This is an entry in relation to the book I am currently writing.

Last month, I wrote about time. This month, I am writing about how I could see a government working across multiple star systems.

This is just going to be a lore post more than anything else. It doesn’t really fit the book in any fashion, but I figure it might be enjoyable for people to read to get a sense for what is to come.

Limitations on travel

In the setting of Reconnect, ships carrying humans will accelerate only up to 1.1g, or approximately 10.8 metres per second per second.

Taking into account the need to stop, the average ship could get from Earth to Mars in 1 day and 16 hours. However, Earth and Mars are not exactly settings in this book, and we have something else to contend with.

There are two principal planets in my story’s universe: Hibernia and Augustia. There are a smattering of other planets too, but all in all, the distance between these planets is on the surface about 13 light years apart.

Ignoring fuel, it would take just over 14 years to travel between the two planets although because of time dilation, the passengers onboard would experience something like five. The idea of being in a tin can for what would be perceived as half a decade is unpleasant even though it would be a third of what it truly would take.

This is of course impractical for the setting of my book, so of course there is a solution: we’ve achieved some sort of faster than light travel.

Humanity’s loss or the “Disconnect”

A few centuries from now, humans figured out how to pinch through spacetime with the use of twinned gates. One half of a gate was sent off from the Solar System to Tau Ceti. This was achieved with a light sail pushed by lasers.

When the gate arrived, it was soon realised that the planet they expected to be habitable was less than ideal. It would require terraforming in order to make it even remotely useful to colonise beyond a smattering of small population centres confined to spaces akin to those found on Mars.

As a consolation, the star system itself was ripe with resources to exploit. These resources were plentiful enough to permit the construction of significant numbers of gate pairs. This was in stark contrast to humanity’s home system, which could not build more than two pairs, one of which had failed to activate upon arrival at Proxima Centauri, less than five light years away.

Four gate pairs were constructed and then sent off towards other nearby stars. This was met with success as habitable planets were discovered orbiting all of them. This led to worlds named Hibernia and Augustia finding themselves colonised.

However, for reasons that remain a mystery, the only gate connecting back to Earth irreparably collapsed. While possible to build a new gate pair, the motivation to be governed from afar was unpopular with most of the colonists. This was further ensured after political order was returned and contact back home was forbidden by those in power.

Earth without the resources available to remedy the situation, within a few centuries did successfully send a probe containing an unspecified message and a few bottles of whiskey. Yet, unauthorised contact back to humanity’s home world was fleeting at best. When discovered, it was swiftly responded to by the colonial governments with punitive measures towards those involved.

After a generation passes, trade and travel between the colonies becomes commonplace and the memories of the “Old World” as it would be referred to become lost, anecdotes, or stories contained within what entertainment survived. The worlds that linked via these still functional gates were the places these humans would now only know.

New gates would be constructed to ensure redundancy and with time provide additional capacity, but nobody would dare allocate resources to build one to a place that would have once been called “home”.

Regular travel

Trips between Augustia and Hibernia take about three weeks, with one week being to one gate, the other traveling through The Hub or Tau Ceti as we know it, and then another week to get from the gate to the destination.

Gates are kept as far away as possible from planets and stars as they do interfere with the gravity of objects around them despite their mass not being all that significant.

The other aspect about the gates is that there’s a speed limit for their use. Gates have a speed limit of 3,342 KM/h. Why? Reasons. Just accept it.

This restriction creates a chokepoint as while the gates themselves can easily handle multiple vessels going in and out and that travel from one side to the other is largely instantaneous, you have to slow down as otherwise you will run into problems that I will not reveal at this time.

Side note about light sails

I made mention of pushing the gates by light sail, which are a real thing, but it’s probably going to be asked: why could humans not travel by this method?

In short, it is discovered that constant relativistic effects on human consciousness can really take their toll. One of the characters describes it as slowly turning you into “just a bag of meat and water”. The closer you approach velocities where time dilation is measurable in days, the more your mind begins to irreversibly fail.

Despite the centuries that have gone by between now and the book’s setting, we still fail to grasp what traps us in the bodies we’re given at birth.

Weak early institutions

Humanity has so far only had to compete with itself in its interstellar expansion. While the planets have not been devoid of flora or fauna, anything resembling sapient such as ourselves has yet to be observed.

