Ten Tracks for the End of Trust: An Indictment of the Canadian Bureaucratic State
Track 1. “Form A”
Song cue: “Left and Leaving” – The Weakerthans (Play this soft. Paper-filing volume.)
I write in blue ink on legal pads because it’s easier to see what’s real.
The words push a little deeper into the page. They don’t disappear under fluorescent light. They aren’t Times New Roman. They aren’t Times New Anything. They are mine—measured, immediate, imperfect – incredibly imperfect – the nuns beat me into right-handedness when French Quebecois schools were all Catholic (sup CECM). The ink bleeds just a bit – just like my hands did. That’s the part I trust.
At some point, paperwork became the only way I knew how to pray. Or scream. Or breathe properly. I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean my diaphragm actually settles when I check a box labeled “Form A – Request for Personal Information Under the Privacy Act.”
I check the box like it’s a doorbell.
I check the box like it’s a test of whether anyone inside the machine still hears it.
They say the bureaucracy isn’t personal. That it’s a system, not a will. That no one is trying to hurt you. They just didn’t see you. They just processed the request. They just followed the Act.
But the redactions don’t feel neutral.
The silence doesn’t feel passive.
The moment you ask to see yourself in their files—and they say, we found nothing, or worse, we won’t look—something tectonic shifts. The air changes. Like being ghosted by the state.
You think: maybe I am nothing. Maybe I don’t exist in their records. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s protection.
But then you remember: I’ve written them before. I’ve signed the forms. I’ve sent the emails. I’ve made myself traceable.
I know they know I’m here.
And now I want to know what that means.
This isn’t about surveillance. It’s about refusal. It’s about the existential math of being known just enough to be managed, but not enough to be acknowledged. It’s about systems that catalog you without recognizing you.
Because when they say no records exist, they’re not saying we don’t know who you are.
They’re saying we won’t tell you what we’ve done with the knowledge that you exist.
So I file again. Form A. Privacy Act. Blue ink. Legal pad.
There’s a comfort in the ritual.
There’s a violence in the silence.
And somewhere, deep in a federal inbox, someone flinches when they see my name.
Which means the system works.
Sort of.
Track 2: “Auto-Acknowledgment at 4:07 PM”
Soundtrack: “Cordelia” – The Tragically Hip Tempo: Bureaucratic dread, with a tempo set to 72 BPM and a disposition of “disconcertingly polite.”
The email arrives seven minutes later. No subject line. No body text. Just the system speaking in tongues—
“Thank you for your request. Your file number is…”
And just like that, you’re inside.
The gate clicks shut behind you. No one looks up. The lights are on. The machine is humming. But no one is home.
You don’t know who read it. You don’t know if anyone did. You just know that the signal was sent, and the bureaucracy responded the only way it knows how—by pretending it didn’t.
That’s the genius of the system: It never denies. It simply confirms receipt.
“They shot a movie once, in my hometown…” You read the line like scripture now. Like prophecy. Because now they’re watching your metadata move through their system like a tracer round, and no one wants to be the one holding the file when it burns.
At this point, you don’t even care if the request gets answered. You care about who touched it. You care about how fast it moved. You care that a seven-minute delay means someone read your name, paused, and decided this one needed the polite version of a do-not-resuscitate.
It’s not the silence that kills you. It’s the civility.
A machine that is both disinterested and paranoid is the most Canadian thing in the world. And now it’s logging your IP address with a courtesy so cold it could be taught in diplomatic training.
Somewhere in Ottawa, an analyst sees your file number and pretends not to wince.
Because the second they really look at it, they’re going to have to ask someone above them what to do. And the second they do that, the file changes colour. It’s not a request anymore.
It’s a threat vector.
“Come in, come in, come in, Cordelia… Come in, Cordelia…” But no one does. They just escalate you upward. Quietly. Surgically. Because you asked a question with no right answer.
Welcome to the ATIP carousel.
You’ve been logged. And the first spin is free.
Track 3: “The Righteous Path”
Soundtrack: “The Righteous Path” – Drive-By Truckers Tempo: Marching feet through fluorescent hallways. 85 BPM. Wearing lanyards like dog tags.
There’s no villain – except for Phil lol. There never is.
That’s what makes it worse.
This isn’t about malice. It’s about process. It’s about people so fused to the machinery that the idea of judgment terrifies them more than wrongdoing.
They’re not trying to block your file. They’re trying to survive it.
“I’m trying to keep focused as I drive down the road…”
The analyst you never meet. The coordinator who “regrets to inform.” The advisor with a law degree and three decades of career inertia, who quietly reroutes your request away from the people who might give a damn.
