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

Independent Investigative Journalism

Editor’s Note:

This analysis was conducted over several months using primary source documents obtained through formal Access to Information requests filed with Durham Regional Police Service, publicly available police supplementary reports, contemporaneous news releases, and verified secondary sources. All claims are sourced. Where evidence is absent or inconclusive that absence is explicitly noted. The Old Guardian does not publish conclusions that outrun the evidence. This piece is no exception.

THE LOST BOYS OF PICKERING: WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS

Thirty one years later the official explanation remains plausible. It has never been proven.

By Chris Allen | The Old Guardian

On the morning of March 17 1995 six teenage boys from the Durham Region failed to come home. They were Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, Michael Cummins, Robert Rumbolt, Daniel Higgins, and Jamie Lefebvre. Thirty one years later their families still don’t know what happened to them. What follows is not an attempt to answer that question. It is an examination of whether the answer we’ve been given was ever earned by the evidence.

The official explanation has never changed. Police concluded the boys stole a boat from East Shore Marina on Frenchman’s Bay in Pickering, took it out onto Lake Ontario without life jackets in freezing conditions, and drowned. That explanation is plausible. It is consistent with known facts about where the boys were that night, what they were doing, and the conditions they faced. It may well be correct.

But plausible is not proven. And in the thirty one years since six teenagers vanished from a Pickering marina, the evidence that would confirm the official conclusion with certainty has never been found. What has happened instead is that a plausible explanation has hardened through repetition into assumed fact. This review examines what the documented record actually supports and where that hardening outran the evidence.

What the record confirms

The boys ranged in age from 16 to 18 and came from four different municipalities. Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, and Robert Rumbolt were from Pickering. Michael Cummins was from Oshawa. Daniel Higgins was from Ajax. Jamie Lefebvre was from Scarborough. They were friends and they were together that night.

They left a party in Pickering in the early hours of March 17 1995. The departure time is documented in contemporaneous police records as approximately 12:40 a.m. Before leaving someone in the group told a friend they were going to goof around on a boat. That statement, attributed to an unnamed witness in every source reviewed, has never been traced to a named primary source in thirty one years of public reporting.

At 1:48 a.m. a surveillance camera at East Shore Marina on Frenchman’s Bay recorded three individuals entering the marina service area and walking toward the boat launch. Those three individuals were identified at a meeting held at 25 Division on March 20 1995 by Detective Sergeant T.M. Cameron as Jamie Lefebvre, Robert Rumbolt, and Michael Cummins. The identification was made from time-lapse black and white footage described in police records as poor quality.

A 14 foot fiberglass imitation Boston Whaler with a 25 horsepower Yamaha outboard motor was stolen from East Shore Marina that night. The boat had been filled with styrofoam and was described by marina staff as designed to be unsinkable. It was also described as being in rough shape with a pin-sized hole in the hull.

Durham Regional Police Service began a formal search of Lake Ontario at approximately 2 p.m. on March 19 1995. That is roughly 36 hours after the boys were last documented. The search involved Air Sea Rescue, the Coast Guard, Metro Toronto Police Marine Unit, and an OPP helicopter. It was called off on March 20 1995 after one day of active operations covering an estimated 4000 square miles of lake surface.

No bodies were recovered. No vessels were recovered. No personal effects were officially confirmed as belonging to the missing boys.

Those are the anchored facts. Everything that follows in the official narrative is inference built on those facts.

What the record cannot confirm

Three of the six boys have no documented presence at East Shore Marina at any point on the night they disappeared.

Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, and Daniel Higgins do not appear on any surveillance footage at any documented location after leaving the party at approximately 12:40 a.m. The official conclusion requires all six boys to have been at East Shore Marina and on the stolen boat simultaneously. The evidentiary basis for placing three of the six boys at the marina that night consists entirely of inference drawn from the conclusion rather than documentation supporting it.

This is not a minor evidentiary gap. It is a foundational one. The question of where Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, and Daniel Higgins were between 12:40 a.m. and whenever they disappeared has never been publicly established.

Five findings that the public narrative has not addressed

Finding One: The timeline strains the walking narrative.

East Shore Marina sits at the south end of Liverpool Road South in Pickering directly on Frenchman’s Bay. The residential areas of Pickering south of Highway 401 where a first apartment for an 18 year old would plausibly have been located in 1995 are between 3.5 and 4 kilometers from the marina. At a realistic pace for a group of intoxicated teenagers on a cold March night that distance represents closer to 85 to 95 minutes of walking rather than the 68 minutes available between the documented departure time and the 1:48 a.m. surveillance appearance.

The timeline between leaving the party and appearing on camera is consistent only with a starting point significantly closer to the marina than the probable residential area, transportation assistance for part of the route, or a departure time earlier than 12:40 a.m. None of these possibilities has been publicly examined.

Finding Two: Three boys on camera, three boys unaccounted for.

Surveillance at East Shore Marina confirmed three boys entering the marina service area at 1:48 a.m. Three boys have no documented location after leaving the party. If all six were together when they left and all six ended up at the marina the group separated at some point and reconvened without that separation or reconvening being captured on any camera or documented by any witness.

Alternatively three of the boys were never at the marina. If Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, and Daniel Higgins went somewhere else that night the official conclusion that all six drowned together from a boat stolen at East Shore Marina cannot be supported by the available evidence.

Finding Three: A vessel designed not to sink has never been found.

The stolen boat was specifically constructed with flotation material designed to prevent sinking. The Boston Whaler design philosophy is built around a vessel that remains at or near the surface even when completely swamped. Despite thirty one years of lake activity on both sides of Lake Ontario, legal reporting obligations for navigation hazards, and the extensive initial search operation, this vessel has never been found.

Lake size and cold water explain why human remains might not surface. They do not adequately explain why a buoyant unsinkable hull has never been reported anywhere on either shoreline or in any subsequent lake survey in three decades.

Finding Four: The dock camera went dark at the critical moment.

Private investigator Bruce Ricketts, who worked this case pro bono for thirteen years before his death in January 2024, obtained and reviewed the full 16 hours of surveillance footage from East Shore Marina. He documented that the camera nearest the docks, which he described as the most important camera, shut down at 2:21 a.m. on March 17 1995. This was during the window when the boys were supposed to be in the marina area and shortly after three unidentified individuals were observed on camera at 2:09 a.m. The dock camera remained non-operational until at least 8:40 a.m. that morning, a minimum six hour outage covering the entire critical period.

Whether this shutdown was mechanical failure or deliberate has never been publicly established. The question was never answered before Ricketts died.

Finding Five: The only physical evidence is analytically questionable.

A gas can found near Wilson, New York on March 29 1995 is the only physical item ever officially tied to the missing boys. It was identified by a marina yard manager who stated he was 99.99 percent certain it was the gas tank from the stolen boat based on a dent in one corner.

This identification has never been forensically confirmed. Ricketts, who obtained photographs of the tank through ATIP requests, assessed the identifying mark as a minor blemish insufficient for confident identification. The tank was found floating inverted with its cap missing. Basic physics raises questions about whether an open inverted tank could maintain buoyancy for the fourteen days between the disappearance and its discovery. The tank was found directly across the lake from Pickering despite documented witness statements that currents and wind conditions at the time would push floating objects toward Rochester, New York, significantly further east.

Additionally RCAF Search and Rescue operational logs obtained by Ricketts documented a Boston Whaler type vessel spotted at Fairport Marina on Frenchman’s Bay at 7:25 p.m. on March 18 1995, approximately eighteen hours after the boat was stolen from East Shore Marina on the same bay. No follow-up to this sighting has been documented in any police records made available through access to information requests.

Why this matters

These findings do not prove an alternative explanation. They do not establish that the six boys survived, that foul play occurred, or that anyone acted improperly in the original investigation. What they establish is something more precise and in some ways more troubling.

The official conclusion was reached without the evidentiary support that conclusion required.

Three of six boys were never documented at the scene of the alleged accident. The primary physical evidence has never been confirmed forensically. The most critical surveillance camera failed during the most critical window. The vessel at the centre of the official theory has never been found despite being engineered to float. A potentially significant sighting the day after the disappearance was never documented as followed up. The one underwater search method capable of definitively locating a sunken vessel was contracted then cancelled before it began. The active search lasted 36 hours. No underwater search was ever conducted.

Each of those points has an innocent explanation. Equipment fails. Resources are limited. Cold cases are hard. Thirty year old investigations conducted in a pre-digital era had constraints that modern investigators don’t face.

But the cumulative effect of those gaps is a conclusion whose confidence level has always exceeded its evidentiary foundation. And thirty one years of repetition has transformed that overconfident conclusion into social consensus, which is not the same thing as truth.

The families of Jay Boyle, Chad Smith, Michael Cummins, Robert Rumbolt, Daniel Higgins, and Jamie Lefebvre have lived with that gap every day since March 17 1995. They deserve better than a plausible explanation treated as a proven one.

Where this file stands

The Old Guardian will continue to monitor this case. Access to Information requests are active with Durham Regional Police Service and the City of Pickering. A federal request for RCAF Search and Rescue operational logs from March 1995 is being prepared. Additional analytical work is ongoing.

The simplest explanation for what happened on March 17 1995 may still be the correct one. Six teenage boys made a dangerous decision on a cold night and paid for it with their lives. That explanation is plausible. It is consistent with the documented facts. It may well be true.

But the evidence that would confirm it with certainty has never been assembled. Until it is the honest position is not that we know what happened to the Lost Boys of Pickering. It is that we know what we cannot rule out.

That is not closure. It is the truth of where thirty one years of investigation has left us. And the families who have carried this for longer than their sons were alive deserve to have that truth stated plainly.

Chris Allen is the founder and editor of The Old Guardian, an independent investigative journalism platform based in Toronto. The Old Guardian can be reached at tips@theoldguardian.ca

Leave a comment

Elizabeth Garkowski didn’t ask for much.

She asked that her daughter Grace, who has Down syndrome, receive the educational support she was entitled to at St. Joseph Catholic School on Leslie Street in East Toronto. She asked that the specialized programming that made St. Joseph a destination school for families of children with disabilities be maintained. She asked that the people responsible for her daughter’s education be accountable to her when things went wrong.

What she got was a form letter and a phone number for Queen’s Park.

When Beach Metro Community News asked the Toronto Catholic District School Board for a statement about Bill 33 and its impact on St. Joseph school, the board responded with nine words: “The Board is currently under Ministry Supervision.” Speak to the Ministry of Education.

A Catholic institution, asked about one of its own schools and one of its own students, pointed a mother of a disabled child to a secular provincial government for answers.

This is the story underneath the budget numbers. And the budget numbers are bad enough on their own.