One problem the gate collapse did create is stagnation, meaning that the colonies were suddenly removed from competition. While Earth was a huge benefactor from the resources and wealth brought on by the existence of the gate, the colonised worlds were themselves dependent in return.

Medicine, research, education, and even entertainment were all suddenly divorced from a significant portion of humanity. While these colonised worlds were largely self-sufficient for goods such as food or fuel, they all suffered a significant handicap when it came to anything advanced.

With a portion of humanity finding itself orphaned, it struggled to rebuild its expertise and recreate institutions while thwarting off anyone who wanted to take advantage of the situation. Many charlatans found themselves at an advantage with these young and naive governments, as they could gain access to resources by promising more than they could achieve.

However, time would pass and those with the knowhow would eventually push humanity in the right direction. It would not completely ease the pain, but the colonies would within a few centuries find themselves at parity to what was before.

Okay. What about this government?

Weeks of travel between all of humanity’s new worlds meant that no single, omnipresent government could rule. Past history back on Earth had proven that continental and maritime empires were ineffective. Prior to the gate collapse, what had existed was on already shaky ground with constant rebellions requiring dispatches to the fringes.

Additionally, cultural differences between the people who settled there also lent to the need to let these worlds rule as their own. However, Tau Ceti or “The Hub” was a shared space and thus needed to exist under its own entity.

This resulted in the formation of the Collective Commonwealth, a treaty organisation which exists to share the resources and infrastructure amongst all of its members.

Not all colonies signed onto the treaty, but those settlements within the Tau Ceti system as well as Hibernia and Augustia for example became party to it. Those who are not signatories to the treaty have a wide disparity with respect to trade and movement.

This treaty organisation has its own constitution and rules plus provides its own enforcement to ensure that spaces like The Hub could exist without requiring one single member to control any portion of the shared resource. Each member would also pay into upkeep and the organisation itself would have its own legislative body to oversee matters that encompass all members.

Under the treaty, members are provided with rules around freedom of movement, regulation on trade, research and education, construction of infrastructure, and enforcement of conduct. Each member themselves would be responsible for their own domestic affairs, but are also heavily discouraged from engaging in activities which are the business of the CC.

However, all of this is largely seen by the public, many of whom do not ever leave the worlds they reside on, as a system designed to keep member governments occupied by lineages of power. For those outside of the CC, they see it as a multilateral system to harass non-members. While the CC does not have a military on paper, it has an enforcement agency which behaves like one.

Where this all breaks down

Well, this is where the book comes in. Despite centuries passing, the stagnation remains and eventually catches up with those in the Collective Commonwealth.

And that is where I will leave this blog piece for today!

CC: Don Davies, MP Vancouver Kingsway
CC: Taleeb Noormohamed, MP Vancouver Granville

Hon. Prime Minister,

This is a letter urging you and your party to not vote in favour of Bill C-22, an act respecting lawful access.

Section 487 of the Criminal Code of Canada already provides law enforcement with sweeping abilities to request electronic data from service providers without said providers enduring consequences for their voluntary assistance. By mandating that encryption be effectively disabled for any service used by an electronic device, of which this is what it proposes as the introduction of access by a third-party means that there is no privacy.

This sort of legislation will make out every single person into a criminal by default should they choose to not comply with this. Not only that, it will permit a chilling effect on our technology industry, which relies on trust for activities such as transactions and secrecy in communications. Additionally, it removes telecommunication services from being reliant on being common carriers, as this will escalate to them having to inspect messages during interception.

I do not believe that Taleeb Noormohamed, the current Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation has the skill set and expertise to understand what he has brought forward. This is an individual whose technology career has only overseen e-commerce as an executive in luxury goods and vacation accommodation rentals. If he had any idea of the sort of challenges that this Bill creates, he would then understand the serious ramifications of naively permitting a method for other parties to peer into encrypted communications.

What I am trying to say here is basically this: your parliamentary secretary has no clue about what he is talking about.

His statement as follows:

I want to emphasize the word “existing”. The bill would not create new surveillance powers, new intercept authorities or back doors into any one system. It would make the court-authorized processes that we already have, warrants and production orders, which are tools that have always required judicial oversight, functional in a world that has moved online.

This is contrary to what is introduced in Part 2, 5-2 of Bill C-22:

The Governor in Council may make regulations respecting the obligations of core providers, including regulations respecting […] the retention of categories of metadata — including transmission data, as defined in section 487.‍011 of the Criminal Code — for reasonable periods of time not exceeding one year.

