025 -- a study that Safe Food Matters, one of the applicants who brought the original court case, believes demonstrates that glyphosate causes cancer. That study, published after Justice Zinn’s court order and before PMRA’s deadline, was handed to PMRA as new evidence requiring genuine consideration. It appears in Table 2. The current risk assessment remains valid.

This piece is about how Canada arrived at a moment where that sentence was considered an adequate response to a court order. It is a story that begins not in 2025, but in 2017. And it has been building, court case by court case, rejection by rejection, for eight years.

What the Court Actually Said

On February 18, 2025, Justice Russell Zinn of the Federal Court of Canada ruled in Friends of the Earth Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada et al., 2025 FC 300. The applicants -- Friends of the Earth Canada, the David Suzuki Foundation, Safe Food Matters, and Environmental Defence Canada -- had argued that PMRA was rubber-stamping renewals of glyphosate products without examining new science. Justice Zinn agreed, in part.

The ruling confirmed that product renewals, which occur every five years, are not mere formalities. They are, in Zinn’s words, “streamlined yet still substantive pulse checks that use newly available information to reassess the risk level of registered products up for renewal.” They are checkpoints. Not rubber stamps.

The problem was that PMRA could not demonstrate it had actually used those checkpoints. The court found no meaningful insight in the record into how Health Canada considered the 61 new scientific studies the applicants had submitted, if it gave them any consideration at all. The Minister of Health did not submit an affidavit. No explanation was provided for the absence of documented analysis. The agency’s position amounted to what Justice Zinn identified explicitly as a “trust us, we got it right” approach. The court rejected it.

The court sent the matter back to PMRA with a six-month deadline: by August 18, 2025, the agency had to redetermine the renewal of Mad Dog Plus in accordance with the court’s reasons. That meant genuine engagement with the new science. It meant showing its work.

Ten days before the deadline, Jason Flint sent his email. The current risk assessment is valid.

Canadian readers who followed the American glyphosate story through The Shield and The Reviewer will recognize the institutional posture immediately. In June 2022, the United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found EPA’s glyphosate cancer methodology internally contradictory and legally unsupportable, and sent it back for a methodologically sound explanation. EPA’s withdrawal notice stated that its underlying scientific findings remained the same. Four years later, no corrected determination was finalized. The US Supreme Court used the unrevised conclusion as the foundation for a seven-to-two ruling closing the courthouse door on 100,000 plaintiffs. The posture is the same. The geography is different.

What PMRA’s Review Was Built On

To understand why the one-sentence response is insufficient, it helps to understand what PMRA’s 2017 re-evaluation -- the foundational document the current risk assessment rests on -- was actually built from.

The 2017 re-evaluation drew on six animal studies. Five were in PMRA’s own database. One was external. Three of the six were part of a review article published in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology in April 2000 by Gary Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian Munro. That paper concluded glyphosate does not pose a health risk to humans at typical exposure levels. It quickly became a cornerstone reference for regulators worldwide, cited by the EPA, Health Canada, and the European Food Safety Authority across multiple assessments spanning two decades.

In late November 2025, the journal retracted it.

Co-editor-in-chief Martin van den Berg issued the retraction notice after an investigation into longstanding concerns about the paper’s authorship, data sources, and undisclosed conflicts of interest. The notice documented that Monsanto employees substantially ghostwrote the manuscript, that the paper was based almost exclusively on unpublished studies from Monsanto, that multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies available at the time were ignored, and that the named authors may have received undisclosed financial compensation from Monsanto. Van den Berg stated the journal had lost confidence in the results and conclusions of the article.

Alexander Kaurov of Victoria University of Wellington and Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, had documented the paper’s extraordinary influence in a September 2025 analysis published in Environmental Science and Policy. The Williams paper ranked in the top 0.1 percent of glyphosate-related studies by citation count, appeared in more than 700 academic papers, EPA filings, and AI training datasets, and was referenced uncritically across the vast majority of policy and governance documents that cited it. A ghostwritten paper funded by Monsanto shaped two decades of global regulatory science.

Health Canada’s response to the retraction was immediate and direct. The retraction of this review, the agency stated, does not affect our previous review conclusions because the department also independently evaluated the primary data sources used in the 2000 review paper.

That claim of independent evaluation sits alongside a finding from PMRA’s own 2015 proposed re-evaluation decision document. In reviewing the six animal studies, PMRA found equivocal, meaning uncertain, evidence of oncogenicity in the Atkinson mouse study. PMRA decided not to conduct a substantive cancer risk assessment. Uncertain evidence of cancer was found and set aside. Three of the remaining six studies were part of the now-retracted Williams review. That leaves two studies supporting the Canadian conclusion without a direct ghostwriting concern. Two studies and a dismissed cancer finding are the evidentiary foundation that Health Canada says does not need revision.

There is a further dimension to the independence question. In November 2022, Safe Food Matters obtained through an Access to Information request documentation showing that PMRA and the EPA worked together very closely on their glyphosate assessments under a joint Re-evaluation Work Plan. The two agencies coordinated their reviews. The EPA’s assessment was found arbitrary and unsupportable by a federal appeals court. PMRA’s assessment mirrored it. The ATI record confirms the coordination was structural, not coincidental.

And then there are the 229 blank pages. When civil society group Vigilance OGM filed an Access to Information request asking for the studies supporting PMRA’s claim that glyphosate residues pose no unacceptable risk, PMRA sent, after one year, 229 totally blank pages. The studies that underpin the Canadian regulatory conclusion are, by the agency’s own production, invisible.

The Counter-Narrative and Its Authors

The retraction of the Williams paper has not gone uncontested. A paper published in EXCLI Journal in 2026, organized by pharmacologist and consultant Christopher Borgert and signed by more than 60 co-authors, argues the retraction was editorial overreach and should be reversed. The paper contends the ghostwriting evidence is not definitive, that the alleged omissions stemmed from proprietary data access limitations disclosed in the original paper, and that subsequent reviews by independent expert panels reached similar conclusions. It is a substantive argument that deserves engagement.

The conflict of interest profile of those making that argument is equally part of the record and belongs here.

Christopher Borgert is a self-employed consultant whose clients since 2018 have included Monsanto, CropLife America, and the American Chemistry Council. He organized the response to the retraction and told Undark he paid the $6,400 open-access publication fee himself and is hoping Bayer or another entity will reimburse him. Among the co-authors: Robert Budinsky, retired from Dow Chemical. Christopher Bates, employed at H.B. Fuller. Gio B. Gori, a former tobacco industry consultant who served as editor-in-chief of Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology -- the journal that published the Williams paper -- during whose tenure 45 scientists wrote an open letter raising concerns about the journal receiving tobacco industry funding. Hans Marquardt, a member of Philip Morris’s external research programme in the early 2000s.

Reckoning Science, which analyzed the Borgert editorial in detail, found that it defends the ghostwritten Williams paper by citing additional papers that are themselves alleged to involve ghostwriting or undisclosed industry involvement. The editorial defending a compromised paper relies partly on other papers facing similar integrity questions.

The argument that the retraction was unjustified is a legitimate scientific position. The conflict of interest profile of those organizing that argument is a documented fact. Both are on the record. Readers can weigh them accordingly.

Eight Years of the Same Answer

The one-sentence August 2025 response did not emerge from nowhere. It is the latest entry in a documented pattern that stretches back eight years and has survived two federal court orders.

2019: Safe Food Matters sues PMRA over the 2017 re-registration of glyphosate, arguing the agency failed to properly consider objections. The Federal Court dismisses the case.

February 2022: The Federal Court of Appeal overturns that dismissal and orders PMRA to reconsider the objections, following the Court’s guidance on how to do so properly.

September 29, 2022: PMRA sends a 23-page response rejecting the objections again. Safe Food Matters says the agency ignored the Court’s guidance and produced new reasons and rehashed old ones rather than genuine reconsideration. Notably, PMRA’s response arrives just days after the US EPA withdrew its own glyphosate assessment -- the same assessment a US federal court had found arbitrary and unsupportable -- and PMRA and EPA had been working from a joint Re-evaluation Work Plan.

October 2022: Safe Food Matters sues PMRA again over the September rejection. January 2023: A second lawsuit is filed over the renewal of glyphosate products without consideration of new science.

February 18, 2025: Justice Zinn rules the Mad Dog Plus renewal unreasonable. The trust us, we got it right approach is explicitly named and rejected. Six months to show the work.

June 10, 2025: The Global Glyphosate Study from the Ramazzini Institute is published, finding that glyphosate causes cancer. PMRA receives it as new evidence.

August 8, 2025: Jason Flint emails one sentence. The current risk assessment is valid.

Late November 2025: The Williams paper is retracted.

December 2025: Health Canada says the retraction does not affect its previous review conclusions.

December 2025: Civil society groups formally request a special review of glyphosate including the Ramazzini study. As of mid-2026, PMRA has not responded.

There is also the matter of Bruce Lanphear. In July 2023, Lanphear resigned as co-president of Health Canada’s newly formed Science Advisory Committee on Pest Control Products. He resigned because the committee was unable to access product safety data and because he believed industry had too strong an influence over the regulatory process. This is not an outside critic making that assessment. This is the co-president of Health Canada’s own independent scientific advisory body, appointed to provide the independent check the system is supposed to contain, walking out because the system would not let him do his job.

