Business
The Health Research Funding Scandal Costing Canadians Billions is Parading in Plain View

Why Can’t We See the Canadian Institutes for Health Research-Funded Research We Pay For?
Right off the top I should acknowledge that a lot of the research funded by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) is creative, rigorous, and valuable. No matter which academic category I looked at during my explorations, at least a few study titles sparked a strong “well it’s about time” reaction.
But two things dampen my enthusiasm:
- Precious few of the more than 39,000 studies funded by CIHR since 2011 are available to the public. We’re generally permitted to see no more than brief and incomplete descriptions – and sometimes not even that.
- There’s often no visible evidence that the research ever actually took place. Considering how more than $16 billion in taxpayer funds has been spent on those studies over the past 13 years, that’s not a good thing.
If you’ve been reading The Audit for a while, you know that I’ll often identify systems that appear vulnerable to abuse. As a rule though, I’m reluctant to invoke the “s” word. But here’s one place where I can think of no better description: the vacuum where CIHR compliance and enforcement should be is a national scandal.
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I’ve touched on these things before. And even in that earlier post I acknowledged how:
…as a country, we have an interest in investing in industry sectors where there’s a potential for high growth and where releasing proprietary secrets can be counter productive.
So we shouldn’t expect access to the full results of every single study. But that’s surely not true for the majority of research. And there’s absolutely no reason that CIHR shouldn’t provide evidence that something (anything!) productive was actually done with our money.
Because a well-chosen example can sometimes tell the story better than huge numbers, I’ll focus on one particular study in just a moment. But for context, here are some huge numbers. What follows is an AI-powered breakdown by topic of all 39,751 research grants awarded by CIHR since 2011:
Those numbers shouldn’t be taken as anything close to authoritative. The federal government data doesn’t provide even minimal program descriptions for many of the grants it covers. And many descriptions that are there contain meaningless boilerplate text. That’s why the “Other – Uncategorized” category represents 72 percent of all award dollars.
Ok. Let’s get to our in-the-weeds-level example. In March 2016, Greta R. Bauer and Margaret L. Lawson (principal investigators) won a $1,280,540 grant to study “Transgender youth in clinical care: A pan-Canadian cohort study of medical, social and family outcomes”.
Now that looks like vital and important research. This is especially true in light of recent bans on clinical transgender care for minors in many European countries following the release of the U.K.’s Cass report. Dr. Cass found that such treatment involved unacceptable health risks when weighed against poorly defined benefits.
A website associated with the Bauer-Lawson study (transyouthcan.ca) provides a brief update:
As of December of 2021, we have completed all of our planned 2-year follow up data collection. We want to say thanks so much to all our participants who have continued to share their information with us over these past years! We have been hard at work turning data into research results.
And then things get weird. That page leads to a link to another page containing study results, but that one doesn’t load due to an internal server error.
Before we move on, I should note that I come across a LOT of research-related web pages on potentially controversial topics that suddenly go off-line or unexpectedly retire behind pay walls. Those could, of course, just be a series of unfortunate coincidences. But I’ve seen so many such coincidences that it’s beginning to look more like a pattern.
The good news is that earlier versions of those lost pages are nearly always available through the Internet Archive’s WayBackMachine. And frankly, the stuff I find in those earlier versions is often much more – educational – than whatever intentional updates would show me.
In the case of transyouthcan.ca, archived versions included a valid link to a brief PDF document addressing external stressors (which were NOT the primary focus of the original grant application). That PDF includes an interesting acknowledgment:
This project is being paid for by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). This study is being done by a team of gender-affirming doctors and researchers who have many years of experience doing community-based trans research. Our team includes people who are also parents of trans children, trans adults, and allied researchers with a long history of working to support trans communities.
As most of the participants appear to have financial and professional interests in the research outcome, I can’t avoid wondering whether there might be at least the appearance of bias.