Section 487.011, changes the definition of transmission data under part c from the following:

transmission data means data that […] does not reveal the substance, meaning or purpose of the communication

To as such:

subscriber information, in relation to any client of a person who provides services to the public or any subscriber to the services of such a person, means […] information relating to the services provided to the subscriber or client, including […] information that identifies the devices, equipment or things used by the subscriber or client in relation to the services

This radical change in altering definitions from “transmission data” to “subscriber information” plus the change from “not revealing the substance” is the introduction of the backdoor when combined with the following from the Bill:

487.‍0142 (1) On ex parte application made by a peace officer or public officer, a justice or judge may order a person who provides services to the public to prepare and produce a document containing all the subscriber information that relates to any information, including transmission data, that is specified in the order and that is in their possession or control when they receive the order.

In order for a service to comply with this change to Section 487, it would necessitate the creation of a backdoor. Mr. Noormohamed either misunderstands what the bill actually states, has fed it through a third party and is taking the output from it as truth, or is intentionally being misleading. Let it be known that this change to the Criminal Code is a backdoor.

When Bill C-13 was introduced by then Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews, a bill which would have made substantial changes to Section 487, he cited that it was to protect children, citing Amanda Todd and Rehteah Parsons, two teenaged girls both of whom were victimised by predators. These changes did nothing to further protect children, and once again, Mr. Noormohamed is using the same tactics.

Will opposition to this bill label another political columnist as being “with the child pornographers” as Mr. Toews had inspired a response with to a previous version of the Bill? This government and the many that have come before them have not addressed the real harms that affect children. However, they’ve all been more than happy to use them as pawns when law enforcement wishes to seek new opportunities in order to control the lives of the average, hardworking Canadian.

There is no safe way to introduce third party access to encrypted messages between parties and children are not at risk due to encryption thwarting law enforcement.

Canadians have a right to privacy whether from telecommunication providers or the government in their day to day lives. This bill will make Canada less competitive in the technology industry and will have a chilling effect beyond.

One of the things I have been wanting to do in Reconenct is play a bit with how time is kept. Without giving away too much of the story, multiple planets separated by several weeks of travel spanning different star systems would in my mind lead to a situation where the time standards that we all know today have maybe evolved.

Time-keeping is a core component of my day job as I base all of my work on the use of Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. It’s a relatively simple system where you just need to keep track of one time for the whole planet and then use an offset to determine the local time.

Since I live in Vancouver, my time zone is -7 UTC (which recently changed from -8), this means that I am seven hours behind from what UTC displays.

Here’s an example using a very basic JavaScript clock:

You’re not limited to offsets that are whole integers either. Examples include Newfoundland time, where the island of the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador has an offset of -03:30, or Central Western Standard Time, which gives it an offset of +8:45. It has its quirks, but translating between these times is fairly painless provided your loved ones are not in either of these trying to call each other.

Imagine the frustration of someone in Cocklebiddy in Western Australia trying to figure out when to call their mother who lives in Dildo, Newfoundland and Labrador.

I hold the belief that this system, while geocentric, works well for humanity even if off-world as if you’re in a spaceship travelling around our star system, it is fine. However, what about calendars? And what about other planets?

This is a silly post that I wanted to do so I could talk a bit about my book. Much of the inspiration for coming up with my own dating scheme originates in both Star Trek and the Wayfinder series by Becky Chambers. I welcome people pointing out any problems with this all, but this post is haphazard and is for certain going to have flaws.

I hate calendars

The importance of calendars should not be understated: knowing where we are in the year is important for ensuring that our agricultural sector knows when to grow crops and for legal and financial systems to keep working. However, I am going to show something that may be frustrating to see for the first time.

The months of September, October, November, and December are not where they should be and the year should really start sometime around March. For those of you familiar with the history of Rome as well as the Roman empire, this something you might know already, but January and February did not exist prior to the latter part of 700 BCE. You’d have ten months or 304 days in the calendar, and then winter.

The names of the aforementioned months mean in Latin the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth month–if you don’t speak Latin but speak French, you’ll catch on to how the months are spelt. However, around 713 BCE, January and February were tacked on at the start of the calendar, only because of the importance of end of year celebrations.

While those months were added on to the calendar, it still didn’t mean that the year started on January 1st as it just meant that the calendar rolled over.