The cuts already made

The TCDSB is projecting a deficit of $39.5 million for the 2026-27 school year. That number is actually presented as progress — it is down from the $65.3 million initially projected, meaning provincially appointed supervisor Frank Benedetto has already found $25.8 million in savings.

Here is what that $25.8 million looks like in practice.

The Fifth Block literacy program — a legacy program that had served TCDSB students for years — has been phased out and replaced with a Ministry-approved Early Reading Intervention model. Not because anyone at the school level asked for it. Because the supervisor decided it.

The International Languages Elementary program — offering instruction in Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Spanish and other heritage languages — has been eliminated after more than fifty years. Nearly 20,000 students will no longer receive weekday language instruction. Seventy-seven teachers have lost their jobs. The program that built cultural and linguistic bridges between Toronto’s Catholic school system and the communities that sustained it for generations has been replaced with a Saturday option that costs families $20 to access, where the weekday program was free.

Bell times at select elementary schools have been adjusted for transportation efficiencies. Central staffing has been cut across the board.

The TCDSB’s enrollment is also declining — 1,500 fewer students projected for 2026-27 — reducing provincial revenue by $7.7 million. That revenue loss doesn’t get cut. It gets absorbed.

And $39.5 million still remains.

Where the axe points next

The Ontario Auditor General’s May 2026 special education audit documented what is happening inside TCDSB schools right now, before the supervisor finds the next round of savings.

Three Toronto Catholic schools, each serving fourteen children assessed at the highest level of educational need, had wildly different EA staffing: one school had nine educational assistants, one had three, one had two. Same board. Same needs profile. The only variable was the building.

Across the TCDSB, between 49 and 72 per cent of EA absences go unfilled by a qualified replacement on any given day. One in three students waiting for a psychological assessment at the board has been waiting more than a year. Families who can afford to pay between $2,500 and $4,500 for a private assessment get supported sooner. Families who cannot afford it wait.

At St. Joseph specifically, Garkowski watched three EAs disappear from her daughter’s school in a single year — a 42 per cent cut to EA support staff. The school’s multiple exceptionality room was shut down. The learning disabilities classroom was closed. In total, approximately $700,000 in funding cuts since 2018 have stripped the specialized programming that made St. Joseph a school families of children with disabilities specifically sought out.

Grace is no longer going to recess with her peers. She is no longer being integrated with her peers at all.

“My daughter’s not receiving an education,” Garkowski told Beach Metro Community News, “and it’s her human right.”

The supervisor still needs to find $39.5 million. Special education is the most expensive line in any school budget. The AG audit has already documented the system is at or beyond its breaking point. ETFO has already reported cuts to special education under provincial supervision at other boards.

The math is not complicated.

The mechanism

Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, passed in November 2025, granted the Ontario Ministry of Education expanded powers to intervene in the operation of local school boards — over governance, budgets, delivery of education, student well-being, infrastructure, and community engagement.

The TCDSB has been under provincial supervision since June 2025. Supervisor Frank Benedetto is paid $2,000 a day, up to $350,000 per year plus expenses. He has declined media interviews, referring all questions to the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education has not responded to numerous media inquiries over the past year.

Decisions made under supervision are not subject to the same public accountability as decisions made by elected trustees. When Benedetto eliminated the International Languages program, parents learned of it through a letter the same day it was announced. No public consultation. No trustee vote. No appeal process.

TCDSB trustee Markus de Domenico, who has been fighting the International Languages cuts publicly for months, asked the question that cuts to the heart of what is being lost: “Are we all supposed to do what everybody else does? This is why Catholic education, for example, is unique. The language program here is not something the trustees just invented. Fifty years — five decades of this at Toronto Catholic — is super important.”

Trustee Maria Rizzo was more direct about the mechanism: “The first things that they cut are the things that the province provides no money for.”

Read that again. The province does not fund what makes the TCDSB distinct. Then the province installs a supervisor whose mandate is to cut what the province does not fund. Then the province points to the cuts as evidence of financial mismanagement being corrected.

This is not rescue. This is a controlled demolition dressed up as fiscal responsibility.

What Catholic Social Teaching says

The Catholic tradition has a name for what is happening to Grace Garkowski and the students like her across the TCDSB. It is the preferential option for the poor — the principle that society’s most vulnerable members deserve not equal treatment but priority treatment, that the measure of an institution is how it cares for those who cannot advocate for themselves.

It is one of the most consistent threads running through Catholic Social Teaching from Leo XIII through to Francis. It is not a peripheral idea. It is foundational.

A Catholic school board operating faithfully under that principle would not be cutting EA support for children with Down syndrome to balance a budget handed down by a government that has chronically underfunded special education for years. It would be fighting loudly and publicly for those children. It would be naming the injustice. It would be making noise.

Instead, when a reporter asked about Grace, the board said: talk to the Ministry.

That is not the preferential option for the poor. That is institutional surrender.

The pattern

In my previous piece for The Old Guardian, I documented that the TCDSB’s Catholic voice disappears almost entirely outside of ceremonially safe moments — Christmas, graduation, Corpus Christi. During Lent, the board’s communications are functionally indistinguishable from a secular public board.

The International Languages cuts make the same argument in a different register. Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Mandarin — these are not abstract languages. They are the mother tongues of the communities that built Toronto’s Catholic school system. Generations of families chose Catholic schools partly because those schools understood and honored where they came from.

The supervisor eliminated that in an afternoon.

Calandra’s response when asked about the cuts was revealing: the changes bring the board in line with what is offered across the province. Uniformity, not distinctiveness. Standardization, not identity.

That is the project. A Catholic board that looks, sounds, and operates like every other board in Ontario. Funded the same way. Governed the same way. Cutting the same things. Answering to the same authority.

The supervisor doesn’t need to abolish Catholic education. He just needs to make it indistinguishable from everything else. And he is well on his way.

From one parent to another

Garkowski did not give up. She created petitions. She started interest groups. She organized a walk-in demonstration at St. Joseph with other parents. She presented a petition calling for Bill 33 to be revoked and trustees to be reinstated.

“Having this walk-in demonstration was a way for us to stand in solidarity,” she told Beach Metro. “I think when some school communities start showing up with these demonstrations, it sets the stage for other schools to say ‘hey, we can do that.’ I think it creates a snowball effect.”

She is a Catholic parent at a Catholic school, fighting for her disabled daughter in a system that has been legislatively stripped of its ability to fight alongside her.

My son doesn’t attend a Catholic school. But I understand what it means when an institution that was built to protect the most vulnerable is restructured — quietly, legislatively, one directive at a time — until it can no longer do so.

The $39.5 million still needs to be found. Special education is the most expensive line. The supervisors are not accountable to the families they affect. The Ministry is not returning calls.

Grace is not going to recess.

The Old Guardian is an independent publication committed to source-driven, unspun journalism on Ontario education policy and institutional accountability. Elizabeth Garkowski’s account was reported by Matthew Stephens of Beach Metro Community News in December 2025 and January 2026. The Auditor General findings cited are from the May 2026 Special Education Audit. Budget figures are from CP24, CityNews, and the TCDSB’s own budget engagement materials.

Leave a comment

What the Supreme Court actually decided, what the dissent actually found, and why the difference matters more than the headline.

In Part One of this series, we traced how Bayer and Monsanto shifted their defence of Roundup from a scientific argument to a legal one. The question was no longer whether glyphosate causes cancer. The question was whether anyone should be allowed to argue that in court. On June 25, 2026, the United States Supreme Court answered seven to two.

Before drawing conclusions from that number, it is worth reading what the Court actually said, and what it carefully did not say.

The Man at the Centre

Edwin Durnell is a Missouri man. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and believed Roundup was responsible. He sued Monsanto on the grounds that the company had failed to warn him about the cancer risk. A Missouri jury heard the evidence and agreed. They awarded him $1.25 million.

Monsanto appealed. The argument was not that Durnell was wrong about the cancer. The argument was that the question should never have reached a jury in the first place. Because the Environmental Protection Agency had approved Roundup’s label under federal pesticide law, Monsanto contended that state courts had no authority to second-guess whether that label was adequate.

That argument made it to the United States Supreme Court. And it won.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Thomas. That lineup is the first thing to understand. This was not a conservative court protecting corporate interests over liberal dissent. Sotomayor and Kagan, the Court’s two most reliably progressive voices, signed onto Kavanaugh’s reasoning. Bayer got exactly what it needed: not a partisan win vulnerable to accusations of purchased influence, but a structural legal argument that crossed ideological lines and arrived wearing the clothing of consensus.

The majority’s holding is precise and worth stating exactly. The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, known as FIFRA, preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims when those claims would require a manufacturer to add a warning the EPA has not required on the approved label. Because the EPA has never required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label, Durnell’s claim that Monsanto should have included one is, in the majority’s view, a state-law requirement that FIFRA explicitly prohibits.

The majority was equally explicit about what it was not holding. The Court did not declare glyphosate safe. It did not find Roundup’s label scientifically adequate. It did not resolve whether glyphosate causes cancer. The scientific question was deliberately left open. The courtroom door was closed regardless.

How the Door Gets Closed

To understand why seven justices reached this conclusion, you need to understand the specific text they were working with. FIFRA contains what the majority calls a uniformity clause. It states that states may not impose any requirements for labelling or packaging “in addition to or different from” those required under the federal statute.

In plain terms: if the federal government has approved what goes on a pesticide label, states cannot use their courts to force something different onto that label. The question is whether a jury verdict demanding a cancer warning constitutes exactly that kind of forbidden state-imposed requirement. Kavanaugh said yes.

He relied on two prior Supreme Court decisions to get there. The first, Bates v. Dow Agrosciences, established that state tort duties count as labelling requirements for FIFRA purposes. The second, Riegel v. Medtronic, applied nearly identical logic to medical devices, holding that FDA approval shields manufacturers from state tort claims that would impose different safety requirements. The pattern across both cases is the same: federal approval as a ceiling, not a floor.

Durnell’s lawyers argued that his claim only required Monsanto to provide an adequate warning, which is all FIFRA requires anyway. Kavanaugh rejected that framing as too general. The specific thing being demanded, a cancer warning, is not what FIFRA requires. It is, in the majority’s view, precisely the kind of additional requirement the uniformity clause was designed to prevent.

The entire structure rests on one factual foundation: the EPA has not required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label because the EPA has determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.

That determination is the load-bearing wall of the ruling. Remove it, and everything collapses. We will return to it in Part Three.

What Two Justices Found

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Their dissent is not a close call on a genuinely difficult legal question. It is a documented catalogue of what the majority chose not to address.

