The World Cup is coming to Toronto this week. If you’re from away and curious about the most junior partner in this tournament, or simply a Canadian who hasn’t been paying attention, then this article is for you.

Like so many Canadians, soccer (football) has been a key part of my entire life. I played growing up, but I can trace the moment I got hooked on the beautiful game back to 2004. I was twelve years old, and my father had just passed away. While our family was grieving, I found a temporary escape watching the European soccer championships in the basement. I am half Portuguese, and Portugal made it all the way to the finals that year. Retreating into soccer and connecting with that part of my heritage was like therapy getting me through the hardest stages of bereavement.

There are a million unique Canadian stories like this. Powerful moments connecting Canadians to their childhood, to their families, and to their cultural heritage through this one global sport. Canada is a country of immigrants. Toronto, its biggest city, especially so: More than fifty percent of Torontonians were born outside of Canada.

Most Torontonians have steadily fading connections with our countries of origin, but we can temporarily re-atune through the World Cup. We don’t necessarily know, hear, or see the geopolitics in our homelands, but we know who the best footballers are. For example, most Portuguese Canadians couldn’t tell you if Portugal has a Prime Minister or a President (They actually have both). But they certainly all know about Cristiano Ronaldo.

Prior to 2022, Canada simply wasn’t a legitimate international outfit. That meant that most Canadians could easily keep a firm attachment to the old country when it came to soccer. There was no local competition. Immigrant families woke up early and booked time off work to watch their countries play on the international stage. Argentinian, French, South Korean, etc. In a country of immigrants, everyone is from somewhere.

Toronto is the frontier for maintaining distinct cultural enclaves while part of a national whole. This is the proving grounds for the Canadian experiment. Finding a paradigm wherein those cultures can be nurtured, emphasized, and folded into the fabric of the nation’s greater cultural mosaic. All this while working towards the higher goal as laid out in our constitution: peace, order, and good government.

The key to living together in this way is generally staying humble, and keeping the cultural demonstrations to the background (notwithstanding your one assigned weekend for a heritage street festival). In that sense, the World Cup has always been a moment where people are allowed to simultaneously let their hair down a bit and go a little wild, drinking their Peroni, Guiness, or Raki.

International soccer tournaments are a sudden desert bloom in the concrete jungle of Toronto. Partisans get to show off their heritage in a way that just isn’t typically done in Canada. When June hits, you will notice flags flying from every country in the world on the hoods of cars, in restaurant windows, and on apartment balconies.

It’s a glorious feeling to feel like you are in the centre of the universe, as if everyone was there all at once. The world comes to us, and we can go and experience a sampling of the world. Toronto has distinct cultural neighbourhoods that become hubs for supporting national teams, and emphasizing cultural traits. Little Jamaica, Little Italy, Little Portugal, etc.

The cultural enclaves, spanning a few blocks, are also evidence of a chronology of individual diasporas. The neighbourhoods are little time capsules that hint at the waves of newcomers adding and adding to the fabric of the country over decades.

Canada doesn’t have grand botanical gardens, castles, temples, or monuments. But we do have a little bit of everything, and that is extremely special in its own right.

When you combine these rich heritages with the fact that the Canada team was feckless for so long, most soccer fans support their grandparents’ teams. Therefore, if Argentina was playing Canada, Argentinian-Canadians would rather Argentina win. For me, the greatest sporting moment in my life thus far was when Portugal won the Euros in 2016. This is a common sentiment. I would be extremely hard pressed to pick a favourite if Portugal played Canada in a meaningful game.

This is the first thing that someone from away really needs to know: Canada is most Canadians’ second favourite team.

The next thing to be aware of, is we’re having a bit of an identity crisis at the moment. Pinning down a Canadian identity has always been difficult. We have an immense geography — Canada is bigger than the entirety of mainland Europe combined. This means that it’s a challenge to find commonality with people living in the north, in French Canada, or on the coasts. Our motto is “Mari Usque Ad Mare” “From Sea to (Shining) Sea”. Between those seas, there is a lot going on. One thing we tend to have is this idea of humility. Humility is a guiding principle for Canadian character — we typically don’t like to show off.

You may notice that internal circumstances are a little tense. So much so, that two of our provinces (there are 10) are currently actively discussing leaving Canada. We have trouble agreeing, to say the least.

One thing we can agree on however, is that we are in a bit of a fight with our next door neighbour. You may have heard, but the president of the United States — he who shall not be named — has been messing with our minds and wallets. So much so that his threats to annex the country last year completely reversed the direction the country was going politically. People are worried about the impact of the trade war, and saliently they feel slighted. Because by all accounts, we think that we have been excellent neighbours.

Then this past week, the Prime Minister had to get up in front of the entire country and explain why it’s not okay to hate Jews. So yeah, there’s some stuff going on.

Despite all that, Canadians still feel like we live in the best country in the world. We don’t tend to do riots or civil strife (at least not yet). There is nowhere any of us would rather be. We do tend to feel like we’re superior to America, and there’s an impetus to prove it. It is our duty to politely welcome you, and treat you like the valued visitors that you are. Guests are going to have a great time, despite any background problems.

But the second thing you’ve got to know about Canada is that we’re kind of going through it right now. For many of us, hosting this world cup feels like when you are hosting a party but haven’t started cleaning the house soon enough. As a solution, you throw all the dirty laundry into that upstairs bedroom and keep doors closed and everyone downstairs. The guests aren’t going in there, but the host still feels guilty and unprepared. We’re sorry for any inconvenience.

As far as the actual game, soccer is Canada’s most played sport, but it is by no means the most popular to consume - that would be hockey.

This is partly due to the fact that Canadian soccer history has been disappointing to say the least. Prior to this year, Canada has qualified for two world cups. We’ve played six games. We’ve lost them all. We have scored two goals (One by us, one an own goal from Morocco).

Despite that, Canada’s men’s program is actually in its golden age.

The Canadian roster is made up of legitimate world class players. Men who play for big teams in top leagues — Germany, England, Italy, etc. We are a serious team. Canada isn’t necessarily a threat to win the whole tournament, but we’re not just happy to be there anymore either. This is a stark departure from the dark ages that were the 2000s and 2010s. For the first time ever, there are real expectations. Which means that there is potential for disappointment. The games are interesting. They need a win to kick it off.

And so we arrive at Friday’s opening match of the World Cup. Canada vs Italy Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Off the pitch, there is real promise to what this World Cup can bring: a safe environment for us to dip our toes into nationalism, something we are highly uncomfortable with. Canada Day (which falls exactly within the tournament window on July 1st) is never marked by big rallies in seas of red and white. We celebrate by enjoying a day off of work and savouring our short summers. Few Canadians have ever been to a Canada Day party. We aren’t oriented that way, our Protestant roots discourage outward passion.

That’s the last thing you need to know. Canadians are not going to lose our minds for Canada. Our people are not going to go all in, not at the start at least.

Those are the real stakes of the World Cup for Canada: Whether or not Canadians can go all in for the home team.

This World Cup has a chance to be a flash point, a unifying moment wherein our people can come together with real positive purpose. We can be unifying towards something instead of away from something. In other words, we have an opportunity to proudly unite around being Canadian, as opposed to our default mode of “At least we’re not American.”

So, on Friday, eleven young men — most of whom are immigrants or sons of immigrants — will take the field to represent a country of immigrants. This isn’t just their opportunity to make sports history and finally win a game: they could be the match that ignites a fire: inspiring a country and reminding us all what it actually means to be proud of Canada, and to feel profoundly Canadian.

It can go either way. We’ll see how 40 million react. Welcome to Canada, and we’re sorry if it isn’t what you expected.

After Mark Carney’s announcement this week in Toronto on antisemitism, Rabbi Steve Wernick penned an op-ed in The Globe and Mail. It’s a great piece, and I wanted to share it. Unfortunately in Canada, that is not a simple matter. There are restrictions in place. On some platforms, sharing articles from major newspapers is no longer possible. Not all of them though.

In August 2023, the Canadian government passed the Online News Act, requiring platforms like Meta and Google to negotiate and pay Canadian news publishers for linking to content on their platforms. While Google paid up in response, Meta decided to remove its news content from Facebook and Instagram for all Canadian users. They didn’t want to play ball with the government, so took their toys and went home.

Almost three years later, the big Canadian publications are still bleeding subscribers. Print continues to trend towards extinction, yet more and more content is being created than ever before.

So what happened to all the news-seeking individuals on social media? Where do they go to get their information?

The answer is a social media platform called Reddit.

Reddit is an online forum wherein users can post ideas, photos, articles, and videos within certain topical contexts based on interest - sports, politics, video games, and so on. Reddit divides its content into individual forums called subreddits. Each of these is a mini ecosystem with its own culture and rules.

The platform is designed to amalgamate content that is widely liked, or more precisely “upvoted”, and then serve that content to more people. So when something has mass appeal, it becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop.

The big caveat with Reddit, however, is that the platform is completely anonymous. You do not know who anyone else is, where they are coming from, or what their expertise is on a given subject. This isn’t an issue when you’re asking for gardening tips. Trust for a stranger on the internet is pretty high when you’re looking for advice on lawn care. With these more niche subreddits, Reddit does a genuinely good job of pushing authority and legitimacy. It is an extremely useful tool, especially on the smaller subreddits where hobbies and special interests are discussed.

A huge problem arises, however, when you start considering wider issues like politics, finance, and public safety. The site is mysteriously absent from the online news act, so sharing news is fair game on Reddit. A nice loophole for the information-hungry, but an issue when you realize that Reddit is, for the most part, not accountable or policed in any meaningfully legitimate way (more on this below). Further, the site has a habit of becoming a massive echo chamber.

This happens because of the way that the up and downvoting operate. It’s a basic popularity contest, so groupthink ideas tend to be overemphasized, especially on larger subreddits.

For example, we can see this clearly in the Toronto subreddit: r/toronto. The population on r/toronto is extremely progressive, fair enough, the majority of chronically online Torontonians lean left. But when a post or article about municipal politics is shared, the sub has tremendous sympathy for the mayor, Olivia Chow, who is of course also left-leaning. For provincial politics, this population reflects hostility toward Premier Doug Ford (who is a Conservative).

Because of the upvote and downvote system, bias is rampant, but not obvious. Further, it is all hidden behind anonymity. So if you try and post anything on r/toronto in favour of Olivia Chow’s biggest challenger for the next mayoral election, Brad Bradford, you are “downvoted” into oblivion by unnamed masses. It is polarization on steroids. This is a major problem as reddit frames and presents these online communities as good, objective places, when in reality they are loaded. Having a balanced discourse on r/toronto is impossible but it’s still the best free place to get amalgamated news on the internet.

Getting downvoted feels bad. There is an emotional sting when a stranger thinks your comment or idea sucks. However, there is also an actual loss of online currency when someone downvotes you on Reddit. There is a feature called “Karma,” which is a rough measure of how much authority your anonymous profile has on the platform. Karma is a wonderful idea in isolation, but it has a major flaw: it is just a summation of other people’s encouragement. This can be achieved by being the first to announce a headline. “Joe Biden wins the Presidency” would have picked up hundreds of thousands of upvotes in the r/news subreddit. Alternatively, it can be achieved by grinding it out, with hundreds of posts and comments on your local sports team over time. The flaw here is that that authority can be achieved by arbitrary means, and that the community deciding what’s best has messed up incentives. Karma also translates across the platform, which means if you are the guru on r/gardening, you have more authority when chiming in on r/physics and vice versa.

This is particularly salient because Reddit is designed to feel objective. It is a masterfully simple and effective psychological trick. Because of the anonymity, when you’re reading a Reddit post, you are inclined to think that the person you are interacting with is just like you. Human brains fill in the blanks.

This illusion of objectivity and truth is central to Reddit’s perceived authority. Because of this mirror effect, people are inclined to trust what they read on the internet, no matter how many times they are told not to. When this starts to move into the realm of topics like geopolitics, you can easily see how this can be problematic. What’s more, because you cannot know or validate who anyone is, there is no proof that they are telling the truth, or that they are a member of the community they claim to represent. There is nothing stopping me — a Canadian living in Toronto — from chiming in on the inner workings of a social issue happening in and being discussed in the subreddit r/Vancouver.

Again, a Reddit user defaults to trusting what they read unless the words themselves are raising serious flags. This is the wonderful original promise of the internet: that the words and ideas are the only thing that matter. But they say that 90% of communication is nonverbal. There is no tone, no insight into the “why” someone is saying something. What’s more, even though you think that your discussion is happening with someone similar to you, it’s just as likely that you are arguing with a child, a bigot, someone with psychosis, or maybe a whacky homeless man. There is a great appeal to this democracy of ideas, but the perception of objectivity that Reddit provides is completely unlike reality.

The primary safety mechanism is fundamentally just a popularity contest.

This matters because when visiting a subreddit like r/toronto, you get served content that is popular in the sub. If there are more upvotes, you’re going to get more servings of that particular piece. A pro-Olivia Chow piece will be served to more people, making the popular more popular, whereas a pro-Brad Bradford piece might get a few views but will certainly be downvoted by the average population of the subreddit. This speaks to immense incumbency bias.

Then there are other more explicit risks. There is nothing stopping a brigade of biased actors from coming into the r/toronto subreddit and using their numbers to control the narrative. The user thinks they are working with an objective platform, but there is no way to know who the person on the other end of the conversation is, or just why they are there.

It would be one thing if it was just the wacky homeless man sitting at the bar downtown, but what if it was a legitimate bad actor from political opposition, or some kind of foreign state. There are no boundaries. Citizenship and location do not control whether you can participate in a nation’s primary subreddit. This is not to imply that Reddit is solely a means of propaganda for foreign states and entities, but if it was, there really would be no way to stop it. If I were such a bad actor, that’s exactly where I would go — especially in a place like Canada, where there are severe limitations on where people actually get their news. It’s free to join, free to use, and it is completely anonymous, that’s dangerous in the wrong unregulated hands.

There is one more key intended failsafe on reddit that needs to be mentioned: the moderators. In each and every subreddit, there are moderators — essentially the judge, jury, and president of each individual sub. There can be one moderator, or many. This scales with the amount of activity in the subreddit. Most of these people, I presume (especially those in the smaller subreddits), are well-meaning volunteers. They are people who are passionate about a certain topic: a TV show from the nineties, a hyperspecific subculture or fan page. Those people are there to police the sub, keep the peace, and make sure that no one is breaking any obvious rules, removing things like racism, hate, and irrelevant content.

Imagine a scenario where two baseball teams find themselves in a final. One is a mighty franchise like the New York Yankees with millions and millions of supporters, and the other is tiny, like say the Milwaukee Brewers. What’s to stop the Yankees fans from going into the Milwaukee subreddit, causing chaos, insulting the team, and making the space intolerable for Brewers fans? In the ideal scenario, that’s what moderators are for — to police those bad actors and prevent that behaviour.

With something as blatantly transparent as sports fandom, it’s pretty easy to see who’s on which side. Moreover, there is a clear understanding of right and wrong.

But what about a subreddit like the one for The New York Times? It is considered the most popular newspaper in the world. You’d figure that the NYT sub would be dedicated to sharing articles from the newspaper. Unfortunately, because of the incentive structures of Reddit, that simply isn’t the case. The subreddit is saturated with hyperpartisan articles that get pushed to the top. Look at the top posts from this year on the r/nytimes subreddit and you see several articles critical of Trump and Pete Hegseth, each with thousands of upvotes. But there’s another subreddit, r/nyt, which brands itself the exact same way: it’s ostensibly all about The New York Times. With r/nyt however, the majority of the top articles have four times the upvotes, and curiously, almost all of them have headlines that demonize Israel.

Thus there are two distinct New York Times reddit realities, both focused and biased in different directions, seemingly representative of the publication on Reddit. For a casual user, it is impossible to know which reality is correct, if at all. A naive news seeker could not be blamed for subscribing to either of those subreddits and seeing the top headlines, with thousands of upvotes as benign the dominant narratives. From there it is a short trip to form opinions based on this shifted reality, Reddit is a pretty well respected site, after all. Compounding this pattern over millions of users, and thousands of subreddits, can have serious implications. The mob mentality is strong on Reddit, and it is not at all obvious to most users.