Christmas day, which has remained consistent as December 25 for much of Europe, was for a long time the start of the year, whereas some adhered to March 1st due to Roman empire influences, and also March 25th, in honour of conception of Jesus. Adoption of January 1st as the start of the year started with the Germans in 1544 and then finally with the American colonies under British control in 1752, two hundred and eight years later.

American exceptionalism predates their revolution I swear.

I know there are other calendars out there such as the Chinese or Hindu ones rife with similar problems I am sure. However, the internationally-accepted calendar we have today is the Gregorian, which in October 1582, was adopted after it was realised that Europe was using a calendar, the Julian, that was off by over a week due to a miscalculation of leap year handling.

The error made with the Julian calendar was that the year was 325.25 days, lending the thought that exactly every four years, we tack on an extra day. However, the year is actually 365.2425 days, so tacking on that extra day like before may seem okay, but it starts to become a problem as centuries become millenniums. At the start of this section, I made a remark about knowing when to grow crops, well eventually the growing season is not going to align with the equinox and that was a problem if we’re going to find ourselves relying on this calendar.

So when the day of Thursday, October 4th, 1582 came to an end, the next day jumped ahead ten whole days to Friday, October 15th. This is why we now have a complicated rule of a leap year being on every year divisible by four, except where it is divisible by 100 unless it itself is divisible by 400. This is why the year 2000 was a leap year, but the year 2100 will not be.

Are we out of the woods with this calendar? Nope. There is a something called a leap second, which gets added periodically based on all sorts of arbitrary variables that our calendar cannot cope with.. It has been since 2016 that we’ve come to witness some, and that is only because they’ve opted to accept that we can ignore them until the mid-2100s in the hopes we figure out how to get computer programmers to deal with it better or some technology comes around to solve it all together.

Let me close off this section by saying this: our geocentric calendar is going to suck in space but we’re also probably going to be stuck with it because of how we focus on human biology.

We do not have to have 24 hours

Before I proceed: I am going to talk about solar days and solar days only.

If you do the basic equation of 24x60x60, you end up with 86,400, which is the number of seconds the a solar day occupies. The definition of a second originally was based off the rotation of the Earth, but it was then defined based off of the frequency if caesium, which unlike our home, does not deviate from our measurements.

The Earth is actually slowing down. Six hundred million years ago, a solar day would have been 21 hours, but due to influences from the Moon and the Sun or other influences including filling giant hydroelectric dam basins, the Earth itself is not reliable to measure the passage of time. So technically speaking, you could say that a solar day on Earth is 86,400.0025 seconds based on current measurements..

But we don’t need to care about that so 86,400 is good enough for what I am talking about.

While “good enough”, there are only so many factors for that number. There are 96 divisors that could fit into that value.

So why not just abolish it? Why don’t we use a thousand minutes to define a day? There’s 1,440 minutes in a day and it would not be that far fetched to consider something different. Let’s talk about Beat Time.

My friend, Jessica made me enamoured with the use of .beats, a scheme developed by Swatch in the 1990s. It isn’t metric time, which was adopted by the French Republic post-revolution, but it is a scheme that permits the existing calendar but adopts its own method that is intended to be used without time zones.

The abolishment of time zones has been proposed by numerous people in the past, including science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. I did say earlier that the use of offsets was a good idea, but I think that .beats is objectively better.

The idea of saying “I will meet you at 800” works real well in my mind.

Time dilation

Back to our friend Mars, trying to keep clocks in sync will require you to contend with general relativity. This late-2025 paper in The Astronomical Journal brought this to light:

This study estimates clock rates on Mars and compares them to those on the Moon and Earth. We find that, on average, clocks on Mars tick faster than those on the Earth’s geoid by 477 μs day, with a variation of 226 μs day over a Martian year. Additionally, there is an amplitude modulation of approximately 40 μs day over seven synodic cycles.

Our good ol’ friend relativity means that time keeping between multiple planets not only has to consider rotation and orbit, but the velocity and tidal forces too. 226-477 μs does not seem that significant, but given that you’re dealing with about a quarter to almost half of a a millisecond, it is not immeasurable.

However, it is insignificant for the purposes of the book, so I don’t really care. I just wanted to bring this all up because I thought this part was neat.

Let’s talk about my worlds

In Reconnect, there are four mentioned worlds. They are not Earth, but we still rely on its time despite the setting for reasons I will not get into. Since they’re not Earth, this means that they all have different orbits and rotations.