The structural conditions are the same ones The Reviewer documented in the United States. Industry-submitted studies as the evidentiary foundation. Independent scientific review that is advisory and non-binding. No enforcement mechanism when timelines are missed. No consequence for institutional resistance to court orders beyond being sent back to produce another inadequate response. The system that produced the Williams paper as a cornerstone of regulatory science is the same system that produced the one-sentence response to a federal court order requiring genuine engagement with 61 new studies.

What Comes Next

The one-sentence response has not been accepted by the applicant coalition. Safe Food Matters’ main glyphosate registration case -- challenging the 2017 re-registration itself rather than a single product renewal -- remains before the courts. That case asks for something the Mad Dog Plus case did not: the establishment of a review panel independent of PMRA to formally examine whether the 2017 registration decision should be struck down or amended. If that panel is ever convened, it will examine the same evidentiary foundation -- the same six animal studies, the same equivocal oncogenicity finding that was set aside, the same retracted Williams review -- that the one-sentence response declared valid.

The Ramazzini study published in June 2025 has been formally submitted to PMRA as new evidence requiring special review. As of mid-2026, PMRA has not responded to that submission. The Government of Canada has also been moving to eliminate re-evaluations altogether, removing the procedural mechanism through which public comments on registered pesticides are currently possible. If that change proceeds, the courtroom door that remained open in Canada -- the one that produced Justice Zinn’s ruling -- may narrow significantly.

The Old Guardian has identified three ATI targets for this investigation. First: the Jason Flint email tables in full -- Table 1 and Table 2 -- and any internal PMRA analysis conducted between the court order and the August 8 response. Second: PMRA’s diquat dibromide registration file, specifically whether the agency conducted an independent assessment or relied on EPA’s approval, given that diquat is banned in the European Union and is now the primary active ingredient in new Roundup formulations. Third: any correspondence between PMRA and EPA under the joint Re-evaluation Work Plan documented in the 2022 ATI release, specifically correspondence related to the timing of their respective glyphosate assessment conclusions.

The global thread that runs through this entire investigation closes here. The United States, Canada, and the European Union all relied on the same ghostwritten, Monsanto-funded study retracted 25 years after publication for serious ethical concerns. Three of the world’s largest regulatory jurisdictions built their safety determinations on the same compromised foundation. In the United States, a Supreme Court ruling has now made that foundation legally unreviewable by state courts. In Canada, a federal court found the foundation inadequate and ordered reassessment. The reassessment arrived in one sentence.

Trust us, we got it right.

A federal court already told Health Canada that was not good enough. The investigation into whether it ever becomes good enough continues.

Editor’s Notes

Companion series: This piece is a companion to The Shield (four parts), The Reviewer, and Not Your Mother’s Roundup. All pieces are available at theoldguardian.ca.

Primary sources: Friends of the Earth Canada et al. v. Attorney General of Canada et al., 2025 FC 300 (Justice Russell Zinn, February 18, 2025); Jason Flint email and attached Tables 1 and 2, August 8, 2025 (published by Safe Food Matters at safefoodmatters.org/filings); Williams, Kroes and Munro, “Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans,” Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, April 2000 (retracted November/December 2025, retraction notice by co-editor-in-chief Martin van den Berg); Health Canada statement on retraction, December 2025 (as reported by The Canadian Press); PMRA Proposed Re-evaluation Decision PRVD2015-01 and Re-evaluation Decision RVD2017-01 (published PMRA documents); Safe Food Matters ATI disclosure on PMRA-EPA Re-evaluation Work Plan coordination, November 2022; Vigilance OGM ATI result, 229 blank pages (as reported in CMAJ and by Safe Food Matters); Bruce Lanphear resignation statement, July 2023 (as reported in CMAJ); Kaurov and Oreskes, “The afterlife of a ghost-written paper: How corporate authorship shaped two decades of glyphosate safety discourse,” Environmental Science and Policy, September 2025; Borgert et al., EXCLI Journal, 2026; Environmental Health News, Borgert conflict of interest documentation; Retraction Watch, December 2025 (retraction notice and van den Berg statement); C&EN, December 2025 (retraction reporting); Safe Food Matters, “Mad Dog Case on Glyphosate: PMRA Refuses Action on New Science,” August 18, 2025; Natural Resources Defense Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022) (referenced for American parallel).

Confidence tier: All findings attributed to Justice Zinn’s ruling are drawn from the published decision at 2025 FC 300. The Jason Flint one-sentence response is quoted verbatim from the Safe Food Matters published email. Health Canada’s statement on the retraction is quoted as reported by The Canadian Press and confirmed consistent across multiple outlets. The PMRA-EPA coordination finding is drawn from the Safe Food Matters ATI disclosure, not from inference. The Borgert conflict of interest profile is drawn from Environmental Health News and confirmed by Borgert’s own statements to Undark regarding the publication fee. The counter-narrative paper is addressed with its full conflict of interest context stated. No claim in this piece asserts definitively that glyphosate causes cancer. The piece reports what primary documents show about PMRA’s methodology, the court’s findings, the retracted study, the coordination record, and the institutional pattern across eight years.

ATI targets identified: Jason Flint email tables in full and any internal PMRA analysis August 2025; PMRA diquat dibromide registration file; PMRA-EPA Re-evaluation Work Plan correspondence. The Old Guardian will file these requests and report on what is returned.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

Leave a comment

This piece is a companion to The Shield, a four-part Old Guardian investigation into the legal, regulatory, and corporate architecture surrounding Roundup litigation, and to The Reviewer, which examines the EPA’s glyphosate cancer determination and what a federal court found when it looked closely at the methodology. Both are available at theoldguardian.ca. This piece stands on its own.

The Exit

On July 29, 2021, Bayer CEO Werner Baumann told investors why the company was removing glyphosate from its residential Roundup line. He did not reach for corporate euphemism. He was direct.

“More than 90% of the Roundup litigation claims Bayer has faced in recent years have come from the U.S. residential lawn and garden market business segment and is what led to the company deciding to abandon it. Let me be very clear that this decision is exclusively geared at managing litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.”

Parse that statement carefully. More than 90 percent of tens of thousands of cancer claims came from residential users. Not the farmer with documented occupational exposure records. Not the licensed commercial applicator. The homeowner. The person who bought a bottle at a hardware store and sprayed their driveway or garden path on a spring weekend without a second thought. That person generated nine out of ten of Bayer’s cancer lawsuit claims.

Baumann’s stated reason for exiting that market was not that Roundup had been found unsafe for residential use. It was that continuing to sell it to residential users was generating too much litigation. The product, in Bayer’s own framing, was fine. The lawsuits were the problem.

The residential user was not informed of any of this. No letter. No recall. No shelf notice. No label change explaining why the product was being reformulated. The bottle that had sat on hardware store shelves for decades simply began appearing in a new version, distinguished from the old one by a small red bar reading “Exclusive Formula.”

What was inside the new bottle is the story this piece tells.

What Replaced It

In October 2024, Friends of the Earth reviewed Roundup products for sale at Home Depot and Lowe’s, the two largest home and garden retailers in the United States. The analysis found seven Roundup products still containing glyphosate on shelves alongside eight new reformulated products. The new products contained combinations of four replacement chemicals: diquat dibromide, fluazifop-P-butyl, triclopyr, and imazapic.

All four chemicals pose greater risk of long-term and reproductive health problems than glyphosate, based on the EPA’s own evaluation of safety studies -- not on Friends of the Earth’s independent assessment. The underlying data is the agency’s. The analysis is FOE’s. That distinction matters for sourcing purposes and is stated explicitly here.

The replacement chemicals have been linked to kidney and liver damage, reproductive and developmental abnormalities, birth defects, and allergic reactions affecting the eyes, skin, and respiratory system. Two of the four -- diquat dibromide and imazapic -- are banned in the European Union.

The worst of the four is diquat dibromide.

Diquat dibromide is present in every single new Roundup formulation. It is classified as a highly hazardous pesticide. It is 200 times more chronically toxic than glyphosate. The European Union banned it under Commission Implementing Regulation EU 2018/1532, effective June 30, 2019, following findings by the European Food Safety Authority of high risk to workers, bystanders, and residents. The UK, China, and several other countries followed with their own bans or severe restrictions.

The United States did not ban it. The EPA continues to approve it for residential consumer use. It is now the primary active ingredient in the product sold to the consumer who was, in Bayer’s own calculation, the source of nine out of ten cancer litigation claims under the previous formulation.

On average, the new Roundup formulations are 45.6 times more chronically toxic to human health than the glyphosate-based products they replaced, and 3.9 times more acutely toxic. Those figures come from the FOE analysis drawing on EPA safety study evaluations. Bayer disputed the analysis, calling it deeply flawed. The company did not identify which specific toxicity comparisons it contested, nor did it dispute that the underlying data source is the EPA’s own safety study evaluations.