To dive a little deeper, the two descriptions for the two New York Times subreddits mentioned above are: “Unofficial subreddit to share, highlight, discuss, and comment upon New York Times content, features, staff, and management” versus “All things about the New York Times — now with the allowance of offbeat and sometimes spirited news discussion.” Which is real? Both? Neither?

Then what happens in another scenario when there is only one dominant subreddit for an important topic, and it is firmly ideologically captured?

This brings us full circle to the news of the past week: Mark Carney on antisemitism, and my attempts to share an article in the r/canada subreddit. There are 1.4 million members in that forum. The article I was trying to post was penned by the senior rabbi of the biggest synagogue in the country. It was blocked by one person.

In other words, an article from a prominent Jewish figure published in the biggest Canadian newspaper, about the Prime Minister making a speech about antisemitism, which he attended live, was banned. It wasn’t allowed to surface because the moderator(s) of r/canada believed it to be breaking a rule.

They said: “The language in this headline is inappropriate for it to be discussed reasonably” — and the post was removed for Rule 7: No Trolling / No Brigading.

This censorship hits directly at the core issue with Reddit. I disagreed with that decision, but there was no recourse, no true way to appeal. There is one person on the other end who gets to decide. They weren’t elected, and they aren’t getting paid. There is no one to escalate and raise this to. This matters more because plenty of Canadians are on Reddit and are looking to the r/Canada sub as a community run, non-partisan, objective place where people can share ideas. But there is a very human, and very biased filter on the front end, literally moderating the content for better or for worse. This is happening at scale.

Now, I don’t necessarily think the specific moderator who denied the post has a political agenda or is an antisemite. But the point is, I have no idea who that moderator is, or what their incentives are. Having a cursory look at the list, it could have been any of the people who go by: u/haggis_boy, or u/data_error, or u/voteoutofspite (these are some of their real handles). They could be anyone in the country. They might not even be Canadian at all. They bring their own biases, which are not reflected or made clear in an environment that is headline focused and presented as objective. It is not unreasonable to wonder whether antisemitic bias — or one individual’s view on Israel — played a role. Who is watching these watchmen? Is anyone even aware of this hidden hand tipping the scales of the discourse?

Run afoul of the moderators, and they can ban you from the subreddit for any reason. Getting banned means you can’t participate. There are no rules except those that the moderators decide. There is real irony in the fact that the more open the platform appears, the more hidden gatekeepers there tend to be.

Reddit, for its part, is very clever about dodging criticism for this. They will not take responsibility, because from their perspective, this is a private, individual subreddit that is completely controlled, operated, and moderated the same way the rest of the subs are. Who are they to define how successful communities should operate?

The philosophy is grounded in well-meaning free internet ideals. But humans ruin everything - see: enshitification/platform decay. There are dozens of access points for bad actors, bots, biases, unfairness, lack of justice, and propaganda to enter the Reddit ecosystem. Whether it’s echo chambers, bad moderators, misinformation, harassment, or brigading — all of these can easily happen on Reddit, and there is no recourse for anyone. This is a free platform. They don’t owe you anything.

The problem is particularly acute in Canada. Globally, Canada is the most captured audience when it comes to Reddit. According to the platform, there are 18 million active users in Canada alone each week — this is the highest market penetration Reddit has in any country in the world. This is almost certainly because news-seekers have been forced to look elsewhere, given that news is no longer being serviced by Facebook and Instagram.

When we look at why Canada has some of the worst antisemitism in the world, we must ask whether it is a coincidence that a huge portion of its young people are on Reddit.

There are solutions available. The Canadian government could treat Reddit the same way it treats Meta, and demand that it be looped into Bill C-18.

Something could also change on the platform’s side. Reddit could implement rules around having the company moderate subreddits that reach a certain size, or they should have to at least be held responsible if/when users are subject to harassment and written abuse.

On a global scale, the problem gets a lot worse as AI and LLMs become more and more entrenched in day to day life. Reddit openly advertises that it is the single largest source of citations for LLMs. When you ask Google, or Copilot, or Claude a question, it has been trained on highly upvoted Reddit posts. These models cannot actually know what the true answer is: they don’t think. They operate on probabilities and upvoted Reddit posts are most probably true. This is the end game we must worry about. The feedback loop that starts with opinion is supercharged with bias and potential for bad actors, and then viewed through a prism of computers and robots. This results in popular opinion being reported as fact. That frontier is the grey area that humans struggle to stay vigilant about over time. When you ask AI a question, eventually you stop asking for the source. It will not tell you the difference between fact and opinion.

There is optimism in the latest pivot being realized online. Long form platforms like Substack, independent podcasts, Youtube video essays, and emerging third party sites like The Hub continue to pick up steam and eyeballs. Just as large swaths of the young population are captured with dopamine quick hitters via Tik Tok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts, substance thirsty people are seeking better content. To be self-serving, this was one of the key inspirations in starting accordingto, getting real discourse front and centre in the Canadian consciousness.

These ideals are antithetical once a platform like Reddit reaches a big enough scale. The gatekeepers, however well intended, will inevitably stifle good discourse. Perhaps it is as simple as a paywall making all the difference. There is a good maxim in the tech world: if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. This is never more true than with Reddit, a multibillion dollar social media platform that has to this point been ignored by the Canadian government. Banning news on Facebook didn’t solve any problems with the news industry, it just moved them to somewhere with even less transparency. You cannot fight human nature.

One avenue that absolutely should be pursued: an actual study on what impact Reddit is having on antisemitism and polarization in Canada. Similar to this one published last April by SamaraCanada. Canadians should be aware where that traffic is coming from, and how the conditions might have been supercharged by the Meta news ban.

It’s time we started paying more attention.

Keep your expectations low, and you’ll never be disappointed.

So it was for me on Monday evening, watching Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivering remarks on antisemitism in Canada. He was joined by Leslie Church, the MP for St. Paul’s, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon, and Minister of Public Safety Gary Anandasangaree.

Leslie Church deserves real credit. By all accounts, she is the one who pushed this up the Federal Liberal Party chain and made it happen. St. Paul’s is one of the most Jewish ridings in Canada. The threat its constituents are facing right now are among the most serious of any area in the country.

Church told an anecdote about her young daughter walking into a synagogue for the first time and being struck by the intense level of security. For diaspora Jews, that security is a benign fact of life - so familiar for so long that they have stopped noticing it at all.

That apathy; the acceptance of a new normal, is exactly why Monday’s announcement matters. It is a signal that the needle might just be moving in a positive direction.

So — did Carney deliver?

That depends entirely on what you were expecting.

If you tuned into the speech hoping for a rousing condemnation of Islamic extremism, a direct naming of anti-Zionism as antisemitism, or a pivot in this government’s posture toward Israel - then you would be sorely disappointed. Mark Carney’s Middle East politics, and that of the “New” Liberal government have been clear since he slipped up during the election campaign last year when asked about a Genocide in Gaza. If that hadn’t tipped you off, then his unilateral recognition of the state of Palestine should have clarified the matter. Evidently, a pivot with sweeping changes should never have been expected. None of that was coming, and none of it came.

But if you came in with reality top of mind, and understood where this government sits, then what happened Monday can be interpreted as highly meaningful. Carney said clearly that “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians”. He cited the statistic that over two-thirds of all religion-motivated hate crimes in this country are directed at Jews, who make up just one percent of the population. He said antisemitism has surged to levels not seen in the post-war period. He said these things out loud, at a synagogue, as Prime Minister. That is not nothing. Being noticed helps. It does not solve the problem, but it matters.

There is a maxim in politics: identify where an issue is going, and get there as quickly as possible. The Liberals have been doing exactly that. That was the impetus for recognizing Palestine, a decision that drew considerable criticism from within the Jewish community as an abject betrayal. But understanding that decision is essential context for understanding Monday. The Liberals can see the Canadian demographics. They know that Muslims outnumber Jews by five to one. They see where the political centre of gravity has moved, and they have positioned themselves accordingly. That is politics, and it is fair to say so plainly.

Notably, Carney did not mention Israel once. That was deliberate, and it signals clearly that this government is not changing its foreign policy posture anytime soon. Those hoping for that pivot will be disappointed. Again, it all depends on expectations.

The most predictable moment of the evening came about two-thirds of the way through Carney’s speech. To his credit, the Prime Minister held out longer than I expected. But eventually the magic words came out of his mouth: “mosque”, “transphobia”, and “Islamophobia” in a speech that was supposed to be about antisemitism. He gave us that all too familiar eye roll moment that comes when Canadian officials bookend their condemnation of antisemitism with platitudes to other groups. He at least had the wherewithal not to take the opportunity to mention Anti-Palestinian racism on this occasion.

Carney also called out immigration as a source of hate in this country. That was significant but I would have liked him to go one step further and name the problem more directly. I certainly did not expect him to. The political capital required for a move like that is far more than this government — or frankly most governments — would be willing to spend.

The headline policy announcement was the creation of the “Ministerial Advisory Council on Rights, Equality and Inclusion”, to be chaired by former senator Marc Gold. It is yet another promise from Mark Carney. So the proof will be entirely in the execution. Antisemitism being the first order of business is encouraging, but we will have to wait and see. The optimist in me believes this might have the potential to mark a watershed moment in Canadian progressive politics. Jews have always been curiously omitted from woke culture, and from the concept of intersectionality. When the Prime Minister is setting up an entire council about inclusion with combatting antisemitism as the crown jewel, we might just be breaking new ground.

The other promise made was that of Bill C-9 — the Combatting Hate Act, currently before the Senate after passing the House in March. The internet is where antisemitism lives now. It is where it germinates and spreads, where it radicalises, and where it finds new and susceptible minds. Trying to do something about that is meaningful, even if the legislation is imperfect.

I have real concerns about the free speech implications of C-9, they are not trivial. But the impulse is right. There are assumptions baked into the Canadian social contract, and when those assumptions are constantly being trampled online, governments have an obligation to act. The West has been remarkably slow to try anything. This government is trying something, or at least promising to. I hope it is leveraged carefully, but I cannot fault the intention.

I think about antisemitism all the time. After listening to Carney’s speech twice, here is where I land:

I believe this Liberal government is finally listening to Canadian Jews. I believe they understand the severity of what is happening in this country. I believe they see the social fabric of the country eroding. I believe they want it to stop.

But whether they are willing to make the tough decisions that will inevitably be required is still an open question. Intentions and promises are not enough. Antisemitism is a millennia-old disease, and it will not be cured by an advisory council and a speech at a synagogue, however well-delivered the rhetoric. What is required now is leadership and courage - the willingness to name things directly, and to actually spend that political capital in the name of justice, morality, and Canadian values.

Until then, the expectations of Canadian Jews should remain low.

** Liked this article? Check out more of Jacob’s writing at accordingto.ca or subscribe below:

** This piece debuted in the Times of Israel on May 14th, 2026. You can read it here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/its-time-to-retire-zionism/ **

They say that Israel is never allowed to win a war. Jews generally, it would seem, are unable to ever claim public victory. But if we examine history, we can see with clarity that we are more than capable of being winners. None of these wins was more important than 1948.

Think beyond just the war of independence. Jews were finally victorious in an ideological and political battle that had been waged in Jewish prayer and custom for thousands of years: The restoration of a Jewish state in the land of Israel. The realization of the Zionist project.

Zionism (it seems we must constantly be reminded), in its most basic form, is simply the right of the Jews to have a state in their ancestral homeland. By those terms, the movement fulfilled its mandate. It won. So let’s stop dwelling. Let’s retire the word “Zionism”. 

It is no longer useful.

Zionism is unique in that there is no other political movement still using aspirational language so long after it succeeded in its goals. Take for example the absurdity of using terms like “universal suffrage”, “abolition”, or even “prohibition” in 2026. Those movements, successful or not, have had their debates settled. Those are past-tense issues. In the American context, Prohibition was settled in the US in 1933. Just 15 years before Israel was established. Then there is a movement you’ve likely never even heard of: the Korean Independence movement. Which concluded with the establishment of the Republic of Korea, in 1948. There are very few people in the world who know enough about Korean independence to debate the dates, political motivations, or efficacy of the movement. But that’s exactly the point: the debate is settled. Despite its relationship with its northern neighbour, South Korea exists. 

Unlike these other political ideas, the key differentiator is that the term "Zionist" has been hijacked by enemies of Jews worldwide. A cursory look at a site like Wikipedia will show you just how toxic the word has become. The definition you find there bears little resemblance to what Herzl intended - it has been rewritten, contested, and poisoned in real time by people who want the question of Israel's legitimacy to remain permanently open. We cannot fight the editors fast enough.

This is not at all theoretical. When I recently told a non-Jewish friend that “of course I was a Zionist”, she told me in hushed tones, “Isn’t that like being Hamas, but the other side?” That is where we are. No amount of education or Jewish pride will turn the tide on this matter in the global public square. There will always be a large contingent of hostile actors online criticizing “Zionists” as evil, as colonial oppressors, and then retreating behind the phrase  “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism".

This act of mental piracy, (raiding, pillaging and then hiding), is the fulcrum for why the Anti-Zionism discussion is so maddening to those of us still wanting to defend the term. Technically speaking, Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism. There is a legitimate logical Judo move there. A person can love Jews and believe a Jewish nation state is not a good idea. Of course, there is almost always alignment in the Jew hating Venn diagram between antisemites and Anti-Zionists.

Speaking of antisemitism, for its own reasons, there is already much discussion and effort to phase that particular term out. “Jew hatred” and “Anti-Jewish bigotry” are starting to circulate, but they suffer from the same fundamental flaw: being non-inclusive of Israel. For me, the clear path forward is to start using “Judeophobia” as the term of choice. 

While contemplating this idea, I came across a past version of this debate. Alana Cooper and Sharona Hoffman, writing in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in October of 2024, argued something very similar in "For the sake of Israel, it's time to retire the word 'Zionism'." Zack Bodner published a response in the Times of Israel Blogs a few days later. 

Two years on, we can revisit the exchange. In my estimation, Cooper and Hoffman were right, although their conclusion is perhaps misoriented. We shouldn’t retire the term “Zionism” just for the sake of Israel, we should do it for the sake of Jews everywhere. “Zionism” is like the star athlete with several championship rings still playing ball well into their 40s. We should let the term enter the hall of fame and call it a career. 

So what’s next then? Where do we go after fighting for this term’s soul for so long? For starters, we can look to the product of Zionism for direction: While not a monolith, Israelis use the term far less than diaspora Jews. It is already becoming archaic within the Jewish state, while it still holds as a central term in diaspora discourse. As an Israeli friend of mine put it, "It's kind of a phased out word. When we talk about love for Israel, we use the Hebrew word for nation — Le'om." 

Thus, nationhood or peoplehood, seem to me to be the best path forward for describing love and support for Israel. As in, support for Israel isn’t Zionism, it is a commitment to and manifestation of Jewish peoplehood. 

While nationhood is understandable by the world over, peoplehood is a bit more specific to Jews. It speaks to and covers the diverse set of ideas, experiences, skin tones, religiosity, and political views. Within the homeland, and without.

Outside of Israel, the narrative is being rewritten by enemies so that the State of Israel is suddenly in question. They want to revive the Zionist debate. This is disingenuous: no serious person would ever start a movement debating whether other countries have the right to exist. The Judeophobe (think Homophobe) will surely adapt. They will find another angle of attack, a foothold to try and delegitimize the only Jewish state. No matter, this is a long dance and we must move forward with language better suited for this stanza of the struggle. 

Bodner argued we should reclaim the word Zionism rather than retire it. But to what end? At what cost? When we get it back, what are we going to do with it? He might have been right two years ago, but as Israel’s credibility and support continue to erode in the west, we need to reorient ourselves. Rather than being a signal of strength, holding onto this debate is giving permission to the world to question the results of a physical, political, and ideological war that was won over seven decades ago.

They say that Israelis and Jews are never allowed to win a war. Well, sometimes we might be the ones stopping ourselves from enjoying the spoils. It's time to retire the term Zionism. 

