Federal Government:1) (Updated) Liberals table crime bill to restrict access to bail, impose tougher sentences; Auditor’s report: 2)(Updated) CRA call centres gave too many taxpayers bad advice, auditor general says; 3) (Updated) You ‘wouldn’t want to live in’ decrepit military housing, auditor general says; 4) Federal, Ontario governments contributing $3B to small nuclear reactor project

1) (Updated) Liberals table crime bill to restrict access to bail, impose tougher sentences

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By David Baxter, October 23, 2025

Liberals table crime bill to restrict access to bail, impose tougher sentences

Minister of Justice Sean Fraser speaks to reporters ahead of a Liberal caucus meeting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Spencer Colby

Updated October 23, 2025 @ 12:32pm

The Liberal government tabled legislation Thursday morning that would make it harder to get bail for a variety of offences, including vehicle thefts, extortion and breaking and entering.

The bill would impose a reverse onus on bail for certain offences. That would move the burden of proof from the prosecutor to the accused, meaning they would have to justify being granted bail.

The Criminal Code already has a reverse onus for bail in place for many serious offences, including murder.

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The legislation says judges would be required to impose weapons bans on people charged with extortion or offences related to organized crime when they do receive bail.

The bill also would allow for consecutive sentences for violent and repeat offenders, so that multiple sentences could not be served at the same time. Crimes subject to consecutive sentences would include vehicle theft, break and enter, extortion and arson.

The Supreme Court has ruled that imposing consecutive life sentences is unconstitutional, but a government official briefing reporters on background said none of the offences eligible for consecutive sentences under the legislation come with that penalty.

The legislation would require that judges consider the number and gravity of outstanding charges facing an accused before deciding whether pretrial detention is necessary.

It also would establish new aggravating factors for sentencing for repeat violent offences, offences against first responders, retail theft and mischief to property.

The bill includes new restrictions on granting conditional sentences, or house arrest, for sexual assault and sex crimes involving a minor.

The legislation proposes changes to the Youth Criminal Justice Act that would allow police to publish identifying information about a person under the age of 18 when there is an imminent danger to public safety.

Police currently are able to publish this kind of information only with a court order. The proposed change is meant to speed up the process of sharing information when there is a public safety risk.

The bill also would clarify the definition of “violent offence” in the Youth Criminal Justice Act to include any offence where a minor causes bodily harm.

Premiers, opposition parties and police agencies have been calling on the government to impose tougher bail laws in response to an increase in vehicle thefts, extortion, organized retail theft and other violent crimes in recent years.

Officials briefing reporters said that a Charter of Rights statement has been ordered for this legislation to determine whether it could stand up to a court challenge.

Officials said that judges’ ability to consider Gladue factors — which examine the effects of racism and poverty on an Indigenous person accused of an offence — will not be affected by this legislation.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 23, 2025.

–With files from Anja Karadeglija.

2)(Updated) CRA call centres gave too many taxpayers bad advice, auditor general says

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Alessia Passafiume and Catherine Morrison, October 21, 2025

The Canada Revenue Agency’s contact centres provided accurate responses to questions about individuals’ taxes only 17 per cent of the time between February and May 2025, the federal auditor general said in a report released Tuesday.

Auditor General Karen Hogan’s office placed calls to the CRA’s contact centres over four months this year, asking general questions.

The report said the call centres were better suited to addressing business tax or benefits questions, and provided accurate responses to those calls 54 per cent of the time. The report said the “completeness” of responses to those questions was just over 30 per cent.

The report said the call centres were much worse at answering questions about individual taxes. The auditor general estimates the accuracy and completeness of responses to those questions at just 17 per cent.

The report said the CRA seems more concerned with adhering to schedules for shifts and breaks than with the “accuracy and completeness of information they provided to callers.”

In a media statement, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said the error rate of CRA call centres proves that “nobody understands the impossibly complicated rules and the government needs to simplify the tax code.”

“The Income Tax Act has become so long and complex that virtually no one can understand it,” said the federation’s federal director Franco Terrazzano. “Hiring more bureaucrats to give even more wrong answers won’t actually fix the problem.”

Hogan said there are “lots of opportunities” for the CRA to improve its performance.

“Whether it be the tools that agents have or triaging calls … I think that they could then better train the agents to respond,” she said. 

Just 18 per cent of incoming calls this year met the CRA service standard by being answered within 15 minutes, Hogan’s report said. Most callers waited an average of 31 minutes, she added.