The packaging is nearly identical to the old Roundup. The same green bottle. The same brand name. The same shelf position at the same retailers. A small red bar reading “Exclusive Formula” is the only visual signal that the product has changed. There is no requirement under FIFRA or any other federal law that Bayer inform consumers their product has been reformulated with chemicals the EPA rates as significantly more dangerous than what they previously bought. No label change was required. No consumer notification was mandated. The EPA approved the new labels. The new labels do not mention any of this.

The Shelf Problem

As of October 2024 -- the last verified shelf review -- seven glyphosate-containing Roundup products remained for sale at Home Depot and Lowe’s. Old stock is legally sellable until it’s gone. Bayer stopped producing glyphosate residential Roundup in 2023, but existing inventory has no mandated sell-by date and no pull date requirement. A consumer buying a Roundup product today may be buying old glyphosate stock, new diquat dibromide stock, or a product containing both -- and there is no reliable way to know which without reading the active ingredient list in fine print on the back label.

The garage shed compounds this problem significantly. Concentrated Roundup loses herbicidal effectiveness over time -- typically seven to eight years under optimal storage conditions, significantly less in the temperature fluctuations and partial seals of a typical residential shed. But herbicidal degradation and carcinogenic potential are two entirely separate biological mechanisms.

The surfactants and adjuvants that make glyphosate kill weeds quickly break down with age and poor storage conditions. The glyphosate molecule itself is chemically stable, non-volatile, and does not degrade in the presence of light or air. A bottle that has lost 40 percent of its weed-killing speed has not lost 40 percent of its glyphosate concentration. The consumer who compensates for reduced visible efficacy by using more product is not reducing their exposure to the compound of concern. They may be increasing it.

No label communicates this distinction. The “safe when used as directed” instruction assumes a fresh, properly formulated product applied under controlled conditions by a person following label directions precisely. It does not describe a three-year-old backyard shed bottle used by someone in shorts and sandals who applies extra product because the weeds aren’t dying fast enough.

And now the same problem applies to the replacement chemicals. The new diquat dibromide formulations are on shelves today. In three years they will be in sheds. In five years they will be the old stock that consumers compensate for with higher application volumes. The label will still not explain the difference between a product losing weed-killing speed and a product maintaining its full chronic toxicity profile. Because no label is required to say that. Because the EPA approved these labels. Because that approval, as The Reviewer documented, functions as the legal ceiling on what anyone can claim about what the label should have said.

What Was Always Available

The residential weed control problem that Roundup was marketed to solve has never required a synthetic chemical herbicide. The alternatives have always existed. They have simply not had a $500 million annual marketing budget.

Boiling water poured directly onto weeds in driveway cracks and patio joints kills on contact through cell membrane disruption, penetrates to the root system on shallow-rooted weeds, leaves zero chemical residue, and has been documented effective since before Roundup existed. No PPE required. No label. No exposure window. No degradation question. No litigation history. Cost: the energy to boil a kettle.

Horticultural vinegar at 20 percent acetic acid concentration -- significantly stronger than household vinegar -- kills broadleaf weeds on contact through the same mechanism. Available at garden centres. Not systemic, so deep-rooted perennial weeds may regrow from established root systems, but for the driveway crack and patio joint application that was Roundup’s primary residential use case it is functionally equivalent. The legitimate safety concern is eye and skin irritation from the acidity. That concern is addressed by gloves and eyewear -- the same PPE the Roundup label recommends and that almost nobody actually wears.

Iron-based herbicides -- like the Scotts product using FeHEDTA as its active ingredient -- are selective, meaning they target broadleaf weeds without harming grass, and are derived from a naturally occurring soil mineral. The isothiazolinone preservatives they contain warrant the same scrutiny as any chemical product. But the active ingredient mechanism is fundamentally different from systemic herbicides, and the regulatory history is substantially cleaner.

Corn gluten meal applied in early spring prevents weed seeds from germinating without any post-emergent chemical exposure. Zero toxicity concern for humans or pets. Applied once per season before germination, it dramatically reduces weed establishment in treated areas.

Flame weeding with a propane torch applied briefly to weed foliage causes cell rupture through rapid heating and is standard practice in certified organic agriculture. Effective for driveways, patios, and gravel paths. Zero chemical exposure. The legitimate concern -- fire risk in dry conditions -- is addressable in two label sentences.

None of these alternatives generate the recurring revenue that a branded chemical product sold at scale through national retail chains produces. Boiling water is free. Horticultural vinegar is a one-time low-margin purchase. Corn gluten meal is seasonal and inexpensive. A hori hori weeding knife lasts twenty years. Roundup, in either its original or reformulated version, generates reliable reorder revenue every season from a consumer base that has been trained by decades of marketing to reach for the bottle rather than the kettle.

The residential weed killer market was never built around what worked best for the homeowner. It was built around what generated the most reliable recurring revenue for the manufacturer. The reformulation to diquat dibromide did not change that logic. It updated it. Same shelf. Same brand. Same revenue model. Different chemical. And a fresh thirty-year clock on the litigation history.

Who Is Reviewing Diquat Dibromide

The question that ends this piece is the same question that runs through the entire investigation.

Glyphosate’s cancer litigation record spans thirty years. It generated more than 100,000 lawsuits, billions in settlements, and a Supreme Court ruling. The science linking it to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has been accumulating since the 1990s and was formally assessed by IARC in 2015. The EPA’s own Cancer Paper found effect estimates ranging from 1.3 to 1.5 increased NHL risk across the meta-analyses it reviewed. A federal appeals court found EPA’s methodology for dismissing that signal internally contradictory and legally unsupportable.

Diquat dibromide has been in consumer Roundup products since 2023. Its residential use history in the United States is three years old. There is no thirty-year litigation record. There is no IARC review. There is no epidemiological cohort study following residential users of diquat dibromide formulations for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or Parkinson’s disease or any other long-latency disease outcome. The science that would surface a problem, if a problem exists, has not had time to accumulate.

What exists right now is an EPA registration approval for diquat dibromide in consumer products. That approval was issued through the same registration review process The Reviewer documented in detail -- industry-submitted studies, a non-binding Scientific Advisory Panel, no enforcement timeline, no consequence for delay. The same process that produced the glyphosate cancer determination a federal court found defective is the process that produced the diquat dibromide approval the consumer is now buying at Home Depot.

The European Union found diquat dibromide posed high risk to workers, bystanders, and residents and banned it in 2019. The EU banned it seven years ago. It is now the primary active ingredient in every new residential Roundup formulation sold in the United States, in a product marketed to the population Bayer’s CEO identified as the source of nine out of ten cancer lawsuit claims under the previous formulation.

There is no requirement from the EPA that labels alert consumers to new chemicals or warn of increased risks when a product is reformulated. Drug companies cannot replace the aspirin in a brand-name pain reliever with a different compound and sell it in the same packaging without disclosure. Pesticide manufacturers can. And did.

Bayer did not solve the residential user’s problem. It solved Bayer’s problem. The residential user’s exposure continues, now with a chemical the EU banned seven years ago, through the same inadequate label framework, under the same regulatory approval process, with the same absence of consumer notification, and with the courthouse door now closed by a Supreme Court ruling that used that regulatory process’s output as its legal foundation.

The next question is whether Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency reviewed diquat dibromide independently or mirrored EPA’s approval through the same procedural alignment that has historically governed its glyphosate conclusions. The Old Guardian intends to find out.

Editor’s Notes

Companion series: This piece is a companion to The Shield (four parts) and The Reviewer. All five pieces are available at theoldguardian.ca.

Primary sources: Bayer CEO Werner Baumann, investor call statement, July 29, 2021 (as reported by C&EN, AgWeb, and Modern Farmer, and consistent with Bayer’s published Five-Point Plan documentation); Friends of the Earth, “New Roundup, New Risks,” October 2024, drawing on EPA safety study evaluations for all toxicity comparisons (foe.org/resources/new-roundup-new-risks); Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1532 of 12 October 2018, concerning the non-renewal of approval of diquat (EUR-Lex, effective 30 June 2019); European Food Safety Authority, Statement on non-dietary exposure on diquat, EFSA Journal 2018;16(4):5260; Friends of the Earth shelf review, Home Depot and Lowe’s, June through October 2024 (seven glyphosate products confirmed, eight reformulated products identified); Kendra Klein, Deputy Director of Science, Friends of the Earth, public statement October 2024.

Confidence tier: The Baumann quote is drawn from contemporaneous reporting across multiple outlets and consistent with Bayer’s own published documentation. The 45 times more toxic figure and the 200 times diquat dibromide figure are drawn from the Friends of the Earth analysis, which explicitly bases its toxicity comparisons on EPA’s own safety study evaluations, not on FOE’s independent scientific assessment -- this distinction is stated in the piece. The EU ban is confirmed through the primary EU regulation at EUR-Lex. The shelf review data reflects October 2024 findings; current shelf status may differ. The herbicidal degradation versus carcinogenic potential distinction reflects established chemical stability data for glyphosate and is not an assertion about human health outcomes. Bayer disputed the FOE analysis as deeply flawed but did not specify which toxicity comparisons it contested -- that response is noted in the piece. No claim in this piece asserts definitively that diquat dibromide causes cancer or that the new Roundup formulations will generate the same health outcomes as the old ones. The piece reports what is documented about the regulatory approval, the toxicity comparisons, the EU ban, and the absence of consumer notification requirements.