Retire it, and Anti-Zionism loses its power. 

Israel exists. It is a fact of life. Like death, taxes, and gravity. On that matter at least, the world should move on, and we would do well not to engage in rhetorical battles we have already won.

Talking about Medical Assistance in Dying ("MAID") is divisive, emotionally charged, and extremely personal. Discussing it is scary, riddled with pitfall traps, and likely to offend people. So naturally, I want to dig into it.

For many Canadians, just thinking about this topic is a no fly zone. We tend to have an aversion to such negative things. It is a necessary conversation though, So this is my attempt to describe how I think about MAID and the conclusions that I do (or don't) come to.

MAID is especially difficult because it short circuits the Canadian psyche. It’s justifying philosophy sits at the nexus of fundamental values that underpin Western ideology, and pits them against each other.

The first value is the sanctity of life - We must preserve life in all instances, and do everything in our power to prolong it.

The second is the notion of personal autonomy — giving people control to do what they want with their lives and their bodies. This idea is the foundation for the basic premise of consent.

Thus, MAID can be looked at as the battle for supremacy between the sanctity of life and our respect for personal autonomy. It is where the unstoppable moral force meets the immovable moral object.

In addition to these two fundamentals, MAID necessitates deep consideration and attention to suffering (quality of life) and a fourth more abstract metaphysical fear around the concepts of death and dying.

Yes, it is a big conversation.

To orient myself, learn more, and to help educate my local community, I facilitated a symposium on this topic back in February. The speakers panel included a palliative care doctor, a legal expert, and a faith leader. That experience taught me that this issue is constantly evolving, and that most people don't feel comfortable asking questions about MAID.

The issue is far from settled in the hearts and minds of Canadians. There is little clarity or common language on how to approach the conversation: when to have it, if you should have it, and how to navigate the social taboos. Then there is much unknown on how to best approach friends, family members, and love ones who are considering the avenue.

The medical expert, palliative care doctor and order of Canada recipient, Dr. Sandy Buchman led the symposium off with an extremely powerful anecdote. He told the story of one of his first exposures to MAID, when he walked into a patient's home for a consultation.

Dr. Buchman was received by an elderly gentleman with a European accent, who, upon his arrival, rolled up his sleeve and revealed the numbered tattoo on his arm. He said — and I'm paraphrasing — "Hitler and the Nazi's wanted to take away my right to choose whether I lived or died. Today I am exercising that right. Will you support me in making my choice?"

That moment helped settle the debate in the mind of Dr. Buchman.

In my personal life, I have a friend whose father was suffering but not terminally ill. He had a clear quality of life issue that caused him physical and emotional pain. What's more, he felt his pain was the responsibility of a doctor who had performed surgery on him earlier that year. In my friend's estimation, that physical pain and the emotional sense of betrayal drove the decision for this individual to pursue MAID. He was suffering badly. He got the procedure done less than a month later.

In the days after their father's death, that patient's family received a voicemail from the health ministry: a social worker had been assigned to their father's case and would be getting in touch to set up an appointment to figure out next steps for treatment.

At the end of his life, this person was let down by the health system. Universal healthcare failed him, and supports did not arrive quickly enough to help. He felt he had lived his life, was miserable, and only had one way out.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if the social worker had been put in place two months earlier, it might have made all the difference in the world. Or maybe, the same conclusion would have been reached. Was this fate or destiny? This man was exercising the exact same right that the holocaust survivor did, after all.

We can't know for sure but we can certainly acknowledge that there are real gaps in Canadian healthcare. Therefore, we must conclude that there is a risk that MAID is providing people a way out of, and giving cover to, a broken and degraded system.

The unfortunate reality is that Canadians are at the mercy of institutions that have gaps. Autonomy is one thing, but if even one person falls through the cracks, compelled to ending their life prematurely, that ought to be considered unacceptable. A single life that could have been saved is a tragedy that should give us serious pause before forging ahead.

It is likely impossible to completely eliminate mistakes, but we need to be absolutely committed to the best outcomes. Add it to the list of reasons to improve the healthcare system. Ultimately, we must be hyper cautious not to allow MAID to cover for the government's shortcomings.

This is a particularly poignant criticism given the trend we see in the number of Canadians receiving MAID. The latest statistics (from 2024) are that since legalized, approximately 2% of deaths in Canada happen via MAID. Saliently, that number is on the rise.

In 2024, that number was all the way up to 5% on the year. 16,000 people. Those numbers feel jarring. But before we draw conclusions, we need to ask, what should that number be? Really, what % of Canadian deaths should be happening via MAID?

What can we find when we dig into the numbers? For Starters, 95% of people who get MAID are on what is called "Track 1", which means a person whose death is "reasonably foreseeable".

What's more, 20% of MAID requests in 2024 were never completed because those people died from other causes before getting the procedure done. That suggests that physicians might actually be too conservative about approving patients.

A couple more key numbers that really stand out: 63% of MAID recipients had terminal Cancer, and their median age was 78. These statistics seem reasonable and signal that MAID is doing what it was designed to do, alleviate suffering for people with no other option.

On the other hand, outliers and anecdotes don't care about these numbers. The famous Stalin line comes to mind: a million deaths are a statistic, one death is a tragedy. My friend from earlier will always have to wonder if the system was responsible for losing his father.

The consequences of making a mistake here are therefore all the more serious. Realizing that even one person received MAID when they shouldn't have, has the ability to call the entire system into question. The data is fascinating and illuminating, but it doesn't tell the whole story. If you’re curious, It's all public, and you can see the 2024 numbers here.

The data implies that for the most part, we are getting MAID right. But what about when we're not talking about senior citizens? There is a big difference between a 90 year old with terminal Cancer, and a 30 year old living with extreme depression.

As of today, that 30 year old with depression could not seek MAID. But in a year's time, (March of 2027) they will be eligible to pursue it. This development changes the landscape significantly, because mental illness is much trickier to reckon with than a physical disease like cancer.

No matter how many years of "Bell Let's Talk" days go by, there is still and will always be a massive stigma around mental health issues.

But, if we accept that mental health is health, which we try to do, then what really is the difference between mental suffering and pain versus that caused by a condition like cancer? Perhaps there isn't one. That is the line of thought that suggests we should allow MAID when the only underlying condition is a psychiatric one.

The big caveat here though is that many mental health issues are by their very nature subjective. Depression for example, is almost never a clear-cut diagnosis. It is often times determined by a combination of self reported behaviours and feelings.

Depression can be heavily influenced by external factors, seasonal changes, lifestyle, and so on. So if literal sunlight might be a valid medication, then the burden of proof needs to be sky high. If death is not reasonably foreseeable, there could be a realistic chance that a positive development is in store and that the patient's outlook might change.

We trust our physicians, but doctors are human beings. They make mistakes too they and can be influenced. You need two to sign off, but are two professional medical opinions enough when the stakes are this high?

If you find the right doctor, they could bias towards an "any reason is good enough for me" mentality. We balk, but that could be argued as a valid medical opinion. Many doctors won’t give the recommendation for MAID. They’ll say, they got into medicine to preserve the sanctity of life, and to prolong it. Cognitive dissonance once again. But it only takes two signatures to be approved. Those physicians who lean all the way towards autonomy are out there, and they might be right.

With mental health issues, there is still so much of the science undiscovered. To give a practical example, postpartum depression wasn't fully recognized or understood as a genuine condition until the 1990s and 2000s. There are many psychiatric disorders where we do not have the full picture yet.

In that same vein, completely new treatments and drugs could come on the market that change the landscape of mental and physical health dramatically. Is it moral for us to end someone's life when help could be just a few difficult years away?

On the other hand - should we, or the state, be able to dictate to anyone that they don't have personal autonomy? Can we tell a person that they cannot end their life if that's the choice they want to make?

The personal autonomy side is winning the battle in both public opinion and the law. MAID is legal after all. It continues to evolve though as lawmakers and healthcare professionals wrestle with more emerging challenges. That next frontier of MAID are the notions of advanced directives, and access to assisted dying for minors.

Advanced directives are the ability to say something along the lines of "If I am so unhealthy that I can't communicate, or if I get Alzheimers and can't recognize my family, I want to get MAID".

At first pass, this seems reasonable. But how do we know if while unable to communicate, that person didn't change their mind? Isn't that murder? What if the post-dementia version of the person is happy and otherwise healthy? Do we, or could we ever respect the advanced directive?

Minors can't consent to many things, they can't drink and they can’t vote. So how can they have the mental maturity to decide if they live or die?

In the case of kids and teenagers, we all mature at different rates. Should there be different rules for a 17 year old in immense pain than for an 18 year old? Probably not. But what about 16? 14? 12?

Where do we draw the line? The questions only get harder.

Then we can add another layer of complexity; elements of faith and feeling. Suicide is of course prohibited in many religions. This isn’t legally suicide, a life insurance company it turns out, will treat it as a natural death.

Within different sects of the most popular religions there are disagreements. Some will permit MAID, while others will treat it as heretical. Different faith groups have different pressures and parameters both for and against based solely on moral grounds within their world views. Can we say with authority that either is right or wrong?

We can go further still, and examine concerns that family members might actually be leveraging MAID to pressure their elders into making the decision to die sooner. Those family members might think that a quicker outcome will alleviate personal obligation, hardship, or in the worst cases, expedite or preserve an inheritance.

On the flip side of that line of thinking, there are potential MAID recipients who simply don't want to feel like a burden on loved ones, caregivers, or the already taxed healthcare system. Can we deny those people their autonomy? Should we be obligated to convince them they aren't a burden?

The debate rages on.

I think about this issue a lot, and the more I consider, the more I am conflicted. Ultimately, the conclusion I have come to isn't for or against - it's more of an approach:

The key is keeping an open mind, being brave about the realities of being human, and to have the maturity to actually have the conversation.

On the micro scale, when speaking to friends, family, and loved ones, you need to position yourself so that you can have an honest discussion without judgement. It's probably best to go in with no opinion yourself, and to start by listening. If you're young, you may be surprised by how much your parents or grandparents have thought about this topic. They may be surprised you're curious to know what they think.

The greatest lesson from my career is that candour and openness in personal and family relationships almost always leads to better outcomes. Making private decisions without clear communication often leads to surprises. In matters of family, surprises are often tremendously difficult.

On the macro scale (the societal conversation), the key is to have respect for other people's perspectives. We never know exactly what someone is going through, or has gone through. We can't assume to know someone another person's capacity to withstand hardship, the value they put on their own human life, or that of others.

When engaging in such minefield laden discussions, I try to always start from a position that everyone has everyone else's best interests in mind. We just might disagree on what those best interests are.

This conversation will continue for decades. There will always be people who claim in the name of the sanctity of life that MAID is simply state-sponsored suicide. On the other hand, there will be those who believe strictly in personal autonomy - "my life, my choice" after all.

Sanctity of Life. Personal Autonomy. The cognitive dissonance abounds.

We will never have a perfect understanding of what is right and wrong on this one, so my final advice, is that when approaching matters of literal life and death, we must come to them with open minds, humility, and above all, empathy.

** This piece is dedicated to the grandmother of Max and Taylor, may she rest in peace. In a quirk of the cosmos, I learned she had died via MAID while doing the final edit on this article. **

Sean, Rudyard,

The Hub has tied itself into a knot on these media subsidies. On your podcast to subscribers and fellows today, you asked, quite candidly, what do your most invested stakeholders think you should do: How to untangle the knot?

The visceral tension makes total sense, if we examine the Hub’s very own words - we can see the origins of the dissonance.  From that page, we can note that you believe in economic competition, free markets, and free speech. Subsidies run afoul of these. They are anti-competitive, make the market markedly less free, and absolutely could lead to a path that puts free speech at risk. What’s more, they just feel icky. 

Let’s think about a similar ick - with a thought experiment: Would you criticize Pierre Poilievere if he took a floor crosser? Would supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada accept a floor crosser if it removed the Liberal majority? Probably not. They can still be against floor crossing generally while also accepting a floor crosser for practical purposes. Does that make them immoral? No. What else are they supposed to do? In other words, don’t hate the player, hate the game. 

Two things can be true. You can want floor crossing to end, propose or support a motion that forces byelections after defections, and also still benefit from one when it happens as it is within the bounds of the rules. It's no different than saying you want to tax everyone more, but want to pay as little tax as possible yourself. That's not hypocrisy. Those are cogent claims that can coexist. 

To be sure, let’s dive into the reasons that I can see why you want to refuse subsidies at this point in time.1.It feels immoral. 

It feels immoral because it is against your values. The implication though, if we follow this string, is that if they take subsidies, the entire Canadian news industry is immoral. But you don’t really believe that. Maybe you believe that there is an unbenign influence tipping the scales of coverage and fairness. But influence has always been a part of the media going back generations. Candidly, this is something you're going to just have to get over. It is the growing pains of running and scaling a successful business.

2. It’s accepting you’ve lost the argument. 

Listening to you discuss this on your pod, I think you’re already at this point. You are the last soldiers on the ramparts. You have fought valiantly. You acquitted yourselves well. Be proud of the fight. Rest easy knowing you did what you could. 

3. You're worried it will compromise your editorial integrity.  

This is the real crux of this discussion. How can you credibly analyze, criticize, discuss, and report on a government if they are actively paying you. Well, the Conservatives do it every day in question period.  

It is absolutely a real risk that subsidy money will influence the way your organization operates and some of the opinions you hold. But you know whether or not your internal culture is mature enough to handle that new subconscious (I hope) editorial input. There is absolutely risk there, only you know if you are strong enough to accept and manage that risk. 

While I would recommend making your choice on those grounds alone, here is my personal, biased take: The Hub has done everything reasonable and frankly possible to demonstrate that it won't let this impact its journalistic integrity. I am a Hub fellow, which isn't quite the same as being a shareholder, but it's about as close as one can get. I am a Hub fellow because the Hub has always been sober, realistic, and genuine about its business and its approach to media. 

There are things I disagree with you on and things I agree with you on. But what inspired me to pull out my credit card and become a fellow was a genuine feeling that there's something about The Hub that you just don't get with any other news organization. Your integrity shines through. It doesn't feel like you have a hidden agenda. The very fact that you're putting this question to your audience is in and of itself extremely salient and meaningful. From my vantage, that suggests that you are a group that can stick to its moral compass while also not being so proud to accept a little help. 

That’s why I believe The Hub should take the subsidy. I believe so because right now, you are fighting with one hand tied behind your back in order to try and stick to your mission. You should turn this around, and instead think of these subsidies as a way to enhance and stay true to your mission. When you are competing at a disadvantage, you will eventually lose your best people. Their self-interest and duty to their own families and careers will outpace their idealism and commitment to the organization. If you can give your employees a (well deserved) raise, put funds into advertising to spread your message, and invest in capital projects that build a strong foundation for your business, then that is in service of the higher goal. You can take the philosophical L on this one, and be better off in the long run. The Hub is still in its early stages, don’t deny it those essential nutrients while its bones are still growing. 

You can also always change your mind later. If you really want, you can keep track of what you’re taking from the feds, and plan to give it back or donate it down the road when you’ve climbed to the top of the media mountain.Moreover, the biggest problem with these subsidies might not be that they exist, the bigger problem is that very few Canadians actually understand what they are or that they are in place at all. I spoke with a 65-year-old physician today, someone who is informed about politics and the world. I asked if they knew the government was funding news organizations in this country. That person had no idea. So consider using some of the subsidy to socialize the fact that they exist at all. 

Educate the public. Make sure that citizens understand that their government is funding their news, and that there are potential conflicts of interest that can arise from that arrangement. This is not to accuse anyone or say that any particular rival organization is compromised. It is simply a call to inform Canadians. They deserve to know and that is entirely consistent with your mission.

This is agonizing, yes. It is a growing pain on the way to greatness. Sean and Rudyard, you have tied yourselves into a knot by sticking to your principles. It’s the kind of knot that gets tighter the more you struggle with it. 

Your self-described bywords are independence, free speech, and original thinking. These subsidies totally create tension with those values and your mission, but instead of looking at them as dissonant and detracting, you can leverage subsidies to promote your ideas and further your mission.