To clarify the units, minutes are the ones we know and love, and M is basically a variation of the Internet time I wrote about earlier. A year for each planet is defined by the number of its local days.

As you can see, there are some things we’re familiar with and peculiarities so let’s talk about each planet individually.

Galactic

And right off the bat, we’re not speaking about a planet but the galaxy itself. One of the things I have some level of confidence in is that we’re probably never going to say goodbye to the idea of UTC or a similar successor for as long as our species exists and makes use of technology.

As such, I decided that in order to keep things working smoothly between the multiple planets, space stations, and whatnot that they themselves would rely on a calendar and clock that is the same no matter where you are.

This is in my mind important because while it may be morning in some city on any of these worlds, morning is a concept that exists provided you have a star and rotation.

When it comes to the International Space Station, they use UTC themselves. About every 90 minutes, the station makes a complete orbit around our planet, meaning that the concept of “morning” based on sunrise would be impractical due to the sun appearing and disappearing about sixteen times every standard Earth day.

Hibernia, Xiadi, and Procula

These are all planets with fairly normal rotations and orbits.

Procula is the odd duck in all of this because its short year and long day–its day is 31 hours and 13 minutes whereas Hibernia is Earth-like at 24 hours and 17 minutes and Xiadi being close at 22 hours and 15 minutes.

Despite being habitable, it is in my mind probably a bit shit to live on Procula considering you have effectively an extra quarter of a day added.

A Martian solar day for example is 24 hours and 39 minutes, which might be just fine from a circadium rhythm standpoint. This is not baseless, as this story from the Harvard Gazette writes:

By recording the daily rhythms of hormones and body temperatures in 24 healthy young and old men and women over a one-month period, the researchers conclude that our internal clocks run on a daily cycle of 24 hours, 11 minutes.

You’d still be exceeding it, but being that nobody really has precise sleep schedules, adding an extra 39 minutes to each day probably would not have any long-lasting health effects. I do have to wonder what losing an hour and 45 minutes would do however as is the case with Xiadi.

Augustia

How would you keep time on a tidally-locked planet? If you’re un familiar, a tidally locked orbit is where one side of an object never changes its face towards its parent. This is the situation with the Moon, where we always see its face no matter what due to how it orbits around our planet.

This situation has been observed with exo-planets and while it does not negate the possibility for habitability, it does introduce a question: what is the local time?

My solution was simply to use the galactic time to define what the local time is and define a local day as how long it takes to go around its parent star. It takes 98 galactic days to go around its parent star.

Earth time is not compatible with local time

As you are probably reading, there’s local and galactic time to contend with. Functionally, time is time if you’re ignoring relativity, as the measurement of a second here on Earth is going to be no different than anywhere else in the universe. However, nobody is going to find it practical to have a Martian day be the same as an Earth day when having any sort of conversation.

The reason why I think a local time works just fine is because there’s no real practical way to have any sort of instantaneous conversation once you get a dozen kilometres away from each other.

In The Expanse TV series, a video call between Chrisjen Avasarala on Earth and her husband, Arjun Avasarala-Rao who was on the Moon had them talking over each other due to the approximately two and a half second round trip delay caused by the speed of light. It’s less of a big deal to contend with as the delay is acceptable, but what about Mars?

With a delay of anywhere between three and twenty two minutes dependent on the position of Earth and Mars in relation to the Sun, you’re not going to have this problem simply because it is not practical to do anything real-time. At best, all communication will be instant messages or email.

This is something I tap into with the book albeit it is a background problem. Physics will dictate the size of your empire even if you achieve fast interstellar travel.

As an aside, I’d love to know if anyone has ever explored what undersea telegraph wires would have done were they to have existed before the American revolution of 1776. I have the belief that it would have been merely delayed although the outcome of it all is indeterminable.

If you’re expecting transport between planets to work well, then you’ll have a universal time, but for anything local, time can just be based on whatever the planet is doing in relation to its parent star. The average person is not going to care about what time it is on Xiadi if they’re on Hibernia because nothing is going to arriving in time anyway.

Colloquialisms will survive

Since I touched on the “average person”, while I think the definition of how we track time will change, even if we adopt a clock much like the .beats scheme, it’s likely that we’ll still use terms like “minutes” or “hours” to describe something with only “days” actually sticking to its original definition in some form.