Start with the history of Roundup’s label itself. In 1999, the EPA approved a Roundup label that did not include a warning about leak risk. The EPA later determined that same approved label failed to meet FIFRA’s own requirements, because the product could spray onto users. The agency imposed civil penalties on Monsanto for distributing a misbranded pesticide under a label the EPA had previously signed off on.

That is not a hypothetical. It is regulatory history with a paper trail. EPA approval did not, in that instance, mean the label was adequate. The agency said so itself, in writing, and made Monsanto pay for it. Jackson’s question follows directly: if EPA approval does not guarantee adequacy even by the EPA’s own subsequent judgment, how can it function as a permanent shield against state courts asking the same question?

Her second finding cuts deeper.

The majority’s preemption argument depends on a specific premise: that Monsanto could not have added a cancer warning to Roundup’s label without EPA pre-approval. If Monsanto had no practical way to add the warning, then a state tort duty requiring it becomes an impossible demand, and impossible demands are preempted. That is the logic.

Jackson documents that the premise is false.

Federal regulations permit pesticide manufacturers to make certain changes to approved labels without prior EPA approval, through a process called minor modification notification. The manufacturer notifies the agency, makes the change, and the updated label takes effect. Jackson identifies at least six instances in which manufacturers used exactly this process to add Proposition 65 cancer warnings to pesticide labels, with no prior EPA approval sought or required.

One of those six instances involves a Bayer subsidiary.

In 2012, Bayer CropScience used the minor modification process to add a cancer warning to the label of LARVIN Technical, an insecticide. The submission cited the same federal regulation Jackson’s dissent relies on. The EPA’s response letter confirmed the notification was accepted. No prior approval was required or sought. This is a different product and a different chemical from Roundup, but the regulatory mechanism is identical, the parent company is the same, and the process Monsanto told the Supreme Court was unavailable is a process Bayer had already used twelve years earlier.

Jackson also raised a procedural problem the majority chose not to engage with. Monsanto never asked for a jury instruction tying the trial verdict to FIFRA’s specific misbranding standard. It never argued at trial that the evidence was insufficient under that narrower framework. The majority therefore ruled on a preemption question the trial record never properly raised. Six justices closed a courthouse door using a key that was not tested at the door.

None of this made it into the majority opinion. The Bayer subsidiary cancer warning document went unaddressed. The 1999 leak-warning penalty went unaddressed. The procedural forfeiture went unaddressed. Six justices said nothing about any of it.

The Odd Concurrence

Justice Clarence Thomas joined the majority but wrote separately, and what he wrote was strange. He did not celebrate the outcome. He questioned the constitutional foundation it rests on.

Thomas argued that FIFRA itself may exceed Congress’s Commerce Clause authority, and that EPA’s regulatory scheme amounts to an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power that benefits incumbent companies at the expense of smaller competitors and consumers. He used Bayer’s legal victory as a platform to attack the architecture that made the victory possible.

For now it is a solo concurrence with no majority behind it. But if Thomas’s view ever commands five votes, the preemption clause Bayer just won on becomes constitutionally suspect. The shield could be dismantled at its foundation by the same ideological movement that helped construct it. Worth watching.

The Question That Remains

Edwin Durnell lost. More than 100,000 other plaintiffs lost the clearest path to their day in court. The ruling did not say glyphosate is safe. It said the agency responsible for deciding that question had already weighed in, and that federal law does not permit state juries to reach a different conclusion through tort litigation.

Everything flows from that EPA determination. It is why the label has no cancer warning. It is why the state claims are preempted. It is the factual predicate the entire seven-to-two ruling stands on.

In Part Three of this series, we examine what that determination is actually worth, and what a federal appeals court already found when it looked closely at how the EPA arrived at it.

The answer was not reassuring. And nobody fixed it before it became the foundation of a Supreme Court ruling.

Editor’s Notes

Primary sources for this piece: 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.); EPA notification record for LARVIN Technical, EPA Reg. No. 264-343, Bayer CropScience, 2012 (confirming minor modification cancer warning via 40 CFR 152.46); Natural Resources Defense Council v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022).

Confidence tier: All factual claims in this piece are verified against named primary sources. The LARVIN Technical finding is drawn from the EPA notification record itself, not from secondary reporting. The 1999 leak-warning penalty is cited in Jackson’s dissent. The LARVIN product is a different chemical from glyphosate and is noted as such in the text. No claims in this piece are inferred or alleged; they are documented.

The Old Guardian | theoldguardian.ca

Investigative Journalism for the Public Interest

Canada is replacing its most productive citizens with precarious temporary workers through a program four times the size of the one everyone is arguing about. Nobody is auditing either.

By Christopher Allen

The Old Guardian • July 2026

I. The Number Nobody Is Using

In 2024, Canada issued 191,630 new work permits through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

You have heard about this number. It has been debated in Parliament, dissected on editorial pages, and used to justify everything from Tim Hortons boycotts to calls for immigration reform. The TFWP is the visible face of Canada’s temporary labour architecture — the program that requires employers to file a Labour Market Impact Assessment, attest that no Canadian worker is available, pay a $1,000 fee, and post the position publicly before hiring abroad.

In the same year, Canada issued 717,405 new work permits through the International Mobility Program.

You have probably not heard about this number. The IMP operates without a Labour Market Impact Assessment. Without an employer attestation. Without a mandatory Job Bank posting. Without a $1,000 fee. It is, by design, the easier door — and it is nearly four times as large as the door everyone is watching.

These are not estimates or projections. They come from the 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, approved by Immigration Minister Lena Diab. The government knows the ratio. The government published it. And the political conversation about Canada’s temporary labour architecture has continued to focus almost exclusively on the smaller program, while the larger one operates in structural silence.

That silence is not accidental. It is the architecture.

II. The Program That Audits Itself

The Temporary Foreign Worker Program has a monitoring problem that its own evaluators have documented. An IRCC program evaluation — a government document assessing the government’s own program — concluded that “continued growth in the IMP, combined with a lack of systematic monitoring of labour market impacts by IRCC and data gaps, particularly related to open work permits, have introduced risks for unintended consequences, such as displacement of Canadian workers and wage suppression.”

Read that again. The government’s own evaluators, in the government’s own document, used the words “displacement of Canadian workers” and “wage suppression” to describe the consequences of a program the government was simultaneously expanding.

The Minister’s own transition binder — the internal briefing document prepared for incoming ministers — confirmed that in 2024, 80 percent of all new work permits were issued under the IMP and 20 percent under the TFWP. The program receiving the overwhelming share of public scrutiny, political pressure, and media attention represents one dollar in five. The program operating with no independent labour market test represents the other four.

This is not a revelation that requires investigation to uncover. It is in the government’s own documents. What requires investigation is why it has produced no meaningful policy response.

III. What Self-Attestation Looks Like in Practice

On June 18, 2026, a restaurant called Punjabi By Nature — located at 8887 The Gore Road, Suite 57 and 58, in Brampton, Ontario — posted a job listing on the Government of Canada’s Job Bank. The position: Cook. Vacancies: 8. Wage: $36.00 per hour.

The listing carried a banner that read: “LMIA requested. The employer could not find a Canadian worker for this job.”

Brampton has a population of nearly 700,000 people, more than half of whom are South Asian. Its unemployment rate is 8 percent — double the national average at the time of filing. The median wage for a cook in Brampton is $18.00 per hour. The restaurant’s cuisine specialty, listed on the posting, is East Indian.

The wage offered — $36.00 per hour — is not the market rate for a cook in Brampton. It is the exact threshold required to qualify for the High-Wage Stream of the TFWP, which carries fewer restrictions than the Low-Wage Stream. At $35.99 per hour, the application would have been automatically refused.

The LMIA history attached to this employer’s profile, publicly available through ESDC’s disclosure database, shows positive decisions in 2025Q2 for one Food Service Supervisor and three Cooks — both filed at the then-current High-Wage threshold of $34.07 per hour.

The pattern is not subtle. The wage is not set by what the market pays. It is set by what the program requires. The attestation — “we cannot find a Canadian worker” — is filed in a city where the majority population shares the culinary tradition of the restaurant, where unemployment is at 8 percent, and where the identical position was filled through the same program the previous year.

This is what self-attestation without independent audit looks like. The employer defines the need. The government accepts the definition. The program processes the application.

Nobody verifies whether the Canadian worker was genuinely unavailable. Nobody checks whether the offered wage reflects what will actually be paid. Nobody follows up after the permit is issued to confirm the employment relationship matches the paperwork.

The architecture trusts the person with the financial interest in the outcome to accurately report the outcome. It has done so for years. The results are predictable.

IV. The Receipt

In May 2026, BC Supreme Court Justice Sharon Matthews issued a ruling in a class action lawsuit that had been working its way through the courts for nearly a decade. The defendants were Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc. — now operating as Circle K — and three Surrey-based immigration consultant companies, including the firm run by regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant Kuldeep Bansal.

Between 2011 and 2016, Bansal operated a foreign worker recruitment program that held job fairs at the Flora Creek Hotel in Dubai. Workers from the Philippines and Nepal paid between $2,000 and $8,500 for what they were told were guaranteed positions at Mac’s stores across British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories.

The jobs, in many cases, did not exist.

One lead plaintiff, Prakash Basyal, attended a job fair in Dubai in the summer of 2012. He paid $2,000 in fees, received an offer to work as a cashier at $11.40 per hour, and paid another $6,000. Three months later, he was told there was no work available for him in Edmonton. When he refused to accept farm work as an alternative, he was left without employment, without legal authority to work elsewhere under his employer-specific work permit, and eventually without housing. He ended up in a Vancouver homeless shelter, surviving on the help of community contacts until a legal aid group helped him file a complaint.

The court found that Mac’s had used the TFWP to create, in its own words, “a pool of foreign workers whom it could call on to come to Canada and fill positions as they became available.” The company had no specific intention to employ the workers when it recruited them. It wanted the pool. The program provided it.

Up to 880 workers were affected. The conduct ran for five years. The ruling came fifteen years after it began.

The architecture that made this possible — employer-specific work permits that tie a worker’s immigration status to continued employment with a single employer, creating conditions in which reporting abuse risks deportation — was not an accident of program design. It is the program design. The temporariness is the feature that generates the leverage. The leverage is what makes the abuse possible. And the abuse, as Justice Matthews found, is what Mac’s Convenience Stores used the program for.

V. What the Government Knew

In 2024, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Tomoya Obokata, delivered a formal report to the Human Rights Council following a 14-day in-country visit to Canada. The report found that the Temporary Foreign Worker Program “serves as a breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery, as it institutionalizes asymmetries of power that favour employers and prevent workers from exercising their rights.”