You believe in economic competition, so stay competitive. You aren’t cheating.  Keep pace with everyone else. You believe in free markets. But you understand, that you are not in one. No moral stand will change that. Meet the moment as it is, not as you would like it to be. You believe in free speech. Be honest with yourselves, determine if this will compromise that aspect of your publication. Put in quarterly checks to make sure that subsidies aren't preventing you from exercising the free speech of your staff and authors.

Fundamentally, you care about freedom. Fine. Stop worrying about untangling this Gordian knot. Be like Alexander, and just cut it. Use the subsidies to build the Hub bigger and better. When you do, and your influence expands, then you can revisit the conversation from a place of strength. 

You won’t lose sleep over this. Your integrity is intact. Take the money. 

Jacob Citron, Hub Fellow circa ‘24

The Copper Handcuffs

This week, I saw a video of people stealing from the LCBO (the only liquor store in Ontario). It made me remember how when I used to work there, management actually instructed employees not to intervene when someone was stealing. It also reminded me of a former LCBO employee who was let go for failing to report a colleague who had an altercation with one of these thieves.

That was a tough time for that person. They had been let go from a decent stable job that they had held for years. Sure, they had been a little unhappy, but never felt like leaving would have made any sense. Life wasn't great, but it could have been a lot worse. So why go through the effort of updating the resume, searching, applying, interviewing, in order to seek something different?

That all changed when they got let go. In the end, what seemed like a devastating failure became a success story, because that same person is now thriving in a completely different career.

This anecdote is significant because of its pattern. It aligns very closely to the career trajectory I went through in my mid-twenties. It's a phenomenon I call the "copper handcuffs".

A Pattern Worth Naming

This is a story about what it means to be a young person in Canada right now. It is a question of what happens when you strive to do more, to be better, to make yourself master of your own domain. Most of all, it is an argument for taking risks, something that is desperately needed in Canada's current economy.

That culture-sponsored aversion is a big problem. Especially for people who work for big institutions, corporations, and government.

Conventional wisdom in this country is that the best thing you can do is get a government job. Those jobs get you a pension, and for the rest of your life, you have it made. While this means that your individual floor is rather high, that mindset makes it really challenging to actually grow our country. Because the other side of that coin is that it disincentivizes entrepreneurship.

Most people do not have the trust and confidence in themselves to believe they could be better, or that they could be great. You see this mindset everywhere, especially in young people who are holding on to copper handcuff jobs because they are terrified of the alternative.

The Year I Worked One Hour a Day

When I was about 25, I was working an entry-level job at TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival. I was earning $35,000 a year in the fundraising department. After a couple of years, I got offered a contract at a different corporation. It was a significant jump, up to $50,000. I felt ecstatic, rich, even. Going from $35K to $50K as a single guy living in a dinky China Town apartment. It was a massive step.

I had been brought on to that new organization as a business sales consultant, but it essentially amounted to a data entry job. I was on a team of eight people supporting the sales staff, most of whom had been with the company for a long time. It was a master class in corporate culture: keep your head down, don't rattle any cages.

Because I grew up around and was decent with technology, I could do my work fast. Much faster than my peers. They were taking five times as long to do the same tasks. I got paid by the hour, and had no incentive to ask for more work. This meant that I had a lot of free time. This also happened to be right around the time people started being allowed to work from home. Most of the team were commuters from the GTA, so the team didn't come in unless explicitly asked to. Lucky me got to work in that dinky apartment in my PJs.

While seeming like a boon, the issue was that I was finishing my work in about an hour, and getting paid for eight. For $50,000 a year, from a private corporation, that sounds like a great deal on paper. And for a while, it was.

My routine became something like this: wake up at 8:59 AM, log on, go get a coffee, come back, and do one hour of work. By 10:30 at the latest, I was done for the day. Waiting by the phone, waiting for something to occur. I learned that no matter how hard I tried, I got paid the same amount. After a while, I started filling the time by playing video games. Eventually, once I became comfortable that there were no consequences for only doing one hour of work a day, I added another wrinkle: by 10:30, I would be smoking a joint and getting stoned, playing Final Fantasy, and maybe grabbing some Dim Sum.

That was my life for about a year. Wake up. Coffee. Work for an hour. Smoke weed. Play video games. Rinse and repeat.

On any given day? Fantastic. Who wouldn't want to put one hour in, kick back, get paid, and get good reviews? But as time went on, you start to understand what is actually happening to you. A slow decline into a trap mired in meaninglessness. Because I was firmly locked into copper handcuffs.

People talk about the golden handcuffs: jobs at big law firms or Google, where the pay is so good you just can't bring yourself to leave. No matter how much abuse you take, long hours, time away from the family, you'll stick around for the money. The copper handcuffs follow the same logic with different variables on the effort, time, and rewards. The arithmetic at the time was simple: a 25-year-old making $50,000 a year for one hour of work. Pretty good.

That right there is the fundamental problem. I was locked in. I was in such a comfortable situation, that I couldn't see that I was just damaging myself. I was burning days of my life for a relatively small amount of money. I was gaining no experience, I was not learning, I was not making decisions. That has long-term consequences, because it sets you back in life and career in ways that are not immediately visible.

Eventually I felt a little stalled, but still — why would anyone leave that situation? They wouldn't. And I didn't.

Luckily, after about a year, the organization got new leadership. My entire department was cut. As a contractor, I was not brought back. As scary and awful as that was, to be out of work — a huge part of me was relieved. I knew it was the right thing, and knew it would be good for me in the long run.

Had that not happened, I wouldn't have been forced into discomfort. I wouldn't have spent a few months struggling and reevaluating where I was going. I might not have turned things around, gotten a job where I was actually providing value, learning, growing. It was only after that I was able to kick-start my career and move forward. Getting let go from that job was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

You Don't Really Work for Your Company

The LCBO story and mine are ostensibly the same story: you go to work at a big organization with a great reputation. But once you're inside, you don't necessarily reap the benefits — you give that corporation much more than you get. For the young, they are buying your prime. They are buying the years in your twenties when you could be learning, growing, failing, and picking up real responsibility. Getting some experience is fine. But if you are not growing beyond that, what is the point?

This is a question every young person should be asking themselves about where they work these days and who they work for.

Because the truth is, you don't work for the LCBO or whatever big corporation that employs you. You work for your boss. If that boss is just a middle manager who has been coasting for fifteen years, then that is a serious problem. You are going to end up being shaped by the person who controls your professional life. That's the place where most of us spend the majority of our waking hours. So as a starting point — take a look at the person you work for. If you do not want to be like that person one day, then that is a signal worth paying attention to.

Don't be afraid, the data is clear: people who stand up for themselves, demand more of their institutions, and push back more often, are better off in the long run. In the case of the contact of mine who got fired from the LCBO, they "fell up" into that new, more successful, higher ceiling career. They almost certainly would not have left the "stable" job they had. It's not ingrained in Canadians culturally, the perceived risks were too great.

Good Enough Is the Enemy of Great

This reflects a fundamental truth about the philosophy of our citizens. We have trained people to be more afraid of what they will lose than to focus on what they could gain. We are in an era of anxiety and worry, and our culture reinforces that fear until we end up harming ourselves through overinsulation. It holds people back. It keeps people down.

It is well-meaning. That government job, that security, that stability is understandable. But "good enough" is the enemy of "great", especially when you are young and you have the potential to be more.

On the other hand, when you have a population that is focused on what we could gain — when we are thinking about opportunity and growth — failure is just a quicker path to success. In sales, this can be looked at as the idea that every "no" gets you closer to a "yes". When you try, and fail, and feel the awful feelings that come with rejection, you arrive at the new paradigm faster. That is how you build velocity. In the tech world, they call this failing fast.

Copper handcuffs are the antithesis of this. They hold people down and keep them contained in a context that is just good enough they aren't incentivized to make a change. If you were making half a million dollars in a dead-end role, at least you would be so far ahead financially that it might eventually make sense. But linear corporate jobs, the ones that trap young people early and leave them with cost of inflation raises over years? They pale in comparison to what could be attained with a little bit of risk. It's not even close.

A Different World

One of the fundamental issues is that our culture is built on an education system and conventional wisdom that doesn't reflect the modern context. The model has served and benefited people who were able to get way ahead, and now are pensioned, property owning, secure, and naturally risk-averse.

So we can understand why they would be espousing the same values and strategies that made them successful. But this model gears our system towards playing it safe without reflecting a commensurate benefit. We should be promoting individuals to play to their strengths, teach them how to build things, how to get better jobs, and how to take calculated risks.

But that old model prevails, and the advice that comes from that generation can send the wrong signals.

Input from those who have walked before is vital. It should absolutely be sought out and considered. But too often, well-meaning mentors are drawing on a lived experience that is meaningfully different. The context has changed.

The cultural programming that still lingers was built in a time of abundance and advantage for Canadians. There was stability, affordable housing, and pensions were a standard part of most jobs. Those conditions are no longer applicable. There is a significant gap between the world that our elders navigated and the one that young Canadians are trying to navigate today.

That is the lesson: seek the advice from people who have gone before, but make sure you apply it to your context. Examine the underlying assumptions. Understand that the conditions may have fundamentally changed. Advice is advice — it is not doctrine.

Take Off the Handcuffs

Conventional wisdom is what enables the copper handcuffs. Young people get locked in, and never even realize that they can consider an alternative. They are taking society's advice, walking in the path that is well travelled, and unaware that they are in a professional bind.

The institutions designed to help Canadians prosper may no longer be fulfilling their mandate. The jobs that feel safe may be costing young professionals years they will never get back. The advice given and received, however well-intentioned, may have been calibrated for a world that no longer exists.

Failure is uncomfortable. But it is the most effective teacher that humans have. When you are young, with time on your side and a long horizon ahead of you — that is exactly when you should be willing to fail. That's when to take risks. To trust yourself.

If you do that, you can remove those copper handcuffs before you forget you are wearing them.

Let me start with a number. About 3,000 people lose their jobs to AI-driven automation every single day. That’s not a projection. That’s not a warning from a think tank. That’s what’s happening, while you’re reading this, while I’m writing it. Companies are restructuring, optimizing, finding efficiencies — all the soft language we use to describe a process that ends with a human being updating their LinkedIn to #OpenForWork and wondering what they’re supposed to do next.

I keep thinking about a game from 11 years ago.

SOMA, developed by Frictional Games — the Swedish independent studio behind the lauded Amnesia series — is a survival horror game set at an underwater research station in 2104. Most people who know it remember it for its atmosphere, its monsters, the way it made them feel claustrophobic in a way that had nothing to do with the size of the room they were sitting in. What I remember, about six years after playing it for the first time and returning to it again recently, is what it was actually about.

SOMA is about what it means to be human when the thing that made you human can be copied, transferred, and left behind. It is one of the most precise and unsentimental examinations of that question I’ve ever encountered in any medium. And I think 2026 is exactly the right moment to revisit and take it seriously.

The Premise

You play as Simon Jarrett, a man from Toronto who, following a brain injury, agrees to an experimental scan of his consciousness. He wakes up — seemingly — a hundred years in the future, at an underwater facility called PATHOS-II, surrounded by machines that believe they are people and a world above the surface that has been rendered uninhabitable. Humanity, as it existed, is gone - obliterated by a comet crushing into the face of the earth. What remains is a digital backup called the ARK: a simulation, containing the scanned minds of the last surviving humans of Earth, waiting to be launched into space.

The horror isn’t the monsters, though there are monsters. The horror is the question the game keeps asking, quietly and then with increasing insistence: if your consciousness is copied — your memories, your fears, your sense of self, the particular way you laugh at things that aren’t funny — which one is you? The original or the copy?

This is Not Totally a Hypothetical

Here’s the thing about SOMA’s central question: it’s not typical science fiction. The philosophical problem at its core — the question of personal identity, of what continuity of self requires — is a real problem that real people are beginning to navigate in ways that would have seemed absurd ten years ago.

Companies are already selling the idea that your personality, your knowledge, your professional judgment, can be captured and replicated in a system that outlasts you. Digital grief services let families interact with AI models trained on the messages and recordings of people who have died. Knowledge-management tools marketed to corporations promise to extract institutional expertise from employees before those employees become redundant. The language varies. The underlying transaction is the same: we will take what makes you useful, render it portable, and then we will no longer need you specifically.

Simon Jarrett confronts this at the end of the world. A lot of workers are confronting a version of it at end of the quarter.

What the Machines Understand That the Humans Don’t

One of the most striking things about SOMA is how it handles the machines that have absorbed human consciousnesses. They are not straightforwardly villainous. They are confused, frightened, insistent on their own reality in ways that are genuinely sympathetic. A robot named Catherine — who carries the mind of the scientist most responsible for the ARK project — is your guide and, in some sense, your friend. She is also ruthless about certain things, in the way that someone who has already let go of one version of themselves can afford to be.

What the machines understand, and what the human characters in the game keep failing to accept, is that the self is not a fixed thing. It is a process. It is the ongoing, continuous activity of a particular pattern of information responding to its environment. When that process is interrupted — when a copy diverges from an original — there is no metaphysical thread that connects them. There remain just two things that used to be one thing, now developing separately.

That’s not a comforting thought. But it is an accurate one. And I think it maps onto the current moment in ways that are worth being honest about.

When a company trains a model on the work of its employees — on the accumulated judgment, the institutional memory, the hard-won expertise — and then restructures away the people who produced it, something real has been transferred. The question SOMA would ask is: what remains of the original? What happened to the person whose pattern was copied and then no longer needed?

The ARK and What We’re Promised

The ARK is the game’s most loaded image. It is the solution the surviving humans built for themselves: a perfect digital simulation, launched into space, preserving something essential about human civilization long after the physical world has ended. It is genuinely beautiful as a concept. It is also, depending on how you read it, either a miraculous act of preservation or an elaborate mechanism for making people feel better about something they could not prevent.

I think about the ways we talk about AI and the future of work in terms that echo this structure. We will retrain workers. We will find new jobs that haven’t been invented yet. The economy has always adapted; it will adapt again. Progress creates as well as destroys. All of that may be true in aggregate and over time. It is not particularly useful to the specific person who is 52 years old and has spent 20 years developing expertise in something a model can now do faster, cheaper, and without benefits.

Spoiler alert: The ARK gets launched at the end of SOMA. It makes it to space. Simon does not get to be on it. He is the copy that got left behind, still underwater, still conscious, now entirely alone. The game ends there, in the dark, with him - or not with him?

It’s one of the most devastating endings to a game that I can think of. And it’s not cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s honest about who gets to be part of the future being built and who gets to watch it leave.

Why horror is the Right Genre for this

There’s a reason Frictional made this a horror game rather than a philosophical dialogue or a science fiction drama. Horror is the genre that takes seriously the idea that something terrible might be happening and the people with power to stop it might not. Horror trusts that the audience can sit with something without it being resolved. Horror doesn’t require a solution. It requires an honest witness.

What we are living through right now, economically and technologically, resists the narratives we usually reach for. It’s not a clean story about progress. It’s not a clean story about loss. It’s something more like 3,000 people a day encountering, in a very immediate way, the question that Simon Jarrett spends a whole game trying to answer: what exactly is it that I have to offer, now that the thing I built can persist without me?

I don’t have a resolution to that. I don’t think SOMA has one either. What it has is clarity. It takes the question seriously enough to follow it to its actual conclusion, and it doesn’t flinch when that conclusion is uncomfortable.

The Thing That Makes SOMA Stay With You

Most horror games give you monsters to run from. SOMA gives you a question you can’t outrun: what makes you irreplaceable? And then spends eight hours making a rigorous case that the answer might be — nothing, or nothing you can point to and defend, nothing that doesn’t dissolve under sufficient examination.

That sounds bleak. I think it’s actually freeing, in a way, or at least clarifying. If the self is a process rather than a fixed thing, then what matters is not preservation but continuation. Not staying the same but staying in motion. That’s an uncomfortable thing to sit with when the motion is being interrupted, when the process is being disrupted by forces you didn’t choose and can’t control. But it is, I think, truer than the alternatives.