If I tell a friend that I’ll be arriving “in a few minutes”, it’s intended to not be specific as it is intended to just say you’ll be arriving “soon”, which itself is not specific.

Just spill the beans

Okay. So humans are full of bad habits and compromises. I doubt we’re going to ditch our current, internationally-accepted calendar even if we find ourselves spanning multiple star systems. So, I chose to do something down the middle: I got rid of months–sort of.

The format is quite simple: you have an era (defined as BCC or CC), the date itself, and then the time.

The date can be expressed as the number of days in the form of an integer since the start of the year or it can be broken into its traditional month and day in the expanded format.

In space, harvest times don’t really matter unless you’re on Earth, so we can express the time of year in whatever format we want. The local calendar may do whatever it wants, but the galactic calendar can go about in a neutral manner.

As for the year, it is expressed with an era beforehand which is optional, but it is based on an event that dictates the origin of the universe I am working within. There is no actual year per se, but we need one for the sake of this post so this is what we’re getting.

Leap years are kept and follow the same rule although it is offset based off of when the era rolls over.

As for the time itself, you may have noticed that the .beat time of does not correspond with the universe time of . This is because the Internet time is based on whatever it is in Switzerland, whereas the time used in the story is based on UTC.

That’s how I have chosen to do time in this book: just simplify it and don’t refer to months by their names any longer.

Closing

I’ve been sitting on this entry for a week and decided to push it out, errors and all. I’m enjoying my time spent writing this book and hope that the small sliver of insight into what is the world building is looking like earns some excitement.

In my 2025 year-end entry, I announced that I have been working on a science fiction novel, which really is my first-ever book. Its present working-title is “Reconnect” and I’d like to let you all in what it is about.

A quick summary of the story is as follows:

Keira Carroll is the Chief Security Officer aboard The Robyn, a passenger ship travelling its usual route between the planets Hibernia and Augustia.

After a mostly typical transit through a gate leading into The Hub, she and the crew encounter an unusual distress signal and are obliged to investigate.

Boarding a vessel of an unusual design, they find themselves with a crew and passengers seeking refuge claiming to be from somewhere long unreachable. However, doubts about the improbability of their origin are dashed when they witness technology far more advanced than seen before.

This discovery thrusts Keira and her compatriots into a multi-system conflict that had been brewing unbeknowst to the public for decades, with her becoming public enemy number one merely due to her helping those in need.

The summary really is the reason why I have been putting off this blog entry as nothing I wrote was approaching perfect. It has stressed me out to no end and so I have decided that since perfect is the enemy of good, I will post something that is good enough as it is unlikely to be whatever is on the back cover or some listing.

Earlier last year, I started to spend a lot more time compiling my thoughts and notes into a universe of my own creation. It takes place about eight hundred years into the future and its setting involves a period where much of humanity is no longer able to make its way back to its home world. I am trying to adhere to physics to a certain degree although I take some liberties with how things might transpire over the next near-millennia.

Naturally, this book is being written without the aide of any sort of large language models, meaning that if the book is terrible, you can blame me and me alone. So that should be exciting! Much of the book is inspired by Becky Chambers’ Wayfarer series, Andy Weir’s Artemis, James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion. The Expanse in particular is a fun one for me because as I built much of the core universe for the book, I began reading the series only to discover that much of what I had in mind was similar to theirs.

Although I have no plans for a protomolecule-like McGuffin I must lament.

I have no idea on how I will publish this book, but I will do my best to keep folks abreast of how things are coming along on my Bsky account. I tend to allocate up to three nights a week to working on this novel.

I’ll close off this post with two drawings from one of the pages of notes I’ve been keeping while putting this all together.

These probably make no sense on the surface, but that is okay! They’re for me to know what is going on and where things are! I can think of things in my head, but it’s easier to draw it all out so I am not later altering what I saw in my memory.

If you’re looking to help me out or offer any advice, my contact details are available on this site, but note that I do have a group of other writers to lean on so I am not doing this without the aide of wonderful people.

Recently I had a question: why does nobody talk about running out of Social Insurance Numbers? Every Canadian, permanent resident in Canada, or someone with a work visa receives a SIN. These numbers are actually a finite resource and it has been bugging me about why this never comes up.

This is kind of a shitpost so don’t take it as completely factual, but some effort was put into guessing things.

What is a SIN?