In any case, that’s where the evidence trail stopped. I couldn’t find any references to study results or even to the publication of a related academic paper. And it’s not like the lead investigators lack access to journals. Greta Bauer, for example, has 79 papers listed on PubMed – but none of them related directly to this study topic.
What happened here? Did the authors just walk off with $1.2 million of taxpayer funding? Did they do the research but then change their minds about publishing when the results came in because they don’t fit a preferred narrative?
But the darker question is why no one at CIHR appears to be even mildly curious about this story – and about many thousands of others that might be out there. Who’s in charge?
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Business
Hudson’s Bay Bid Raises Red Flags Over Foreign Influence

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
A billionaire’s retail ambition might also serve Beijing’s global influence strategy. Canada must look beyond the storefront
When B.C. billionaire Weihong Liu publicly declared interest in acquiring Hudson’s Bay stores, it wasn’t just a retail story—it was a signal flare in an era where foreign investment increasingly doubles as geopolitical strategy.
The Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670, remains an enduring symbol of Canadian heritage. While its commercial relevance has waned in recent years, its brand is deeply etched into the national identity. That’s precisely why any potential acquisition, particularly by an investor with strong ties to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), deserves thoughtful, measured scrutiny.
Liu, a prominent figure in Vancouver’s Chinese-Canadian business community, announced her interest in acquiring several Hudson’s Bay stores on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (RedNote), expressing a desire to “make the Bay great again.” Though revitalizing a Canadian retail icon may seem commendable, the timing and context of this bid suggest a broader strategic positioning—one that aligns with the People’s Republic of China’s increasingly nuanced approach to economic diplomacy, especially in countries like Canada that sit at the crossroads of American and Chinese spheres of influence.
This fits a familiar pattern. In recent years, we’ve seen examples of Chinese corporate involvement in Canadian cultural and commercial institutions, such as Huawei’s past sponsorship of Hockey Night in Canada. Even as national security concerns were raised by allies and intelligence agencies, Huawei’s logo remained a visible presence during one of the country’s most cherished broadcasts. These engagements, though often framed as commercially justified, serve another purpose: to normalize Chinese brand and state-linked presence within the fabric of Canadian identity and daily life.
What we may be witnessing is part of a broader PRC strategy to deepen economic and cultural ties with Canada at a time when U.S.-China relations remain strained. As American tariffs on Canadian goods—particularly in aluminum, lumber and dairy—have tested cross-border loyalties, Beijing has positioned itself as an alternative economic partner. Investments into cultural and heritage-linked assets like Hudson’s Bay could be seen as a symbolic extension of this effort to draw Canada further into its orbit of influence, subtly decoupling the country from the gravitational pull of its traditional allies.
From my perspective, as a professional with experience in threat finance, economic subversion and political leveraging, this does not necessarily imply nefarious intent in each case. However, it does demand a conscious awareness of how soft power is exercised through commercial influence, particularly by state-aligned actors. As I continue my research in international business law, I see how investment vehicles, trade deals and brand acquisitions can function as instruments of foreign policy—tools for shaping narratives, building alliances and shifting influence over time.
Canada must neither overreact nor overlook these developments. Open markets and cultural exchange are vital to our prosperity and pluralism. But so too is the responsibility to preserve our sovereignty—not only in the physical sense, but in the cultural and institutional dimensions that shape our national identity.
Strategic investment review processes, cultural asset protections and greater transparency around foreign corporate ownership can help strike this balance. We should be cautious not to allow historically Canadian institutions to become conduits, however unintentionally, for geopolitical leverage.
In a world where power is increasingly exercised through influence rather than force, safeguarding our heritage means understanding who is buying—and why.
Scott McGregor is the managing partner and CEO of Close Hold Intelligence Consulting.
Bjorn Lomborg
Net zero’s cost-benefit ratio is crazy high

From the Fraser Institute
The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.
Canada has made a legal commitment to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. Back in 2015, then-Prime Minister Trudeau promised that climate action will “create jobs and economic growth” and the federal government insists it will create a “strong economy.” The truth is that the net zero policy generates vast costs and very little benefit—and Canada would be better off changing direction.