Simon Jarrett is left behind at the bottom of the ocean. He is also, still, alive. Still conscious. Still responding to his environment. The game doesn’t tell you what he does next. It just leaves the question open.

I think that’s where a lot of us are at right now.

You Should Play it

SOMA is available on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and — in a Pathos Edition that removes the combat encounters for people who want the story without the stress — with an alternative mode that Frictional added specifically because they felt the horror was getting in the way of the ideas for some players. That’s a developer confident enough in what they made to say: the scary parts aren’t the point. The point is the question.

For anyone who works in technology, who’s been affected by a layoff or knows someone who has (including myself), who’s been paying attention to what the language of “efficiency” and “optimization” is actually describing when you follow it to its conclusion — I think SOMA is worth your time. Not because it will make you feel better. Because it will make you feel seen, which is different, and which is sometimes what you need.

The technology quietly running your world — and why you should understand it

You’ve probably heard the term “machine learning” tossed around in headlines, boardrooms, and tech commercials. It sounds complicated - and sometimes the people who work with it like it that way. But here’s the truth: it’s not magic, and it’s not some distant science-fiction concept. Machine learning is already woven into how you shop, how you get treated at the hospital, and how your bank keeps your money safe. Understanding even a little bit of it puts you ahead of most people walking around with this technology in their pocket.

I’m wrapping up a postgraduate program in Data Analytics, with two machine learning courses behind me. But long before I opened a textbook on the subject, machine learning was already working on my behalf — and yours. The goal of this piece is simple: explain what machine learning actually is, why it’s one of the most consequential technologies of our time, and share some real-world examples that might genuinely surprise you.

So, what is machine learning?

At its core, machine learning is a way of teaching computers to learn from experience, rather than programming them with a rigid set of rules. Think about how you learned to recognize a dog as a child. Nobody handed you a manual listing every possible dog breed, coat colour, and size. You just saw enough dogs — and enough things that weren’t dogs — until your brain got the pattern. Machine learning works the same way.

Instead of a human writing out every instruction, a machine learning system is fed enormous amounts of data and uses that data to figure out patterns on its own. The underlying engine is called an algorithm - essentially a set of mathematical instructions that tells the computer how to process information and improve over time. Give the algorithm enough examples, and it starts making predictions, spotting anomalies, and generating insights that no human could reasonably produce alone.

A more advanced form of machine learning is what’s called deep learning. Deep learning utilizes neural networks - algorithms loosely inspired by the way neurons connect in the human brain. Neural networks are especially good at complex tasks like recognizing images, understanding spoken language, and generating text. They’re the engine behind most of what we’d call “AI” today, from voice assistants to image generators to the large language models (LLMs) powering tools like ChatGPT. But the neural network is just one tool in a much larger machine learning toolbox.

The reason machine learning has exploded in the past decade comes down to three things converging at once: there now exists more data than ever before (we create roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of it daily), there is more computing power to process that data, and there are smarter algorithms to make sense of it all. That combination has unlocked capabilities that were firmly in the realm of fantasy just twenty years ago.

Healthcare: the doctor who never sleeps

Few industries stand to gain more from machine learning than healthcare - and few have more to lose if it’s applied carelessly. The promise is enormous: a system that can analyze medical images, patient histories, and research literature simultaneously, flagging concerns that a tired radiologist at the end of a long shift might miss.

Consider what’s already happening in cancer detection. Google’s DeepMind developed an AI system trained on tens of thousands of mammograms that now detects breast cancer with greater accuracy than expert radiologists — reducing both false positives (unnecessary anxiety and procedures) and false negatives (missed diagnoses). In the United Kingdom, this system has been rolled out in clinical settings, catching cancers earlier and, in some cases, saving lives that traditional screening might have missed.

Closer to everyday experience, machine learning is powering tools that predict patient deterioration in hospital wards before symptoms become critical. By analyzing patterns in vital signs, lab results, and medication records, these systems flag patients at high risk of sepsis - a fast-moving, life-threatening condition - hours before a human clinician would typically notice the warning signs. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, a machine learning-based sepsis alert system reduced sepsis mortality by 18 percent. That’s not some marginal improvement. That’s people returning home who otherwise would not have.

Machine learning is also quietly reshaping drug discovery. In 2020, DeepMind’s AlphaFold cracked one of biology’s most stubborn puzzles: predicting how proteins fold into three-dimensional shapes. Proteins run virtually everything in the human body, and understanding their structure is essential to designing drugs that target disease at the molecular level. What took lab researchers years, AlphaFold now does in minutes — and scientists worldwide are already using it to pursue treatments for diseases from Parkinson’s to malaria.

Retail and e-commerce: the shelf that knows you

If you’ve ever clicked on an online recommendation and thought, “how did they know?” — machine learning is how they knew. The retail and e-commerce sector was one of the earliest adopters, and it has refined the technology into something that feels almost uncanny.

Amazon is the textbook case. Its recommendation engine - the “Customers who bought this also bought” section - accounts for an estimated 35 percent of the company’s total revenue. The system analyzes your browsing history, purchase history, wish lists, search queries, and even how long you hover over a product page. It then cross-references your behaviour with millions of other shoppers who look similar to you statistically, and surfaces items you’re likely to want before you know you want them. It sounds simple. The math underneath is anything but.

Inventory management is another area where the impact is quietly enormous. Traditional retail relies on historical sales data and gut instinct. Machine learning systems factor in dozens of variables at once: weather, local events, social media trends, regional holidays. Walmart uses these tools to manage inventory across thousands of stores in real time, cutting waste and preventing stockouts in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

Perhaps most interestingly, machine learning is reshaping fraud detection in e-commerce. Every time you check out online, a model is evaluating hundreds of signals in milliseconds — your location, your device, your typing speed, whether the shipping address matches your usual pattern — to determine whether the transaction might be fraudulent. If something looks off, the system flags it before the transaction completes. This happens billions of times a day, invisibly, and it’s why credit card fraud, while still a problem, hasn’t overwhelmed the digital economy the way many feared it would.

Finance: the algorithm watching your money

Finance was among the first industries to embrace machine learning at scale, and it has arguably gone further, faster than almost any other sector. The reason is straightforward: money moves in patterns, and machines are very good at finding patterns.

Algorithmic trading — using machine learning models to make buy and sell decisions at speeds no human trader can match — now accounts for the majority of trading volume on major stock exchanges. These systems analyze news feeds, earnings reports, social media sentiment, and thousands of market signals simultaneously, executing trades in microseconds. The result is markets that are more liquid and efficient, though they also introduce new forms of volatility that regulators are still learning to manage.

For everyday customers, machine learning shows up in credit decisions and fraud detection. The days of a loan officer making a largely subjective call are mostly behind us. Today, models evaluate your creditworthiness against thousands of variables and millions of similar borrowers. Done well, this expands credit access to people traditional methods overlooked. Done poorly, it bakes historical biases into automated decisions — which is why fairness in financial AI is one of the more pressing debates of our time.

Credit card fraud detection is another area where the impact is staggering. Mastercard’s AI systems analyze over 75 billion transactions per year, catching fraudulent activity in real time with what the company reports as a false positive rate dramatically lower than previous methods. That matters because every legitimate transaction flagged as fraud is a frustrated customer; every fraudulent transaction that slips through is a real loss. Getting that balance right on a global scale is exactly the kind of problem machine learning was built to solve.

Emerging AI: the territory we’re just beginning to map

The use cases above are impressive, they are proven, deployed, and scaling. What’s more exciting however, and more uncertain, is what’s emerging at the frontier of machine learning right now. We are, in a very real sense, watching a new form of general-purpose technology take shape in real time.

Large Language Models (LLMs) - the type of AI behind systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google’s Gemini - represent a qualitative leap in what machine learning can do. These systems are trained on vast quantities of text and learn not just to retrieve information but to reason, explain, summarize, write, and generate in ways that feel genuinely intelligent. The business implications are enormous: from customer service to legal research to software development, tasks that once required expensive human expertise are becoming partially automatable.

In climate science, machine learning is being applied to weather prediction, wind turbine placement, and near-real-time deforestation tracking via satellite. Google DeepMind used it to cut the energy powering its data centre cooling systems by 40 percent - a meaningful environmental win and a proof of concept that this kind of optimization can scale broadly.

Perhaps most consequentially, machine learning is beginning to accelerate science itself. Researchers are using AI to identify new battery materials, predict chemical reactions, and scan astronomical data for signs of distant planets. The pace of discovery - already fast - is being pushed further by systems that synthesize research far faster than any human team.

Why this matters to you

It’s easy to read about machine learning as if it’s someone else’s concern - a technical conversation happening in rooms you’ll never enter. That’s a comfortable illusion, and increasingly a costly one.

Machine learning is shaping decisions that directly affect your life: whether you qualify for a loan, how your doctor spots a tumour, what prices you’re shown online, how quickly emergency services reach you. Understanding the basics of how these systems work - and where they can go wrong - is becoming a form of basic literacy. Ignore them at your own peril.

I’ve spent the last year studying this field formally, and the thing that strikes me most isn’t the complexity of the mathematics - most who know me would confess I'm no math guru. It’s how human the whole enterprise is. Machine learning systems only reflect the data we feed them - which means they reflect our priorities, our blind spots, and our values, for better and for worse. Understanding that fact is more important than comprehending the mathematical back end of any single algorithm.

That's why - as humans - it's now more important than ever that we understand data and the role it plays in our lives. Think about that the next time you log in, make a purchase, browse a questionable website, or turn on your location services - we act, and machines learn.

New Year's Eve, 2012. The night before the winter Classic in Detroit, Michigan. The Zac Brown Band concert. I bump into a grey haired man with his wife. I’d never seen anyone so jovial. He was holding two beers, judging by his red cheeked glow, he had probably had a couple already. He was wearing an Ireland scarf and had a massive grin. An absolute beauty. I was face to face with Joe Bowen. I pointed out that I was an admirer, and that I really admired his beverages. He actually offered me one of his beers but I declined.

Joe Bowen is the long serving play by play guy for the Toronto Maple Leafs. I grew up watching and listening to Mr. Bowen call hockey games back in the days of Leafs TV - a channel I miraculously had access to at the age of 13. I was particularly fond of his goaltender intros, always built on triple alliteration. Something like "Technicians of the tangled twine"(There’s a nice list on reddit here).

His passion always rang through. The sheer pleasure he derived from the Maple Leafs was so genuine. They are qualities that the fan base needs badly as it potentially enters the dark half of the NHL success cycle. We may never have anyone affiliated with the Maple Leafs like Joe Bowen again. Unfortunately that's a conscious choice that the organization is making.

This is significant because Bowen is the personification of a critical issue that is never discussed when it comes to Hockey in Toronto. It is not discussed as it is benign and a fact of life to most who love the team. It is derived from the way Rogers and MLSE chose to handle its Maple Leafs broadcasts on Sportsnet and Hockey Night. 

Joe Bowen was the Leafs TV guy until 2014 when Rogers purchased the NHLs broadcasting rights. He was moved to the radio because Sportsnet wanted their premier national broadcasters to cover the Leafs. While this doesn’t seem like a significant issue, it really does matter. Sportsnet almost always has the Leafs on as a national broadcast. They also know that they get criticism from other parts of the country for paying too much attention to or favouring the Leafs. The solution? Doing what CBC had been doing for years on hockey night: stay neutral. Have play by play guys that call the game like an objective observer. Have intermission panels that are always neutral. 

Other teams like the Buffalo Sabres had Rick Jeanneret. The Bruins had Jack Edwards calling all of their games. These two are famous because they gave their fan bases a uniting voice — a person that encapsulates the emotions of the people watching the game. There is something cathartic about hearing your hometown bias reflected in the narration. You see it with another Rogers property: the Toronto Blue Jays. It was amazing when Jerry Howarth or Buck Martinez called the games because you knew they were on your side. The playoff run last year with Buck and Dan made the broadcast and the experience that much better. It turned the media into allies, they were part of the team. Your guides on the adventure. They were there to connect you to the game, and to the team. They were not there to be journalists and critical all the time. 

So, why does this matter? It’s because when you examine the predicament through a lens of team culture, it becomes vital. There are the tangible benefits for fans getting a better experience. There is also an updraft that comes from the good vibes and emotions from enfranchised media employed by the team. People that want you to win and who aren’t just there to write a story. Then there is something deeper about what it represents from MLSE and Rogers.

This is not a knock on Chris Cuthbert, who is an amazing play-by-play guy — probably my favourite in the business from a sheer talent perspective— but he doesn’t love the Leafs. Nor is it his job to. The Oilers have Jack Michaels (clearly a fan). The Habs have John Bartlett, (clearly a fan who by the way used to call Leafs games - brutal). Of course we can't forget the Jim Hughson days. The 2017 "The defender, lost his stick" comes to mind. Have a listen on Youtube. (Here’s Joe Bowen calling the same play by the way) 

These guys aren't bad play-by-play voices. But they are not Toronto Maple Leafs fans. They are excellent at their craft, but they aren't one of us. What that gives you is a neutral voice for your sportscasting when fans really do just want that pro-Leafs voice. By contrast, there's an entire online  subculture of people watching Leafs games and highlights synced up to the Joe Bowen call instead of whatever Sportsnet caster they had assigned.

Bonesie was not the most talented broadcaster in the industry. He barely had any famous signature calls, really. But when the Leafs scored a big overtime winner, or a goaltender made a giant save, his passion rang through the radio or TV screen. You felt connected with that. It materially made your viewing experience better. It validated externally what you were feeling internally. It gave us a fantastic way to experience and share the moment both during and afterwards. It made you more of a fan.

Without Bowen, that is gone. With the Rogers regime, it will likely stay gone — because they don't want to service Leafs fans that way. It's an irony of their success as the top NHL franchise as far as popularity. The Leafs are almost always the national broadcast. Most diehard Leafs fans know this and will agree. They want desperately to have a homer play-by-play guy on the TV. Yet they are denied.

On a higher level, this is an allegory for the central crux of what's wrong with the Maple Leafs these days. Their ownership group is not completely focused on winning. It is more so focused on making money.  They bring in amazing business people. They likely aren't bringing in enough die hard Maple Leafs fans. Unfortunately, this means that the organization is being run by people who care more about their careers than the Maple Leafs winning Stanley Cups.

Brendan Shanahan, for example, did a good job of getting things back on the rails, but he is not predominantly a Leafs fan. He repaired the relationship with some storied alumni, but he lived in the US while he ran the team. Kyle Dubas was in talks with Pittsburgh long before he left. It is likely the same for all these executives and decision makers. They are hockey people. Not Maple Leafs people.

This exasperates the known issue with the Toronto market. It is the Mecca of hockey, and some people can’t cut it here. The pressure makes decision makers take a path that reflect well on them, not necessarily on the team. For instance, look at Brad Treliving's hesitance to tank, or Craig Berube trying his darnest to win garbage time hockey games. It would make sense, then, that we'd want lifelong Leafs fans in the key roles and positions of power. It’s ultimately why Marner leaving didn’t bother so many people: even though he was a local guy, you could tell he cared more about the name on the back of the jersey than the front. 

This issue is in lockstep with the incredibly corporate nature of MLSE. This is not a comment on work ethic or care level, but the people running things are operating inside an extremely corporate culture. It is an environment with Bay Street incentives: tow the line, cover your ass, keep your job. Do what you can to climb the corporate ladder. It is completely different from the culture you’d expect from a winning organization.

Most saliently, this is antithetical to the heart of Leafs nation: the blue collared people like Joe Bowen. The organization is not run by those people. That is why the rink is so quiet that it is nicknamed the Library. Perhaps it doesn't matter though, because despite that silence, the Leafs are still always among the top earners in the NHL. 

This, it would seem, is yet another competitive advantage for small market teams in a salary cap environment. The Panthers and the Golden Knights are businesses too but they need to be relevant to make money. They need to win to be relevant. That shines through. The Leafs are victims of their own dominant financial success. They don’t need to be good to be relevant. 

