Ontario’s pandemic response spawned a secretive compliance bureaucracy known as Regional Regulatory Hubs (RRH) which are overseen by Regulatory Compliance Ontario (RCO).
Born from pandemic-related initiatives, this permanent regulatory compliance mechanism utilizes behavioural insights to achieve its goals and this happens with little (if any) public oversight.
The clerk of the small town of Cobourg, Ontario, Brent Larmer, briefly mentioned the secretive initiative during a Town Council meeting earlier this year in February. Referring to an Eastern Regulatory hub, Larmer noted that the mysterious bureaucracy meets every six weeks to discuss regulatory enforcement including building trust in response to protests, misinformation and anti-government sentiment.
Rebel News first featured a report on this in June, with government documents received back about this secretive agency sounding eerily similar to a ministry of surveillance, propaganda and censorship.
The “inter-ministry initiative” is a “collaborative effort” that includes over a dozen individual ministries. Oddly, the objective outline of this initiative was edited in the response documents to look as though it had been released in full, despite the index of records stipulating that it was withheld.
It was clear in the response documents that this sneaky, elusive bureaucracy lacks transparency and accountability – which is why Rebel
filed for more, and now the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs has come back to these requests with notes of clarifications not once, but twice.
After issuing five different points of clarification the first go around, an additional point of clarity citing “uncertainty as to exactly what type of records” are being sought was requested.
The evasive responses and obfuscations suggest that the bureaucracy is deliberately avoiding transparency. This uncertainty for the average person is precisely why information requests were filed — to shed light on the murky workings of Ontario's regulatory compliance system. After all, the organization and its secret meetings remain hidden from public scrutiny.
The public deserves to know this bureaucracy's real objectives, from behavioural science, avian influenza, compliance enforcement, joint investigations, misinformation, public trust, sector challenges, unlicensed businesses, how and who they classify as “bad actors,” what kind of information sharing they engage in, and how their programming is delivered.
As long as the public is left in the dark, the use of behavioural insights in compliance programs raises serious concern for the continued psychological manipulation of the masses, suggesting that this is a tool for unchecked bureaucratic control rather than to serve the public interest.