Ongoing monitoring: The Old Guardian will continue to monitor EPA’s diquat dibromide registration review, PMRA’s parallel approval status, and any emerging epidemiological research on residential diquat dibromide exposure outcomes.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

Leave a comment

The Shield documented what EPA’s glyphosate determination did to 100,000 plaintiffs. This piece examines how that determination was made, why a federal court found it defective, and what happened when nobody fixed it.

This piece is a companion to The Shield, a four-part Old Guardian series examining the legal, regulatory, and corporate architecture surrounding Roundup litigation. The Shield is available in full at theoldguardian.ca. Familiarity with the series is useful but not required. This piece stands on its own.

Fourteen Words

On June 25, 2026, the United States Supreme Court closed the courthouse door on more than 100,000 plaintiffs who alleged that exposure to Roundup caused their cancer. The ruling was seven to two. It was written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And it rested, in its entirety, on fourteen words.

The EPA has determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

Because the EPA reached that conclusion, the agency never required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label. Because no cancer warning was required, Monsanto had no federal obligation to include one. Because Monsanto had no federal obligation to include one, state tort claims demanding it are preempted by federal law. The logic is a chain. Remove any link and the chain breaks. The fourteen words are the first link. Everything that followed depended on them holding.

This piece is about those fourteen words. Where they came from. How they were produced. What a federal appeals court found when it examined the methodology behind them. And what the EPA did when that court sent them back for correction.

Before going further, one thing needs to be stated plainly. Monsanto’s record in this dispute is not a matter of serious debate. Internal documents revealed coordinated strategies to influence research and public messaging. Ghostwriting. Conflicts of interest. A landmark study retracted due to ethical concerns and reliance on unpublished Monsanto data. Juries across the country, hearing the evidence directly, found for plaintiffs repeatedly. Billions of dollars paid in settlements. That record stands and is not in dispute here.

But this piece is not about Monsanto. It is about the other institution in the room. The one whose job was to stand between Monsanto’s conduct and the public. The one with the authority, the mandate, and the methodology to reach a conclusion independent of what Monsanto wanted that conclusion to be. The EPA is not a passive actor in this story. It is the regulator. And its record, examined closely, raises questions that the Supreme Court ruling made more urgent, not less.

How the Process Works

Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, every pesticide sold in the United States must be registered with the EPA. Registration requires the manufacturer to demonstrate that the pesticide, when used as directed, will not cause unreasonable adverse effects on human health or the environment. The EPA evaluates that demonstration and either grants or denies registration.

The evidentiary foundation of that evaluation is primarily built from studies submitted by the manufacturer. The company seeking registration bears the cost of producing the safety data the agency reviews. This is not a hidden arrangement. It is the explicit structure of the regulatory system. The EPA does not independently commission its own toxicology studies. It reviews what industry provides, supplemented by published scientific literature.

The obvious structural tension in that arrangement -- that the party with the most to gain from a favourable conclusion is also the primary supplier of the evidence the agency uses to reach it -- has been noted by scientists, regulators, and courts for decades. The scientists who gathered in Seattle in March 2026 to review the glyphosate evidence proposed an overhaul requiring data from independent laboratories free from conflicts of interest, with the costs borne by industry but the research conducted outside its control. That proposal has not been adopted.

Registration is not permanent. The EPA conducts periodic registration reviews to assess whether pesticides already on the market continue to meet current safety standards. For glyphosate, that review process has been running, in various forms, for decades. The relevant modern chapter begins with the EPA’s 2017 and 2019 reviews, which reaffirmed the not likely to be carcinogenic conclusion, and the 2020 interim registration decision that a federal court later vacated.

Built into the registration review process is a check: the Scientific Advisory Panel. The SAP is an independent body of external scientific experts convened to review EPA’s methodology and conclusions. It can identify problems, flag inconsistencies, and recommend corrections. What it cannot do is compel the agency to act on its recommendations. The SAP’s findings are advisory. The EPA is not required to follow them. In the glyphosate review, the SAP identified specific methodological problems with EPA’s approach. The agency proceeded anyway.

What the Cancer Paper Said

At the centre of EPA’s glyphosate cancer assessment is a document known internally as the Cancer Paper. It is the agency’s systematic review of available evidence on glyphosate’s potential carcinogenicity, produced as part of the registration review process. It reviewed epidemiological studies, animal carcinogenicity data, and mechanistic evidence. It arrived at a bottom-line hazard descriptor: not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

What the Cancer Paper said on the way to that conclusion is the problem.

The epidemiological data the paper reviewed did not point clearly toward safety. Effect estimates across the case-control studies and meta-analyses the agency examined were greater than 1, meaning most studies indicated glyphosate exposure was associated with an increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The meta-analyses showed effect estimates ranging from 1.3 to 1.5, indicating people exposed to glyphosate were between 30 and 50 percent more likely to develop NHL than those who were not. The paper reviewed that signal and attributed it to chance, bias, or confounding factors.

The specificity of that signal matters scientifically. Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is not cancer generally. It is a defined category of more than 60 distinct lymphoma subtypes affecting the lymphatic system. A chemical showing a consistent epidemiological signal for a specific cancer type is a more focused and harder-to-dismiss finding than one correlating with cancer broadly. Confounding factors and lifestyle variables are harder to invoke against a specific biological target. The NHL signal is not a vague association. It is a documented pattern across multiple independent research groups pointing at the same disease.

That is a legitimate scientific judgment. Discounting effect estimates for methodological reasons is standard practice in epidemiological review. What is not standard is what the Cancer Paper said next.

The paper explicitly stated that a conclusion regarding the association between glyphosate exposure and risk of NHL cannot be determined based on the available evidence. Those are the agency’s own words. The evidence was, by EPA’s own assessment, insufficient to reach a conclusion on the central question.

The EPA then selected not likely to be carcinogenic to humans as its final hazard descriptor.

Under EPA’s own Cancer Guidelines, that descriptor is appropriate only when the available data are considered robust for deciding that there is no basis for human hazard concern. The agency said in one paragraph that it could not determine the NHL risk. It said in effect in the next that the data were robust enough to conclude there was no meaningful concern. Those two statements cannot both be true. The Cancer Paper contained them both, and the EPA signed off on the document.

What the Court Found

In June 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals examined EPA’s glyphosate cancer determination in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 38 F.4th 34. The court’s findings were not a matter of contested scientific interpretation. They were a documented accounting of specific methodological failures, each traceable to EPA’s own guidelines and its own Scientific Advisory Panel’s contemporaneous objections.

The first failure was the one already visible in the Cancer Paper. The court found EPA could not reasonably treat its inability to reach a conclusion about NHL risk as consistent with a conclusion that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer. The internal contradiction was not subtle. It was the difference between “we cannot determine the risk” and “there is no meaningful risk.” The agency published both in the same document.

The second failure concerned animal carcinogenicity data. The EPA used historical control data selectively, invoking it only to undermine tumor results, never to support them. EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel had flagged this practice during the review. The panel warned that to subjectively choose to use historical control incidence data only in situations where it undermines tumor results is to potentially introduce bias into the assessment. The agency was told this by its own advisory body. It proceeded anyway.

The third failure is the most striking because it involved something the EPA appears to have invented. The agency discarded tumor results occurring at or above what it called a 1,000 milligrams per kilogram per day limit dose, treating those results as uninformative. The Ninth Circuit found that EPA’s own Health Effects Test Guidelines establish no such limit. The guidelines state only that the highest tested dose need not exceed that figure. They do not say results above it should be discarded. EPA created a threshold that does not exist in its own methodology and used it to eliminate data that pointed toward cancer risk. The Scientific Advisory Panel called it an ad hoc decision that is not well-justified and is not justified on the basis of the Cancer Guidelines.

The court’s conclusion was precise. Inconsistent reasoning is, absent explanation, the hallmark of arbitrary action. EPA’s glyphosate cancer determination did not survive substantial evidence review. The Ninth Circuit vacated the relevant portion of EPA’s 2020 interim registration decision and remanded it for a methodologically sound explanation.

Note what the court did not say. It did not say glyphosate causes cancer. It did not say EPA’s ultimate conclusion was wrong. It said EPA’s reasoning was internally contradictory, that it relied on data selectively in ways its own panel flagged as biased, and that it invented a methodological threshold to discard unfavourable results. It sent the determination back for a do-over conducted honestly.

What EPA Did About It

The Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in June 2022. EPA withdrew its interim registration decision in response. The withdrawal notice, filed by the agency itself, stated: EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.

That sentence deserves to sit alone for a moment. A federal appeals court found EPA’s reasoning internally contradictory, its data use selectively biased, and its invented limit dose methodologically unjustifiable. EPA’s response, in the document withdrawing the vacated decision, was to announce that its underlying finding was not changing.

Not: we are reviewing the specific methodology the court identified as defective. Not: we are examining whether the limit dose threshold we applied is supported by our own guidelines. Not: we are reconsidering how we used historical control data after our own Scientific Advisory Panel warned us against it. The finding remains the same.

