Author: johnastapleton

In 1973, I was twenty-two, with a newly finished master’s degree - too early - yet convinced that ideas mattered—especially the ones that sat uneasily with the world as it was. I was already interested in poverty in Canada, not as an abstraction but as a lived condition shaped by institutions, language, history and policy. At the same time, I was absorbing existential philosophy through doctoral-level courses at York University, trying to understand how meaning is constructed, how experience precedes explanation, and how people live inside structures they did not design. I flamed out before getting my PhD because I had - somewhat later - come to the point where I could not stand the thought of sitting in a classroom listening to anything about anything. Twenty-two may be too…

It has become almost axiomatic to say that the Baby Boomers won the economic lottery. They bought houses decades ago that are now worth many multiples of what they paid. They invested in markets that rose far beyond what anyone in 1980 could have reasonably forecast. A house bought for $100,000 that is now worth $1.2 million. A stock market that has turned early investments into forty- or fifty-baggers. These facts are real, and denying them only weakens the argument that follows. But facts are not the same as conclusions. And what has quietly hardened into orthodoxy is not simply that Boomers did well, but that no subsequent generation can possibly do as well. That belief now functions as an article of faith. Inheritors, not creators The so-called Greatest Generation…

We have grown accustomed to talking about seniors almost exclusively on the spending side of the ledger. Old Age Security is framed as a looming fiscal burden. CPP benefits are treated as obligations inherited by younger generations. Demographics are invoked as destiny, and aging is presented as a problem to be managed. What is rarely discussed—almost never quantified—is the other half of the equation: how much income tax governments collect from seniors themselves. Income tax collected from seniors Canadians over 65 now pay income tax on nearly every major source of retirement income. Old Age Security is taxable. CPP is taxable. Employer pensions are taxable. RRIF withdrawals are fully taxable. This is not a marginal phenomenon; it is the core architecture of retirement income in Canada. When you aggregate the…

The recent Minneapolis shooting of a 37-year-old mother, captured on video and circulated almost immediately, should have been a case where evidence narrowed disagreement. Instead, it became a case study in how the same visual record can sustain radically different interpretations, each internally coherent, each morally charged, and each largely impervious to rebuttal. This is not because the video is unclear. It is because evidence does not arrive naked. It arrives already clothed in assumptions, categories, and expectations. What we are witnessing is not a dispute about facts, but a clash between interpretive protocols—systems for deciding what counts as threat, intent, innocence, or justification before the evidence is even assessed. Watching news commentators questioning interpretation is painful because they at least appear to fail to fully understand that what we…

We tend to describe the deterioration of news and research reporting along with political decision-making crises of polarization, misinformation, or declining trust. Those diagnoses are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Beneath them lies a deeper problem: the steady normalization of decision-based evidence making, enabled by a widespread collapse in critical thinking skills that were once explicitly taught and socially enforced. All the reasons for the collapse of critical thinking have been written about ad nauseam. I shall not repeat them here. My point here is that  we have not entered an era without evidence. We have more now than we have ever had with new ways through AI to analyse it.  But we have entered an era in which evidence is unmoored from method and its philosophical roots as…

We often describe our moment in history as one in which evidence is ignored, denied, or suppressed. That diagnosis is comforting. It suggests that the problem lies with bad actors who reject facts. What is more troubling—and more accurate—is that evidence is everywhere, but its origins and methods of generation – its grammars – have been lost. In short, we have not stopped using evidence. We have stopped thinking with it. In an earlier essay, I argued that much of public life now operates through decision-based evidence making: decisions are reached first, then justified retroactively by whatever data, anecdote, correlation, or expert view can be made to fit. What has become clearer since is that this practice is sustained not merely by cynicism or ideology, but by a widespread collapse…

Not because I didn’t care. Not because I was reckless. I failed because I answered one question as a human being rather than as a compliance officer. The question was whether a person with a criminal record could volunteer to help with vulnerable people in a non-profit in Toronto. I answered yes. It seemed obvious. I was thinking of a woman I met during a project I was doing concerning Legal Aid. When she was 18, she was caught as a found in - in a bar fight. Her boyfriend—later convicted of serious offences—had slipped a switchblade into her purse without her knowledge during the police raid. The boyfriend disappeared. She pleaded  guilty to a criminal charge at age 19 to avoid jail on a first offence. Decades later, at…

There are only a handful of income security programs in Canada that occupy a strange and under-examined space: they are not taxable, but they are tax reportable. The Guaranteed Income Supplement, social assistance, and workers’ compensation all fall into this category. They arrive without tax withheld. They do not increase income tax owing. And yet they are quietly fed into the tax system in ways that matter enormously for low-income people. Each of these benefits comes with a T-slip (e.g. T4-OAS or T-5007) . Each is reported on the tax return. And each lands on Line 23600—the line the Canada Revenue Agency uses to calculate “net income.” That detail sounds technical, almost trivial. It is anything but. Line 236 (now 23600) is a fulcrum of the modern income security system.…

There is a comforting belief that Veterans’ benefits sit outside the tax system, safely insulated from clawbacks and government take-backs. It’s true in part—and dangerously misleading in practice. Most Veterans’ disability benefits are tax-free. Pain and Suffering Compensation, disability pensions, attendance allowances—these are rightly treated as compensation, not income. They are not taxed. They do not show up on a tax return. In public debate, this often becomes shorthand for “Veterans are taken care of.” Then there is the Income Replacement Benefit (IRB). The IRB is different. It is taxable. It is treated as earnings. And it now accounts for well over a billion dollars a year in federal spending. Using even the lowest marginal income tax rate, Ottawa quietly recovers hundreds of millions of dollars annually from IRB recipients.…

Canadian charities like to say that donations are “tax deductible.” They are not and haven't been for decades. Full stop. Donations attract non-refundable tax credits, an entirely different thing. Yet the misuse of “deductible” has become so widespread, so normalized, that it now functions less as an error than as an alternative charitable language—one that relies on vagueness, implication, and a polite hope that donors won’t ask too many questions. Consider the standard pitch: “Your donation is tax deductible.” What most people hear is: I give money, the government gives me some back. What they are not told is how much, under what conditions, or—most awkwardly—whether they’ll get anything at all. Because many won’t. If you are a low-income donor who pays no income tax, your charitable receipt is worth…