The UN is not a fringe voice. A Special Rapporteur report to the Human Rights Council is a formal accountability mechanism applied to governments, not a think-piece or an advocacy document.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s response was to object to the phrase “contemporary slavery” while acknowledging the abuses the report described. He added, in public, that the government was being careful not to further inflate food prices.

Food prices.

The government’s stated reason for caution in reforming a program that a UN rapporteur described as structurally enabling contemporary slavery was the downstream effect on what Canadians pay for groceries. The workers in the program — the people whose employer-tied status makes them unable to report abuse without risking deportation — were weighed against the cost of a meal, and the meal won.

This is not an interpretation. It is what the Minister said.

VI. The Other Side of the Exchange

While Canada’s temporary labour architecture has been importing precarious workers through an unaudited pipeline, a different flow has been running in the opposite direction.

In 2025, 120,640 Canadian citizens and permanent residents emigrated — the highest annual total since Statistics Canada first tracked the data in 1952. The first quarter of 2026 produced the highest quarterly emigration count ever recorded. Over four consecutive years, the rate has accelerated. Nearly 467,000 Canadians left between 2022 and 2025.

This is not random churn. Statistics Canada’s Portrait of Canadian Emigration shows that 67 percent of those leaving are between the ages of 20 and 44 — more than double their share of the general population. Nearly 70 percent hold at least a university degree, against 29 percent of the population at large. They are disproportionately concentrated in applied science, technology, business, and finance. Sixty-one percent go to the United States.

The Bank of Canada’s own research found that roughly 40 percent of Canadians who would rank in the top one percent of earners have already emigrated south.

Mike Moffatt, an economist at the Smart Prosperity Institute, has noted that the true emigration figure is likely an undercount. Young Canadians working remotely from abroad, maintaining Canadian bank accounts and filing Canadian taxes while building lives elsewhere, do not show up in Statistics Canada’s emigration data. They are still on the books. They have already left.

The entrepreneur emigration story sits underneath these numbers in a place the data cannot fully reach. Canada’s three largest startup ecosystems — Toronto-Waterloo, Vancouver, and Montreal — lost a combined $66 billion in ecosystem value between 2019 and 2024. The United States went from producing 11 times more high-potential startups than Canada in 2015, to 45 times in 2024. Venture capital investment as a share of GDP fell from nearly 0.5 percent to 0.2 percent in three years.

These are not the numbers of a country that is attracting and retaining the people who build things.

VII. The Loop

The political conversation about Canada’s temporary labour architecture treats the two flows — the inflow of temporary workers and the outflow of permanent residents — as separate phenomena with separate causes and separate remedies.

They are not separate. They are the same system producing two outputs simultaneously.

When wages in a sector are suppressed by an uncapped supply of workers whose immigration status ties them to their employer, compliant employers cannot compete. They raise prices, reduce margin, or exit. Canadian workers in that sector find the wage no longer worth the work and move on — to other industries, to other provinces, or to other countries. The domestic labour supply in that sector thins. Employers file LMIA attestations certifying they cannot find Canadian workers. The attestation is now technically accurate. The program approves more workers. The sector becomes structurally dependent on the same architecture that displaced the domestic workers in the first place.

The architect of the loop is not malice. It is the absence of monitoring. A program that issues 717,000 work permits annually and cannot tell you which industries employed them — because, as IRCC’s own evaluators documented, the data collection mechanism was never built — cannot detect the displacement it is causing until the displacement has already become structural.

By the time the loop is visible, it is self-sustaining. The domestic workers who would have filled those roles have already left. The employers who would have paid competitive wages have already closed or restructured. The attestation that justified the program in the first place has been made accurate by the program’s own operation.

This is not a bug. It is what happens when a self-attestation system operates without independent audit at scale.

VIII. What Has Been Managed

Canada has not failed to notice the problems in its temporary labour architecture. It has noticed them repeatedly, documented them carefully, and managed their appearance rather than their substance.

The CRTC commissioned an independent report into the 2022 Rogers outage and held the findings for a year before releasing a summary. Immigration officials wrote internally in 2020 that people were paying consultants to invent business ideas for startup visa applications. The IRCC evaluators flagged displacement risk and wage suppression in a program evaluation. The UN Special Rapporteur delivered a formal finding of breeding-ground conditions for contemporary slavery. The Minister acknowledged the abuses and cited food prices.

In each case, the institution with the mandate to act had the information. In each case, the response was calibrated to manage the appearance of accountability — a report released slowly, a letter sent carefully, a reform announced without the audit mechanism that would make it real.

The Replacement Economy is the consequence of that institutional posture applied to labour market policy for a decade.

Canada did not choose to replace its most productive, most mobile, most entrepreneurially ambitious citizens with a precarious temporary workforce operating through an architecture that the government’s own evaluators described as carrying risks of displacement and wage suppression. It arrived here through a series of decisions that each seemed defensible in isolation — an exemption here, a threshold there, a monitoring framework deferred until the inventory of applications could be cleared.

The inventory has not been cleared. The monitoring framework has not been built. The 717,000 permits issued last year will be followed by more this year.

The tap is open. The hot water is running out.

Sources and Methodology

This editorial draws on the following primary sources:

— Government of Canada, 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.

— IRCC Program Evaluation of the International Mobility Program, 2014–2022.

— IRCC Minister’s Transition Binder, May 2025.

— Statistics Canada, Portrait of Canadian Emigration, Catalogue 11-627-M, March 18, 2026.

— Statistics Canada, Quarterly Population Estimates, Q1 2026, released June 17, 2026.

— Bank of Canada research on high-income emigration, as cited in The Hub, June 2026.

— Workers v. Mac’s Convenience Stores Inc., Overseas Immigration Services Inc., Overseas Career and Consulting Services Ltd., and Kuldeep Bansal, BC Supreme Court, Justice Sharon Matthews, May 28, 2026.

— United Nations Human Rights Council, Report of the Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Tomoya Obokata, Document A/HRC/57/46/Add.1, July 22, 2024.

— Job Bank Posting #3604048, Punjabi By Nature, Brampton ON, June 18, 2026.

— ESDC LMIA Employer Disclosure Database, Punjabi By Nature, 2025Q2.

— The Hub, “Canadians and permanent residents leaving Canada at highest rate since 1950s,” June 29, 2026.

— The Walrus, “The Temporary Foreign Worker Program Can’t Be Fixed,” Adnan R. Khan, July 7, 2026.

The Old Guardian accepts confidential tips at tips@theoldguardian.ca

The Replacement Economy is an ongoing investigative series examining Canada’s temporary labour architecture and its consequences for workers, employers, and the country’s demographic future.

Leave a comment

Surrey Provincial Court Judge Reginald Harris had a word for it.

Rampage.

That word didn’t come from an advocate or a victim’s family or a headline writer looking for impact. It came from the judge’s own sentencing reasons. It is the court’s characterization of what Harinder Singh Sihota did that night.

So what does a rampage cost in Canada?

Four years.

That’s what Judge Harris imposed. With credit for time already served, Sihota had 874 days remaining as of his sentencing on July 2, 2026. He was also ordered to pay restitution of $26,845.98 to victim Stacey Johnson and $12,543.07 to victim Krystle Zimmer by December 31, 2030. Judge Harris noted in his reasons that Krystle Zimmer’s family still has a long road ahead regarding her medical issues — and that they still don’t know where that road leads.

Twelve thousand dollars and an uncertain medical future. That’s what Krystle Zimmer got.

Eight hundred and seventy-four days. That’s what the system gave her in return.

The defence had asked for 18 months to two years. The Crown fought for four. The gap between those two numbers — 18 months on one side, four years on the other, for the same rampage — tells you almost everything you need to know about where Canada stands on impaired driving accountability in the summer of 2026.

A Month of Progress

To be fair, July 2026 brought real movement on impaired driving in Canada.

On July 1, Ontario tightened its impaired driving rules again. Anyone criminally convicted of impaired driving causing death now faces a lifetime provincial licence suspension, reducible only after 25 years under specific criteria. After completing a mandatory ignition interlock period, drivers face an additional six-month zero-tolerance condition before full reinstatement. The look-back period for repeat offenders doubled from five years to ten.

These are meaningful changes. They deserve acknowledgment.

On July 15, the federal Bail and Sentencing Reform Act — Bill C-14 — came into force. Over 80 targeted changes to the Criminal Code. Stricter bail conditions. Tougher sentencing for repeat violent offenders. Mandatory consecutive sentences for violent auto theft paired with break and enter. Restored driving prohibitions for manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death. Backed by every province and territory, every premier, and law enforcement agencies across the country.

Also meaningful. Also deserving of acknowledgment.

Parliament moved. Ontario moved. Credit where it’s due.

But the Surrey case was sentenced in this same month. In this same legal environment. And the Crown’s ceiling — the best outcome prosecutors could argue for — was four years for a rampage.

The Gap Nobody Fixed

Bill C-14 mandates consecutive sentences when someone commits violent auto theft and break and enter together. Parliament looked at that combination of offences and said — these sentences run one after the other, not at the same time. The number of crimes matters.

That logic is sound.

But a driver who kills multiple people in a single impaired driving incident — the Brady Robertson case, four people dead including three children — does not face mandatory consecutive sentences under Bill C-14. Judges must consider consecutive sentences for repeat violent offenders in certain cases. Consider. Not require.

The gap is specific. It is not an oversight anyone can credibly defend in public. It is simply unfinished business.

If the number of cars stolen determines whether sentences stack, the number of people killed should determine the same. That is not a radical proposition. It is arithmetic.

The Other Gap

There is a second gap worth noting, and it has nothing to do with courts or judges.

Earlier this year, The Old Guardian asked several major Canadian rental car companies a straightforward yes or no question: does your company have a written policy preventing someone convicted of impaired driving causing death from renting one of your vehicles?

One company responded publicly. Their answer revealed a policy built around a 48-month lookback window for DUI convictions. After 48 months, a conviction — including a conviction for killing someone while impaired — no longer affects rental eligibility under their stated policy. There was no distinction between a standard impaired driving conviction and one involving a fatality.

No federal legislation currently requires rental companies to check anything beyond a valid licence. A convicted killer whose provincial licence has been suspended for 25 years can hand a credit card to a rental counter and drive away in someone else’s vehicle. Legally. Today.

Ontario closed the licence gap. Bill C-14 moved the federal needle. Nobody has touched this one.

What the Numbers Say

Canadian sentencing for impaired driving causing death ranges from approximately three years to seventeen years depending on jurisdiction, judge, and circumstances. The seventeen-year sentence — handed to Brady Robertson, who had 15 prior driving convictions and killed four people including three children — remains one of the harshest in Canadian history. The three-year sentence — handed to Jonathan Patten, who had multiple drugs in his system and killed 25-year-old Nicholas Fong — was justified partly on the basis of remorse and rehabilitation potential.