Four years passed. As of 2026, EPA had not finalized a revised, methodologically corrected cancer determination. Glyphosate products remained on the market under existing labels. The registration review the agency described as anticipated to be completed in 2026 was a timeline that had been anticipated and missed before.

In March 2026, with Supreme Court oral arguments weeks away, EPA made a public commitment. Responding to questions from The New Lede following a scientific symposium at which CDC, National Cancer Institute, and university researchers called for urgent regulatory action, the agency stated: “This year, EPA will undertake a comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous scientific review of glyphosate to evaluate its use and ensure decisions are fully aligned with the best available science as well as human health and environmental protections. That review will include expanded public access to underlying data and science, analysis of independent peer-reviewed research on potential cancer and developmental risks, evaluation of opportunities to reduce exposure, and coordination with USDA, HHS, and states.”

Three months later, the Supreme Court ruled seven to two in Bayer’s favour, using EPA’s existing not likely to be carcinogenic determination as the controlling federal science. The promised rigorous review had not been completed. The vacated methodology had not been corrected. The finding a federal court found legally unsupportable was treated by the Supreme Court as dispositive.

And now the legal pressure that might have compelled the review to actually happen has been eliminated by the ruling the unrevised determination made possible.

The Structural Question

The Ninth Circuit identified not one methodological failure but three, each documented, each flagged in advance by EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel, and each working in the same direction. Every failure discounted data pointing toward cancer risk. None of the failures discounted data pointing away from it.

When a regulatory process produces a consistent pattern of errors that consistently benefit one party, the question that follows is not simply whether mistakes were made. It is why the mistakes always pointed the same way.

This piece will not answer that question definitively. The primary documents do not support a definitive answer, and this series does not make claims the evidence does not support. What the primary documents do support is a precise accounting of the structural conditions under which those directional errors became possible.

The evidentiary foundation of EPA’s review was primarily built from industry-submitted studies. The manufacturer with the most to gain from a favourable conclusion was the primary supplier of the data the agency reviewed. The independent check on that process, the Scientific Advisory Panel, issued specific objections to specific methodological choices. Those objections were advisory and non-binding. The agency was not required to address them. It did not.

The registration review timeline has no enforcement mechanism. When EPA misses anticipated completion dates, there is no consequence. The agency anticipated completing the glyphosate review multiple times before 2026 and did not complete it. Glyphosate products remained registered and on the market throughout. The manufacturer faced no regulatory consequence from the delay. Plaintiffs attempting to litigate in the interim faced a SCOTUS ruling that used the incomplete, court-vacated review as its scientific foundation.

The manufacturer’s own statements confirm the directional pattern the structural conditions made possible. In July 2021, Bayer CEO Werner Baumann told investors that more than 90 percent of Roundup litigation claims had come from the residential lawn and garden market. His explanation for removing glyphosate from consumer products was unambiguous: “This decision is exclusively geared at managing litigation risk and not because of any safety concerns.” The residential user -- the casual applicator who trusted the label, skipped the PPE, did not shower immediately after use, and wore work clothes the next day -- generated nine of every ten cancer claims. The manufacturer’s response was not to fix the label. It was to exit the market segment.

One further structural assumption embedded in the regulatory model deserves naming. The “safe when used as directed” conclusion was built on studies using fresh, properly formulated product applied under controlled conditions. Glyphosate products degrade over time in storage. The surfactants and adjuvants that drive herbicidal efficacy -- the speed at which a product kills weeds visibly -- break down with age, temperature fluctuation, and exposure. But herbicidal degradation and carcinogenic potential are two separate biological mechanisms. The glyphosate molecule itself is chemically stable, non-volatile, and does not degrade in the presence of light or air. A bottle that has lost weed-killing speed has not lost glyphosate concentration. The consumer who uses more of an older product to compensate for reduced visible efficacy may be increasing their exposure to the compound of concern, not decreasing it. No label communicates this distinction. No regulatory model accounts for it.

The Tracey Woodruff observation, made at the March 2026 Seattle symposium, is worth returning to here. Woodruff is a professor at Stanford University and a former senior scientist for EPA’s own Office of Policy. She said: “It’s hard to get the government to change, particularly because the industry spends a lot of money lobbying Congress to make sure the laws favor their point of view.” That is not an activist claim. That is a former EPA scientist describing from the inside the structural dynamic the outside record confirms.

The structural conditions that allowed three directional methodological failures to survive EPA’s internal review process, survive the Scientific Advisory Panel’s contemporaneous objections, survive a federal court vacatur, and ultimately survive intact into a Supreme Court ruling are not accidental features of the system. They are the system. Industry-submitted evidence. Non-binding independent review. No enforcement timeline. No consequence for delay. And a legal architecture, now confirmed by the Supreme Court, that treats the output of that system as the controlling ceiling on what any American court can find.

What Comes Next, and a Note on Canada

The EPA committed in March 2026 to a comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous scientific review of glyphosate. That commitment is now the primary accountability lever remaining after the Supreme Court ruling eliminated the legal pressure to deliver it. Whether the review happens, whether it honestly addresses the three specific methodological failures the Ninth Circuit identified, and whether its conclusions are reached through independent evidence rather than industry-submitted data are the live questions this investigation will continue to monitor.

Congressional oversight of EPA’s registration review process is a second lever. The specific failures documented here -- the invented limit dose, the selective historical-control use, the internal contradiction between inconclusiveness and the not likely descriptor -- are on the public record in a published federal appellate decision. They are subjects that fall within congressional oversight authority. Whether any committee pursues them is a political question. The record exists regardless.

A note on Canada. EPA’s glyphosate determination does not exist in isolation. Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency conducts its own registration reviews and has historically arrived at conclusions that mirror EPA’s on glyphosate, including its own not likely to be carcinogenic finding. That parallel raises a question the PMRA has not been required to answer publicly: did Canada’s review reach its conclusion independently, through its own methodological assessment of the available evidence, or did it proceed substantially from EPA’s prior determination? If Canada’s regulatory independence on glyphosate is procedural rather than substantive, the structural questions this piece raises about EPA apply with equal force north of the border. That question deserves its own investigation, and The Old Guardian intends to pursue it.

For now, the American record stands on its own. An agency whose methodology a federal court found internally contradictory and legally unsupportable. A withdrawn decision whose underlying finding the agency immediately announced was not changing. Four years without a corrected determination. A Supreme Court ruling built on the uncorrected foundation. And a promise of rigorous review made three months before the ruling that eliminated the pressure to keep it.

The fourteen words that closed the courthouse door on 100,000 plaintiffs came from somewhere. This piece has followed them back to their source. What was found there is not reassuring. And the institution responsible for those words has, so far, given no indication it intends to revisit them.

Editor’s Notes

Companion series: This piece is a companion to The Shield, a four-part Old Guardian series. Part One: “From Trust the Science to Shield Us from the Lawsuits” (published prior to the Durnell ruling). Part Two: “Seven to Two” (the ruling and the dissent). Part Three: “Trust the Regulators” (the EPA determination and the Ninth Circuit findings). Part Four: “The Architecture” (the full containment map). All four parts are available at theoldguardian.ca.

Primary sources: Natural Resources Defense Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022) (full opinion); Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 25, 2026 (majority opinion by Kavanaugh, J.); EPA withdrawal notice following Ninth Circuit vacatur, 2022; EPA public statement on glyphosate registration review, March 2026, as reported by The New Lede (Carey Gillam, March 27, 2026) and verified against the original statement; EPA Cancer Paper, glyphosate registration review (internal language quoted via Ninth Circuit opinion at 38 F.4th 34); Scientific Advisory Panel findings on glyphosate methodology (cited within the Ninth Circuit opinion); International Agency for Research on Cancer, glyphosate classification as probable human carcinogen, 2015; Tracey Woodruff, Stanford University and former EPA Office of Policy senior scientist, statement at Seattle Glyphosate Symposium, March 2026, as reported by The New Lede; Bayer CEO Werner Baumann, investor call statement, July 29, 2021 (as reported by C&EN, AgWeb, and Modern Farmer); Bayer AG, Five-Point Plan to Close the Roundup Litigation, May 2021.

Confidence tier: All findings attributed to the Ninth Circuit are drawn from the published decision at 38 F.4th 34. EPA’s withdrawal notice language is drawn from agency records as cited in court filings. The EPA March 2026 statement is quoted verbatim as verified against The New Lede’s March 27, 2026 report. The Baumann investor call quote is drawn from contemporaneous reporting across multiple outlets and from Bayer’s own published Five-Point Plan documentation. The herbicidal degradation versus carcinogenic potential distinction reflects established chemical stability data for glyphosate and is not an assertion about human health outcomes. No claim in this piece asserts definitively that glyphosate causes cancer in humans. The Canada/PMRA paragraph identifies a question for future investigation and does not assert a conclusion.