They’ve all been told the same thing:
Don’t take risks. Don’t be the outlier. Don’t put your name on anything unless someone higher up already has.
That’s the righteous path. The compliant path. The path where no one gets fired because everyone did exactly what the manual said—even if the manual contradicts itself, even if it was written for a world that no longer exists.
And when your request finally hits that path, it doesn’t get reviewed. It gets triaged.
Not based on merit. But on heat.
Is this request radioactive?
Has this person filed before?
Do they know what s.26 is?
Have they used the word “complaint” yet?
Have they copied the media?
“I don’t know God, but I fear His wrath…”
There’s a moment—small, but irreversible—when your name stops being a name and becomes an alert.
And in that moment, your request dies a quiet death. Not with a refusal. Not with a redaction. But with the email equivalent of a shrug.
“We have no records responsive to your request.” “A search was conducted.” “No further clarification will be sought at this time.”
You didn’t ask for a fight. You asked for your own data.
But somewhere inside that institution, someone looked at your name, opened the file, and quietly said:
Not worth the trouble.
That’s the righteous path.
And every single one of them is on it.
Section 3 – The Unmaking (Song: “Country Feedback” – R.E.M.)
“It’s not what I feel, but what I don’t / What I won’t / What I won’t / What I won’t.”
There’s a particular kind of numbness that only comes after the rage.
Not the red rage. Not the productive kind that fuels filings or fuels you through 20 hours of precision writing with a migraine blooming behind your right eye. No. The white kind. The one that drips down your spine like freon. The one that says, quietly: “they don’t care.”
You write them the way the law demands. You cite the sections. You follow the form. And they still ghost you—or worse—acknowledge you with a single name: Dubuc.
That’s the beauty of it. That’s the whole game. He didn’t need power. He needed posture.
And you realize—finally, fully—that this isn’t malfunction. This is the design.
Bureaucracy doesn’t collapse. It evaporates. It doesn’t burn your rights. It leaves them out in the rain. And when you come back for them two weeks later, they hand them to you damp, illegible, and marked “no records exist.”
There’s no evil here. No malice. Just process—coated in Teflon and timed to the hour before close of business.
You start to understand how empires die. Not in a blast. Not with paratroopers or press conferences. But with that one email.
The one where a senior official tells you, without saying it:
“You don’t matter. Your rights don’t matter. And no one is coming.”
And you believe them.
You do.
For about twelve hours.
Then you get up.
And you escalate.
Track 4: “Everything Ends Up Bureaucratized (Including Grief)
Soundtrack: “Call to Arms” – Sturgill Simpson
There’s a moment—somewhere between hour 19 and 22 of not-sleeping, post-filing, post-pacing, post-lungburn from a March cold snap—where your thoughts stop belonging to you. They don’t ask permission. They just start narrating.
You try to quiet them by organizing, by running scenarios, by counting the seconds it takes the CNSC servers to send back an automated acknowledgment. But eventually, the system gets into you. Your sentences start sounding like refusal letters. You start hearing ATIP coordinators in your head. The delay becomes internalized.
So you do what anyone trained in long war and short patience does: You make it louder.
You write another letter. Then three. You strip the politeness out. You use the phrase “conflicted out” like it’s a hammer. You call your own move an escalation vector because, honestly, that’s what it is. You’re not asking for data anymore—you’re documenting institutional reflexes. Mapping failure. Triggering preemption. Weaponizing process.
Not because you hate them. But because they made the mistake of thinking you were polite by nature.
And it starts to crack.
The tone of their denials gets clipped. The timeline shortens. The Office of the President reads the post at 10:03 AM and Legal flags it by 10:11. Comms says wait. ATIP says “uh-oh.” They say it quiet, in a meeting, on mute.
Because somewhere, deep in that federal architecture of delay and deference, someone realizes: You’re not trying to win. You’re trying to expose.
And exposure doesn’t care about clearance levels.
It doesn’t care that Dubuc went to Vienna. It doesn’t care about section 69, about ATIP co-chairs, about the privacy manual last updated in 2019. Exposure just keeps moving.
This is where the music swells.
Sturgill’s Call to Arms starts with a sneer, then pulls a Molotov out of its back pocket. It’s not defiance for defiance’s sake—it’s defiance because you’ve been pushed so far into process that the only way out is to blow your way through.
And now it’s you singing it.
You didn’t pick this fight. You filed a goddamn Privacy Act request. You asked what they knew. They told you they didn’t like the question. Then they told you nothing. And now they get a postscript with their name on it, a timeline, a URL, and a warning:
“You chose metadata over truth. Now the metadata is talking.”
