Frontier Centre for Public Policy
A letter to five Canadian Churches

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
Two years ago, Eric Metaxas, the conservative Christian American author wrote a short, but important, book addressing the American Church. He was concerned the churches were forsaking their Christian principles in not speaking out against the anti-Christian ideologies and practices occurring throughout the U.S.
My letter is limited to admonishing the Canadian churches involved with Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. These churches have not spoken out in support of the missionaries they commissioned to work in these schools, people who poured their lives into their work, and who have been wrongly accused of abusing and murdering residential school children.
Obviously, those employees who are guilty should be condemned and punished, but those who are innocent should not be falsely accused of perpetrating horrific crimes.
Between 1883 and 1996, there were 143 Indian Residential Schools included in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a complex agreement between various Indigenous groups, the federal government, and the churches that managed residential schools.
The Roman Catholic Church managed 62 (43.4%) of the schools, the Church of England (Anglican) managed 35 (24.5%), the United Church (including the denominations that joined together in 1925) managed 19 (13.3%), the Mennonite Church managed 3 (2.1%), and the Baptist Church managed 1 (0.6%) residential school. The federal and territorial governments managed the remaining 23 (16.1%) schools.
There are four historical points to be reviewed.
First, in May 2021, Rosanne Casimer, Chief of the Kamloops Band, announced that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had found 215 unmarked graves of children in the residential schoolyard.
Surprisingly, this was the first public report suggesting that children buried in residential schoolyards had been murdered. There is, however, no credible evidence of murdered residential school children in the 3,500-page Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report which was published 6 years earlier.
Second, despite being absent from the TRC’s “Calls to Action,” the federal government has awarded almost $8 million to the Kamloops band to excavate part of the schoolyard, and set aside over $300 million for other bands to search for soil anomalies or presumed graves.
Third, as expected with such strong incentives, many other bands have claimed that they too have graves of missing and presumed murdered children buried in the schoolyards on their reserves.
Finally, in an impressive gesture of support, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau knelt beside a grave in a well-known cemetery with a teddy bear in his hand decrying the genocide perpetrated by the churches. Later, he had the Canadian flags at government buildings around the world flown at half-mast for 6 months so that both Canadians and citizens of the world would mourn this Canadian tragedy.
Since the spring of 2021, almost 100 Christian churches have been vandalized, desecrated, or set on fire, supposedly because of the “genocide” that had taken place at the sites of Indian Residential Schools. Sadly, some of these churches, the Lutheran and Orthodox churches, for example, did not manage any of the schools.
No doubt, most Canadians are thankful there is no forensic evidence that children have been murdered and buried in schoolyards. Of course, there are children’s bodies in parish cemeteries that are often close to the schools, but most of them died of communicable diseases like influenza and TB, and they have been given proper funerals.
My concern is that over the last three years, the five churches that managed Indian Residential Schools have said little or nothing to defend themselves or the staff they commissioned to work in the schools.
In a time of need, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Christians stepped forward to care for children living in residential schools. But the churches have not stepped forward to defend their staff in their time of need. These people are getting old, and they need support now. Instead, the churches have abandoned, or worse, condemned their faithful employees for abusing children.
Equally surprising, no church leader has supported the fundamental principle of Canadian law: individuals (and churches) are considered innocent until they are proven guilty.
It grieves me, and the few other living residential school employees, that our churches have not publically supported their innocent employees. Surely, they have a moral obligation to ensure that truth and justice prevail.
Eric Metaxas has tried to awaken American churches by pointing out where they have gone wrong. Should we not try to awaken Canadian churches to defend their involvement in Indian residential schools?
Is it too much to suggest that the church leaders think back to lessons learned from Martin Luther King Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who stood up for Christian principles against the evil practice of dehumanizing people—Blacks in the U.S. and Jews in Europe?
Not only will these churches be judged by the moral and ethical lessons they preach, but, more importantly, by the principles they live by. Canadians will see the true values of church leaders in their actions, especially concerning those they commissioned to work in their schools.