Achieving net zero carbon emissions is far more daunting than politicians have ever admitted. Canada is nowhere near on track. Annual Canadian CO₂ emissions have increased 20 per cent since 1990. In the time that Trudeau was prime minister, fossil fuel energy supply actually increased over 11 per cent. Similarly, the share of fossil fuels in Canada’s total energy supply (not just electricity) increased from 75 per cent in 2015 to 77 per cent in 2023.
Over the same period, the switch from coal to gas, and a tiny 0.4 percentage point increase in the energy from solar and wind, has reduced annual CO₂ emissions by less than three per cent. On that trend, getting to zero won’t take 25 years as the Liberal government promised, but more than 160 years. One study shows that the government’s current plan which won’t even reach net-zero will cost Canada a quarter of a million jobs, seven per cent lower GDP and wages on average $8,000 lower.
Globally, achieving net-zero will be even harder. Remember, Canada makes up about 1.5 per cent of global CO₂ emissions, and while Canada is already rich with plenty of energy, the world’s poor want much more energy.
In order to achieve global net-zero by 2050, by 2030 we would already need to achieve the equivalent of removing the combined emissions of China and the United States — every year. This is in the realm of science fiction.
The painful Covid lockdowns of 2020 only reduced global emissions by about six per cent. To achieve net zero, the UN points out that we would need to have doubled those reductions in 2021, tripled them in 2022, quadrupled them in 2023, and so on. This year they would need to be sextupled, and by 2030 increased 11-fold. So far, the world hasn’t even managed to start reducing global carbon emissions, which last year hit a new record.
Data from both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration give added cause for skepticism. Both organizations foresee the world getting more energy from renewables: an increase from today’s 16 per cent to between one-quarter to one-third of all primary energy by 2050. But that is far from a transition. On an optimistically linear trend, this means we’re a century or two away from achieving 100 percent renewables.
Politicians like to blithely suggest the shift away from fossil fuels isn’t unprecedented, because in the past we transitioned from wood to coal, from coal to oil, and from oil to gas. The truth is, humanity hasn’t made a real energy transition even once. Coal didn’t replace wood but mostly added to global energy, just like oil and gas have added further additional energy. As in the past, solar and wind are now mostly adding to our global energy output, rather than replacing fossil fuels.
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that even after two centuries, humanity’s transition away from wood is not over. More than two billion mostly poor people still depend on wood for cooking and heating, and it still provides about 5 per cent of global energy.
Like Canada, the world remains fossil fuel-based, as it delivers more than four-fifths of energy. Over the last half century, our dependence has declined only slightly from 87 per cent to 82 per cent, but in absolute terms we have increased our fossil fuel use by more than 150 per cent. On the trajectory since 1971, we will reach zero fossil fuel use some nine centuries from now, and even the fastest period of recent decline from 2014 would see us taking over three centuries.
Global warming will create more problems than benefits, so achieving net-zero would see real benefits. Over the century, the average person would experience benefits worth $700 (CAD) each year.
But net zero policies will be much more expensive. The best academic estimates show that over the century, policies to achieve net zero would cost every person on Earth the equivalent of more than CAD $4,000 every year. Of course, most people in poor countries cannot afford anywhere near this. If the cost falls solely on the rich world, the price-tag adds up to almost $30,000 (CAD) per person, per year, over the century.
Every year over the 21st century, costs would vastly outweigh benefits, and global costs would exceed benefits by over CAD 32 trillion each year.
We would see much higher transport costs, higher electricity costs, higher heating and cooling costs and — as businesses would also have to pay for all this — drastic increases in the price of food and all other necessities. Just one example: net-zero targets would likely increase gas costs some two-to-four times even by 2030, costing consumers up to $US52.6 trillion. All that makes it a policy that just doesn’t make sense—for Canada and for the world.
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