In 2023, the Treasury Board of Canada’s program spending on diversity, equity and inclusion was roughly 100 times what it was in 2016. Public Safety Canada’s was about 40 times higher. The federal Crown prosecution service spent 20 times more.

These are some of the figures that were revealed in a House of Commons report tabled in response to a question by Conservative MP Vincent Ho. Back in October, he asked all federal departments to detail their DEI program spending, DEI-related jobs and DEI contracts, along with an explanation of how they evaluate DEI performance.

The results came back in the first week of December. And while they don’t paint a complete picture of how much DEI accounts for budgetary waste in the federal government, they do provide a useful outline.

On program and salary spending, the report reveals a massive increase over the years of the Liberal government: modest sums in 2015 and 2016 that grow by orders of magnitude to peak around 2023. By the very end of the Trudeau government and the beginning of that of Prime Minister Mark Carney, the feds were no longer throwing record amounts of money at DEI, but they’re still shovelling it out in volumes far beyond 2015 levels. It’s like speeding: you may not be going 200 km/h anymore, but slowing down to 170 is still a problem.

Aside from Treasury Board, Public Safety and the prosecution service, which all confirmed to Parliament that they did indeed spend a boatload more on DEI, Veterans Affairs Canada saw a similar hike. It went from spending nothing on such programs until 2019, when it tallied $54,000 in DEI programs. From 2022 to 2021, that figure was over $1 million each year. Transport Canada went from spending about $4,000 on such things in 2016 to $1 million in 2023.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada spent only $11,000 on DEI between 2016 and 2021; but in 2024 alone, it spent $1.2 million. In 2022 it had only four full-time equivalent DEI roles — directors, managers and advisers with some nexus to inclusion. By 2024 there were 10 of these, including a new team lead and human resources officer for the department’s new Centre for Anti-Racism and Equity.

Yes, the federal department responsible for calculating how many crabs we can pull from the ocean each year has an anti-racism unit. The manager is paid somewhere between $113,000 and $126,000 and their job is to support racial employee clubs and deliver initiatives that “actively confront individual and systemic racism, (respect) the Canadian Human Rights Act, (advance) racial equity, and (foster) inclusive organizational and cultural practices.”

Similar positions cropped up elsewhere: at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, where DEI program spending rose from about $58,000 in 2016 to about $427,000 in 2025, a new advisor role on DEI was introduced in 2024 with a salary of about $100,000. And at Finance Canada, directors and analysts in DEI began taking roles in 2022 with salaries ranging from $113,000 to just over $200,000. And at the Department of National Defence, $100,000 was paid to each member of an anti-racism advisory panel.

Often underlooked are the various regional development agencies of the federal government. Here, we can see that they, too, have enjoyed the extra DEI money from on high. The Pacific region agency paid for sessions on “Indigenous Storytelling,” “Indigenous Medicine” and “Allyship and Psychological Safety.” The Southern Ontario agency has handed out $100 million in subsidies since 2016 for entrepreneurs who are either Black, female or official language minorities.

Western Canada’s agency, meanwhile, paid for anti-racism workshops from an Islamophobia-focused DEI consultant who believes that Canada’s default slate of Christian holidays perpetuates racial trauma against people of colour, and that asking someone if they condemn Hamas is an act of putting them through a psychological checkpoint which should be resisted.

But what’s most telling from this report back to Parliament are its gaps. Many departments simply refused to answer Ho’s inquiry. Women and Gender Equality Canada, for example, reported that it couldn’t determine its DEI spending and job count because it was so deeply integrated into the department’s functions (in a way, that’s true; the whole thing is a DEI department and we can safely file its entire $132 million budget under that category).

Other uncooperative departments? Canadian Heritage couldn’t say what its DEI program spending amounted to, even though it’s one of the strongest vanguards of the cause, nor could Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Indigenous Services Canada, Health Canada, the Department of Justice and the federal diversity bean-counting entity, Employment and Social Development Canada.

Those absences foreshadow the big job ahead of rooting DEI out of government. If civil servants can’t cobble together a list of DEI-related contracts, program spending totals and departmental jobs in a month for a simple House of Commons request, it’s going to be very difficult for the Conservative ministers who one day take office to clean it all up. The first step to making any cut is knowing what’s there to cut off. The longer civil servants can slow walk that information up to their ministers, the better for them.

So, when Conservative minister X takes office in Canadian Heritage someday, he can expect to be told that DEI is simply too integrated in the department to provide him a timely inventory report. His job will be to fire whatever deputy minister the Liberals left behind, and install a replacement who doesn’t take “no” for an answer. And when person’s Liberal-leftover underlings give those same excuses, they, too, should be replaced. The same dance should play out in every other department that has fondly embraced discrimination under the guise of DEI.

There’s a lot of work ahead, but it’s doable — especially if the planning starts now.