Rodney A. Clifton lived for 4 months in Old Sun, the Anglican residential school on the Siksika (Blackfoot) First Nation during the summer of 1966, and he was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residential hostel in Inuvik during the 1966-67 school year. He is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His most recent book, with Mark DeWolf, is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. The book will be out on November 5, and it can be preordered from the publisher.
Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. He lived for four months in Old Sun, the Anglican Residential School on the Blackfoot (Siksika) First Nation, and was the Senior Boys’ Supervisor in Stringer Hall, the Anglican residence in Inuvik. Rodney Clifton and Mark DeWolf are the editors of From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021). A second and expanded edition of this book will be published in early 2024.
Business
Ottawa’s Plastics Registry A Waste Of Time And Money

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Lee Harding warns that Ottawa’s new Federal Plastics Registry (FPR) may be the most intrusive, bureaucratic burden yet. Targeting everything from electronics to fishing gear, the FPR requires businesses to track and report every gram of plastic they use, sell, or dispose of—even if plastic is incidental to their operations. Harding argues this isn’t about waste; it’s about control. And with phase one due in 2025, companies are already overwhelmed by confusion, cost, and compliance.
Businesses face sweeping reporting demands under the new Federal Plastics Registry
Canadian businesses already dealing with inflation, labour shortages and tariff uncertainties now face a new challenge courtesy of their own federal government: the Federal Plastics Registry (FPR). Manufacturers are probably using a different F-word than “federal” to describe it.
The registry is part of Ottawa’s push to monitor and eventually reduce plastic waste by collecting detailed data from companies that make, use or dispose of plastics.
Ottawa didn’t need new legislation to impose this. On Dec. 30, 2023, the federal government issued a notice of intent to create the registry under the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act. A final notice followed on April 20, 2024.
According to the FPR website, companies, including resin manufacturers, plastic producers and service providers, must report annually to Environment Canada. Required disclosures include the quantity and types of plastics they manufacture, import and place on the market. They must also report how much plastic is collected and diverted, reused, repaired, remanufactured, refurbished, recycled, turned into chemicals, composted, incinerated or sent to landfill.
It ties into Canada’s larger Zero Plastic Waste agenda, a strategy to eliminate plastic waste by 2030.
Even more troubling is the breadth of plastic subcategories affected: electronic and electrical equipment, tires, vehicles, construction materials, agricultural and fishing gear, clothing, carpets and disposable items. In practice, this means that even businesses whose core products aren’t plastic—like farmers, retailers or construction firms—could be swept into the reporting requirements.
Plastics are in nearly everything, and now businesses must report everything about them, regardless of whether plastic is central to their business or incidental.
The FPR website says the goal is to collect “meaningful and standardized data, from across the country, on the flow of plastic from production to its end-of-life management.” That information will “inform and measure performance… of various measures that are part of Canada’s zero plastic waste agenda.” Its stated purpose is to “keep plastics in the economy and out of the environment.”
But here’s the problem: the government’s zero plastic waste goal is an illusion. It would require every plastic item to last forever or never exist in the first place, leaving businesses with an impossible task: stay profitable while meeting these demands.
To help navigate the maze, international consultancy Reclay StewardEdge recently held a webinar for Canadian companies. The discussion was revealing.
Reclay lead consultant Maanik Bagai said the FPR is without precedent. “It really surpasses whatever we have seen so far across the world. I would say it is unprecedented in nature. And obviously this is really going to be tricky,” he said.
Mike Cuma, Reclay’s senior manager of marketing and communications, added that the government’s online compliance instructions aren’t particularly helpful.
“There’s a really, really long list of kind of how to do it. It’s not particularly user-friendly in our experience,” Cuma said. “If you still have questions, if it still seems confusing, perhaps complex, we agree with you. That’s normal, I think, at this point—even just on the basic stuff of what needs to be reported, where, when, why. Don’t worry, you’re not alone in that feeling at all.”
The first reporting deadline, for 2024 data, is Sept. 29, 2025. Cuma warned that businesses should “start now”—and some “should maybe have started a couple months ago.”
Whether companies manage this in-house or outsource to consultants, they will incur significant costs in both time and money. September marks the first phase of four, with each future stage becoming more extensive and restrictive.