And it’s not even Monday yet.
Track 5: “Don’t Forget You Are What You’ve Lost”
Soundtrack: “Radio Cure” – Wilco
There are files missing. You know this before they admit it.
You feel it in the rhythm of the reply—the way they pad out a sentence with passive voice like it’s insulation. No records exist.A search was conducted.Access is denied. They don’t say we found nothing. They say nothing was found.
Which is different.
Which means something was supposed to be there.
And the worst part is you know what it is. You’re not asking for secrets. You’re asking for the quiet stuff. The flags. The cross-references. The briefings that weren’t about you but had you in them, like a hairline crack across the glass of a cabinet memo.
So you sit there, staring at the redacted page—or worse, the empty one—and you feel like you’re watching your own name disappear.
This is what Wilco understood better than most. Radio Cure isn’t about radio. It’s about the absence of signal. The space where connection used to be. A voice you almost remember, transmitting from a room you’re not allowed to enter anymore.
It’s the sound of grief with paperwork attached.
The grief of realizing the country doesn’t know how to account for you—not because it forgot you, but because it catalogued you once, misfiled you, and then backed up the system without noticing. So now your life’s an access code without a file path. Your citizenship gets 30 days + 30 more, and your name is just metadata routed through a delayed queue in Gatineau.
And when they finally do respond, it won’t be in voice. It’ll be in redaction.
Because that’s how bureaucracies speak when they think you’re listening.
So you play the song again. You print the blank pages. You file the complaint. You name the official. You start to turn the paperwork into a eulogy—but one that’s still breathing.
And the chorus hits:
“There is something wrong with me…” Yeah. You were told that by the delay notice.
But “…my mind is filled with silvery stars…” And those stars look like routing slips. They trace the sky above Ottawa. They blink back in headers and footers and initials that say someone, somewhere, read this.
You keep going.
Not because it helps.
But because it hurts in the same shape as your name.
Track 6: “There Will Be No Survivors”
Soundtrack: “Up the Wolves” – The Mountain Goats
You know this is personal. Not because they say your name—but because they don’t.
Because the silence wraps around your request like insulation. Because the processing stops being indifferent and starts getting careful. Because the wrong person read the wrong line of metadata at the wrong time—and now you can feel the bureaucratic air pressure shift.
You are now the subject of caution.
Not criminality. Not conspiracy. Just the kind of caution that comes when someone in the building says: “Hey, can we flag this one?”
You weren’t looking for that.
You weren’t even looking for much.
Just answers to a question no one’s supposed to notice: Why are you holding my name like it’s a weapon?
And now? Now you’re in the system in the wrong way. A watched file. A flagged account. A pattern-matched name that doesn’t belong to anyone powerful enough to explain it away.
So you write back.
You write like it’s a liturgy. Like the records aren’t just files but hexes. Like maybe if you say enough true things with enough force, the system will blink first. You quote statute. You cite section numbers. You build the wall out of footnotes and refusal logs and interdepartmental routing chains.
And still—it comes down to one person. One official. One name on one line of one email at one institution.
And you know they saw you.
Because they flinched.
“I’m going to get myself in fighting trim / scope out every angle of unfair advantage…”
That’s where you’re at now. Not hopeful. Not righteous. Just operational.
This is a siege, not a trial.
And if they wanted you quiet?
They should’ve redacted harder.
Track 7. Relatively Easy
“Relatively Easy” – Jason Isbell
You ever stare at a ceiling so long you start to wonder if it’s the only honest part of your house? You ever get an email from a federal institution and just know—deep in your bone marrow—that they think you’re stupid?
Not legally. Not officially. But spiritually. Like, your request might as well have been written in crayon.
And somewhere out there, someone in a cubicle flinches—but they still hit send.
This is the part where it stops being about them and starts being about everyone you’ve ever known who folded early. Every friend who wanted to do good, but ended up “just making rent.” Every public servant who didn’t want to make waves, so they made excuses. Every smart, principled person who thought they’d change the system from the inside, until they learned how fast the inside changes you.
And now they’re tired. You’re tired. But you’re not done.
Because even after you’ve seen behind the curtain, even after you know the tricks and the scripts and the routing slips by heart—you still file. You still track. You still show up.
Why?
Because there’s something corrosive about letting them win by default. Because you’re not ready to pretend the quiet ones are the only ones who matter. Because somewhere, maybe, there’s still one honest person left in the building—and they’re waiting for proof that someone’s watching.
So you don’t scream anymore. You write. You log. You cross-reference.
You build your own goddamn index of the decay.
