Author: johnastapleton

What two internal briefing binders tell us about Ontario's social services I have been reading two heavily redacted briefing binders from Ontario's Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services (MCCSS). One was prepared in March 2023 for a ministerial transition and the other in November 2024 for an incoming deputy minister. Together they run to more than 1,400 pages. Having worked in the Ministry and its predecessors for 28 years, from 1975 to 2003, I found the documents both familiar and unsettling. The programs are largely recognizable, as are the perennial problems of budgets, administration, service delivery and accountability. What seems different is the way the Ministry describes its own performance and the risks it faces. Reading the 2024 binder, I sometimes felt I was looking at the briefing book…

When government discovers that talking about a problem can become a permanent alternative to solving it We have written about the Word Salad Bar, that remarkable establishment where governments serve generous portions of recognition, commitment, collaboration and continuing engagement, accompanied by very little that anyone can actually measure. But we left a question unanswered. Why does the government Word Salad Bar never close? We understand why governments sometimes resort to evasive language. They want to avoid an awkward commitment, reassure an unhappy constituency, postpone an expensive decision or keep several groups reasonably content. These are familiar political manoeuvres. They have probably existed for as long as governments have. What is harder to explain is their permanence. A government recognizes a problem. It consults. It develops a strategy. It announces an…

There is a particular small drama that Facebook has become remarkably good at delivering. A young woman sits in the passenger seat of a car. She is conventionally beautiful, heavily made up and often dressed to emphasize her sexuality. She looks directly into the camera. There is no story, no joke and usually very little that could reasonably be called creative content. Instead, she asks a question. Would you like a woman who did this? Would your wife or girlfriend do that? Would you prefer someone more adventurous? Would you leave your present partner for someone like her? The language is frequently euphemistic enough to avoid saying explicitly what is being offered, although there is little ambiguity about the sexual act being suggested. Then comes the request: leave a heart.…

The number is $10.3 billion. Nearly 774,000 Canadians, we are told, still owe the federal government that amount in pandemic benefit overpayments. It is a wonderfully authoritative number. Not $10 billion. Not approximately $10 billion. $10.3 billion. That extra $300 million is reassuring. Somebody has obviously counted. But almost nobody asks the obvious question: How do we know? I don't doubt that CRA has $10.3 billion recorded as owing. The question is how we get from CRA has classified $10.3 billion as owing to Canadians owe CRA $10.3 billion. Those statements look identical. They aren't. During the pandemic, government deliberately got money out quickly. CERB relied largely on attestation. Verification came later, sometimes years later, when people were asked to reconstruct their earnings and produce documentation acceptable to CRA. If…

Recipes by Sarah Bondy and John Stapleton Disability advocates have become connoisseurs of a peculiar form of government communication. They say: We recognize the challenges. We value lived experience. We are listening. We remain committed. We continue to work with our partners. We are taking a whole-of-government approach. We continue to monitor the situation. Our work is ongoing. Each sentence sounds reassuring. None is necessarily untrue. Indeed, that is part of the problem. They belong to a class of statements so universally agreeable that they tell us almost nothing about the particular matter at hand. Consider this example: Customer satisfaction is important to us. Has any organization ever announced the opposite? Customer satisfaction has become tiresome  and we would prefer that customers stop calling. At least we would have learned…

The trouble with turning inequality into a generational war I read the Maclean’s essay on generational inequality – the Generation that got it all -with mixed feelings, not least because I am quoted in it. There is a great deal in it that I agree with. A 37-year-old Toronto renter paying more than $1,000 for half of a small apartment while watching the price of food rise has every reason to wonder what happened. Housing costs have become absurd. Younger people who do not already own housing face barriers that many of us did not face at the same age. Statistics Canada confirms the basic divide: among families under 35, median net worth in 2023 was $457,100 for homeowners and just $44,000 for those without a principal residence.   That…

 CBC Newsworld recently ran a ribbon announcing that Canadians still owe Ottawa $10.3 billion in pandemic benefits. The number has been repeated so often that it has acquired the authority of an established fact. Canadians received money they were not entitled to, the government discovered the problem, and now the money must be returned. It is a wonderfully simple story. Unfortunately, the simplicity is largely a CRA construction. The $10.3 billion is not an independently established measure of money Canadians wrongly received and retained. It is the accumulated product of decisions made by the agency that administered the benefits, reviewed eligibility, established debts and pursued repayment. CRA has counted what CRA decided was owing, and the resulting total is presented to the public as proof that the money is owed.…

The story of smong is about knowledge surviving through time. On the Indonesian island of Simeulue, the memory of a devastating 1907 tsunami was passed from one generation to another as a simple lesson: when the earth shakes and the sea suddenly withdraws, go to high ground. Nearly a century later, that knowledge saved lives during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It is an extraordinary example of a society successfully preserving what it had learned. But there is another problem with human knowledge that may be just as important. Sometimes we have not forgotten the lesson. We possess enormous amounts of relevant knowledge, but it is scattered among different people, disciplines, governments and technologies. The problem is not remembering it. The problem is assembling it and getting it to the…

What nuclear winter, a tsunami and two reactors meltdowns can teach us about artificial intelligence There are moments when humanity discovers a danger before experiencing its worst possible version. Those moments present us with an unusual problem. We have evidence, but not the final evidence. We know enough to be frightened, but the catastrophe that would settle the argument has not happened. What are we supposed to do then? Artificial intelligence may be bringing us to such a moment. Dario Amodei, the head of Anthropic and hardly an outsider to the development of artificial intelligence, has now called for the development of AI to slow down. His concern is not simply that AI occasionally gives a wrong answer or that people may lose jobs. He points to something potentially much…

I have been thinking about the way we talk to people who do not believe in vaccination. We usually begin with the vaccine. We tell them how effective it is, quote studies, explain the risks and point to what happened to disease rates after vaccines were introduced. When that does not persuade, frustration sets in. Before long, one side is talking about ignorance and misinformation while the other is talking about freedom, government and pharmaceutical companies. Perhaps we are starting in the wrong place. Suppose instead that we started with something on which almost everyone can agree: the human body is astonishingly good at looking after itself. Cut your finger and, most of the time, you do not have to tell your body what to do. Blood clots, new tissue…