Category: Blog

Every few years, we are told that donors are fatigued and volunteers are disappearing. I’ve never found that explanation convincing. More to the point,  I simply don’t buy it. What I see instead is a growing misalignment between how institutions are required to operate versus the many people who actually want to contribute. In the Toronto region especially, volunteering has become increasingly difficult to navigate. Police background checks are slow and layered requiring expensive hardware, online access, and more than a little computer savvy . Screening processes requiring numerous attestations are long, standardized, often irrelevant and intrusive, while probing everything from footwear to personal values. Much of this feels excessive, but it’s important to say clearly: these requirements are rarely of the non-profit’s own making. They are imposed through insurance…

By now, “evidence-based decision making” has become one of those phrases that appears in almost every policy document,   briefing note, and  government slide deck. I cringe when I see it or hear it. It has become a moral label — a way of saying, “I am the rational one here.” People doing research start their roundtable discussions by proudly announcing that their research is ‘evidence-based’ as if somehow, other research or opinion pieces do not use evidence. But increasingly, when someone insists they are using “evidence-based” approaches, I find myself thinking that if they have a mission statement with a social goal, they may be engaging in the opposite: what they may be really doing is decision-based evidence making (a phrase I attribute to Armine Yalnizyan and Richard Shillington). The…

I understand the frustration that animates Paul Kershaw’s work. Younger Canadians face a housing market that feels rigged, tuition that rises faster than wages, and child-rearing costs that outpace family incomes. On the facts, Kershaw is right: many baby boomers had an easier run at owner-occupied housing and education than today’s young adults. Where I part company is not with the diagnosis, but with the remedy—specifically, the call to end or curtail Old Age Security for senior couples with gross incomes around $180,000 and to redeploy those funds to younger adults, children, and lower-income seniors. That approach borrows the romance of Robin Hood—take from the “rich” to help the poor—but it rests on a myopic reading of income, income taxation, and the risks we face  in later life. Here is…

The Washington Post appears to want readers to believe that welfare fraud in Minneapolis is both widespread and inevitable — a natural outgrowth of a “too-big” welfare state. It’s a shopworn story, morally satisfying to some and politically repeatable by many. But its conventionality depends on leaving out the most important facts about fraud, public money, and who actually takes the most from government systems. Let’s start with ownership. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos, a man whose companies have long minimized taxes through complex international structures, transfer pricing, and generous access to public infrastructure funded by taxpayers. The US Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation regularly catalogs how corporate tax avoidance costs hundreds of billions annually — orders of magnitude beyond anything discussed in this article. Yet when…

I appreciate John’s November blog, Fourteen theories of poverty, three income measures and no margin for error. He makes it clear that this is a work in progress and welcomes feedback. I have several suggestions that may help further develop his analysis. The blog starts with a list of fourteen ‘theories of poverty’ that have shaped policy in Canada. It goes on to explore the commonalities and differences among these theories and proposes a new integrating theme: the ‘absence of slack’. Additional points I think the list of fourteen is useful but some additions are needed. These relate to framing the concept of poverty in terms human rights. It is probably implicit in the list, but it needs highlighting. There is a big gap in understanding between policy shops, dominated…

Robyn Urback’s column on homeless encampments captures something important: many Canadians are frightened, frustrated, and exhausted by what they see in their parks and neighbourhoods. Parents are anxious about encampments near daycares. Workers feel unsafe. Residents are losing faith in cities that seem unable to uphold basic norms. These concerns aren’t imaginary; they reflect real conditions on the ground. But where Urback’s diagnosis resonates, her conclusions misfire. The uncomfortable truth The column treats tents as the cause of disorder rather than the visible footprint of a much deeper failure — a failure of systems, not of people. Encampments did not appear because activists romanticized them, or because people prefer tents to shelters. They appeared because the supports designed to prevent homelessness — shelter capacity, income adequacy, mental-health care, addictions treatment,…

A short reflection on style, substance, and (perhaps) integrity Using AI to assist in my writing has been unexpectedly transformative.For years, I wrote alone—drafting, revising, structuring, revisiting old pieces, tightening arguments, clarifying evidence. Then I began asking a chatbot to rewrite sections in my style, to try a second draft with my cadence, or to expand a paragraph into an argument worth making. The shift has been to greatly speed the writing process: not because the machine has replaced the work, but because it helps to get to much of the real work faster. What I have learned, though, is that the machine’s eagerness to please is both a strength and a liability. Give it a paragraph of my writing and say “rewrite this in my style,” and it does…

Every weekday morning, CBC Radio’s Q introduces me to a world I barely knew existed. I listen to it only because it comes on after The Current. I stumbled into it. Tom Power, with his usual warmth and enthusiasm, speaks to Canadian entertainers he describes as “big names,” “breakout stars,” or “massively influential.” He cues up songs that, according to him, “almost everyone was listening to last year.” And just about  every time, I realize I have never heard of the artist, the collaborator, or the hit. Maybe once; but usually not a flicker of recognition. This isn’t a matter of taste. It is a matter of awareness. I had believed I followed the Canadian cultural scene, at least in broad strokes. But Q revealed something more humbling: I have…

News and weather become unrecognizable What happens when media overrides content and enters into cognitive overreach     ADHD: a …. disorder characterized by persistent patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and/or impulsivity that interfere with functioning and development. There was a time when news, weather, and sports functioned as straightforward civic services. News told you what happened. Weather prepared you for the day. They were limited, predictable, and—most importantly—designed for human scale.You could watch them, absorb them, and act on them. Today, the same services appear everywhere—on television, phones, computers, smart TVs, streaming feeds—but the content has mutated. News has largely become continuous crisis, often and more and more delivered as police and fire communications…. Breaking! Weather has become theatre: tragedy in storms, comedy in daily forecasts. What happened? To answer this,…

There is a quiet pattern running through modern public life—across transportation rules, bank products, pharmaceutical advertising, insurance disclosures, and even safety messaging. It is not moral failure. It is not regulatory capture. It is not even what Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification,” although some of the symptoms overlap. What we face is something simpler and more unnerving: an expanding universe of rules and responsibilities that are literally impossible for ordinary people to meet, even with good intentions and careful effort. We are building systems that expect superhuman attention, perfect reaction times, post-graduate comprehension, and then we bill, fine, penalize, or blame people when their human limits collide with those expectations. We can name this for what it is: the Impossibility Gap—the distance between what rules assume people can do, and what…