🇨🇦 Return the government’s mistake, get punished anyway

A Thunder Bay man did the one thing Ottawa never does: he corrected an error and sent the money back. Alex Pilon returned a mistaken CRA deposit of $24,274.26, and his reward was having his account locked and more than $3,300 in actual refunds withheld for a year and a half, plus a missing $412.19 GST credit, as reported. Honest taxpayer, guilty until buried in bureaucracy.

This is the modern Canadian state in miniature: instant when it wants your money, comatose when it owes you a cent. The CRA got a federal 100-day improvement plan, hired 2,500 workers, and still managed a 27 per cent spike in complaints to more than 3,500. So naturally the machine wants more staff, more systems, more funding, never less power. Trudeau-era governance built a country where agencies can freeze you out, hide behind privacy boilerplate, and call it service. A sovereign country serves its citizens. This regime audits them, stalls them, and shrugs.

🍁 Maple Chronicles