When the Canada Revenue Agency was asked how much it spends on “diversity, equity and inclusion,” the agency suddenly developed amnesia. However, the agency acknowledged that five senior executives are formally assigned DEI responsibilities.

In an order paper response to a question posed by Conservative MP Vincent Neil Ho covering January 1, 2016 to October 20, 2025, the CRA admitted it has no mechanism to identify, extract, or total DEI-related spending from its operating budget.

Salaries, consultants, training, travel, communications, contracts — all of it, Canadians are told, is so “integrated” into daily operations that it cannot be tracked.

Try that excuse in a CRA audit. 

Even more striking, while the CRA claims it cannot quantify DEI spending, it does openly acknowledge that five senior executives are formally assigned DEI responsibilities.

Two vice-presidents classified at the EX-03 level each earn between $169,165 and $202,918 per year. Three director generals classified at the EX-02 level earn between $151,155 and $181,365. Using only the top of those salary bands, that means as much as $920,000 per year in senior executive compensation tied directly to DEI oversight before a single consultant, trainer, or contractor is paid.

The CRA’s refusal to disclose the numbers is not an outlier inside the federal government. It is the rule.

Major departments with sprawling budgets told Parliament they also cannot provide full DEI spending totals because the information is not tracked in centralized systems.

Those departments include Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, Finance Canada, Canadian Heritage, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Parks Canada, Library and Archives Canada, Crown-Indigenous Relations, the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, and, unironically, the DEI ministry of Women and Gender Equality Canada.

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Across department after department, the same justification is repeated almost word for word: spending is not tracked centrally and would require manual collection that could lead to incomplete or misleading information. The Liberal government, it seems, can track carbon footprints, gender identity, and workplace “feelings of belonging,” but cannot track money.

One of the few agencies that did provide any actual dollar figures was the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency.

Even there, the numbers only apply to grant funding; not salaries, not consultants, not travel, and not communications. ACOA reported $31,975 in DEI-related grant spending in 2019, $29,600 in 2020, nothing in some years, and $55,362.50 in 2024.

The total amount disclosed across the entire nine-year period was just $116,937.50. Every other cost category was marked as not tracked.

To its credit, ACOA also disclosed the number of staff tied to DEI work. In 2016 it devoted half a full-time equivalent to DEI duties. That shifted to 0.3 in 2017, back to 0.5 in 2018, then climbed to a full FTE in 2019.

By 2020 the agency was at 1.5 FTEs, rising to 1.7 in 2021, dipping slightly in 2022, returning to 1.7 in 2023, falling to 0.7 in 2024, and then climbing right back to 1.7 in 2025. That represents nearly a decade of continuous DEI staffing, yet even here, salary totals were never disclosed.

When it comes to contracts, the secrecy deepens further.

Across multiple departments, the government admitted it has no centralized DEI vendor category and that DEI services are embedded inside broader procurement files. Identifying them would require manual audits that were not completed. The result is that Canadians are given no public list of DEI vendors, no total value of DEI contracts, and no breakdown of whether those contracts were awarded competitively or sole-sourced.

Consulting firms are being paid, but taxpayers are not allowed to see who they are or how much they receive.

While Ottawa claims it cannot track the cost of DEI, it has no problem tracking almost everything else connected to it.

Departments openly report on hiring by race and sex, promotions by identity category, retention by identity category, executive demographic targets, mandatory anti-racism training completion, and workplace surveys measuring whether employees feel valued, included, or psychologically safe.

The CRA itself now operates a full Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Performance Measurement Framework tracking recruitment, promotions, retention, executive representation, and survey sentiment, but not a single dollar figure tied to financial cost.

The Liberal government knows exactly how people feel. It just won’t say who’s getting paid to harvest those feelings.