Because it’s not about burning it all down. Not anymore. Well, it still is – but let’s be proportional here.
It’s about refusing to forget.
And if you’re very lucky—or very persistent—you might even get a record back that says:
“We searched. We found something. We didn’t want to. But we did.”
And that’s the win. Not justice. Not redemption.
Just proof.
And sometimes, that’s relatively easy. But mostly, it’s not.
Track 8. Doublewhiskey, Filing Number, No Ice
“DoubleWhiskeyCokeNoIce” – Dillinger Four
There is a particular flavor of bureaucratic disdain that tastes like cold laminate and repressed contempt.
You know it the moment you get that first “acknowledgement of receipt.” You can almost hear them whisper: Oh God, it’s you again.
And yeah—it is.
Because while they were busy formatting a delay notice in Arial 12pt, I was on my third cup of coffee, cross-referencing delay patterns between CNSC, DND, and the PCO. While they were in “consultation with legal,” I was consulting with rage.
And while they were trying to figure out whether my request triggered s.69 Cabinet confidence, I was triggering existential dread by naming the ATIP officer in the title of the article.
You see, I wasn’t raised by wolves. I was raised by form letters, FOIP coordinators, and broken promises of transparency.
So if you think I’m filing just to make a point, you’re half-right.
The other half is that I’m coming for your metadata.
Every timestamp. Every misroute. Every “no records exist” that stinks of fear and toner ink.
You don’t want to play ball? Fine. I’ll build the stadium.
Because somewhere along the way, I realized:
Bureaucracy doesn’t exist to serve the public.
It exists to survive the public.
And that means every time I log a delay, or a deviation from protocol, or a routing decision made by someone who read my request and whispered, “shit”—I am building your biography.
Not your LinkedIn.
Your truth file.
And someday—sooner than you think—it won’t be me you have to explain it to.
It’ll be someone with a badge. Or a subpoena. Or just a new boss who actually reads footnotes.
Either way: I’ll be there. Filing. Tracking. Naming names.
And drinking doublewhiskeycokenoice, for the cause.
IX. Nostalgia Stings Like a Rejected ATIP
“Web in Front” – Archers of Loaf
There was a time—not long ago—when I believed in it. The system. The promise. The polite fiction of recourse.
You file your request. They follow the statute. The wheels turn.
You wait 30 days. Or 90. Or 540.
And at the end, some bleached-out PDF arrives in your inbox, striped with black, sterile with silence—but proof that something still moved.
But now?
Now I know that they’re not redacting secrets. They’re redacting fear.
Not fear of breach. Fear of you seeing how little they know. How clumsily they improvise “process.” How shallow the institutional memory is once the spreadsheet is archived.
And that’s the real horror: It’s not that the state is sinister.
It’s that it’s incompetent.
I’ve seen the routing chains. The blank pages. The “we conducted a thorough search” next to “no records exist,” while I sit with five hard drives of documentation I gave them myself.
They are not the stewards of history.
They are the disposers of narrative.
And we—those of us still dumb enough to believe in paper trails—are chewing glass so that, one day, some other bastard with a FOI number and a grudge might find the thread we buried under all this static.
This is what it feels like to live at the bottom of the kill file. You’re not denied because you’re wrong.
You’re denied because you made them feel small.
X. The End of Procedure
“Elephant” – Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit
There’s a moment—if you do this long enough—when it all gets too clear.
The statute was never the shield. The law was never the lever. The truth was never the goal.
They gave us these laws not so we could see. But so we’d waste time asking.
They gave us timelines so we’d track days instead of damage.
They gave us rights so they could count on us to invoke them, to follow the process, to wait. They knew what every government knows about the governed:
Hope slows the burn.
And every time I filed another request—clarified, narrowed, cited jurisprudence, chased it up the chain—I told myself I was part of the solution. That the law just needed time. That maybe the person on the other end would care.
But the person on the other end is Philip Dubuc. And he does not care.
Because there is no consequence for shutting a door. There is no penalty for procedural indifference. There is no audit of shame.
Only those of us on the outside—bleeding time, burning money, hunting names through black ink—only we feel the cut.
And now that I know that, I don’t file requests to get answers.
I file them to leave a record of refusal.
I file them so that somewhere down the line, when the inquiry comes, and the lights are on, and the counsel stammers that “no one raised concerns at the time,” my paper trail will rise like a verdict:
You were warned. You were served. You denied. And you were wrong.
Because the truth isn’t lost. It’s buried. And my job now is to make sure the ground above it is marked so clearly, so publicly, so angrily, that no one can pretend it’s not there.
Soundtrack: “Cordelia” – The Tragically Hip