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The Public Health Agency of Canada has put out a procurement notice asking for infrastructure to support large-scale, design-focused behavioural studies.

That’s the language they chose. Behavioural. Design-focused. At scale. The stated priorities include vaccination uptake, mental health, and — of course — climate-related health challenges.

Those are not treatments. They are behaviours. They want compliance. Obedience.

This is PHAC saying, plainly, that it wants better tools to study how Canadians act and how to influence that behaviour in line with government priorities.

This matters because we already know how PHAC operates. During COVID, PHAC admitted it tracked the mobility data of 33 million mobile devices in Canada.

That is nearly the entire adult population. With no warrants. No individualized consent. Movement data was collected to measure compliance with lockdowns and the information was sold for a profit behind users' backs by providers. 

At the same time, internal government documents show the Canadian military was running influence and propaganda exercises. One exercise involved circulating a fake story about wolves being released, as a test of information spread. Senior officers later warned that these activities risked undermining public trust.

Now PHAC is institutionalizing this manipulation work.

This RFP is about building permanent capacity to conduct behavioural research tied to government objectives, and making sure we are all obedient little drones.

All of this is happening while PHAC continues to fail at basic administration.

The agency has repeatedly had to destroy millions of dollars’ worth of expired PPE. Masks, gloves, gowns sitting in warehouses until they aged out and were thrown away. Inventory mismanaged. Rotation failures. Distribution failures. Quiet write-offs paid for by taxpayers.

PHAC could not manage boxes on shelves. But it wants sophisticated infrastructure to study and influence the behaviour of an entire population.

If the priority were preparedness, the investment would be in logistics, stockpile management, hospital capacity, staffing, and emergency response systems that actually function.

Instead, the investment is in behavioural science.

The language is explicit. The history is documented. The pattern is consistent. Tracking people. Testing messaging. Studying compliance. Building tools to do it again and again.

When government agencies define behaviour as a health problem, personal freedom becomes a variable to adjust. Travel, movement, medical decisions, energy use, and speech all become subjects of research rather than rights to be respected.

PHAC is not asking how to be more competent. It is asking how to be more effective at influencing Canadians.

And that tells you everything about what comes next.