Bowen’s last decade is a perfect simulacrum for that problem. He was a real fan, and relegated to the background on the radio while the suits got the better seats and jobs on TV. The people with the passion are pushed to the background. They sit in the Greens and Purples while the ones who couldn’t care less get the Platinums. This is most problematic because hockey, more than any sport, is a game of passion. 

You can have a plan, but it happens too fast for exact measurements. It's impossible to draw up a perfect play because there are too many variables. You do need that “it” factor. That commitment and effort to a cause greater than oneself. It's not like football or baseball with individual assignments and constant timeouts. There's too much going on. You need creativity, you need the passion.

Joe Bowen was the last vestige of that passion.

With him gone, and with the new TV deal about to kick in, there is an opportunity for MLSE and their ownership group — Rogers, who controls the lion's share of the broadcast — to make this right. Stop worrying about neutrality. Give us a homer Leafs play-by-play guy. Someone who understands what the fans are going through, who actually cares, and who wants what we want. It's one small thing, but they say the way you do anything is the way you do everything.

My favourite Joe Bowen call was when the Leafs qualified for the playoffs in 2017, Auston Matthews' first season. Connor Brown scored a go ahead goal late. Curtis McElhinney made that big save with a minute left against Sidney Crosby. “Holy Mackinaw, they’re going to the playoffs!”. I was at that game in person, and the call is somehow stitched into my mind as a fundamental part of the experience. That was because there was hope in Joe’s voice, and there was his passion. 

Eventually because it was more cost effective, they stopped sending Bowen on the road to call games. He got to watch on a TV screen and try and do play by play from a studio. Another hit to passion because of the bottom line. He retires this week after a hall of fame career. 

The lesson should be that that is exactly the kind of thinking that slowly destroys an organization in the long run. It's a systemic problem. It comes from the top. It needs to be addressed. 

Whoever the Leafs hire next needs to understand that. They need to be a great hockey mind, but the most important thing is understanding Leafs fans and their psyche. If the organization and its players are in harmony with its fan base, that will create the conditions that attract the southern Ontario boys home. It will make Toronto a good place to play again.

The only way to do that is to hire a sad and woeful and never say die Maple Leafs fan to run the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The fact that Keith Pelley had to outsource the hiring of this role in the first place is not at all encouraging. It represents a fundamental disconnect between the board of MLSE, Rogers, and it’s crown jewel sports team. Cynically, that probably means the corporate through line is not going to change. Until it does, the real fans, guys like Joe Bowen, are likely going to have to endure more of the same. 

To Mr. Bowen, from another woeful, die hard, love this team forever kind of guy: You are forever the voice of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Thanks Joe. And Holy Mackinaw, what a career. 

The Iran War has not lacked military clarity. What it has lacked is an answer to a much harder question: after so much force has been applied, who is in control of what happens next?

The United States: Superior Force, Diminishing Control

The United States has reaffirmed its status as the world’s leading military power. It has demonstrated its ability to project force at great distance with a degree of coordination and intelligence integration no other military could plausibly match. Iran’s air defenses and naval forces have been severely degraded, and significant elements of its senior leadership have been eliminated. No other country could have achieved military success at this level.

Yet the war has exposed a growing gap between military capability and strategic success. Iran’s ability to disrupt the Strait of Hormuz imposes costs that airpower alone cannot neutralize. Even limited interference has produced energy price volatility, shipping insurance shocks, and supply‑chain instability. While the U.S. economy remains comparatively resilient, the broader global impact has carried real domestic consequences. President Trump’s political base is showing cracks, and public tolerance for additional escalation may already be approaching a breaking point.

President Trump’s stated desire for rapid disengagement further reduces U.S. leverage. When escalation is politically undesirable, threats lose credibility. President Trump’s stated desire for ending the war is now widely understood, not only by domestic audiences, but by adversaries as well. That visibility has implications. Iran can reasonably conclude that time works in its favor, increasing its leverage in negotiations. With polling showing the President underwater on the war, the administration faces limits on how much additional force it can credibly threaten in pursuit of concrete objectives. Short of committing ground forces or pursuing regime change, both options carrying severe risk, it remains unclear what form of escalation would compel Iranian capitulation rather than merely prolong the conflict.

Bottom Line The United States retains overwhelming strike power, but economic damage, domestic political limits, and escalation risk increasingly restrict what that power can achieve.

Israel: Near‑Term Security, Long‑Term Political Risk

Israel has achieved significant security gains by dismantling Iran’s regional network and constraining its ability to project power. Hamas has been severely degraded, Hezbollah’s operational capacity is reduced, and Syria is largely neutralized as an operational front. Israel has also meaningfully disrupted elements of Iran’s missile and nuclear programs.

In the short term, these outcomes materially improve Israel’s security. If the conflict were to end today, Israel would face fewer immediate threats than prior to October 7th. That improvement, however, has come at a clear diplomatic cost. While the October 7th attacks initially generated broad international sympathy for Israel, that support was first strained by the war in Gaza and then further eroded by the current conflict. Diplomatic tolerance has narrowed across much of Europe and the Global South, leaving Israel increasingly reliant on a shrinking set of partners, most notably the United States.

The longer‑term picture is more complex. Israel’s battlefield success has coincided with a steady erosion of U.S. public support. Declining approval among Democrats and independents is well documented, but more strategically consequential is the softening of Republican support. While Republicans still remain broadly supportive, pro Israel sentiment has fallen compared to pre‑October 7th levels. There is concern as fatigue sets in and internal divisions deepen, particularly among younger voters.

In the near term, U.S. policy is unlikely to change. Security assistance, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic backing remain strong. Over a 10–20 year horizon, however, the erosion of bipartisan legitimacy matters. Elite support without durable public backing becomes increasingly fragile as leadership turnover and voter coalitions evolve.

Bottom Line Israel secures exceptional near‑term safety but faces longer‑cycle strategic uncertainty as its most reliable political foundation narrows.

Iran: Power Consolidation, Short‑Term Leverage, Long‑Term Risk

Iran has suffered severe military losses. Its air force and navy are badly damaged, strategic assets have been degraded, and their senior leadership has been eliminated. Rebuilding conventional capabilities will take years under significant economic and political constraints.

The post‑war Iranian system appears increasingly consolidated under direct IRGC control, as civilian leadership and internal checks play an even smaller role than before the conflict. This concentration elevates actors within the Iranian regime who are historically more ideological, more risk‑tolerant, and more comfortable with confrontation than compromise.

What Iran has gained is not control, but volatile leverage. By threatening the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has demonstrated its ability to impose outsized economic pain without matching its adversaries militarily. Whether Tehran believes it can apply that pressure indefinitely without triggering a broader response remains an open, and dangerous, question.

By contrast, U.S. and Israeli restraint toward critical civilian infrastructure reflects longer‑term thinking about post‑war stability, reconstruction, and diplomatic legitimacy. That restraint, however, is conditional. As disruption persists and costs mount, escalation incentives shift.

Iran’s future power projection is likely to evolve, with degraded conventional forces giving way to disruption and economic leverage.

Bottom Line: Iran emerges more centralized and more capable of disruption—but also more exposed to escalation dynamics it may not fully control.

Secondary Actors

Russia emerges as a net beneficiary of the conflict. Western attention has been diverted from Ukraine, energy prices remain elevated, and sanctions enforcement has grown more ambiguous. While Russia may lose some Iranian military cooperation, the strategic and economic relief outweighs those costs.

Ukraine faces tighter access to Western munitions as global stockpiles are redirected, but the war has raised Kyiv’s relevance in an unexpected way. Ukrainian advances in drone warfare and air‑defense integration have drawn interest from the Gulf states, opening potential new pathways for support.

The Gulf states are clear losers. Missile and drone threats, economic disruption, and reputational damage have undermined the perception of stability that underpins investment and tourism. Restoring their pre‑war image of security will be difficult.

China occupies an ambiguous position. Beijing benefits rhetorically from Western instability but remains exposed to prolonged energy disruption and regional volatility if instability persists.

What Comes Next

The Iran War underscores a defining reality of modern conflict: military power can be applied decisively, but control over outcomes is by no means guaranteed.

That reality now sits uncomfortably alongside the push for a ceasefire. Negotiations highlight how difficult it is to convert battlefield advantage into a sustainable political settlement, as each actor now pulls in a different direction, seeking exit, security, or leverage, without being able to fully control the consequences.

Whether a ceasefire holds matters less than what comes after it. The unresolved question is the same one the war has posed from the start: after so much force has been applied, who defines what happens next?

Hit Pause: The War in Iran Is Not Over, and Iran Has Not Won

If you pay attention to media in the West right now, two fundamental premises are being bandied about. The first: the war in Iran is over. The second: the United States has clearly lost. This line of thinking has snowballed, fuelled by hatred for the president. But before we publish any more op-eds about how we are living in the age after the American empire, let's take a breath: Because I don't see how this war is over, or how the US has lost — except perhaps on the grounds of reputation.

A Ceasefire Is Not Peace

As of Tuesday night, there is a ceasefire in place. However, when a war ends, there is typically a negotiated peace or a surrender. A ceasefire is not that. It is an agreement to stop shooting at each other for a set period of time. The ceasefire in place hasn't been clearly established, with conflicting views on whether or not Hezbollah and Lebanon are included. Indeed, both Israel and Hezbollah continue to fight to the chagrin of much of the world. The ceasefire is two days old, and already violated. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed. Only Iranian allies are getting through.

Most notably, nobody is officially saying the war is over. But it's being covered as if it is, which is a remarkable editorial choice that most major outlets are taking. We only have to look back at the Hamas-Israel war to see how fragile these pauses can be. Both sides reposition, rearm, and prepare for a resumption of hostilities — this happened repeatedly throughout Gaza, and with Hezbollah and Israel before that. It is now standard for the Middle East, a region famous for its inability to agree on anything for very long. We should also remember that most analysts would say that Iranian proxies ultimately lost those wars, even when they appeared to be winning before ceasefires were announced.

The Demands Are Miles Apart

The most clear signal that this war is not over is the enormous gap between what Iran is demanding and what the United States has put on the table. Among their ten point plan, Iran wants enrichment rights, a full US withdrawal from the region, permanent tolling rights over the Strait of Hormuz, and war reparations. The US is demanding no enrichment, free international navigation through the Straits, and restrictions on Iranian proxy activity. These are not close positions. These are diametrically opposed — and for either side to prevail, the other has to fundamentally capitulate.

Pakistan is hosting negotiations that are just getting started. Using the Hamas-Israel war as a template, there were endless rounds of talks where the parties weren't remotely close - and the war didn't end until Hamas essentially surrendered, with Israel conceding only on secondary points. The media is covering this as if both sides are quietly converging. They're not. The gulf is still enormous.

What the Media Is Leaving Out

Iran is being declared a winner by outlets while they omit some rather significant facts. Iran's war-making capabilities have been substantially crippled. They've been firing salvos at Israel, seemingly trying to hit whatever they can. The US and Israel, by contrast, have been conducting targeted strikes - eliminating Hezbollah's command infrastructure, taking out Iranian political leadership, and killing the majority of Iran's top military brass. The Ayatollah is dead.

Perhaps most significantly underreported however: Iran made a major blunder and attacked countries across the region. Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and others - nations that had been trying to stay neutral, are now crystal clear on what Iran thinks of them. Israel and the US on the other hand, attacked none of them. The bottom line is those countries now have a very clear picture of who the regional threat actually is. Israel, by contrast, looks like a capable and reliable protector. That's a major geopolitical shift that is barely being discussed.

Trump, TACO, and the Circular Logic Problem

US military assets remain fully deployed. Fifty thousand troops. Two carrier strike groups. Twenty warships. If Iran doesn't engage seriously in Islamabad, the leverage to re-escalate is intact. Yet, still, Iran has been declared a victor.

The reason this keeps getting missed is that media vitriol toward Trump has become a lens that distorts everything globally. This is what is sometimes called Trump Derangement Syndrome. To be clear, this is not praise of the president or his methods. It is simply an acknowledgment that hating someone and finding them grotesque, doesn't make them an idiot. Trump being chaotic doesn't mean he is wrong. This man is constantly underestimated by the globe. He was supposed to get crushed by Hillary Clinton. Kamala Harris was being touted as a clear winner until November of 2024. Trump has twice been elected to be the most powerful person on earth. Yet we still underestimate his resolve. We forget, he likes to win.

Then there's TACO: Trump Always Chickens Out. The idea that Trump makes threats and then never follows through. This again is a fundamental misreading of a deliberate strategy. Start at an extreme, land in the middle, and it looks like a retreat. It isn't. It's how he gets more than he gives. Just look at the recent run of global affairs. NATO defence spending is way up. The tariffs everyone said he'd never impose are in place. He ended the Gaza War and got the hostages home. The US has managed to pressure NATO and Canada into significantly enhancing their military presence in Greenland and the north. TACO is a narrative, it's pretty funny, but it's not serious analysis on global affairs at least. President Maduro would likely testify to the same.

Finally, there's a logical contradiction at the centre of the "US lost" narrative. The argument goes: 1. American power has degraded. 2. The proof is that the US was supposed to beat a backward place like Iran in a war. 3. Trump lost, so now US power is diminished and the American empire finished. But that's circular — the conclusion is the premise.

Either American power was already in decline before this war, in which case Trump didn't cause it and no US president was ever going to win cleanly. Or it wasn't in decline, in which case killing the Ayatollah, the IRGC chief, and most of Iran's military leadership is a strange definition of losing. Winning a war is a result of military capability and influence. It is not the cause of it. Soft power, at some point, needs to be leveraged. There's a lot of leveraging still on the table - so let's not declare the American goose cooked before they've gone all in.

Hit Pause

The US is certainly losing one battle: the one over its reputation. The vast majority of the media is reflexively anti-Trump and unhinged tweets are low hanging fruit. It is farcical. Meanwhile, Israel's operations in Lebanon are compounding global condemnation towards them. The narrative continues to swing.

But to suggest Iran is winning requires fully ignoring that the supreme leader is dead, that its new Ayatollah is reportedly incapacitated, its military leadership has been systematically eliminated, and its own civilians still don't have internet access. We're supposed to call that victory?

The negotiations in Pakistan this weekend will be consequential. If the US walks away and cedes the region, history will certainly record an Iranian win despite catastrophic losses. But that outcome doesn't exist yet. It is baffling that it has become the primary narrative.

What is more likely, given every pattern the Middle East has ever shown us, is that the ceasefire fractures, both sides reposition, and a second round begins with a different set of facts on the ground.

The war is not over. Even if it were, Iran did not win it. That conclusion is wishful thinking, it's the geopolitical equivalent of calling the game at halftime because you want a particular team to lose.

Hit pause for now. Let's not declare winners before we have a result.

This morning, Marilyn Gladu, the Conservative MP for Sarnia, elected four times as a Conservative, crossed the floor to join the Liberals. She is the fifth opposition MP to do so since November, following Conservatives Chris d'Entremont, Michael Ma, and Matt Jeneroux, and NDP MP Lori Idlout. Gladu was also, for the record, publicly calling for automatic by-elections for floor crossers just three months ago. In January she said “Really, the whole point of being an MP is to represent your constituents. So if they’re voting you in under one platform –for you to switch for whatever reasons, just seems to me to not be representing what you’re supposed to be there to represent."

You can't make this stuff up.

Imagine If the Shoe Was on the Other Foot

If you don't see the problem, think about this potential scenario for just one second. Imagine Donald Trump had a minority of seats in Congress and a couple of Democrats switched teams and became Republicans. The amount of vitriol that would rise to the surface of the discourse. It is not a stretch to posit that it would turn violent in a place like the USA. People would be taking to the streets. It would matter.

Yet for some reason, Canadians are giving each of these people a pass. We talk about our sovereignty. How Canada must be protected, how we think it's so important to have a democracy with clear rules and regulations. That your voice counts, and your vote matters. But evidently, this is totally wrong.

That's Not How the System Works

Technically, in this country, you don't vote for a leader. You vote for your MP. With this fact, the common counterargument surfaces: elected officials have the ability to change their mind, and they're elected as a member of parliament — not as a party delegate.