Same charge. Same outcome. A fourteen-year gap.

In Surrey, a man caused 13 crashes and injured 9 people. The Crown’s best argument was four years.

These numbers are not a sentencing system. They are a lottery.

What Comes Next

Canada is not standing still on impaired driving. The Ontario PC government’s Safer Ontario platform, Bill C-14, Andrew’s Law — named after Andrew Cristillo, a 35-year-old father of three killed in a head-on crash in Whitchurch-Stouffville in August 2025 — these are not nothing. They are evidence that political will exists when public pressure is sufficient.

The question is whether that will extends to the specific gaps that remain.

Mandatory consecutive sentences when a single impaired driving incident kills more than one person. Impairment designated explicitly as a mandatory aggravating factor on the criminal record at sentencing. Federal legislation requiring rental companies to check a national conviction registry before handing over keys — with real corporate liability if they don’t.

None of those things exist today.

A federal petition addressing exactly these gaps is coming. When it does, the ask will be narrow, specific, and deliberately built on the framework Parliament just established with Bill C-14. Not a new law. A completion of the one that just passed.

In the meantime — what does a rampage cost in Canada?

We have an answer. The question is whether we’re comfortable with it.

The Old Guardian covers impaired driving accountability, criminal justice reform, and public safety in Canada. If this piece raised questions you think deserve answers, share it.

Leave a comment

Ontario’s case for taking over the Toronto District School Board rested on a simple promise: elected trustees had failed, and a Ministry-appointed supervisor would restore the accountability parents and students had lost. A year in, two cases inside the TDSB’s own walls put that promise to a direct test. One suggests the promise was kept. The other suggests it wasn’t. Read together, they say more about what supervision actually is than either side’s talking points do on their own.

The Transfer That Didn’t Stick

In June 2025, weeks before the province took control of the TDSB, the board announced it was transferring Barrie Sketchley, the longest-serving principal in Ontario’s history, out of Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, the school he helped found 33 years earlier. The board framed it as a routine rotation. Students didn’t see it that way. Hundreds walked out of class. A petition to reinstate him drew nearly 2,900 signatures. Parents said a policy requiring consultation before a principal transfer had been ignored.

Two months later, the newly installed provincial supervisor reversed the decision. Sketchley stayed at Rosedale Heights through his planned retirement the following June. A superintendent’s letter to the school community called it a “win-win,” and the parent advisory council chair agreed, writing that the reversal meant “their voices were heard.”

Whatever else is true about supervision, this is a case where it worked the way its defenders say it should: a contested, opaque decision made by TDSB management got overturned in response to sustained public pressure, and the person the community wanted stayed put.

The School That Keeps Shrinking

Heydon Park Secondary School tells a different story, and the timeline matters.

In June 2025, days before supervision began, the TDSB announced it would stop accepting Grade 9 students at Heydon Park, its only high school built specifically for young women, transgender, and non-binary students, many with intellectual disabilities. The board cited low enrolment, nine applicants for the fall. Parents and the school’s advocacy network disputed that framing directly, pointing to TDSB’s own projections showing enrolment had been climbing in the years before the cut, not falling. A planned open house that typically drove new registrations had also been cancelled that spring.

Then something happened that the pro-supervision case doesn’t account for. A Local Feasibility Study, already scheduled for August 2025 to explore ways to keep Heydon Park viable, was cancelled outright when supervision began that June. Not delayed. Cancelled. The one process designed to give the school’s community a formal say in its future disappeared at the exact moment the province took over.

A year later, in June 2026, the story continued under the supervisor’s watch, not before it. Citing construction safety concerns at a nearby elementary school, the TDSB announced Heydon Park students would be relocated out of their building as early as January 2027 to make room for the displaced students. Parents at the school say they found out through a letter, with no advance consultation. “The latest decision by the board shows a lack of transparency and consultation,” multiple parents told CTV News Toronto. A school council co-chair put it more simply: “We need the stability. We need the security.”

That is the same complaint, using nearly the same language, that TDSB families have been raising since before supervision existed. A full year into provincial control, it hadn’t changed.

What Connects Them

Put side by side, these aren’t contradictory stories. They’re the same institution behaving two different ways depending on which lever got pulled.

Sketchley’s case shows supervision can work as advertised: an opaque, community-opposed decision reversed once enough people pushed back. Heydon Park shows the opposite is just as true: a vulnerable community’s own request for a formal process to be heard was cancelled the moment supervision arrived, and the pattern of unilateral, after-the-fact decisions has continued unbroken since.

The honest reading isn’t that supervision is a failure, and it isn’t that supervision is a fix. It’s that supervision has been applied inconsistently, responsive when the backlash was loud and visible, unmoved when it wasn’t. Rosedale Heights is a large, well-connected arts school with an active advisory council and media attention within days. Heydon Park serves roughly 110 students, many with intellectual disabilities, in a building its own advocacy group calls “the TDSB’s best kept secret.”

If accountability under supervision depends on how much noise a community can make rather than on a consistent standard applied to every school, that isn’t accountability. It’s a different version of the same problem the province said it was fixing, just with a different set of names attached.

A note on how this piece came together: This story started as an attempt to test the strongest case for supervision, not undermine it. Columnists making the case for provincial takeover of the TDSB pointed to both the Sketchley transfer and the Heydon Park enrolment cut as evidence the board’s pre-supervision governance had failed. On the facts, they were right about that much. Where the record diverges from their framing is what happened next. Reading the opposing argument in good faith, then checking every claim against primary sources, is what turned up the part that argument left out, that supervision fixed one and quietly worsened the other. That’s the process, applied the same way regardless of which direction the evidence points.

Sources: CBC News, CTV News Toronto, Global News, TorontoToday, and Heydon Park Secondary School Advocacy (heydonadvocacy.ca).

Leave a comment

The Toronto District School Board’s 2026-27 budget presentation makes one claim clearly and repeatedly: there will be no reductions to school-based special education supports.

The board’s own Parent Involvement Advisory Committee didn’t buy it, and neither should you.

The question the board hasn’t answered

On June 10, 2026, PIAC formally adopted a set of recommendations, moved by Farheen Mahmood and seconded by Crystal Stewart, requesting written answers from TDSB staff on a long list of budget questions. Buried in that document, question 26, is one of the sharpest lines in the entire request:

“The presentation states that school-based special education staffing remains unchanged, yet 15 Diagnostic Kindergarten classes have reportedly been eliminated. Please provide enrollment data used to support the closures of these classes.”

That is not an accusation. It is a committee, the body specifically constituted to represent parents on exactly these questions, pointing directly at a contradiction in the board’s own materials and asking the board to explain itself.

As of this writing, more than a month later, there is no public record of that question being answered.

A second, independent voice says the same thing

PIAC’s question sat unresolved for weeks, one document, one claim, unconfirmed. Then, in the July 6 wave of school council letters sent directly to Supervisor Rohit Gupta, Cresthaven Public School’s council raised the same program, independently and without apparent knowledge of the PIAC document, describing what its letter calls “the dire situation in the school’s Diagnostic Kindergarten and ISP classes.”

Two sources. No connection to each other. Same specific program. Same conclusion: something is wrong with Diagnostic Kindergarten this year, and the board’s public claim that special education staffing is untouched does not match what parents and committee members are seeing.

Diagnostic Kindergarten classes exist to identify and support the youngest students with developmental delays and disabilities, before those needs compound into larger, more costly problems later in a child’s education. It is not a peripheral program. It is early intervention, the kind of support that is cheapest and most effective when it happens early, and most damaging to lose.

What the budget numbers actually show

The board’s own 2026-27 budget document offers a possible answer to how “no reductions” and “classes eliminated” can both be technically true at once.

The Special Education Fund itself is down $7.3 million this year, a 1.8 percent decline in absolute dollars. At the same time, the board’s public materials cite a 2.2 percent increase in special education spending per pupil. Both figures come from the same document. Both are accurate. They are not describing the same thing.

Per-pupil spending rises when the number of dollars falls more slowly than the number of students does. TDSB enrollment is projected to drop by 4,912 students this year. A shrinking total, divided among fewer children, can produce a larger number per child while the actual resources available to any given classroom, or any given Diagnostic Kindergarten program, shrink in real terms.

That is arithmetic. It is not evidence that support held steady. And it is entirely consistent with a board that can say “staffing is unchanged” in a budget presentation while individual schools report specific programs disappearing.

The pattern, not just the program

This isn’t really a story about fifteen classrooms. It’s a story about what happens when the only people asking hard, specific questions, a parent advisory committee and a handful of school councils, get silence in return, while the language in official presentations stays carefully worded enough to survive a surface read.

PIAC asked in writing, through the proper channel, more than a month ago. Cresthaven raised it independently through the letter campaign. Neither has received an answer. The board’s own numbers suggest a real explanation exists. Nobody at the TDSB has offered it.

Until they do, the claim that school-based special education staffing “remains unchanged” should be read for exactly what it is: a sentence that survives scrutiny only if nobody asks what’s underneath it.

Sources: TDSB Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, SCS.26.06.1, June 10, 2026. Cresthaven Public School Council letter to Supervisor Rohit Gupta, July 6, 2026. TDSB 2026-27 Budget, tdsb.on.ca.

The Old Guardian’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Leave a comment

Thirteen school councils. Two waves of letters. Zero replies.

Between June 22 and July 6, 2026, parent-elected school councils across the Toronto District School Board sat down and did the thing Regulation 612 says they exist to do: they wrote to the person now running their children’s education system and told him, in plain language, what was actually happening in their buildings. Not talking points. Not survey data massaged for a press release. Direct accounts from Bowmore Road, Montrose, Perth Avenue, Williamson Road, Carleton Village, Cresthaven, Swansea, Annette Street, Runnymede, Mountview, Grove Community, High Park Alternative, and Berner Trail.

As of this writing, twelve of those thirteen councils have received nothing. Not a form letter. Not an acknowledgment of receipt. Nothing.

“I’m still in contact with all the councils,” campaign coordinator Kamin Peyrow Lee told The Old Guardian, “and no one has gotten any acknowledgement from the supervisor about their letter as far as I know.” The single partial exception, Berner Trail Junior Public School, got a response, but Lee is careful about why: the school had already been in contact with its superintendent over a specific local issue, and a protest had been scheduled for the same day the letters went out. “That protest got a lot of attention,” she said. “So technically Berner Trail JPS have received a response from the board about their specific issue, but I would not say that it was the letter that got the response.”