Beginning in 1967, all Canadians, permanent residents living in Canada, and those with a work visa have been issued a Social Insurance Number. It is used as an identifying number permitting you to pay taxes and access government services. It also has horrible feature creep such as being used for your credit history, but that is for another time.

It is a nine-digit number with some special properties.

046 454 286

While the above is fictitious, it is a valid SIN. However, it does not mean that SINs range from 000 000 000 to 999 999 999 (or a whole billion of numbers) are available as there is some very basic validation using the very simple Luhn algorithm.

Because of this validation, it actually means there are only 100 million valid SINs, but there are some rules with how it is handled.

The first digit of a SIN indicates the type of number it is. A SIN starting from 1 through to 7 means it is issued based on the region you were registered in–not born, but often they align. For example, someone with a SIN starting with a 3 for sure means the person got their number while living in Québec, whereas 7 could either mean British Columbia or Yukon, but also something else of which I will get to in a moment.

For the rest of the numbers, 0 is reserved for the Canada Revenue Agency, 8 is for business numbers, and 9 is given to people who are here on a work visa of some sort.

With these rules in mind plus the algorithm that validates the numbers, there’s only a pool of 70 million total allocated. However, while that might seem like a lot, especially considering projected populations by the mid-century, there quite a few factors to consider with how the whole system works.

Population broken down by regions

The 1966 census put Canada at just over 20 million people. When the 2021 census was conducted, we reached over 37 million, but it is likely in the 2026 census, we’ll surpass 42 million.

Using Statistics Canada’s projections, Canada’s population by 2050 could be with a maximum growth scenario, just shy of 55 million people. There’s a low-end of the scale, but even then population projections show that we will be flirting with the 50 million mark regardless.

Here’s how it all breaks down by province or rather, Social Insurance Number areas.

If you wish to view the 1966 census, the Government of Canada has a document you can review.

If you wish to view the 2021 census, a non-PDF page can be browsed as well.

Ontario and Northwestern Ontario

Ontario is a special province with special privileges because it is the most populous, so it is given 4 and 5. However, not all of Ontario is included in the scheme.

Northwestern Ontario is lumped in with the 6 region, which shoves out about 230,000 people from the pool. This number has remained stable since the earlier census so it doesn’t really have as much of an impact as one might think. I’ve pooled its population with those regions to reflect this scenario.

However, the province is now eating into what is available for the Maritime provinces and Newfoundland and Labrador, which is region 1. I did not reflect the population of those provinces but will talk about how I address this later.

British Columbia and Yukon’s problem

So there are 0, 8, and 9 numbers that are available, but they’re not intended to be used geographically. However, 8 has been exhausted and now is dipping into 7. This means that the available pool for the province and its northern territorial neighbour is ever so slowly shrinking in availability.

Death

The thing not mentioned thus far is that SINs outside of 9 are unique to each person, meaning that when a person dies, their number is supposed to go with them. This implies that numbers are exhausting themselves as population grows. Let’s figure out how many people have died in each region since 1967.

From 1991 up to 2021, 7,415,242 deaths have been recorded, but if you go up to 2024, you can add an additional million to that count. As the baby boomers continue to age and die off, the deaths will continue to increase and that has to be taken into consideration for the future.

Statistics Canada only keeps track of deaths by place of residence and not from where they were born. It has been difficult to track down official numbers on deaths pre-1991, but Macrotrends has it per 1,000 people. Based on that data, we’re looking at about 10 million people having passed away since the SIN system has been implemented.

That is one whole block of numbers that we cannot use any longer.

When will we hit exhaustion?

Here’s how I think the current pool looks like health-wise with the death figure added in. We’ll assume one SIN per counted person because the number of non-citizens would not affect the outcome that much regardless of what someone might tell you.

It can be safe to assume that 18.38 million SINs are still available in the system. However, I cannot ascertain how much of region 7 has been affected by the exhaustion in 8, so it is probably safe to assume that it is lower than that.

There are about 459,000 registered corporations federally, with an additional 36,200 more not for profits. The same report suggests that each year, anywhere between 12,000 and 24,000 are dissolved. That’s just for the federal side of things and I am certain that the number of much higher when taking into consideration how many are registered just to individual provinces.

This is a bit beyond my knowledge area, but considering that the 8 block has been exhausted, I am certain the 33% figure for region 7 is significantly lower in availability.