Ongoing monitoring: The Old Guardian will continue to monitor the EPA glyphosate registration review, the PMRA parallel review question, paraquat and chlorpyrifos preemption proceedings, and the $7.25 billion Roundup settlement fairness proceedings.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

In Part Three of this series, we examined what the EPA determination at the centre of the Supreme Court ruling is actually worth, and what a federal appeals court already found when it looked closely at how the agency arrived at it. The answer was not reassuring. And nobody fixed it before it became the foundation of a seven-to-two Supreme Court decision that closed the courthouse door on more than 100,000 plaintiffs.

Part Three ended with a question: what does accountability look like when the courtroom is no longer an option?

Before answering that, it is worth understanding precisely how the courtroom was closed. Because it did not happen in a single Supreme Court ruling. It was constructed, track by track, over years. And the construction tells you something important about what it will take to build accountability in the other direction.

The Map

Six tracks. Each one a separate move. Each one pointing the same direction.

Track One: The Supreme Court argument.

Bayer’s preemption argument did not emerge fully formed. It was developed and refined through years of lower court litigation, tested in appellate courts, and finally carried to the Supreme Court in the Durnell case. The legal theory -- that FIFRA’s uniformity clause shields manufacturers from state failure-to-warn claims when the EPA has approved their label -- was Bayer’s highest-risk, highest-reward play. A loss would have meant the scientific debate continuing in trial courts indefinitely. A win, as the seven-to-two ruling demonstrated, meant the debate ending as a practical matter of law regardless of what the science eventually showed.

Track Two: The settlement as deadline pressure.

The $7.25 billion class settlement proposed in February 2026 was not simply a compensation mechanism. It was a timing instrument. With SCOTUS oral arguments set for April 27 and the opt-out deadline set for June 4, plaintiffs had to decide whether to accept the settlement before the Supreme Court ruled. Bayer needed that uncertainty hanging over claimants through the entire decision window. A SCOTUS win would dramatically reduce future liability; accepting the settlement before that win meant accepting less. Bayer structured the timeline to exploit that gap. Fourteen law firms representing nearly 20,000 claimants called the 600-page settlement agreement negotiated behind closed doors, handed to opposing counsel on announcement day, with fifteen days before Bayer sought preliminary approval. That is not how fair settlements are built. That is how you manufacture consent under a deadline.

Track Three: State shield laws.

While the federal legal strategy moved through the courts, Bayer was simultaneously running a state legislative campaign through a coalition called the Modern Ag Alliance. The alliance backed bills in multiple states declaring that a federally approved pesticide label satisfies any state-level duty to warn. North Dakota and Georgia passed such laws in 2025. In early 2026, Kentucky’s Republican-led legislature overrode Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s veto to enact a version of the same law. Beshear, a former state attorney general, pointed out that cosmetics, personal hygiene products, and household cleaners all carry warning labels. Kentucky’s law would allow dangerous pesticides to be sold without any equivalent risk warnings. The legislature overrode him anyway. Three states with legislative shields in place before the SCOTUS ruling even landed.

Track Four: The executive order.

In early 2026, the Trump administration issued an executive order expanding domestic glyphosate production while offering liability protection to manufacturers. The order was framed as a national security and food independence measure. Most glyphosate is produced by Bayer in Germany and Syngenta in China; bringing production onshore, the administration argued, required legal protection because companies would otherwise face billions in potential lawsuits. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS Secretary, defended the order. This is the same Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who represented Dewayne Johnson, the California groundskeeper who won $289 million from Monsanto in 2018 after a jury found the company failed to warn him about cancer risk. Kennedy was one of Johnson’s attorneys. He has stated publicly, as recently as early 2026, that he believes glyphosate causes cancer. He defended the liability protection order anyway. The fractures this created within the MAHA movement are real and ongoing.

Track Five: The Ruveon spinoff.

Days after the June 25 ruling, Bayer announced the separation of its glyphosate business into a new standalone entity called Ruveon. The timing was not coincidental. By ring-fencing the Roundup brand and all associated products into a separate subsidiary, Bayer insulates its core pharmaceutical and crop science divisions from whatever residual litigation survives the SCOTUS ruling. The claims that are not preempted, the types of suits the 2005 precedent left open, now land on Ruveon’s balance sheet rather than Bayer AG’s. Win the legal battle, spin off the remaining liability. The SCOTUS ruling and the spinoff are one sequenced strategy, not two separate corporate decisions.

Track Six: The Chinese glyphosate tariff petition.

Within days of the ruling, Bayer filed a trade petition seeking US duties on Chinese-made glyphosate. The petition was framed as protection against unfair competition. The effect, if granted, would be to hand Bayer dominant market position in the US glyphosate supply at precisely the moment its legal liability exposure has been minimized. The farmers who filed amicus briefs in Bayer’s favour during the Durnell case -- arguing glyphosate was essential to American agriculture -- are now the ones being squeezed by Bayer’s market protection play. The Amplification Principle question is worth asking directly: who actually benefited from the SCOTUS ruling? Not the farmers who defended the product in court. Not the 100,000 plaintiffs who lost their day in court. Bayer benefited. And Bayer moved immediately to consolidate that benefit into market dominance.

The Track That Failed

Not every track in the containment strategy succeeded. The pesticide industry had been pushing to include language in the 2026 Farm Bill giving the EPA sole regulatory oversight over pesticide labelling, a legislative codification of what the Durnell ruling accomplished judicially. The Republican-controlled House voted to strip it. The opposition came from an unexpected coalition: MAHA movement activists and progressive environmental groups finding themselves on the same side of a floor vote for entirely different reasons.

That failure matters for what it reveals. The six-track containment strategy is not invulnerable. When public attention coalesces around a specific legislative vehicle, in a specific window, with an unusual coalition, one track can be stopped. The Farm Bill provision was stopped. The lesson is not that the strategy failed. Five of six tracks succeeded, and the one that mattered most, the SCOTUS preemption argument, succeeded decisively. The lesson is that the strategy has seams, and those seams are where accountability efforts need to focus.

Beyond Roundup

The Durnell ruling does not apply only to glyphosate. It applies to any pesticide whose label has been approved under FIFRA. That means the preemption logic Kavanaugh established is now available to every manufacturer of every EPA-approved pesticide facing state failure-to-warn litigation.

Paraquat is the most immediate example. More than 6,000 plaintiffs have filed claims alleging paraquat exposure caused Parkinson’s disease. Syngenta, paraquat’s primary manufacturer, had already filed preemption motions in the paraquat MDL before Durnell was decided, anticipating the ruling. Those motions now have a seven-to-two Supreme Court decision behind them. Both plaintiff and defence attorneys in the paraquat litigation have told courts that the Durnell ruling could determine whether those 6,000 Parkinson’s claims survive.

Chlorpyrifos is a third pesticide now facing the identical preemption argument. Plaintiff firms are already recruiting Parkinson’s disease claimants for chlorpyrifos cases. The first lawsuit was filed in Pennsylvania days before the Durnell decision landed.

But the implications reach further than pesticides. In his majority opinion, Justice Kavanaugh referenced the preemption logic potentially applying to over-the-counter drugs, cosmetics, meat, poultry, eggs, and packaged foods, depending on how lower courts interpret the ruling. Each of those product categories has a federal regulatory approval process. Each of those processes could now function as a ceiling on state tort liability rather than a floor on safety requirements. The Durnell ruling is not a pesticide decision. It is a product liability restructuring event with implications across the consumer economy.

What Accountability Looks Like Now

The courthouse door is closed for failure-to-warn claims against Roundup. It is not the only door.

The most direct lever is the EPA review EPA promised in March 2026. The agency committed publicly to a comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous scientific review of glyphosate, including analysis of independent peer-reviewed research on potential cancer and developmental risks and expanded public access to underlying data. That commitment was made before the ruling that eliminated the legal pressure to deliver it. Whether EPA follows through, and whether the review honestly addresses the specific methodological failures the Ninth Circuit identified in 2022, is the live accountability question this series will continue to monitor. If EPA conducts a genuine review and reaches a different conclusion, the label changes. If the label changes, the preemption argument collapses for future plaintiffs. The ruling is not permanent. It is contingent on the EPA determination that underlies it.

Congressional oversight is a second lever. The EPA’s registration review process, its reliance on industry-submitted studies, its handling of the Ninth Circuit remand, and the specific methodological failures documented in the NRDC ruling are all subjects that fall within congressional oversight authority. Whether any committee pursues that oversight is a political question. The Farm Bill vote demonstrated that the unusual coalition capable of moving it exists. Whether it can be sustained and directed toward regulatory accountability is a different challenge.

State attorneys general retain authority the Durnell ruling did not touch. The preemption ruling bars state failure-to-warn tort claims. It does not bar state consumer protection enforcement, state public health regulation, state environmental monitoring, or state legislative action on pesticide use restrictions. Several states already ban or restrict glyphosate uses that federal law permits. That divergence can widen. It will require political will that the Modern Ag Alliance will continue to oppose, track by track, state by state.

International regulatory divergence is a fourth pressure point. The European Union has been moving toward tighter glyphosate restrictions for years. Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency operates independently of EPA and has historically conducted its own reviews. If international regulatory bodies reach conclusions that diverge from EPA’s not likely determination, the scientific and political pressure on EPA to revisit its methodology increases. Bayer sells glyphosate products globally. A world in which the EU restricts glyphosate while the US shields manufacturers from liability is not a stable equilibrium.