Read that twice. The formal channel, the one Ontario law says exists specifically to give parents a voice, produced silence. Public pressure produced a reply. If you want to know what this board actually listens to, that’s your answer, and it came from the people running the letter campaign themselves, not from The Old Guardian’s own conclusion.

What the letters actually said

The thirteen schools weren’t a coordinated messaging operation reciting the same script. They were a large elementary school and a small alternative one. A designated Model School and a school with a diagnostic kindergarten program. Schools with strong new leadership and schools still working through a turbulent year. What they shared wasn’t talking points. It was the same handful of experiences, arrived at independently.

Bowmore Road and Montrose, two schools with no apparent connection to each other, both named the same closed facility as the single most significant loss their students would feel: the Island Natural Sciences School, an outdoor education centre closed by the TDSB this year. Montrose surveyed twenty-one families and heard it over and over. “We had graduation and 6 out of 8 students who spoke cited Island School among their fondest memories from grade 6,” one parent wrote. “I am saddened and angry that my child and future grade 6s will not have this experience.” Bowmore’s letter called it a rite of passage that had, for years, been “an equalizer for all students, ensuring that regardless of a student’s background or socio-economic standing, all were afforded the opportunity to make important curriculum connections.”

Perth Avenue’s council reported something sharper: their Holiday Market, a fundraiser and community tradition, was cancelled after the school’s principal was told by TDSB’s own Risk Management team that the decision reflected a “reduced risk tolerance” during the period of provincial supervision. Not a budget line. Not an enrollment number. A parent-run community event, cancelled, with supervision itself cited as the reason.

Williamson Road, serving more than 500 students, has no full-time vice-principal and no full-time teacher-librarian. Parents there also described something else worth noting alongside Perth Avenue and Bowmore’s account of shrinking supervision: a growing reliance on screens to manage students during lunch, not as enrichment, but as a substitute for staff who aren’t there.

None of these are anonymous complaints. Every letter came with a named contact and a phone number, offered specifically for media follow-up. These are people willing to put their names on what they’re describing.

What the board’s own numbers say

The TDSB’s 2026-27 budget, published on the board’s own website, tells a story that doesn’t match the one the board tells in public.

The Special Education Fund is down $7.3 million, a 1.8 percent decline in absolute dollars, according to the board’s own revenue tables. At the same time, the board’s public materials cite a 2.2 percent per-pupil increase in special education spending. Both figures are technically accurate. They are not describing the same thing. Per-pupil spending rises when total dollars fall more slowly than enrollment does, and TDSB enrollment is projected to drop by 4,912 students this year alone. A shrinking pie divided among fewer students can produce a larger slice on paper while the pie itself gets smaller. That is arithmetic, not investment, and the difference matters enormously to a parent trying to figure out whether their child’s support will still be there in September.

Computer spending is down $8.4 million, 21.2 percent, the steepest cut anywhere in the instructional budget. This is the same fiscal year the Ontario government is putting $60 million into Edwin, a new provincewide digital learning platform from Nelson Education, rolling out to all 72 school boards starting this September. The province wants a platform. The board is cutting the devices. Nobody has explained how those two facts are meant to coexist.

And underneath all of it sits the number that actually explains where the board’s savings came from. Of the $59.5 million in “Supervisor Savings Measures” that brought this year’s deficit down from a preliminary $74.5 million to $15 million, $34.8 million, 58 percent of the entire total, came from Central Staff Reductions. Not efficiencies. Not waste. Headcount.

What thirteen letters and a budget table have in common

Put them side by side and the pattern isn’t subtle. A board under provincial supervision cut the people, cut the devices, and quietly let per-pupil framing paper over a real decline in special education dollars, all while telling parents that supervision exists to fix mismanagement. Meanwhile, thirteen school communities wrote directly to the person in charge, using the one formal channel still available to them, and got back exactly what you’d expect from an institution that has already told you, through its own numbers, where its actual priorities sit.

Silence is data. This board has now generated a great deal of it.

Sources: TDSB 2026-27 Budget, tdsb.on.ca. TDSB Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, SCS.26.06.1, June 10, 2026. Letters from the Bowmore Road, Montrose, Perth Avenue, and Williamson Road school councils, July 2026. Correspondence with Kamin Peyrow Lee, campaign coordinator, July 2026. CBC News, Edwin platform reporting, 2026.

The Old Guardian’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

www.theoldguardian.ca | Independent Investigative Journalism

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

Ten years ago today, Parliament passed Bill C-14 and Canada became one of the first countries in the world to legalize medical assistance in dying. The assurances that made it possible were precise: MAiD would be a last resort, available only to those in irremediable suffering for whom no other option remained. Consent would be meaningful, not inferred. Vulnerability would be protected, not eligible.

Today, on the tenth anniversary of that legislation, a parliamentary committee has recommended that the federal government indefinitely exclude people with mental illness from MAiD eligibility — a recommendation that is itself an acknowledgment of how far the program has drifted from what it promised to be.

But here is what the committee report does not address, and what this investigation has spent months building from primary government sources: the accountability failures it identified in psychiatric MAiD are already present — documented, measured, and in some cases prosecuted — in the system currently serving 100,000 Canadians who have already died.

A pause on expansion answers a different question than the one the evidence raises. The question the evidence raises is this: does Canada have a MAiD system that can be trusted with the authority it already has?

The answer, built from Health Canada’s own annual reports, parliamentary testimony, regulatory findings, and six documented case files, is no.

I. The Scale No One Is Stating Plainly

In 2024, 16,499 Canadians died by MAiD. That represents 5.1 percent of all deaths in the country — one in twenty. By raw numbers, MAiD is now the fourth most common way Canadians die, behind cancer, heart disease, and accidents. The government does not state it this way, because the World Health Organization classifies MAiD as a health service rather than a cause of death. That classification is itself part of the story: the agency responsible for counting how Canadians die has formally decided not to count this one.

Cumulative provisions surpassed 100,000 in April 2026 — nine years after legalization. Quebec’s MAiD rate has reached 7.9 percent of all provincial deaths, the highest rate in the world. In the same decade, Canada’s palliative care coverage has declined, its hospice bed capacity sits at 57 percent of the recommended standard, and its average healthcare wait time has reached 30 weeks — while the average time from MAiD request to death is 13 days.

These numbers are not from critics of the program. They are from Health Canada’s own annual reports. The government collected them, published them, and released them under a ministerial message emphasizing compassion and patient-centered care. The numbers tell a different story than the message does.

II. What the Promises Actually Were

The legal foundation of Canada’s MAiD framework is Carter v. Canada, the 2015 Supreme Court decision that struck down the criminal prohibition on assisted dying. Carter was explicit about the conditions under which the right existed: competent adults in grievous and irremediable suffering, for whom no other means of relieving suffering remained acceptable. The safeguards — two assessors, reflection periods, mandatory consideration of alternatives — were not bureaucratic decoration. They were the conditions under which the court found the right existed at all.

The first legislative expansion came in 2021 with Bill C-7, which created Track 2 MAiD for people whose death is not reasonably foreseeable — people who are not terminally ill. The psychiatric expansion — MAiD for those whose sole underlying condition is mental illness — was added by Senate amendment and has been delayed three times, most recently to March 2027, which is where the AMAD committee has now recommended it stay, indefinitely.

What has not been delayed is the erosion of the conditions that made the original framework defensible. Four words have been quietly redefined in the decade since Carter, without legislation, without parliamentary debate, and without public announcement.

Irremediable once meant that medicine had exhausted its options. It now means that the patient finds available options unacceptable — and Canada is the only jurisdiction in the world that does not require proof that treatment was tried before approving MAiD. Suffering has expanded from clinical symptoms to life circumstances: poverty, isolation, loneliness. Compassion has been reframed from accompanying a person through their pain to removing the person experiencing it. And safeguard now describes a documentation process that records compliance without verifying it.

None of those redefinitions passed through Parliament. They accumulated through training programs, clinical guidelines, and the institutional culture of a provider community funded and organized around access rather than gatekeeping.

III. The Data the Minister’s Message Does Not Mention

The government publishes detailed annual data on MAiD. What follows is drawn entirely from Health Canada’s own Fifth and Sixth Annual Reports.

The approval rate

In 2019, 59 percent of MAiD requests ended in death. By 2023 that figure was 78 percent, and rising. In any other medical context, an approval rate approaching 80 percent for an irreversible procedure would prompt scrutiny of whether the gatekeeping function was operating. In the MAiD context, it is presented as evidence of appropriate access.

The Track 2 profile

Track 2 MAiD — for people who are not terminally ill — grew 34 percent between 2022 and 2023, and a further 17 percent between 2023 and 2024. The people receiving it are predominantly women (56.7 percent in 2024), with a median age of 75.9 years, the majority of whom have lived with their condition for more than a decade. In 2024, 61.5 percent self-identified as having a disability. Only 23.2 percent received palliative care before dying — down from 29.6 percent the year before.

That last number deserves to be read slowly. Nearly eight in ten people who received non-terminal MAiD in 2024 did not receive palliative care. Among those who required but did not receive palliative care, 91.2 percent confirmed that services were accessible to them. They could have accessed palliative care. They did not. Then they received MAiD. The government reports this as a sign of appropriate patient choice. It is also consistent with a system in which the path to death is faster and better resourced than the path to care.

The suffering data

Health Canada asks practitioners to report the sources of suffering cited by MAiD recipients. In 2024, 50.3 percent of Track 2 recipients cited feeling like a burden on family, friends, or caregivers as a contributing factor. For Track 2, 44.7 percent cited isolation or loneliness.

Feeling like a burden is a documented primary driver of suicidal ideation. It is precisely the cognitive state that crisis psychiatry is designed to identify and treat as a distortion, not a terminal prognosis. When half of all non-terminal MAiD recipients report it as a significant factor in their decision, the system is not responding to irremediable suffering. It is ratifying a social failure and calling it compassion.

The voluntariness gap

In 2024, in 21.2 percent of Track 1 cases, the practitioner selected only one source of information when determining that the request was voluntary. One source. For an irreversible decision. In the same year, 45 people were found ineligible specifically because their request was determined to be the product of external pressure. Those are the cases where pressure was identified. The data offers no information about cases where it was not.

IV. Six Cases. Six Failure Modes. One System.

The following documented cases are not presented as representative of all MAiD provisions. Most people who access MAiD in Canada do so with genuine informed consent, in genuine irremediable suffering, with adequate assessment. The cases below document specific failure modes in a system without adequate mechanisms to detect or stop them.

Jolene Van Alstine, 45, Saskatchewan

Van Alstine has normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism — a rare but treatable parathyroid disease. The treatment is surgery. No Saskatchewan surgeon was available to perform it. To obtain a referral to an out-of-province specialist, she first needed an endocrinologist appointment in Saskatchewan. No Saskatchewan endocrinologist was accepting new patients. The system had produced a closed loop.