Ontario began to dip into region 1 at some point in the past decade so it’s difficult to say how much has already been consumed without guesswork. With a projection of up to 7.7 million more residents by 2050, there’s certainty for the province to exhaust that region’s availability even if a slow growth scenario comes into play.

So I have no real way to address the actual use but I imagine that considering what is available in its original regions, it’s probably under 10% right now, but not for much longer.

Québec though with its regions 2 and 3 has plenty of room to grow as it is only expected to grow a meagre 1.4 million. Even with expected number retirements, there should remain some room to take on what Ontario is expected to undoubtedly need. Is this a political possibility? I imagine it could be, but who knows there.

Here’s the big problem: Western Canada.

British Columbia is expected to grow by 2.3 million people in the coming two decades, which might seem like the biggest problem, but it’s actually everybody else that is going to have a larger impact.

The Prairie provinces plus Northwestern Ontario and the two eastern territories are potentially going to grow by 12.1 million. Alberta alone is suggested to hit 8.1 million people, putting it 600,000 ahead of its western neighbour. Region 6 includes these provinces and that sort of growth will for certain exhaust their allocation of SINs.

Based on all of this, it is extremely unlikely to occur in the next decade. I would not be surprised to hear talk about in the 2030s and for sure expect by the 2040s that the way we handle the Social Insurance Number system will require a change.

How to fix this

Like all problems including climate change and resource exhaustion, this is a problem for the future and for sure the Gen Z types who are entering the workforce will be managing this with the generation behind them rolling their eyes at their solutions.

Let’s let this dumb millennial suggest a few and what each has as for a problem.

Just add a digit

This is probably the most sensible idea and can still be verified the same way. It would add about a billion more SINs to the available pool by making each region allocated with 100,000,000 numbers. This should be fine until the United Nations has to take over every country because climate change causes the oceans to rise many metres, causing ruin to national governments and to also ensure political unity in the face of the Martian Congressional Republic.

But that is not going to happen for a few more centuries, so no need to worry.

From a technical standpoint, it would require most to permit a tenth digit. You can grandfather in existing number by appending or prefixing a zero at the end depending on implementation.

This is how I would do it and is therefore unlikely to happen.

Reuse numbers

Don’t.

Because of feature creep such as credit ratings being dependent on these numbers, I would not recommend this. Ten million SINs have likely been retired merely to due to death alone since its implementation and that number is going to be significant considering how many there are left to go.

This would for certain lead to fraud of some sort.

I don’t expect this to occur.

Come up with a new system

From a technical standpoint, this is probably the second worst idea after reusing. Imagine being told that the nine digit number you know off the top of your head from having filled out job applications a dozen times as a teenager is now going to be replaced with something else.

I am willing to bet that some consultants will make retirement by 35 if they were to get the government on board with this one, so expect this one to be floated towards the top unfortunately.

This is the most expensive and will make private corporations a lot of money, so it is probably the most likely.

Ditch the algorithmic check

It’s not hard to generate a SIN number. A simple Python script is often enough.

def check(sin):
    def dof(n):
        return [int(d) for d in str(n)]
    digits = dof(sin)
    odd = digits[-1::-2]
    even = digits[-2::-2]
    csum = 0
    csum += sum(odd)
    for d in even:
        csum += sum(dof(d*2))
    return csum % 10

def valid(sin):
    return check(sin) == 0

for x in range(100000000,800000000):
    if valid(sin=str(x).zfill(9)):
        print(x)

The above just generates numbers, confirms it against the Luhn algorithm, and prints it out if valid. This code has been written countless times and I am sure sits in various repositories. With a few changes, you can use the above to generate credit card numbers too since they use the same check–I recommend against openly doing this for legal reasons.

If you have a better way to write the above, have at it. I am a terrible software developer.

The actual problem is attaching to a name. However, offline checking of a SIN is useful in some scenarios. The government does not want everybody to all the time check against some central computer.

However, as I write this, I don’t think that I have ever had my SIN confirmed as my own. You cannot even get a plastic card with the numbers on it so does it matter? It does make it difficult to spit out a number on the spot, but like the code example above, you could just randomly pick from one anyway and then make it a problem when it comes to tax time.

Because of a potential fraud angle I am sure that the government could come up with, I don’t think that they will choose this option.

Closing

I am so glad that this is not my issue to tackle ultimately. Perhaps the 2038 computer bug issue will solve this problem for us, which is about the time the federal government would be in the midst of taking this issue seriously.