It Can Happen Here

Canada’s comforting illusion about executive power

Canadians have become very comfortable looking south.

We watch Donald Trump test the limits of executive authority, watch the court challenges pile up, and reassure ourselves that Canada is different. Our institutions are stronger, our governments more restrained, our politics more sensible. There is an unmistakable note of smugness in much of the Canadian reaction to what is happening in the United States.

We should probably be a little less confident.

The point is not that Canada and the United States have identical political systems. They plainly do not. It is that Canadians may have an exaggerated sense of how effectively our own institutions prevent governments from using broad executive powers to achieve political objectives, even when the evidence underneath the regulatory system points somewhere else.

One of the better examples happens to involve salmon farming in British Columbia.

Before half the readership leaves, this is not another argument about whether salmon farming is good or bad. You can believe every open-net salmon farm in British Columbia should disappear tomorrow and still find the way we arrived at that policy deeply uncomfortable.

When responsibility for regulating salmon farming in British Columbia moved from the provincial government to DFO in 2010, many of us in the industry regarded it as progress. Salmon farming had become intensely political in B.C., and federal regulation seemed to offer something more disciplined: professional regulators, national standards, federal scientists and decisions grounded more firmly in evidence than in the political temperature of the day.

For a while, that appeared to be exactly what was happening.

Following the Cohen Commission, DFO spent years examining one of the central allegations surrounding the industry: that salmon farms in the Discovery Islands posed a significant threat to migrating Fraser River sockeye. Nine separate pathogen risk assessments were completed. Their conclusions were remarkably consistent. For the pathogens assessed, the risks to the abundance and diversity of Fraser River sockeye were found to be no more than minimal under the fish-health management practices then in place.

The government asked its scientists to investigate the risk. They did the work. The answer was minimal.

Then the government decided to remove the farms anyway.

In December 2020, Fisheries Minister Bernadette Jordan announced that salmon farming would be phased out of the Discovery Islands. The companies challenged the decision and, in 2022, the Federal Court quashed it because the process had failed to meet the requirements of procedural fairness.

Ottawa went back and did it again.

Joyce Murray, the next fisheries minister, conducted a new process and again declined to renew the licenses. This time the decision survived judicial review. The Federal Court upheld it, and in January 2026 the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed the industry’s appeal.

That is where this becomes much more interesting than another argument over salmon farms.

The important point is not that the government acted illegally. Ultimately, the courts concluded that it had the authority to make the decision.

That is precisely the point.

Section 7 of the Fisheries Act says that the minister may issue fisheries licenses “in his absolute discretion.”

Those are extraordinary words.

They do not mean a minister can simply behave lawlessly. Decisions remain subject to administrative law and judicial review. But they give the political executive enormous latitude over the eventual outcome. Canada could build a sophisticated regulatory system, employ scientists, veterinarians, biologists and fisheries professionals, spend years developing an evidence base, and still leave the ultimate decision in the hands of a minister who was not bound by that evidence.

That is what happened.

The scientific assessments did not compel the removal of the Discovery Islands farms. The political executive nevertheless had sufficient discretion to remove them.

Perhaps you think it made the right decision. That isn't really the issue.

Science cannot answer every public-policy question. Governments legitimately consider Indigenous rights and interests, economics, uncertainty, social concerns and the precautionary principle. Elected politicians exist in part to weigh considerations that cannot be settled in a laboratory.

But there is a considerable difference between acknowledging that reality and pretending we have constructed a regulatory system in which evidence protects us from politically motivated outcomes.

We haven't.

And this is no longer simply a Trudeau story.

Mark Carney inherited the B.C. salmon-farming policy when he became prime minister in March 2025. He has now spent roughly a year and a half talking about making Canada more economically resilient, producing more of what we consume at home and strengthening Canadian food security. In June 2026, his government launched a National Food Security Strategy specifically aimed at increasing domestic food production and reducing regulatory barriers.

Yet the policy to eliminate open-net salmon farming in British Columbia remains.

Nor has the current Fisheries Minister, Joanne Thompson, reversed course. Her own 2026 briefing material says aquaculture supports prosperity and food security in coastal and Indigenous communities, while simultaneously confirming that the government continues to deal with the B.C. “transition” policy and is still “reviewing all the different perspectives” to determine its next steps.

There is an irony there that is difficult to miss.

A government promising to produce more Canadian food, strengthen domestic supply chains and remove regulatory barriers has inherited a policy deliberately eliminating a significant source of domestically produced food — and has left it standing.

Whether one calls that contradiction, political expediency or simply the inertia of government is open to debate. What matters for this discussion is that changing the prime minister did not make the underlying exercise of executive power disappear.

Which brings us back to Trump.

Part of what Canadians find so disturbing about the current American presidency is the aggressive use of executive authority to pursue objectives that would be much harder to achieve through Congress. The legal mechanics are different. An American executive order is not the same thing as a Canadian fisheries minister exercising statutory discretion, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

But the institutional temptation is remarkably familiar.

Legislatures delegate substantial authority because governments require flexibility to govern. Executives discover how broadly that authority can be exercised. Expert agencies provide analysis. Political leaders decide how much weight to give it. Courts intervene when someone argues that the line of lawful authority has been crossed.

And here is the part Canadians should think harder about: the executive does not have to cross that line to achieve an extraordinary amount.

The Discovery Islands decision demonstrates that rather neatly. DFO did the science. The government wanted a different outcome. Its first attempt was stopped by a court because of the process it followed. Ottawa corrected the process, reached essentially the same destination, and this time the courts upheld it.

The system worked, in the narrow legal sense.

And the farms still closed.

Then in June 2024, Ottawa went considerably further and announced that open-net-pen salmon farming throughout coastal British Columbia would be prohibited after June 30, 2029. That policy remains the stated federal position today.

You may applaud that outcome. In some ways, that makes you the ideal person to consider the question I'm asking.

Because broad executive power rarely looks dangerous when it is producing something we want.

When a government we support uses discretionary authority to pursue a policy we favour, we call it leadership. We talk about political courage, decisive government and the need to cut through bureaucracy.

When the identical institutional power passes into the hands of someone we distrust, we suddenly discover the importance of constraints.

So forget salmon farms for a moment.

Imagine a minister whose politics you despise. Imagine that minister confronted with extensive technical evidence that points in one direction and a politically attractive outcome that points in another.

Now give that minister “absolute discretion.”

Still comfortable?

That is the question Canadians should be asking while congratulating ourselves on how much more sensible our government is than the one south of the border.

The comparison is not that Mark Carney is Donald Trump, any more than it was that Justin Trudeau was Donald Trump.

The comparison is that power does not become benign because the person exercising it is Canadian.

Our constitutional structures are different. Our political culture is different. But the same basic problem exists here: we grant governments substantial discretionary powers and then place enormous faith in the judgement and restraint of the people who inherit them.

The B.C. salmon-farming decision should make us a little less smug about that arrangement.

There is a simple test for whether any executive power is one we should be comfortable granting.

Do not imagine it in the hands of the government you voted for.

Imagine it in the hands of the government you fear most.

If the institution still looks sound, perhaps it is.

If it suddenly looks frightening, the problem was never just the politician.

It was the power we gave them.