Sure, technically that is true.

But in reality. Out in the real world, that is not at all how the system works. Most Canadians do not know the name of their MP. They almost certainly do not know who their previous MP was. They vote for their leaders. They remember who they voted for by the leader of the party. It's not technically the case, but outside of exceedingly rare circumstances, that's just how it is, and everyone knows it.

Beneficiaries of Floor Crossers Will Always Rationalize It

A lot of (in this instance) Liberal supporters will say: well, it doesn't matter, that's their prerogative, that's actually how the system works. Rules are rules, after all. And they'll keep saying that right up until the floor crossing goes the other way.

That's the major hypocrisy at play here. People support this when it benefits their team and oppose it when it doesn't. That's not a principle, that's just picking a side. It should be self evident to anyone with a modicum of sense that if the Conservatives were doing exactly this right now, those same people would be furious. And they'd be absolutely right to be.

This Really Matters

This is especially problematic because taken in aggregate, the Liberal government has gone from a minority to a majority. In other words, the Liberals will be in full control of the country for a four years. It was already certainly the case with the current by-elections, frankly. But now it's cemented, a fait accompli.

This matters most of all because it erodes people's confidence in democracy. What is the point of voting for a party, or a person representing a party, if they can just switch teams whenever they'd like? For many, there is no point.

In other words, these elected officials, during their campaigns, clearly said they would subscribe to a certain set of ideals. Then once elected, once given power, they completely abandoned those statements and principals. In any other industry, this would be considered fraud. Maybe in this context, it is. It opens the Liberal government to the notion that their majority is fraudulent. The polls suggest they could have picked it up honestly, with by-elections, but they did it with backroom deals.

This Will Just Keep Happening

If this isn't addressed (which in all likelihood, it never will be), it becomes a permanent feature of our democracy.

Quite simply, being an MP sitting in government is better than not being in government. You are more prominent. You have more power. It is essentially all upside. Therefore, as an MP, you are always incentivized to be in government. This will stand for any opposition MP moving forward.

The integrity of parliamentary democracy is supposed to keep things in balance. We can have disagreements about how fair the system is right now, but making it less fair, and just always incentivizing floor crossing, is something else entirely.

Again, think about the shoe being on the other foot. If the Conservatives had a minority, or even a majority, they could poach Liberal MPs the exact same way - offer them appointments, give special attention to their ridings. It just becomes a prominent feature of how politics works. It means then that you're always going to have people incentivized to cross the floor to the party in power.

Because, aside from integrity (which doesn't seem to be a feature we care about in politicians much anymore), why wouldn't you? There's no penalty. You don't lose your job, as a matter of fact - you have more job security, because now there won't be an election for three more years.

Without guardrails in place, opposition MPs will be incentivized to cross the floor. Always. At some point, there isn't really a reason to have more than one party at all.

The Fix

There's nothing wrong with an MP saying: "I don't have confidence in my leadership anymore, and I would like to step away from this party and operate alone". That's legitimate and can happen in extremely rare situations.

But that MP should not be allowed to join another party. If they want to change teams, quite simply, they should step down and have to run in a byelection. This would ensure that they still have the confidence of their constituents. Indeed, if they are firm in their belief that that is the will of their constituents (which they always tell you they are), then they should be more than happy to stand again for election wearing a different hat.

At the very least, they should not be allowed to simply walk into another caucus.

The whole notion of being able to actively poach floor crossers (and it does not matter that it's been used before) is a threat to our democracy. If we actually care about that, this needs to stop. And the fact that there's no penalty, no political cost, that this is framed as a failure of the Conservative party, instead of being morally dubious, is pathetic. Again, the same would apply if the shoe was on the other foot.

The great irony is that in 2015, Justin Trudeau was elected partially because he had promised electoral reform. It would seem, this fact has been be lost on Canadians.

What's more, detractors of the Liberal government will now always be able to call Carney's mandate illegitimate. Frankly, those detractors might be right.

It’s rare to find a single document that tracks everything from the success of our $10-a-day childcare to the survival of wild Pacific salmon, but the recently released progress report on the 2022-2026 Federal Sustainable Development Strategy (FSDS) does exactly that. This report serves as a vital roadmap for our daily lives, monitoring essential priorities like housing affordability, climate action, and the cost of food. It tells a story about our national goals that everyone should know. To understand where we are going, we need to look at the results of this scorecard which show a country making some progress, but falling short of a passing grade. 

To create this snapshot, the government set 50 national targets across our environment, our economy, and our social well-being. This year, for the first time, the report used a consistent, data-driven way to measure progress. 

Here’s where we stand with the 50 targets: 

• 5 have been achieved 

• 17 are on track 

• 7 have made progress, but acceleration is needed to reach the target 

• 9 have made limited progress 

• 9 have deteriorated, which means progress is moving away from the target since the starting point 

• 1 has not been achieved 

• 2 targets do not yet have available data for the three-year cycle 

Successes and Ongoing Priorities 

There are wins in this report that show what happens when we invest in change. We are seeing measurable gains in clean fuel production, better drinking water on reserves, and the growth of our science and technology talent. These are important steps forward. 

However, some of the areas requiring more work are the ones Canadians feel most deeply. Issues like homelessness, mental health care, public transit, food security, and wastewater systems on reserves are all flagged as needing urgent attention, and several are actively moving in the wrong direction. This data shows us exactly where to focus our energy next, and the window to course-correct on some of these priorities is narrowing as 2026 deadlines approach.

Why Community Action Matters 

One of the most important takeaways from the report is that sustainability is a shared responsibility. While national policies provide funding, the most meaningful progress often happens at the local level. 

Community action is already helping to bridge these gaps: 

• Local Food Systems: In many regions, community-led greenhouses and food hubs are directly tackling food insecurity and high grocery costs where national averages are falling behind. 

• Conservation Partnerships: Efforts to protect wildlife often rely on local boots-on-the-ground community groups and Indigenous-led programs that monitor species and restore habitats in their own backyards. 

• Climate Resilience: Neighbourhood projects, such as urban tree planting or local transit advocacy, help make our towns more resilient to the changing climate while improving daily life. 

An Honest Conversation 

At its heart, this 2025 progress report is a tool for every Canadian. It acts like a mirror, showing the distance between the goals we have set and the progress we are making today. None of this is a reason to be cynical. Instead, it’s a reason for an honest conversation about our priorities. By looking at the data, we can see exactly where we are on track and where we still have work to do. 

You can read the full 2025 Progress Report on the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy here.

There's a moment early in Hideo Nomo's 1995 debut season that captures something essential about what Japanese players have had to do every time they've transitioned to MLB. He stood on a Dodger Stadium mound with that wind-up — the one that had opposing hitters looking like they'd never seen a baseball before — and faced a National League that had no idea what was coming. The Tornado, they called it. And true to its name, it changed everything in its path.

The story of Japanese players in Major League Baseball is, at its core, a story about what happens when you show up somewhere new and perform so well that the world has no choice but to rethink everything it assumed. It's a story that keeps getting told and keeps getting more astonishing with every chapter. This year, a new one begins at Rogers Centre. His name is Kazuma Okamoto, and he is the latest chapter in a sixty-year arc that started, improbably, at Shea Stadium in 1964.

The man who hummed “Sukiyaki” on the mound

On September 1, 1964, a twenty-year-old named Masanori Murakami walked out of the bullpen at Shea Stadium — reportedly humming a Japanese pop song to calm his nerves — and became the first Japanese player to appear in a Major League Baseball game. He was there because the Nankai Hawks had sent him as a baseball exchange student. The Giants noticed his arm quickly. In parts of two seasons, he posted a 5-1 record and a 3.43 ERA, striking out over a batter per inning. A fan club formed. A local restaurant put a Murakami cocktail on the menu. He was, plainly, good enough to belong.

And then he was gone. A dispute erupted between the Giants and the Hawks over his contract rights — the Giants believed they had purchased him outright; the Hawks insisted he had only been loaned. The argument escalated through the off-season until the NPB commissioner brokered a compromise: Murakami would return for one more year, then go home for good. He pitched in 45 games for San Francisco in 1965, saving eight, and then boarded a plane back to Japan. He pitched there for another seventeen years. The door that had cracked open swung quietly shut, and it would stay that way for three decades.

The Tornado that opened the floodgates

What Nomo did in 1995 was different in kind. Mashi had been sent. Nomo chose. He exploited a loophole in NPB's retirement rules to sign with the Dodgers — a move viewed in Japan, initially, as a betrayal. The doubt in America was equally pointed. Could a Japanese pitcher really compete at the highest level, against the hardest throwers and strongest hitters, in front of the biggest crowds?

The short answer: 2.54 ERA. 236 strikeouts. NL Rookie of the Year. The Tornado turned out to be entirely unhittable for stretches of that first season, and Nomo eventually compiled 123 MLB wins across twelve seasons. But his statistics undersell his real contribution. What Nomo did was break the psychological barrier. After him, Japanese fans woke up at four in the morning to watch MLB games. After him, teams sent scouts to Japan in earnest. The posting system — the formal mechanism allowing NPB players to negotiate with MLB clubs — was built in his wake. He didn't just prove Japanese players could make it. He rewired the entire relationship between the two leagues.

Ichiro and the art of proving everyone wrong

If Nomo opened the door, Ichiro Suzuki walked through it so magnificently that he rebuilt the house on the other side. When the Seattle Mariners paid $13.25 million just for the right to negotiate with Ichiro in 2001, there was genuine skepticism that a Japanese position player — not a pitcher, where the transition was at least somewhat understood — could hit major league pitching. This was the home run era. The league was enormous, juiced and slugging. Ichiro was five-foot-eleven and 170 pounds soaking wet. His weapon was a pendulum swing that produced line drives and bunt singles.

What followed was one of the great debut seasons in sports history: a .350 average, 242 hits breaking a rookie record from 1927, 56 stolen bases, AL Rookie of the Year and AL MVP in the same season. He collected 200 or more hits in each of his first ten MLB seasons, set the all-time single-season record with 262 in 2004, and finished with 3,089 MLB hits. In 2025, he became the first Japanese-born player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the ceremony in Cooperstown drew Japanese fans who'd made the pilgrimage just to watch.

The wave that followed is impossible to argue with: Hideki Matsui won World Series MVP with the Yankees in 2009. Yu Darvish, Masahiro Tanaka, Kenta Maeda — each one another proof of concept, another argument for the scouts, another reason for the next player to believe the crossing was worth it.

Shohei Ohtani and the limits of description

At some point, writing about Shohei Ohtani requires acknowledging that the English language may be genuinely insufficient for the task. He arrived with the Angels in 2018 as a two-way player — starting pitcher and elite hitter — and the consensus was that one of those things would have to give. Nobody had sustained this at this level since Babe Ruth, and even Ruth eventually chose. Ohtani did not choose.

He won the AL MVP unanimously in 2021: 46 home runs, 10 pitching wins, the first player in history to accomplish that feat. He struck out Mike Trout to close out the 2023 World Baseball Classic, winning the title for Japan on the sport's biggest international stage. Then he signed with the Dodgers for ten years and $700 million — the largest contract in professional sports history at the time — and in his first LA season became the first player ever to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases. He won consecutive NL MVPs in 2024 and 2025, returning to the mound in his second Dodgers season while hitting 55 home runs, leading Los Angeles to the World Series title. The numbers stop making sense at a certain point. They feel less like statistics and more like dispatches from a different category of athlete.

Toronto's moment: Kazuma Okamoto arrives

Toronto has been circling the Japanese market for years — Shohei Ohtani's name came up in Blue Jays conversations more than once; Roki Sasaki was reportedly of interest. Neither happened. What did happen, in January 2026, was a four-year, $60 million deal with a 29-year-old infielder from the Yomiuri Giants who goes by a nickname that tells you something important before you've seen him swing: the Young General.

Kazuma Okamoto spent eleven seasons as one of the most feared hitters in NPB, slugging 248 home runs for the Giants — the Yankees of Japanese baseball. He led the Central League in home runs three times and earned six All-Star selections. In 2023, fully healthy, he hit 41 home runs with a .958 OPS, then capped the year by hitting a solo home run in the World Baseball Classic final to help Japan beat Team USA. He is, by any honest measure, the real thing.

He arrived at his Blue Jays introductory press conference and opened in English: 'I am very happy to join the Blue Jays. I will work hard every day and do my best for the team.' Through an interpreter, he explained his reasoning: the roster was strong, the franchise well-run. And when he asked his daughter to choose her favourite logo from among all thirty MLB teams, she pointed at the Blue Jay. There's something quietly perfect about that — a city landing a player because a child pointed at a bird and said yes.

Spring training offered early evidence the investment was well placed. He slashed .316/.435/.632 in Grapefruit League play, and a home run off Clay Holmes in February had Statcast analysts noting that only a handful of right-handed hitters in the modern era have made that kind of contact on that pitch location. The translation question always lingers — NPB pitching is not AL pitching, and every Japanese star who's thrived here still went through an adjustment period. But what Okamoto's numbers reveal is a patient, disciplined hitter: an 11.3% walk rate in his injury-shortened 2025 season, a strikeout rate that matched his walk rate exactly. He adjusts. That tends to matter.

What Toronto gets, beyond the bat, is something harder to quantify: a connection to a market and a tradition the Blue Jays have wanted for years. A dozen Japanese reporters filled the press conference room at his January introduction, outnumbering the local contingent. Spring training was similarly busy with cameras from across the Pacific. The Blue Jays have understood for some time that signing a Japanese star means more than signing a player. It means opening a conversation with a baseball culture that is enormous, passionate, and paying close attention. Rogers Centre, which has seen plenty of history already, is about to become part of a story that started more than sixty years ago for the first time and shows no signs of slowing down.

What sixty years of crossing the Pacific has taught us

What the full arc looks like, compressed: a twenty-year-old humming a pop song as he walks to a mound at Shea Stadium. A tornado windup dazzling Dodger Stadium in 1995. A man named Ichiro — just the one name, a legend — getting 200 hits a year for a decade straight. A two-way player who made Babe Ruth look like a reasonable comparison. And now: a man called the Young General, standing in a Blue Jays hat, telling a Toronto crowd he's here to work hard and do his best.

Those words carry more weight than they might seem to. Every player who made this crossing said something like them. Very few of them were just being polite.

The season starts this week. Pay attention.

TL;DR: Here's some math on World Cup Qualifying, who deserves to be there, and maybe some hints for the predictors out there.

Preface

This started with a simple grievance: Italy. They had a tough group stage qualifying campaign, lost a single-leg playoff final on penalties, and are staying home while teams with worse underlying records are going to the World Cup. It felt like the format was doing something unfair — but to actually test that, you have to be able to compare records across confederations, and that means accounting for schedule strength. Which meant building the whole thing from scratch.

So with the help of AI, that's what I did.

**What I ended up with**

- 908 qualifying matches across all 6 confederations + intercontinental playoffs, with scores

- Full W/D/L records for all nations who participated in qualifying

- Strength of Schedule (SOS) for every team, using ELO-based win probability

- Performance vs Expected analysis for all 45 qualified teams

**The methodology in brief**

For Strength of Schedule, I used the median ELO of the 48 qualified teams (1775) as a reference point — so the question is "how hard would this schedule be for a typical World Cup team" rather than against some arbitrary average. Lower SOS score = harder path.

For Performance vs Expected, I built two metrics:

1. **Δ ELO** — actual points % minus what the team's own ELO predicts they should earn. Did they beat their own benchmark?

2. **Δ Schedule** — actual points % minus what a median World Cup team (ELO 1775) would earn on the same opponents. Did they outperform a WC-calibre baseline?

I also filtered to only count games against top-100 ELO opponents (ELO ≥ 1400) — so early-round blowouts against minnows don't inflate anyone's numbers.