Plastics are petroleum products—and like oil and gas, they’re being demonized. The FPR looks less like environmental stewardship and more like an attempt to regulate and monitor a vast swath of the economy.
A worse possibility? That it’s a test run for a broader agenda—top-down oversight of every product from cradle to grave.
While seemingly unrelated, the FPR and other global initiatives reflect a growing trend toward comprehensive monitoring of products from creation to disposal.
This isn’t speculation. A May 2021 article on the World Economic Forum (WEF) website spotlighted a New York-based start-up, Eon, which created a platform to track fashion items through their life cycles. Called Connected Products, the platform gives each fashion item a digital birth certificate detailing when and where it was made, and from what. It then links to a digital twin and a digital passport that follows the product through use, reuse and disposal.
The goal, according to WEF, is to reduce textile waste and production, and thereby cut water usage. But the underlying principle—surveillance in the name of sustainability—has a much broader application.
Free markets and free people build prosperity, but some elites won’t leave us alone. They envision a future where everything is tracked, regulated and justified by the supposed need to “save the planet.”
So what if plastic eventually returns to the earth it came from? Its disposability is its virtue. And while we’re at it, let’s bury the Federal Plastics Registry and its misguided mandates with it—permanently.
Lee Harding is a research associate for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Business
It Took Trump To Get Canada Serious About Free Trade With Itself

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
Trump’s protectionism has jolted Canada into finally beginning to tear down interprovincial trade barriers
The threat of Donald Trump’s tariffs and the potential collapse of North American free trade have prompted Canada to look inward. With international trade under pressure, the country is—at last—taking meaningful steps to improve trade within its borders.
Canada’s Constitution gives provinces control over many key economic levers. While Ottawa manages international trade, the provinces regulate licensing, certification and procurement rules. These fragmented regulations have long acted as internal trade barriers, forcing companies and professionals to navigate duplicate approval processes when operating across provincial lines.
These restrictions increase costs, delay projects and limit job opportunities for businesses and workers. For consumers, they mean higher prices and fewer choices. Economists estimate that these barriers hold back up to $200 billion of Canada’s economy annually, roughly eight per cent of the country’s GDP.
Ironically, it wasn’t until after Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement that it began to address domestic trade restrictions. In 1994, the first ministers signed the Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT), committing to equal treatment of bidders on provincial and municipal contracts. Subsequent regional agreements, such as Alberta and British Columbia’s Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement in 2007, and the New West Partnership that followed, expanded cooperation to include broader credential recognition and enforceable dispute resolution.
In 2017, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA) replaced the AIT to streamline trade among provinces and territories. While more ambitious in scope, the CFTA’s effectiveness has been limited by a patchwork of exemptions and slow implementation.
Now, however, Trump’s protectionism has reignited momentum to fix the problem. In recent months, provincial and territorial labour market ministers met with their federal counterpart to strengthen the CFTA. Their goal: to remove longstanding barriers and unlock the full potential of Canada’s internal market.
According to a March 5 CFTA press release, five governments have agreed to eliminate 40 exemptions they previously claimed for themselves. A June 1 deadline has been set to produce an action plan for nationwide mutual recognition of professional credentials. Ministers are also working on the mutual recognition of consumer goods, excluding food, so that if a product is approved for sale in one province, it can be sold anywhere in Canada without added red tape.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has signalled that his province won’t wait for consensus. Ontario is dropping all its CFTA exemptions, allowing medical professionals to begin practising while awaiting registration with provincial regulators.
Ontario has partnered with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to implement mutual recognition of goods, services and registered workers. These provinces have also enabled direct-to-consumer alcohol sales, letting individuals purchase alcohol directly from producers for personal consumption.
A joint CFTA statement says other provinces intend to follow suit, except Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.
These developments are long overdue. Confederation happened more than 150 years ago, and prohibition ended more than a century ago, yet Canadians still face barriers when trying to buy a bottle of wine from another province or find work across a provincial line.
Perhaps now, Canada will finally become the economic union it was always meant to be. Few would thank Donald Trump, but without his tariffs, this renewed urgency to break down internal trade barriers might never have emerged.
Lee Harding is a research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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