And there is a fifth lever that is the most basic of all, and the one this series began with. The label.

If a product’s safety is genuinely unquestioned, manufacturers do not spend years and billions of dollars building legal, legislative, executive, and judicial shields against the consequences of that safety being examined. They compete on the evidence. The six-track containment strategy documented in this series is not the behaviour of a company confident in its science. It is the behaviour of a company managing a liability exposure it cannot resolve through science alone.

Consumers retain the right to ask questions the label does not answer. Farmers retain the right to choose inputs. Municipalities retain the right to restrict applications on public land. Journalists retain the right to publish what the primary documents show. None of those rights were closed by the Durnell ruling. The courtroom was the arena where evidence was tested, witness by witness, in front of twelve citizens. Losing that arena is not a small thing. But it is not the only arena.

Edwin Durnell

Edwin Durnell is still a Missouri man. He was still diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A Missouri jury still heard his evidence and still believed him. That did not change on June 25, 2026.

What changed is that the question his case raised -- did Monsanto have an obligation to warn him -- has been removed from the arena where it could be answered. Not because the answer is clear. Because the architecture built around the question made the question unanswerable in court.

This series began with a simple observation: the public was asked for decades to trust the science. The argument has shifted. It is no longer about the science. It is about whether the science can be litigated at all.

The question underneath that one has always been simpler. When a product causes harm, and a person is harmed, and a jury of that person’s peers finds the manufacturer failed in its duty to warn -- who decides whether that finding counts?

For now, the answer is: not a jury. Not a state court. A federal regulatory agency whose methodology a federal appeals court already found internally contradictory and legally unsupportable, and which restated its conclusion without correcting its methodology, and whose determination now functions as the permanent legal ceiling on what any American court can find about who was warned, and when, and whether it was enough.

That is the shield.

And that is what it was built to do.

Editor’s Notes

Primary sources for this series: Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, U.S. Supreme Court, decided June 25, 2026 (majority opinion by Kavanaugh, J.; concurrence by Thomas, J.; dissent by Jackson, J., joined by Gorsuch, J.); Natural Resources Defense Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022); EPA notification record for LARVIN Technical, EPA Reg. No. 264-343, Bayer CropScience, 2012; EPA public statement on glyphosate registration review, March 2026, as reported by The New Lede (Carey Gillam, March 27, 2026); Annals of Global Health, pesticide genotoxicity study, July 2026; International Agency for Research on Cancer, glyphosate classification as probable human carcinogen, 2015; Missouri circuit court settlement filings, February through July 2026; Kentucky General Assembly override record, 2026; Bayer AG corporate announcements on Ruveon spinoff, July 2026; US International Trade Commission petition filings, Bayer glyphosate antidumping case, June 2026.

Series note: The four parts of The Shield were developed sequentially as the legal proceedings unfolded. Part One was published before the Durnell ruling. Parts Two, Three, and Four were developed after the June 25, 2026 decision, using primary documents including the full Supreme Court opinion, the Ninth Circuit decision, and EPA regulatory filings. No claim in this series asserts definitively that glyphosate causes cancer in humans. The series reports what primary documents show about the legal, regulatory, and corporate architecture surrounding that question, accurately and at the correct epistemic level.

Ongoing monitoring: The Old Guardian will continue to monitor the EPA glyphosate registration review, paraquat and chlorpyrifos preemption proceedings, the Ruveon liability structure, and the $7.25 billion settlement fairness hearing scheduled for July 9, 2026.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

In Part Two of this series, we examined what the Supreme Court actually held in Monsanto v. Durnell and what the dissent documented that the majority chose not to address. The ruling closed the courthouse door on more than 100,000 plaintiffs. It did not declare glyphosate safe. It rested entirely on a single factual predicate: the EPA has determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, and therefore has never required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label.

When a new study published in the Annals of Global Health found this past week that glyphosate causes DNA damage in human cells at the lowest exposure levels tested, Bayer’s response was immediate. The study, the company told The New Lede, was not conducted with the same rigor as studies submitted to regulatory agencies. Assessments by regulatory authorities, Bayer said, do not support the conclusions of this study.

In other words: trust the regulators.

That is a reasonable ask. It is also an invitation to look closely at what the regulators actually did. When you do, the picture is not reassuring.

What the EPA’s Own Paper Said

The EPA’s determination that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans is not a simple finding. It is the headline conclusion of a Cancer Paper the agency produced as part of its registration review of glyphosate. That paper reviewed the available epidemiological studies, animal carcinogenicity data, and mechanistic evidence, and arrived at a bottom-line hazard descriptor: not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

What the paper said along the way to that conclusion is a different matter.

The epidemiological data the EPA reviewed did not point clearly in one direction. Effect estimates across the case-control studies and meta-analyses the agency examined were greater than 1, meaning most of the studies indicated that glyphosate exposure was associated with an increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The meta-analyses showed effect estimates ranging from 1.3 to 1.5, indicating that people exposed to glyphosate were between 30 and 50 percent more likely to develop NHL than those who were not.

The EPA reviewed that data and discounted it, attributing the elevated estimates to chance, bias, or confounding factors. That is a legitimate scientific judgment call. What is not legitimate is what the Cancer Paper said next.

The paper explicitly stated that a conclusion regarding the association between glyphosate exposure and risk of NHL cannot be determined based on the available evidence. That sentence, written by the EPA’s own reviewers, means the agency could not reach a conclusion on the central question. The evidence was, in the agency’s own words, insufficient to decide.

The EPA then selected not likely to be carcinogenic to humans as its final hazard descriptor.

Under the EPA’s own Cancer Guidelines, that descriptor is appropriate only when the available data are considered robust for deciding that there is no basis for human hazard concern. The EPA said in one paragraph that it could not determine the cancer risk. It said in the next, in effect, that the data were robust enough to conclude there was no meaningful risk. Those two statements cannot both be true.

That internal contradiction sat inside EPA’s Cancer Paper for years. The scientific debate continued. The lawsuits multiplied. The agency did not revisit its conclusion.

What a Federal Court Found

In 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals examined EPA’s glyphosate cancer determination in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA. What the court found was not a close scientific disagreement between regulators and critics. It was a documented series of methodological failures that rendered the agency’s conclusion legally unsupportable.

The first problem was the one already visible in the Cancer Paper itself. The court found that EPA could not reasonably treat its inability to reach a conclusion about NHL risk as consistent with a conclusion that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer. The agency said it could not determine the risk and then issued a determination. The court said that is not how science or law works.

The second problem was the way the EPA handled its animal carcinogenicity data. The agency used historical control data selectively, invoking it only when it undermined tumor results, never when it might support them. EPA’s own Scientific Advisory Panel flagged the practice during the review process, warning that to subjectively choose to use historical control data only in situations where it undermines tumor results is to potentially introduce bias. The agency proceeded anyway.

The third problem is the most striking. The EPA discarded tumor results occurring at or above what it called a 1,000 milligrams per kilogram per day limit dose, treating those results as uninformative for cancer assessment purposes. The Ninth Circuit found that EPA’s own Health Effects Test Guidelines establish no such limit. The guidelines state only that the highest tested dose need not exceed that figure. They do not say results above it should be discarded. The EPA invented a threshold that does not exist in its own methodology and used it to eliminate unfavorable data. The Scientific Advisory Panel called it an ad hoc decision that is not well-justified and is not justified on the basis of the Cancer Guidelines.

The court’s verdict was unambiguous. Inconsistent reasoning is, absent explanation, the hallmark of arbitrary action. EPA’s glyphosate cancer determination did not survive substantial evidence review. The court vacated the relevant portion of EPA’s 2020 interim registration decision and sent it back to the agency for a methodologically sound explanation.

The court acknowledged it was possible EPA could reach the same conclusion on remand. But it would need to get there honestly, through reasoning that did not contradict itself and did not rely on thresholds the agency invented for the occasion.

What EPA Did About It

The Ninth Circuit issued its ruling in June 2022. What happened next is the accountability story at the centre of this series.

EPA withdrew its interim registration decision in response to the ruling. The withdrawal notice, filed by the agency itself, stated explicitly: EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.

Read that again. The agency whose methodology a federal appeals court found internally contradictory and legally unsupportable announced, in the very document withdrawing the vacated decision, that its underlying finding was not changing. Not: we are reviewing our methodology. Not: we are examining the specific failures the court identified. The finding remains the same.

Four years passed. As of 2026, EPA had not finalized a revised cancer determination. Glyphosate products remained on the market under existing labels. The agency described its final registration review as anticipated to be completed in 2026, a timeline that had been anticipated and missed before.

In March 2026, with the Supreme Court case already accepted and oral arguments months away, EPA made a public commitment. The agency announced it would undertake a comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous scientific review of glyphosate, including analysis of independent peer-reviewed research on potential cancer and developmental risks and expanded public access to underlying data. The statement was detailed and specific. It named coordination with USDA, HHS, and state agencies. It mentioned strengthened monitoring of residues in food and water.