**A few findings that stood out**

- Norway is the most obvious overperformer — perfect record, +33% above their own ELO prediction, against genuinely decent Group I opposition

- Panama qualified but massively underperformed their ELO (-29%). One of the more worrying numbers for a team heading to the tournament

- Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia all show negative Δ ELO — they underperformed their own ratings. But their Δ Schedule is strongly positive because CONMEBOL is genuinely brutal. They were stress-tested in a way most qualifiers weren't

- Nigeria's numbers are striking — -28% Δ ELO with a reasonable sample. They didn't just miss on bad luck

- Algeria has a ⚠ flag — only 2 qualifying games vs top-100 opponents after filtering, so their numbers are tough to really dig into. A clear indicator there is likely a problem in African Qualifying.


** Sorry Canada, USA, & Mexico - you didn't play any qualifying games.

**On the AI disclosure**

I used Claude (Anthropic) extensively to help compile and cross-verify the match data, build the ELO calculations, and construct the spreadsheet. The methodology decisions — what to measure, how to define the reference point, what to filter — were mine, but the heavy data lifting was AI-assisted. I think that's worth being transparent about, especially for something where the data integrity matters. The match counts were validated against Wikipedia confederation H2H matrices and known format specs, but I'd encourage anyone who spots errors to please flag them. I did not do an audit and am trusting the data.

Italy Didn't Miss the World Cup. The World Cup Missed Italy.

No, there's no need for a referendum on Italian football. The Italians got jobbed — and it's probably not why you think. This isn't about your typical sports gripes: referees, coaching decisions, or bad luck. The Italians and their fans should have a gripe with FIFA and UEFA for having absurd mechanisms for qualifying for the World Cup in the first place.

The Numbers

While they certainly weren't perfect, here's what Italy did in qualifying: 7 wins, 1 draw (the Bosnia game ended in a tie), 2 losses. A 73.3% points percentage. That's a better qualifying record than European teams Portugal, Scotland, and certainly Bosnia, and Sweden — all of whom are going to the tournament. Outside of Europe, Brazil qualified with 52%, Qatar with 59%. Island nation Curaçao qualified with 80%, but they got there by beating Suriname and Guatemala.

In the first round, Italy beat everyone except Norway and still went home.

The FIFA Rankings Problem**(see bottom)

FIFA has a rankings system that determines seedings for qualifying and tournaments (brought to you by CocaCola). It's better than nothing because it typically prevents Argentina from playing Spain in the group stage. But there are fundamental flaws. The system doesn't take into account certain key metrics like margin of victory, the fact that penalty shootout wins are really ties, or home field advantage (a major factor in international soccer.

The FIFA rankings don't account enough for the strength of the opponent. That's a big problem.

There is a much better system they could use called ELO — the same model used in chess. If Magnus Carlsen beats a hobbyist, his rating barely moves. If the hobbyist somehow beats Carlsen, their rating skyrockets. The system knows the difference. ELO isn't tracked by FIFA, but it is tracked independently at eloratings.net. FIFA, of course, doesn't use it.

FIFA recently changed how they do their rankings, but it's still a ways off from ELO - and the differences in

The UEFA Gauntlet

Europe decided to divide their qualifying into 12 groups, with one team qualifying per group. Italy got the short straw and drew Norway - who ELO sees as a top-12 team in the world. They could have drawn Hungary, Iceland, or Bosnia. Instead they got Erling Haaland's Norway. Subsequently, they went 6-2 in that group, finished second, and then had 2 do or die must win games to make it.

If we accept that Norway is indeed that good, it means that from the outset, Italy only had about a 40% chance of qualifying. If we give them a 50% chance of getting in via the playoffs - that's still only 70% total. That's not a reflection of how good Italy is - it's a reflection of a format that put a top-20 team in an unfair spot from the jump because some ping-pong balls ended up going a certain way. 

Shootouts Are Basically a Coin Flip

Here's where the playoff format is unjust for teams like Italy. In group play, the 3-points-for-a-win system incentivizes attacking football (ie, trying to win). You can't sit on draws when your opponent might beat someone else later. That changes completely in a one-off knockout game - because now there's another option. The penalty shootout.

What this means is that if you're a heavy underdog, your best strategy isn't to win. It's to not lose. Get to penalties and it's basically a coin flip. The pressure actually flips to be worse for the favourite, the Italians knew what was at stake. This uniquely works for underdogs in soccer because it's really hard to score goals in the sport. A team sitting back and never trying to score can grind to 90 minutes and suddenly they're 50/50 to go through.

The end result is you end up in this weird situation where one team isn't actually trying to win - they're just trying not to lose. And the odds are often in that team's favour.

That's what happened to Italy. In this game in particular, they were winning, but they also lost a player to a red card (which is its own massive variable)  and ultimately went out on the coin flip tiebreaker; penalties.

Who Actually Gets In

The cruelest part perhaps isn't that Italy missed out. It's who made it in instead. Qatar is in the field - after hosting in 2022, they qualified through a weak AFC (Asia) group with a 59% points percentage across 18 games. Curaçao, a Caribbean nation of just 150,000 people qualified by essentially fielding the Dutch C team. Players who never had a shot at playing for the Netherlands, get citizenship, and then get to spend their weekends beating weak Central American opposition like Bermuda - a team full of bankers and trades guys. Meanwhile Italy went 7-1-2 in UEFA and gets to watch the world cup from home.

There is genuinely 0 chance some of these small teams win a game at the World Cup. Should a team be there if they have no chance of winning? That's a real question FIFA should be asking. They almost certainly won’t, however.

These confederations all pay their dues to FIFA, and like so many things in life, it comes down to money. Individual soccer federations make lots of money just for making the world cup. It is not unreasonable to think that there are incentives other than the “pure joy of sport” at play here. 

How to fix it

There are plenty of potential fixes and improvements available:

1. Open up inter-confederation qualifying so you're not punished for being geographically next to the best teams on earth. 

2. Emulate the champions league and allocate spots in the world cup based on performance. In other words, if all the African teams perform well, and none of the South American teams perform well, the next World Cup should reflect that. UEFA already does this in their champions league with countries like England getting to send more teams than Denmark. 

3. Get rid of one-off knockout games in qualifying entirely - if the whole point is figuring out who deserves to be there, you want formats that reduce variance, not blow it wide open. Group stage points tables do that. Single elimination shootouts don't. 

4. Come up with an alternative to penalty shootouts. Incentivize winning instead of incentivizing "not losing".

5. Ditch the FIFA rankings and start adopting ELO for seeding. FIFA can make it the "CocaCola ELO rankings".

Moving Forward

Italy didn't choke. They got put in a bad position by a system that was never really designed for merit. Detractors will say, "just win", but that doesn't mean it's fair. Now, the world misses out on experiencing Italy on the world stage.

There's much more here, deep dives into confederation allocations, the Nations League path, teams playing in confederations outside their physical location, and so much more, but that's the essence of FIFA - controversy.

As a final extra gut punch: because Italy didn't qualify, and because FIFA doesn’t use the ELO rankings, they now will be seeded as a second tier team for the next qualifying cycle. That means that Italy will likely have to do it all over again, maybe against Spain or France. It also means, that those other teams, will now have to get through Italy to get back to the world stage. Meanwhile, New Zealand will have their qualification depending on whether or not they can take down New Caledonia (which yes, is a place that exists).

Correction: ** A previous version of this article (Prior to April 5th) had misinformation about the FIFA world rankings. They aren't as bad as they were prior to 2018, but they still aren't as good as ELO **

In 2017, Canada became the first country in the world to launch a funded national AI strategy. Backed by an initial $125 million, it was a move to cement a permanent seat at the head of the global table, and for years, that early lead seemed to pay off. We built world-class research hubs in Toronto, Montreal, and Edmonton that attracted the brightest minds in the field and dominated academic journals.  

Since 2024, the federal government has committed roughly $3.3 billion to AI infrastructure and sovereign computing. It was a major investment to build computing power and the basic tools needed to compete globally. However, as we move through 2026, the landscape is shifting in ways that require us to look at things differently. The challenge has evolved: we have moved from the era of recruiting elite talent in our labs to building the infrastructure to support them, yet we are still missing the bridge to using these tools in the daily economy. 

The Learning Curve 

The data confirms that we are in a quiet transition. Statistics Canada reported in 2025 that about 12 per cent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the last year. While this is a steady increase, growth is mostly seen in digital sectors like finance and information technology. 

A 2025 survey from KPMG Canada adds context to this trend. While over 90 per cent of business leaders say their organizations are exploring AI, only 2 per cent point to a measurable financial return. This reflects a period of careful experimentation, as most firms move through the early stages of adoption. But the outlook is shifting from curiosity to commitment: three in 10 respondents expect a return within the year, while six in 10 project a timeline of one to five years. For a local company, this transition requires building the digital foundations needed to move from a successful pilot to a profitable operation. 

This creates a growing divergence in the national economy, as some early movers are already institutionalizing this technology. Many of the country’s largest organizations have moved past simple pilot projects to set up dedicated AI divisions, often led by newly appointed Vice Presidents of AI or Chief AI Officers. For these leaders, the goal has shifted from testing the tools to scaling them across thousands of employees and daily operations. 

Refining how we use these tools is in everyone's interest because it's what makes the country more efficient. Canada's productivity has trailed other countries for a long time, and the Conference Board of Canada suggests that using AI more widely could boost our economy by 14 per cent over the next decade. We know that productivity drives wage growth and helps us keep our quality of life. 

Power and Practicality 

When we talk to the people tasked with making these systems functional, the conversation usually centers on data rather than theory. To run a reliable AI system, a business needs clean and organized data, but decades of old processes have created a logistical hurdle where modern applications are being forced into an outdated infrastructure. 

This friction extends to the national level, where Canada faces a shortage of domestic computing power. Canada’s share of global compute capacity has sat at less than one per cent among G7 peers. Without the ability to do heavy lifting here at home, we often find ourselves exporting our data and buying back the results from other countries. 

While the government is now reviewing proposals for large-scale, sovereign data centres, these projects face a significant physical reality: the electrical grid. With global data centre energy demand projected to double by late 2026, our provincial grids are facing unprecedented pressure. Until we can effectively plug in these supercomputers without straining the local power supply, our progress wil remain tethered to foreign interests.  

The Canadian Blueprint 

Canada is excellent at pioneering new ideas, and our challenge is to be consistent in how we use them. If we want to move forward, we should view AI as a basic utility like electricity or the internet. 

First, we need to help smaller firms get their data ready, supporting companies outside of the tech sector as they transition to AI-ready infrastructure. Second, we should simplify the human side of this work through clear national standards that give businesses the confidence to move from trials to investment. 

Finally, our goal should be to support a uniquely Canadian model that prioritizes privacy and people. A more deliberate, thoughtful approach can be a strength that allows us to build systems that we can rely on for the long term.

Canadians are known for being really nice. We give people the benefit of the doubt. We trust in our institutions. We are slow to anger, to say the least. The same qualities of being nice and trusting can lead us into a state of paralysis. It's not until someone starts threatening our sovereignty that the majority of the population starts to really pay attention to politics.

You see it clearly in Toronto voter turnout. Last year, when the spectre of American influence galvanized us, voter turnout was sky high at 69.5%. This is not the norm at all however. In the 2022 municipal election for example, just 29.2% of eligible Torontonians cast a ballot — the lowest turnout since 1974, and less than half of the 60% who showed up in 2014. Provincial numbers aren't much better.

This is because most of us don't see a clear link in how our voice actually makes a difference in the city we live in. People care about Toronto, but there is very little knowledge of what actually happens at City Hall. There is therefore no clear consensus on what is going wrong.

There is consensus though, that just about everyone agrees the city has been in decline over the last decade. When we examine why, we start to notice a key trend that reared its ugly head once more this week at City Hall.

To be clear, the city has no deficit of legitimate issues to wrestle with. Affordability, safety, and transit chief among them. But yet again, while council could have been spending its time wisely, they chose to focus on a motion with no real relevance: banning ICE — the infamous United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — from the World Cup in Toronto.

While the vast majority of people in this city likely agree with the statement "I don't want ICE here in Toronto during the World Cup," it simply didn't need to be said. It's irrelevant, and it deliberately misleads people into thinking there is a risk of a foreign government sending its people here to... do what exactly?

Their methods aside, ICE exists to remove illegal immigrants from the United States. Hopefully the mayor and her colleagues know that as of the writing of this piece, the 51st state proposal is not a realistic possibility. We actually have our own agency tasked with managing our border, Canada Border Services Agency. No mention of them however, so council doesn't seem to be concerned about immigration enforcement in Toronto.

This motion is just about as absurd as banning any other foreign law enforcement agency — the French Army, perhaps, or the IRGC. German stormtroopers? Or maybe Imperial ones?

The rational conclusion therefore is that this is pure political theatre. Designed either to signal a point, or to stoke fears that some repressive agency is en route to oppress Torontonians. It is wasteful at best and cynical at worst — and after watching the mayor's PR video, the latter seems closer to the truth.

There is no credible reason to expect ICE or any foreign power to be operating on Canadian soil during the six soccer games played in Toronto. There wasn't even a threat or a rumour. And even if there were, that would be a federal matter entirely outside the mayor's jurisdiction.

We can tell this motion was unnecessary because the same thing was attempted in Vancouver, where it was rightfully dismissed as being out of order. Yet the ideologues here managed to waste valuable taxpayer time and money on the very same matter.

If it were just once, perhaps it could be forgiven. But this mayor and her councillors have been engaging in performative politics for years while the city slowly but surely declines. While our residents suffer, council spent time and millions of dollars renaming Dundas Square. Now, they are suing constituents for selling Dundas square T-shirts for charity. They also insist that each and every meeting kick off with lengthy land acknowledgements that, while well-intentioned, rob the city of time that could be spent solving the issues that affect the Indigenous community most disproportionately: drug addiction, homelessness, and poverty.

The irony this week was particularly sharp. While council roiled about an imagined ICE invasion, the city was facing its very real gridlock. There was a streetcar derailment Thursday morning causing delays across five routes during rush hour. Over the weekend, entire portions of the subway are shut down to commuters for signal upgrades to ancient infrastructure. Earlier in the week, there were jarring reports of violent home invasions and stabbings on the TTC — and when Councillor Bradford put forward practical safety measures to address the crisis, he was met with indifference from entrenched colleagues who are seemingly more interested in symbolic gestures than solutions.

We must all acknowledge that while hopefully well-intentioned, the leaders of this city have simply not been effective enough to carry the mantle. A large part of that is letting ideology get in the way of good, practical governance.

When we allow this type of thinking to permeate, our public servants become unable to serve the public.

We need real change. We need to help our most vulnerable. We need to get this city running efficiently so that we can share the scarce resources we have. The stakes are too high to stay this misguided course. Municipal elections are this fall. We need to try something different, because what we have clearly isn't working.

Four thousand three hundred and seventy four, give or take.

Gausman settles and fires. He strikes him out. One down. and I consider, truly, for the first time in five months, baseball.

They were a foot away from a championship. Sports nirvana. A world series for a generation of Canadian fans starved of glory.

A swing and a miss. He strikes out the side. Three down, and I reckon with the pain of coming that close. It's been blocked out, a mini trauma that I just couldn't face.

This is the day where that wound starts to heal. The nation of Jays fans is bonded by nonsensical grief.

Down 0-2 in the count, Vladdy gets on base. There's a mental exhale, a feeling akin to stretching an angry muscle after a bad night of sleep.

Jays go down in the inning, I make a little joke, pet my dog, take a load off.

Six up for Gausman now, and six down. There's a comfort in the background as I write. Familiarity.

The baseball season is long. There are Four thousand, three hundred and seventy four outs that every team will make.

Climbing that mountain, hoping to get back to the top. Each batter another step closer. A great project. A long journey.

The pain will linger. The feeling like you missed out on a life changing experience. A championship banner hangs for eternity after all.

"Nine up, nine down. Six Ks already for Kevin Gausman" says Dan Shulman.

Ok. Fine. I'm smiling.

Maybe, after all, I'll look forward to those outs. Outs in my new basement. Outs from the dock. Outs from the outfield district. Outs from who knows where. Outs while I'm asleep. Outs from the bar. Outs I won't see.

Four thousand three hundred and seventy four outs.

I'm going to enjoy them, best I can. The optimist in me, always there, is awake again at last.

Baseball is back.