She was approved for MAiD. Her appointment was set for January 7, 2026. Her approval was later pulled on a procedural technicality. American broadcaster Glenn Beck saw coverage of her case on social media, contacted her husband, and arranged surgical consultations in Florida. As of January 2026, she was alive.

Her assessor, Dr. George Carson, confirmed to CBC News that the approval criteria were met. He did not establish that her condition was medically irremediable. He established that the Saskatchewan healthcare system had failed to treat it. Those are not the same thing, and the framework Canada built was supposed to require the distinction.

Kristin Logan, Campbell River, BC

Logan, a dual Canadian-American citizen and US Air Force veteran, was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. Per her husband Donovan James, Canadian doctors told her MAiD was her only option because they had no treatment available. A chemotherapy requisition was placed and then disappeared. She met her oncologist only by phone. She accessed treatment in Washington state under her US veteran benefits. She has since achieved multiple remissions.

Her own words: ‘How can you prioritize cases so that people with aggressive stage four cancer get seen by someone and when they do get seen, they get offered treatment and not MAID like I was the first time?’

Miriam Lancaster, 84, Vancouver

Lancaster was taken to Vancouver General Hospital with severe back pain. According to her and her daughter, the first thing a physician said was an offer of MAiD — before any diagnostic tests had been conducted. She declined. She was diagnosed with a fractured sacrum, a painful but treatable injury. She made a full recovery and climbed an active volcano in Guatemala in February 2026.

She later noted that her husband had also been offered MAiD at the same hospital ten days before his death from metastatic cancer in 2023 — also unsolicited.

Fr. Larry Holland, 79, Vancouver

Holland, a Catholic priest, was admitted to Vancouver General Hospital after fracturing his hip on Christmas Day 2025. He was not terminally ill. He was offered MAiD twice during his recovery — first by a physician, then weeks later by a nurse — despite having told staff he is a Catholic priest morally opposed to euthanasia.

Vancouver Coastal Health confirmed in writing that staff ‘may consider bringing up MAiD based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so.’ That written confirmation is the institutional anchor for a pattern that Lancaster, Holland, and Chilliwack patient Pat Gray all experienced at facilities in the same health authority catchment: not rogue physicians, but documented institutional policy producing documented outcomes.

The policy document behind that outcome is CAMAP’s guidance on ‘Bringing up Medical Assistance in Dying as a clinical care option,’ which explicitly instructs practitioners not to assume patients oppose MAiD because of their faith, citing Roman Catholic nuns as an example. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers is funded by Health Canada.

Kiano Vafaeian, 26, Ontario/BC

Vafaeian received MAiD on December 30, 2025 in Vancouver, after being denied multiple times in Ontario and traveling to British Columbia where he was approved under Track 2. He had Type 1 diabetes, partial vision loss, and a history of mental health struggles. His family was not informed of his approval; they learned of his death days later through estate paperwork.

University of Toronto law professor Trudo Lemmens stated the case raises serious questions about whether non-treating physicians can approve MAiD when the patient is clearly battling mental health issues. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of BC told the Globe and Mail it had never disciplined a doctor in relation to medically assisting someone’s death.

Thomas Dillon, 45, London, Ontario — and Dr. James MacLean

In June 2023, Dr. James MacLean assessed Thomas Dillon for MAiD outside a Tim Hortons in London, Ontario, after exchanging dozens of text messages with him. MacLean then drove Dillon personally to the location where MAiD was administered in January 2024. Dillon’s family was not informed. His sister had arrived at the Tim Hortons to accompany her brother; MacLean drove him instead.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario found that MacLean’s conduct crossed professional boundaries and risked appearing coercive. A broader review of his general practice found his conduct exposes or is likely to expose patients to harm or injury in five of twenty charts reviewed — a 25 percent harm rate. In a second case, MacLean failed to administer one of the three drugs used in assisted death; the patient resumed breathing after being pronounced dead. MacLean had already left.

The CPSO’s response: a minimum six-month supervision period beginning April 15, 2026. MacLean is permitted to continue providing MAiD throughout that supervision period.

Ontario’s MAiD Death Review Committee tracked 428 possible Criminal Code violations between 2018 and 2023. It referred zero to law enforcement. The MacLean case is what that zero looks like in practice.

Dr. Ramona Coelho, a member of the Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, responded to the MacLean findings with this: ‘What is striking is not only the seriousness of the concerns identified in these cases, but the limited regulatory response.’

V. The Psychiatric Frontier Canada Is Not Ready For

The AMAD committee has recommended that Parliament indefinitely exclude mental illness from MAiD eligibility. That recommendation is correct. The clinical infrastructure required to implement psychiatric MAiD safely does not exist. What the recommendation does not say — but what the evidence from those same AMAD hearings establishes — is that the accountability infrastructure required to implement the current system safely does not exist either.

Dr. Allison Crawford, chief medical officer of Canada’s 9-8-8 suicide crisis helpline, testified to AMAD that up to 7 percent of all interactions with the service involve mention of MAiD, and that 74 percent of those callers had experienced suicidal thoughts in the previous 48 hours. She stated there is currently no reliable clinical method to distinguish between suicidal intent and a reasoned wish to die in the context of psychiatric MAiD.

Dr. John Maher, Chief of Psychiatry at an Ontario hospital and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health, told AMAD he personally challenged an approval he believed was illegal — a patient with schizophrenia approved on the basis of a skin condition a dermatologist said could be treated with a cream, and a sore ankle. The patient was psychotic and delusional at the time. ‘People are clearly getting MAID for reasons that are frankly illegal,’ Maher told the committee.

Dr. Harvey Chochinov, one of Canada’s most respected palliative psychiatrists, testified that at least half the people who would die by MAiD for mental illness would have gotten better.

These are not positions from the fringes of the debate. They are the testimony of the government’s own expert witnesses, to the government’s own committee, about the government’s own system.

The Netherlands is frequently cited as evidence that psychiatric MAiD can be implemented safely. Dutch psychiatric euthanasia rose from 2 cases in 2011 to 219 in 2024, with a disproportionate increase among young adults and, more recently, minors — including an autistic teenager who described his life as joyless and had attempted suicide two years before being euthanized. Dr. Sonu Gaind, past president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, commented on that case: ‘The threshold for assisted death in Canada is actually lower than the Netherlands. If MAID for sole mental illness is opened up in Canada, the numbers would significantly exceed what you see in the Netherlands.’

That is the model jurisdiction telling Canada: we have gone further than you understand, and your system is built to go further still.

VI. Who Bears the Weight

Track 2 MAiD recipients in 2024 were 56.7 percent women, with a median age of 75.9 years, the majority living with conditions they had managed for more than a decade. Sixty-one percent self-identified as having a disability. Half reported feeling like a burden. Nearly half in Track 2 cited isolation or loneliness.

Senior women in Canada earn 26 percent less in retirement than senior men. Government transfers make up 43 percent of their total income. Twelve percent live in housing that is unaffordable or below acceptable standards. Women are twice as likely to work part-time, reducing their pension contributions across careers spent disproportionately in unpaid caregiving. They become the people with no one to care for them.

Ontario coroner data shows that people in the lowest material resource category make up 20 percent of the general population and 28.4 percent of Track 2 MAiD recipients. People in the worst housing instability category make up 34.3 percent of Track 1 deaths and 48.3 percent of Track 2.

The Lancet noted in 2024 that Canada does not require MAiD to be a last resort, and that women seek and receive psychiatric MAiD at two to three times the rate of men.

None of this requires that anyone in the system intended to harm elderly women. What it requires is that the system knows these facts — they are in its own annual reports — and has not structurally adapted to address them. The palliative care investment gap is undocumented at the federal level. The disability support crisis is noted in the data and unremedied in policy. The housing instability of Track 2 recipients is recorded and unaddressed. The law does not require MAiD to be a last resort. The expansion proceeds.

There is a version of targeting that does not require intent. It requires only that a system produce disproportionate harm to a specific population, have the data to show it, and decline to act. At some point, sustained inaction in the face of documented disparity becomes its own form of decision.

VII. What Today’s Report Does and Doesn’t Answer

The AMAD committee’s recommendation for indefinite exclusion of mental illness from MAiD is the right call. The clinical tools to assess irremediability in mental illness do not exist. The method to distinguish a suicidal crisis from a settled wish to die does not exist. CAMH itself, which provides capacity assessments for psychiatric MAiD, has stated that no reliable method exists to make that distinction. Proceeding without those tools on a fixed political timeline would be, in Dr. Maher’s word, reckless.

But here is what the recommendation does not do: it does not address the 428 Criminal Code violations Ontario tracked and did not refer. It does not address the Tim Hortons assessment, the six-month supervision, the continued provision. It does not address Jolene Van Alstine’s closed referral loop, Kristin Logan’s lost chemotherapy requisition, Miriam Lancaster’s unsolicited emergency room offer, Fr. Larry Holland’s twice-repeated offer during hip fracture recovery. It does not address the Track 2 palliative care rate that fell from 29.6 to 23.2 percent in a single year while the program expanded.

If Parliament wants to invoke the notwithstanding clause — which CBC News has reported is under consideration, and which would mark the first time the federal government has used that override in 44 years of Charter history — to protect an indefinite exclusion from constitutional challenge, that may be necessary. But a clause protecting the exclusion does not build the accountability infrastructure the system already lacks.

Dr. Ramona Coelho, writing in The Hill Times on May 20, framed it precisely: ‘Suffering is shaped not only by illness, but also by trauma, poverty, isolation, and lack of access to care. The ethical obligation of medicine is to respond to that complexity with treatment, supports, and time. Yet assisted death is already occurring in cases where suffering is driven by unmet medical needs, psychiatric illness, trauma, isolation, and socioeconomic vulnerability.’

And then: ‘Pausing the practice for mental illness should only be the start.’

The committee has recommended the start. The country has not yet begun the conversation about what comes after it.

VIII. The Line Canada Said It Would Never Cross

I support assisted dying. I support the right of a competent person in genuine irremediable suffering to choose death with dignity, in a system that has genuinely tried everything else. I supported it when Carter was decided. I supported it when Bill C-14 passed ten years ago today.

What I cannot support is the system Canada has built to administer that right.

A system with a 78 percent approval rate is not carefully assessing whether each request meets a rigorous standard. A system that processes death in 13 days while rehabilitation waits 30 weeks has not equalized its options. A system that tracked 428 possible Criminal Code violations and referred zero to law enforcement does not take its own rules seriously. A system that allowed a physician to assess a patient at a Tim Hortons, drive him to his death, leave a second patient breathing after pronouncing him dead, and receive six months of supervised practice as a consequence — while continuing to provide MAiD throughout — has not built a gate. It has built a door.