Marc Brière, national president of the Union of Taxation Employees, said he’s not surprised by the report’s results, given staffing reductions have meant that remaining employees are working in “poor” conditions.

“This place feels like it’s a sweatshop,” Brière said, adding that the CRA has lost around 3,000 employees since last year. “The people left behind working are exhausted, their mental health has seriously deteriorated.”

Brière said the pressure on workers to answer calls in a timely manner may be affecting the quality of responses.

“They want to answer the calls quick because that’s what they have been asked,” he said.

Brière said he was surprised by the high rate of incorrect answers reported by the auditor general. He said staff need to receive more ongoing training.

On Sept. 2, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne set a 100-day timeline for the CRA to address call centre delays, with a deadline of Dec. 11.

The CRA said at the time it wanted to answer at least 70 per cent of incoming calls by mid-October.

Melanie Serjak, an assistant CRA commissioner responsible for most contact centres and front-line services to taxpayers, told The Canadian Press last week that its target was surpassed by the beginning of the month.

The agency extended the term contracts for approximately 850 of its call centre agentsand rehired a few hundred more.

The CRA also said it’s expanding its use of artificial intelligence as part of the 100-day plan to improve services. The agency is extending the hours its online chat service is available and increasing the number of questions its AI chatbot can answer.

Serjak said the AI chatbot being piloted is “much like ChatGPT” and can be used by Canadians to get answers to “some non-account specific questions related to personal taxes and benefits.”

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Champagne said the government was “ahead of the curve” on tackling problems at the CRA.

“We saw that coming, we saw that we needed to improve services for Canadians,” he said. “We were already ahead of the game by asking that we improve services, that we use technology, that we allocate more people because we want efficiency and at the same time, we want great services for Canadians.”

The CRA has used a virtual chatbot, called Charlie, that is not using generative AI. Hogan’s report evaluated the accuracy of Charlie’s responses and she said taxpayers are more likely to get an accurate response from the chatbot than from an agent.

“Charlie got it right 33 per cent of the time, so that’s a little more accurate than reaching an agent and asking them a question about your personal taxes,” Hogan said Tuesday. “I think it just highlights that there’s a lot of room for improvement.”

The report also found the chatbot’s responses tended to be brief and offered “limited context and minimal additional information.” It was also less accurate than other public web-based conversational artificial intelligence tools.

Tax-Filer Empowerment Canada, a national association representing about a dozen of the country’s leading tax preparation and tax software firms, said in a media statement that the auditor general’s report proves that the CRA “has been struggling to pick up the phone for years, and the situation is not getting any better.”

“Today, the auditor general is confirming that the status quo is not enough to meet the basic expectations of Canadian taxpayers,” the statement read.

“A government which is serious about reducing the size of the public service while improving services to Canadians should challenge our industry to do more rather than relying solely on an agency which has a hard time delivering on its core mandate.”

Wayne Long, secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions, told reporters Tuesday service levels “have not been where they should be.” He also said the 100-day plan is showing “spectacular” results so far.

“We’ve got a lot of room for improvement. We know it, we accept the report and we’re going to do better,” Long said.

3) (Updated) You ‘wouldn’t want to live in’ decrepit military housing, auditor general says

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Kyle Duggan, Oct. 21, 2025

Auditor says military recruitment is falling behind, base housing is in bad shape

Many of the living spaces used by Canadian Armed Forces members at several bases are in “poor physical condition” and ripe for overcrowding, Auditor General Karen Hogan said in a report released Tuesday.

Hogan and her team examined living conditions on three Canadian Forces bases: Esquimalt in British Columbia, Gagetown in New Brunswick and Trenton in Ontario.

Hogan said the buildings her team inspected were aging and decrepit — the oldest dates back to the Great Depression — and 32 of 35 need at least one high-priority repair.

“That might mean that building didn’t have safe drinking water … toilets weren’t working, or there was structural damage to the exterior walls of the building,” Hogan told a news conference after the report’s release.

These are “the kind of conditions that you and I wouldn’t want to live in, and the kind of conditions I don’t think we should expect our Canadian Armed Forces to live in,” she added.

The report said National Defence’s own data suggests at least 25 per cent of its quarters need major repairs or do not meet operational needs. She also called out the department for failing to meet its own spending goals on infrastructure maintenance.

“We’re working actively to improve all of that,” Defence Minister David McGuinty said when, after the report’s release, a reporter asked him if he would live in base housing.

