Author: johnastapleton

There is an invisible Parliament inside Parliament Hill. It doesn’t sit in the Commons or the Senate chamber. It gathers in hotel ballrooms, wood-panelled boardrooms, and private receptions along the corridors of power. This is the Ottawa bubble — a self-referential ecosystem of think tanks, lobbyists, political staff, and sympathetic bureaucrats who have quietly taken control of the conversation between government and citizens. Similar bubbles have formed in provinces, territories and municipalities. The bubble of newly-formed gatekeepers is not made of politicians alone. It includes a revolving cast of institutes, consultants, and public affairs firms that claim to “translate” public opinion into workable policy. In reality, they translate their own donors’ preferences into briefing notes that ministers can repeat with confidence. Large and small - dozens of “policy shops” now…

In every part of Canada, poverty today is seen most vividly through food security and housing. The public landscape of hardship is the food-bank lineup, the encampment, or the crowded shelter. These are real and urgent human stories. They deserve attention and compassion. But the growing focus on hunger and homelessness has also changed how we talk about poverty itself. The structural questions of income security — how benefits are designed, how people qualify, and how far benefits stretch — have quietly moved to the background. This isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s the natural outcome of a system that funds crisis response more readily than long-term reform. Yet the effect is that the debate about why people cannot afford food or housing has become quieter, even as the symptoms of poverty…

When Donald Trump was once challenged for repeating something he knew to be false, he shrugged and said: “It sounded better.” In that single phrase lies the secret of modern persuasion — and the danger now shared by both populist politics and artificial intelligence. We are entering an age in which sounding true outweighs being true, and both humans and machines are learning that resonance beats reality. From Fact to Performance Trump’s answer was not a gaffe; it was a theory of communication.He revealed that, in contemporary politics, truth is performative. The success of a statement is judged not by its factual accuracy but by its emotional impact and narrative power. If it works — if it makes the crowd cheer, if it feels right — that is proof enough.…

Once upon a time, when things broke, you fixed them. A radio hissed? Swap the tubes. A clock slowed down? Adjust the gears. A password didn’t work? Try the one you always use for everything, and voilà. Now we live in the age of the Unfixable. Take my internet-synced clock. It’s marvelously precise, always in step with the global atomic time network—except it’s three hours and eight minutes behind. Not three hours, not three hours and ten, but three-oh-eight. You could use it to time a soufflé, if you don’t mind eating it for breakfast the following day. Or consider my car radio. It underwent a “firmware upgrade” that—judging by its results—was designed by a graduate student in Zen studies. It now intermittently shuts off the sound altogether. The screen…

Every now and then, a columnist I admire writes something that makes me stop cold. David Brooks did that on September 5, 2025, with his essay Why I Am Not a Liberal. Brooks is often thoughtful. He looks at evidence carefully and makes conservatives and liberals alike rethink their assumptions. That’s rare. But in this column, he knocks down a straw man, swaps his argument halfway through, and leaves the reader with conclusions that don’t hold.  The Straw Man Brooks points to studies where very poor families received an extra few hundred dollars a month. The extra money helped with bills, food, and rent. But, he notes, it didn’t magically transform kids’ language skills, health, or parents’ career prospects. Here’s the problem: who ever thought even a significant, temporary cash…

(with apologies to Harper’s Index) Maximum monthly amount a single 65+ Ontarian receives from OAS/GIS/GAINS, July 2025 … $1,923Maximum monthly amount a 60–64 couple receives from Ontario Works … $1,136Percentage by which the senior’s single rate exceeds the younger couple’s … 69.3% Flat annual earnings exemption for a Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) recipient … $5,000Value of $5,000 exemption (2020) if indexed to 2025 prices … $6,010Share of full-time minimum wages represented by $5,000 … 14.6% ODSP earnings exemption (yearly) in 2025 … $12,000Percentage by which ODSP exemption exceeds GIS exemption … 140% Nominal GIS clawback on non-employment income … 50% Real clawback on non-employment income after 2011 and 2016 changes… 59% Real clawback for GAINS recipients…84%Effective clawback for GAINS recipients in subsidized housing … 89%OAS clawback rate for high-income seniors…

With apologies to Harper’s Index Maximum monthly amount  an adult couple can receive on Ontario Works (2025): $1,136 Maximum monthly amount that a single person with disabilities can receive from ODSP $1,408   Percentage by which the maximum single ODSP rate exceeds an OW couple’s rate: 24% Last time earnings exemptions for OW were increased: 2013 Value of the $200  flat rate exemption if indexed to inflation in 2025: $267 Value of $200 as a share of  full time minimum wages in 2025: 7.2% In 2013: 12%   Size of the  2023 ODSP earnings exemption in 2023: $1,000 a month Percentage of OW recipients  reporting earnings in 2002: 18% In 2024: 8.2 %   Increase in Ontario’s minimum wage between 2002 and 2025: 151% Increase in consumer prices over the…

The Material Deprivation Index backs them up In a recent edition of Macleans magazine, a woman, Jeni Gunn, writes about her life as a 51 year old single woman living in Canada. She says: “I work hard, buy quality clothes and fake my way through dinner-party conversations. I’m also part of a fast-growing Canadian underclass.” “ …nobody knows I’ve become one of Canada’s working poor: someone who works regularly but still falls below the poverty line.” “ Currently, my monthly take-home pay averages $2,800, most of which goes to rent, insurance, gas, groceries and debt repayment.” Her yearly take home pay is $33,600. A 74 year old single woman writing anonymously in a US publication called the Moneyist recently reviewed her financial future saying: “If I were to earn more…

Introduction I am getting ready to head back in to Toronto’s Libraries, online forums and Church basements to talk about retirement on a low income in Canada. A majority of the people in the audiences I address are able to apply for benefits, understand their income tax returns and comprehend the basic rules that govern Old Age Pensions and other programs. They have sufficient critical thinking skills. But I am finding that a growing minority of attendees are unable to engage the decisions they need to make and they are having more and more trouble navigating application processes and our income tax system. This minority often does not possess critical thinking skills and may lack numerical ability. They live in a world of numerators with few if any denominators. They…

Near the end of Mark Carney’s best selling book Value(s), he talks about a landmark on Headington High Street where the owner of a home “... had constructed a giant sculpture of a shark attacking his roof on an otherwise nondescript street” (p.518). Carney  says: “Over the years I have thought back to the shark because it is not just nuclear fallout that spreads across borders, but financial instability, cyber-crime and climate chaos. To what extent can a country wall itself off from these sharks? And for those that try, what opportunities in trade and investment, ideas and creativity, do their citizens forfeit?” What will we forfeit? The Headington Shark must bother Mark Carney a lot these days. There are many sharks attacking our rooftops and Mr. Carney is thinking about…