The promise that made MAiD acceptable was that it would be the last resort of a system that had exhausted every other option. Canada has not exhausted its options. It has underfunded them, understaffed them, and made them inaccessible. Then it built a process that moves from request to death in 13 days and called it compassion.

Ten years in, 100,000 deaths later, on the day a parliamentary committee recommended the first structural limitation the program has ever received, the question is not whether to pause the expansion. The question is whether Canada is willing to hold the system it already has to the standard it promised.

The evidence says it has not been. The evidence also says it could be. That distinction is the only thing that separates a program worth defending from one that has quietly become something else.

Key Statistics — Health Canada Annual Reports

Editor’s Notes and Sources

This investigation is built on primary government sources. The statistical spine is Health Canada’s Fifth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (2023 data, published December 2024) and Sixth Annual Report (2024 data, published November 2025), available at canada.ca. All percentages and case volumes cited are from these primary documents unless otherwise noted.

Case file sources:

Jolene Van Alstine: CBC News (Dec 10, 2025); Global News; CTV News Regina; Toronto Sun; CBN News (Jan 9, 2026). Assessor Dr. George Carson’s comments confirmed on record to CBC.

Kristin Logan / Donovan James: Global News; Campbell River Mirror. Core narrative confirmed by Global News; social media updates not independently verified and not cited.

Miriam Lancaster: National Post (Sharon Kirkey, March 27, 2026). Account based on patient and family statements; no independent regulatory investigation findings have been publicly reported.

Fr. Larry Holland: BC Catholic (primary — official media of the Archdiocese of Vancouver); Catholic Register (corroborating); Vancouver Coastal Health written statement (institutional anchor).

Kiano Vafaeian: Globe and Mail (Feb 6, 2026); Global News (Jan 30, 2026). CPSO statement confirmed. Family allegations regarding coached testimony denied by Dr. Wiebe.

Thomas Dillon / Dr. James MacLean: Globe and Mail (broke the story); National Post (Sharon Kirkey); CPSO regulatory findings (public document). Dr. Coelho response on record.

AMAD committee testimony: Dr. Crawford, Dr. Maher, Dr. Mishara, Dr. Chochinov, and Dr. Gupta testified before the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying in spring 2026. Testimony citations should be verified against Hansard transcripts at parl.ca before publication. Secondary reproduction via regional press (Peace Arch News, Black Press regional syndication) and advocacy outlets used for sourcing notes in the research brief; Hansard is the citable primary source.

AMAD committee report, June 17, 2026: CBC News (Jennifer La Grassa, Olivia Stefanovich, Raffy Boudjikanian); Globe and Mail. The committee’s formal written report is the primary document and should be obtained directly from parl.ca.

Parliamentary Budget Office cost estimates: PBO, Costing Bill C-7: An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Medical Assistance in Dying), October 2020. Peer-reviewed cost literature: Trachtenberg & Manns, CMAJ, 2017; Jamil & Pearce, OMEGA Journal, February 2025.

Ontario violation tracking: Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee Reports (2024–2025), confirmed via The New Atlantis / leaked Ontario compliance data (February 2025).

Dr. Coelho quotation: ‘MAID committee hearings exposed a deeper problem,’ The Hill Times, May 20, 2026, via Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Dr. Sonu Gaind quotation: National Post (Sharon Kirkey), March 23, 2026.

CAMAP guidance document: ‘Bringing up Medical Assistance in Dying as a clinical care option,’ publicly available via CAMAP’s website. Funding relationship with Health Canada confirmed via Health Canada grant records.

Notwithstanding clause consideration: CBC News (June 16, 2026).

Gender analysis data: Women and Gender Equality Canada, December 2025; Ontario Human Rights Commission; LEAF, 2023; Lancet Regional Health — Americas, June 2024; Ontario coroner data via The Conversation, October 2024.

Dutch data: Netherlands Regional Euthanasia Review Committees Annual Report 2025.

The Old Guardian is an independent investigative journalism outlet. Investigations are built on primary government sources, peer-reviewed literature, and documented case files. Secondary and advocacy sources are not cited as primary evidence. This editorial represents the views of the author.

It started with life lessons. Things learned the hard way, written down because they deserved to exist somewhere other than the back of my mind. Short dispatches. Did you know entries. The kind of writing that doesn’t have a category but needs to happen anyway.

Then the tools got better. The research got deeper. And the first real investigation published — and something shifted.

It started with a gesture.

When Elon Musk made what many immediately labeled a Nazi salute at a public event, the internet split in two directions within minutes. One side condemned it without question. The other defended it without question. Neither side waited for evidence.

TOG waited.

The investigation went where the evidence led — not where the outrage pointed. What emerged wasn’t a simple verdict in either direction. It was something more useful: a case study in how narrative gets weaponized before the facts have had a chance to breathe. How a moment gets seized, shaped, and deployed by both sides in service of conclusions that were already written before anyone looked closely.

That piece set the template. Follow the evidence. Challenge the frame. Don’t arrive at the destination before you’ve made the trip.

One piece became five. Five became twenty. Twenty became a hundred.

Nobody plans to become a watchdog. You just start paying attention, and eventually you can’t stop.

Looking back across 100 pieces, one pattern emerges that I didn’t anticipate when I started. It runs through the TDSB investigations, through Rogers, through reproductive rights, through Ukraine, through every institution and government file TOG has ever opened.

Overreach.

Not corruption in the classic sense — not always envelopes of cash or obvious crimes. Something subtler and in many ways more dangerous. Institutions, governments, and individuals quietly assuming authority that was never theirs to take. Reaching for what they shouldn’t have. Counting on the fact that nobody is reading the filings, watching the votes, or following the money.

TOG reads the filings.

The Moment It Got Real

There’s a moment in every serious endeavor where you stop doing the thing and realize you are the thing.

Mine came with Lahaina.

I filed my first FOIAs — Freedom of Information requests — using anonymous channels, pushing against a government apparatus that had every institutional reason not to respond. I’m a regular person. Day job. Family. Forty-plus hours a week before TOG gets a single minute of my time.

And there I was, going after information the government doesn’t necessarily want the public to have.

It wasn’t the response that crystallized it. It was the act. The moment I pushed back and the machine pushed back harder — that’s when I understood what this was. Not a hobby. Not a blog. A function. Something that needed to exist because the alternative is silence, and silence is data.

That’s the line TOG has operated on ever since.

One Thread. Many Faces.

A hundred pieces across dozens of topics looks scattered from the outside. TDSB trustees. Rogers Communications. Roblox. Reproductive rights. Ukraine. Palm oil. Forced labour supply chains. Men’s mental health. Lahaina.

What connects them isn’t geography or sector or political category. It’s the same disease wearing different clothes.

Overreach.

Provincial interference treating public school land — land held in trust for children — as an asset to be leveraged by Queen’s Park for interests that have nothing to do with education, while the trustees whose job is to protect that land find themselves systematically undermined. Rogers operating as though market dominance is a substitute for accountability. Governments legislating at the edges of their mandate and counting on public exhaustion to cover the distance.

The Roblox investigation revealed something that still sits heavily — a system architecture that allows child predators to operate with near impunity, and a corporation that knows it. The reporting didn’t come from insider access or leaked documents. It came from surface-level news reports and concerned parents run through a rigorous analytical framework. What emerged was a pattern the company had every reason to obscure and every ability to fix.

They hadn’t fixed it.

That’s overreach of a different kind — not the reach for power, but the reach for profit over protection. The calculus that treats harm as an acceptable variable.

Across every file TOG has opened, the question underneath the question is always the same: who decided they were entitled to this, and what were they counting on to get away with it?

Usually the answer is: they were counting on nobody looking.

What I’ve Been Called

In 100 pieces I have yet to be pushed back on in good faith.

Not once has someone engaged the methodology, challenged a source, or offered a counter-argument built on evidence. What I’ve received instead is a taxonomy of labels: right wing, propaganda, fascist, Nazi, slop.

When I reported on the release of a convicted child predator — his sentence had been served, the system released him, that’s how it works — people in that thread turned on me. The label they reached for was child predator sympathizer.

Let that land for a moment.

I reported a legal fact. A sentence ended. An institutional process concluded. I didn’t editorialize. I didn’t defend the man. I stated what happened.

The outrage didn’t go toward the system that released him. It came at me for noting it.

That’s not criticism — that’s deflection. Discomfort with reality redirected at the person reporting it. And it is itself a data point about exactly the kind of reflexive, evidence-free reaction TOG exists to cut through.

What I’ve observed is that cutting truth gets labeled as right wing by those who’ve drifted far enough left that objectivity reads as opposition. The truth lands as a lie because it doesn’t confirm what they already believe.

My read on them is this: they’re asleep. Inured to the system. Defending a glass house of cards that doesn’t need their protection — because it was never strong enough to stand on its own. They just haven’t looked at it closely enough to know that yet.

TOG looks closely. That’s the job.

I’ll also say this plainly: I have not yet had a solid barometer of correctness because no one has offered one. I remain open to good faith challenge. The North Star doesn’t move for comfort — but it moves for evidence. Bring evidence and we’ll have a conversation.

The Machine. The Ledger. What’s Next.

The Iron Ledger — TOG’s long-term accountability archive — is active.

The TDSB investigation is not closed. The Rogers file is not closed. There are threads in the ledger that have been running quietly for months, waiting for the evidence to reach the threshold that earns publication. That threshold exists for a reason. Faith-level material stays internal. Evidence gets monitored. Proof gets published.

That’s the discipline that separates accountability journalism from noise.

What’s coming won’t be announced prematurely. The North Star governs what gets published, not what gets promised. But the machine is running. The signal is clean. And the pattern that emerged across the first 100 pieces hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s gotten clearer.

Overreach doesn’t stop because someone is watching. But it gets harder to hide.

To The Reader

There are a few of you who have been here since close to the beginning. Who read without performing. Who share quietly. Who come back.

You are not the loudest part of this audience. You never are. But you are the reason the function exists beyond my own compulsion to follow the truth wherever it goes.

This work costs time. It costs the hours between the day job and sleep, the weekends that could be something else, the mental real estate that once occupied gets hard to vacate. I still spend time with my family. I haven’t lost perspective on what matters. But I won’t pretend this is effortless — because pretending serves no one.

What keeps the machine running isn’t momentum or audience size or milestone numbers.

It’s that truth compels me. Productively.

One hundred pieces in, that hasn’t changed.

The Old Guardian continues.

Truth over narrative. Always.