Canada should get a DOGE, but not the one you think

Instead of naively gutting the government, we should be making it work

Newfoundland dog riding moose with parliament buildings in background

As hard as it may be to find wisdom south of the border right now, there is wisdom to be found even in unwise places. But you’re not going to find it by paying close attention to the usual commentary from the Canadian right and left about DOGE—the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency—an Elon Musk-run initiative to cut government spending and eliminate red tape. 

While right-wing voices are calling for Canada to stand up its own DOGE, left-wing voices are shuddering at the thought. Since DOGE has been let off its leash, so many American public servants have lost their jobs that home prices in Washington, D.C., are falling. Programs critical to U.S. foreign policy, such as USAID, have been immobilized overnight. Now DOGE is targeting the big consulting firms, such as Accenture and Deloitte, who have been asked to justify their billion-dollar contracts with the American government by the end of the week.

In polite and moderate Canada, the truth is somewhere in the middle. There is nothing wrong with holding the government accountable. But after witnessing Musk’s wanton destruction of the American state, it’s prudent to ask: accountability to what end? What Canada lacks most is not freedom from an expensive and meddling government; it is the state capacity to make certain parts of the government work at all.

So we should consider creating a Canadian DOGE. But our ‘E’ should stand for effectiveness, rather than efficiency. 

There is no better case study for why we need an effectiveness-hungry DOGE than our track record on combating financial crime. Dealing with president Donald Trump’s fentanyl theatre would have been easier if we had the state capacity to prevent our biggest banks from becoming vaults of dirty money. U.S. regulators proved to have a little more capacity when they caught and fined TD Bank $3 billion for money laundering failures, which included doing business with fentanyl traffickers. 

Canada is the “snow-washing” capital of the world because our institutions are failing. 

The brain of our operation, an entity known as the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, or FINTRAC, is ineffective. FINTRAC is supposed to share intelligence with law enforcement to protect us from global cartels and terrorist organizations. But FINTRAC is more like a black hole. Information goes in and doesn’t come back out. While it receives tens of millions of reports about suspicious activity each year, only an infinitesimal fraction is shared with law enforcement. As the Cullen Commission on money laundering highlighted for the nation, law enforcement “cannot count on FINTRAC to produce timely, actionable intelligence with respect to money laundering threats.”

FINTRAC’s ineffectiveness is not by design. It isn’t a stalwart protector of our privacy, withholding intelligence from law enforcement on principled grounds. More than fifteen years ago, the privacy commissioner told FINTRAC to review and delete any financial intelligence reports about Canadians it may not have the legal authority to possess. Last year, the privacy commissioner reported that FINTRAC had not done so and was sitting on 400 million such reports. And while FINTRAC fails to rid itself of the data it shouldn’t have, it’s not inspiring confidence it can protect the data it should. It recently got hit with a cyber attack so severe that its systems were shut down for months.

FINTRAC’s problem isn’t that its $100-million budget is too big or that its process for collecting intelligence is a drag on economic growth. The problem is it doesn’t have the capacity to do the job parliament gave it.

Which brings us back to DOGE, whose real wisdom is the brash and shameless way it achieves its goals. Our track record on combating financial crime reeks of complacency. While the Trump-Musk duo’s approach to an institution like FINTRAC would be to tear it down with reckless abandon, the Canadian alternative should be to build it up with the same audacity. Radical change follows from radical courage: making it easier to fire and re-staff with the best talent, freeing public-sector managers from procedural prison and encouraging them to make mistakes, rebuilding tech stacks from the ground up, and shuttering failed organizations only to create new ones. The only question is whether such courage is necessary in Canada. In the case of FINTRAC, it is.

The next prime minister could situate a Canadian DOGE within the Treasury Board. Its mandate could be to strengthen Canada’s state capacity. Its leverage could come from the Treasury Board’s control of the government’s purse, as well as license from the prime minister to take the biggest possible risks—including a slew of bad press—to make our federal government capable of more than, as Andrew Potter once quipped, writing a cheque.

Dealing with president Trump’s acts of hostility will be easier if we breathe new life into our failing institutions, building the state capacity necessary to chart our own course. You’ve already been informed of the things Canadian institutions cannot do, whether that’s completing pipeline projects to diversify our exports, procuring fighter jets to invest in our security, fixing what feels like a broken health care system, managing a mostly peaceful protest until it fizzles out without invoking emergency powers, or keeping the public safe from a viral pandemic.

FINTRAC should be one of the first targets we sic our effectiveness-hungry DOGE on, but it shouldn’t be the last. Securing a better future will depend on it. Only once we’ve effectively secured that future should we turn our attention to how efficiently we’ve done it.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece said DOGE shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It appears as if this may have happened not by the hands of the Elon Musk-run DOGE, but by the hands of the CFPB’s acting director who was appointed by Trump.