“We made the single largest investment in Canadian Armed Forces in a generation. We’ve made major pay increases … part of the package to recruit and retain young soldiers.

“This is long overdue. For decades now, governments successively have not been making the investments we need to make in our armed forces.”

McGuinty also acknowledged problems with lead in some of the base housing water systems.

“We have work to do,” he said.

The audit looked at living quarters managed by individual bases and houses managed by the Canadian Forces Housing Agency.

The audit said the agency does not have enough housing units to meet the military’s needs — just as the Canadian Armed Forces is looking to add more than 6,000 new members by April 2029.

The military had just 205 residential housing units available in the spring, with 3,706 applicants on waiting lists.

Discussion groups Hogan’s office arranged with service members also heard from many who were unhappy with a 2024 policy change that gives new recruits priority access to the available residential housing stock.

It found National Defence did not evaluate the potential impacts of the policy change and whether it could undermine efforts to retain longer-serving members.

“Given the number of new members that need to be added to bring the Canadian Armed Forces up to full strength and the fact that the stock of residential housing units did not grow substantially during the past two fiscal years, there is a risk that longer-serving members will be at a lower priority for residential housing units,” the report said.

In a separate report on recruitment, Hogan said the military is not bringing in enough new people to meet its operational needs — and National Defence doesn’t always know why potential recruits ultimately abandon their applications.

“The Canadian Armed Forces continued to have challenges attracting and training enough highly skilled recruits to staff many occupations such as pilots and ammunition technicians,” Hogan said.

Only one out of every 13 Canadians who applied online to join the armed forces over the three year audit period was successfully recruited, the auditor general reported.

The CAF received 192,000 online applications from 2022 to 2025, but 54 per cent of applicants voluntarily withdrew within two months of applying.

The military has committed to recruiting more permanent residents. While the number of permanent resident recruits did increase over the audit period, only 2 per cent of permanent residents who applied were recruited, compared to 10 per cent of applicants who were Canadian citizens.

The CAF’s target timeline for recruitment is between 100 and 150 days. The audit found the recruitment process actually takes twice as long, and the security screening backlog increased over the three-year audit period from 20,000 to nearly 23,000 potential recruits.

The Canadian Armed Forces sought to bring in more than 19,700 new recruits over the course of the audit period, but fell short by 4,700.

McGuinty defended his department, saying National Defence has made strides in overhauling its recruitment system over the past year.

The military did surpass its recruitment target in the last fiscal year by 210 people.

But the report warns it doesn’t have the capacity to train everyone it brings in if it also meets its recruitment targets.

That pressure has forced the CAF to hire temporary instructors. The audit warns future training is in jeopardy due to a training instructor shortage likely caused by “insufficient incentives and a demanding workload,” combined with persistent equipment shortages.

4) Federal, Ontario governments contributing $3B to small nuclear reactor project

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Allison Jones and Sharif Hassan, Oct. 23, 2025

Federal, Ontario governments contributing $3B to small nuclear reactor project

The federal and Ontario governments are putting a total of $3 billion toward a project to build four small nuclear reactors in the Greater Toronto Area.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has added the Darlington New Nuclear Project to his list of projects deemed to be in the national interest and therefore worthy of fast tracking.

He and Premier Doug Ford were at the site east of Toronto on Thursday to announce that their governments are contributing $2 billion and $1 billion, respectively, from the Canada Growth Fund and the Building Ontario Fund.

Carney said it will make Canada the first country in the G7 to have this new kind of nuclear reactor.

“(It is) a generational investment, an investment that will extend Canada’s world leadership in clean energy,” he said. “We are an energy superpower, and we are only getting stronger.”

Ontario Power Generation has said the entire project should cost about $21 billion.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission granted OPG a licence to construct the first of the four SMRs earlier this year and construction began in the spring. It is expected to come online in 2030.

Once all four SMRs are up and running, they will produce 1,200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 1.2 million homes. They are expected to operate for 65 years and the province predicts the project will create 18,000 jobs, including 3,700 highly skilled jobs.

Ford stressed that 80 per cent of the spending on the entire project will go to Ontario companies.

“We’re using Ontario products at every opportunity so that Ontario tax dollars support Ontario workers,” he said.

“That includes using steel made here in the province, by Ontario steelworkers, to build the new SMRs. With tariffs and economic uncertainty hammering Ontario’s workers and businesses, this is exactly the sort of investment our province needs.”