Three months later, the Supreme Court ruled seven to two in Bayer’s favour, using EPA’s existing not likely to be carcinogenic determination as the load-bearing foundation of the entire decision. The promised rigorous review had not been completed. The vacated methodology had not been corrected. The finding the Ninth Circuit found legally unsupportable was treated by the Supreme Court as controlling federal science.

More than 100,000 plaintiffs lost their clearest path to court on the basis of a determination that a federal appeals court had already found did not hold up to scrutiny.

What the Science Outside the Agency Found

While EPA ran out the clock on its registration review, the independent scientific literature was not standing still.

In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. That classification was based on a systematic review of the published scientific literature, conducted by an independent panel of scientists with no industry funding. It has not been retracted.

In March 2026, a group of experts gathered in Seattle to evaluate the scientific evidence on glyphosate health impacts. Luoping Zhang, adjunct professor of toxicology at the University of California Berkeley, told The New Lede that the science is pretty clear on glyphosate’s ability to cause genetic damage in exposed humans and in human cells.

This past week, the Annals of Global Health published the study Bayer dismissed in its statement. Researchers tested ten pesticides and found eight caused DNA damage in human cells. Glyphosate produced cell damage at the lowest exposure levels tested. The researchers concluded there may be almost no safe threshold of human exposure. It was the first study to confirm that pesticide mixtures were also toxic to cells, a finding with implications beyond glyphosate alone.

None of this proves definitively that glyphosate causes cancer in humans at real-world exposure levels. Scientific consensus on complex risk questions rarely arrives in a single study. But the accumulating independent literature points in a consistent direction, and that direction is not toward the EPA’s not likely conclusion.

Bayer’s instruction to trust the regulators over independent peer-reviewed science is therefore not a neutral appeal to authority. It is an appeal to the specific regulatory determination that shields Bayer from liability, produced through a methodology a federal court found arbitrary, restated unchanged after that court’s ruling, and now enshrined as controlling federal law by the Supreme Court.

The Question Now

EPA promised in March 2026 a comprehensive, transparent, and rigorous scientific review of glyphosate. That promise was made before the Supreme Court ruling that eliminated the legal pressure to deliver it. The question of whether that review now happens, and whether it honestly addresses the specific methodological failures the Ninth Circuit identified, is the live accountability thread this series will continue to monitor.

There is a second question, less comfortable but necessary. The EPA does not conduct its pesticide registration reviews in isolation. The process involves industry-submitted studies, agency reviewers, scientific advisory panels, and decades of accumulated regulatory decisions that create institutional inertia. The Ninth Circuit identified not one methodological failure but a pattern of them, each working in the same direction, each discounting data that pointed toward cancer risk.

When a regulatory process produces a consistent pattern of errors that consistently benefit one party, the question that follows is not simply: did the agency make mistakes? It is: why did the mistakes always point the same way?

That question does not have a simple answer, and this series will not pretend it does. What can be said, on the basis of primary documents alone, is this: a federal appeals court found EPA’s glyphosate cancer methodology internally contradictory and legally unsupportable. The agency restated its conclusion without fixing the methodology. The Supreme Court used that unrevised conclusion to close the courthouse door on 100,000 plaintiffs. And Bayer responded to new independent science by telling the public to trust the regulators.

In Part Four of this series, we map the full architecture of how that outcome was built, track by track, and ask what accountability looks like when the courtroom is no longer an option.

Editor’s Notes

Primary sources for this piece: Natural Resources Defense Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022); EPA withdrawal notice following Ninth Circuit vacatur, 2022; EPA public statement on glyphosate registration review, March 2026; Annals of Global Health, pesticide genotoxicity study, July 2026 (as reported by The New Lede); International Agency for Research on Cancer, glyphosate classification as probable human carcinogen, 2015; EPA Cancer Paper, glyphosate registration review (internal language quoted via Ninth Circuit opinion); Bayer AG statement to The New Lede, July 2026.

Confidence tier: All findings attributed to the Ninth Circuit opinion are drawn from the published decision at 38 F.4th 34. EPA’s withdrawal notice language is quoted as reported in court filings and agency records. The Annals of Global Health study is peer-reviewed; the finding that glyphosate showed cell damage at the lowest tested exposure level is reported directly from The New Lede’s coverage of the study. No claims in this piece assert definitively that glyphosate causes cancer in humans; the piece reports what the scientific literature, the EPA’s own Cancer Paper, and the Ninth Circuit found, accurately and at the correct epistemic level.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

Leave a comment

Everything I publish here starts from a position I’ve built through two years of reporting. That’s normal, and it’s how it should work. But it also means I owe it to you, and to the work itself, to occasionally test that position against its strongest opposition rather than its weakest.

So this piece is an exercise. I assigned myself the other side, arguing for supervision as persuasively as the actual evidence allows, not as a strawman, not cherry-picked to fail. The goal wasn’t to convince you supervision was right. It was to find out whether my own conclusions could survive contact with the best version of the argument against them. You learn more about what you actually believe, and why, by seriously trying on the other position than by only ever defending your own.

What follows is that argument, built honestly from real sources, some of which I’ve already reported on myself. At the end, I come back as myself and tell you where it held up and where it didn’t.

The Case for Supervision

For two years, critics of provincial supervision have treated it as self-evidently a power grab, a pretext, an ideological project dressed up as fiscal responsibility. That framing has to work hard to ignore what was actually sitting in these boards’ own records before the Ministry ever stepped in.

Start with what an independent auditor found, not a Ministry press release, the Auditor General of Ontario, examining TDSB’s own conduct from 2017 to 2023, entirely before any supervisor arrived. No long-term capital plan existed for a board with the worst Facility Condition Index in the province. Six completed capital projects ran an average of 39 months over the board’s own estimates, at $146 million against $102 million approved. Violent incidents in schools hit a six-year high, up 67 percent since 2017, and the board underreported them to the Ministry by 9 percent. Fifty-three of sixty-six administrators were placed on paid leave during investigations, some for over 1,200 days, costing $4.3 million, with no documentation justifying the leave in the majority of sampled cases. An Expert Reference Panel on school safety was disbanded the same month it delivered its recommendations.

None of that is Calandra’s characterization. That’s the province’s own independent auditor, and it describes a board that had lost the basic administrative competence to run itself, years before supervision existed as an option on the table.

Critics point to PwC’s investigation finding no evidence of deliberate wrongdoing or recklessness, as though that settles the matter. It doesn’t. A forensic investigation not finding fraud is not the same as finding the institution was being run well. The deficits were real and compounding across TDSB, TCDSB, Peel, and Dufferin-Peel simultaneously, an unusual clustering that suggests a systemic problem with how Ontario’s largest boards were governing themselves under a structure of 22 or more trustees with limited financial expertise, not four unrelated coincidences. When Peel’s own chair disputes “mismanagement” and calls it underfunding, that’s the institution being investigated defending itself. It would be surprising if he said anything else.

Bill 101’s consolidation of trustees from 22 to 12, defenders would argue, is not democratic erosion, it’s an acknowledgment that a board this size had become too large to govern effectively, exactly the diagnosis the Auditor General’s own findings support. Toronto is the only board of 72 in the province over the new cap. That’s not an arbitrary target, it’s the biggest instance of the exact problem being addressed.

On responsiveness, critics have built a narrative that supervision means nobody is accountable. The record doesn’t support that as a blanket claim. When Rosedale Heights parents and students organized against Barrie Sketchley’s transfer, the supervisor reversed it within two months, a faster and more direct response than the elected board had ever offered on a comparable community dispute. Whatever else is true about how that reversal came about, it demonstrates a supervisor capable of responding to public pressure, not one insulated from it by design.

And on land, the harder case for skeptics, the province would argue there’s a coherent, defensible logic that has nothing to do with a hidden agenda. A board losing tens of millions of dollars a year while sitting on a $15 to 20 billion property portfolio is not a board that has optimized its own assets. Pursuing higher-value zoning designations on underused sites isn’t proof of a plan to sell schools out from under students, both boards remain on record stating they aren’t, it’s what any competently run institution with a real estate arm this size would be expected to do with property it isn’t using to capacity.

The honest version of this case is not “everything critics have found is wrong.” It’s narrower and more defensible than that: a demonstrably dysfunctional governance structure, documented independently and before supervision existed, justified an intervention that has been applied unevenly, sometimes responsive, sometimes not, but whose original premise holds up better than the “manufactured crisis” framing gives it credit for.

Post-exercise note: Where this argument is strongest is exactly where it leans on the Auditor General’s findings, those are independently corroborated and genuinely damning on their own terms. Where it’s weakest is where it has to explain away the parts that don’t fit, Calandra’s own “no constitutional cover” quote, the TLC transparency narrowing that postdates the audit and can’t be explained by pre-supervision dysfunction, and the uneven pattern where responsiveness tracks with how much political noise a community can generate rather than with any consistent standard. The steelman survives as an argument that intervention was justified. It does not survive as an argument that everything done since has been in good faith or free of the centralization the series has documented. Those are two separate claims, and conflating them is the rhetorical move worth watching for the next time this argument shows up in a National Post column.

Leave a comment