One citizen wrote this. The site is the work; this is the why. The dated dispatches it grew from are kept whole under New.
A letter of introduction
The world is broken — you know it, I know it, we all know it. We see and feel it every day, each of us in our own way.
We could talk about it from a hundred lenses. We could argue all day about the who, the why, the where, the when and the how. We could argue definitions of the polycrisis, the metacrisis, collapse, climate change — but why bother anymore? We have all become professionals at describing our problems.
Imagine, for a moment, the future your children and grandchildren live in if things just keep going the way they’re going. Are you optimistic — do you see something bright ahead? Or do you quietly assume some kind of collapse is a matter of when, not if?
And if you’re one of the people who figures “they’ll sort it out” — who, exactly, is they? The corporations? The government? Really?
If we the people don’t fix this world, who will?
Somewhere, at some point in time, some group of people need to unite, organize, and lead the way into the future.
Toronto is that place. We are those people. Now is that time.
Ontario’s municipal elections on October 26, 2026 need to be our last stand. By 2030 — the next time Toronto elects a council — almost all of the important decisions about the future will need to have been made.
Toronto is one of the most diverse and multicultural cities on earth — often called the most — and that is our greatest strength. We are among the world’s most literate populations, thanks in part to one of the world’s great public library systems, from whose desks much of this work was written — thanks, TPL. We have world-class universities, drawing brilliant students from every corner of the planet. Read more about why Toronto.
If not Toronto, then where? If not us, then who? If not now, then when?
Toronto, let’s unite. All of us. Let’s stop marching for our special interests and march together.
The answer has never been left or right. The answer is down, then up.
The solution has always been epically simple and stubbornly hard at once: we, the people, unite. We talk about the future we actually want for ourselves and our kids. We collaborate on the best ideas for getting there. And then we build it — together.
This is not a them problem. It is not the government’s job or the corporations’ job to hand us a future. We are those institutions: their workers, their voters, their customers, their congregations, their neighbours.
The only thing stopping us from uniting and creating the future we want is us.
We don’t need money. We don’t need new inventions, new science, new ideas or new technology. We don’t need new organizations. And we don’t need permission.
Toronto’s three million people — backed by four million more across the GTA and nine million more across Ontario — already hold all the money, permission, ideas, tools and talent we need. We can come together and decide the future we want, and how to get there.
The governments we elect can’t do this alone — they need all of us, and all of our organizations, mobilized and working together.
I challenge you with this big question: What could Toronto do in one year, all-out?
What if our universities and colleges, our schools and hospitals, our city hall and its agencies, our companies and startups, our unions, our congregations, our cultural associations, our nonprofits and neighbourhood groups all pointed at the same goals at the same time?
What if you could watch every project, every group, every organization moving — live, on public dashboards, the whole city keeping score of itself?
What if progress was the news — leading the nightly broadcast, on the front pages every morning: what we built, fixed, and healed this week?
What if the rest of the world was watching us do it? What if they helped?
Every problem we have has already been solved by someone, somewhere, somehow. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The world’s best ideas are already free — on the internet and at the library. The world’s best minds are one phone call away, and happy to be asked. The world’s best AI is in our pockets. What’s left is the one part nobody can do for us: review it, synthesize it, adapt it, and apply it to one place. This place.
The strategy is connection — we build and strengthen our own neighbourhoods, our tribes, and our physical and virtual communities. Connecting our neighbourhoods. Connecting our tribes. Connecting our efforts. Making new friends.
Think for a moment about your vision of the future your grandchildren live in.
Can that future happen without the people of the world learning to unite?
A uniting has to start someplace, led by some people, at some time.
Can you think of a better place than Toronto? All of the world is here, and the best of it — every country, every culture, every spiritual tradition on the planet. Alongside them are the freedom fighters, journalists, human-rights advocates and civil-liberties defenders who had to flee everything to get here. Everyone in Toronto descends from someone who wanted a better life. Most of this city left somewhere that broke its heart. That is exactly why the world’s problems can be worked here, face to face — and why everything we solve here is built to carry home.
Those who came before us did the hardest work — through world wars, genocides, disasters, persecution and brutal migrations, they bought the freedoms we live in. Now it’s our turn to stand up and take up their torch:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Here’s my part, honestly.
Who I am doesn’t matter yet. I am a neighbour. I’m a part of your tribe. Born and raised in East York, I’ve spent my entire life working on the biggest and hardest problems I could find, living in developing countries for nearly twenty years, with the people of more than a dozen countries as one of them, journeying through nearly fifty countries along the way. I’m publishing as The Unknown Soldier — partly because on the internet, safety comes first, and mostly so the ideas have to stand without a face. The letter behind that name explains both.
I have a vision of a world full of peace, love, unity, respect, gratitude and service; a world without war, genocide and exploitation of every kind; a world of the people, for the people.
It’s not my vision. It’s a version I’ve pulled together from a lifetime of listening and reading; learning.
I’ve spent my whole life looking for answers. It’s been a lifetime online, exploring as deep as the internet goes, and a career spent working on hard problems, in hard places, all over the world, with some of the world’s largest and most reputable organizations. I’ve seen the best and the worst of humanity, and the best and worst uses of its technologies. And I’ve found my answers: I’m at peace, I’m healthy, and I’m about the happiest person you’re ever likely to meet. The rest of the story I’ll tell you in person — it’s better out loud.
Two years ago, I returned to Toronto and found a man-made disaster. Homelessness. Addiction. Poverty. Human trafficking. Corruption. Lies. Exploitation.
I saw fear everywhere. Fear of not having enough. Fear of outsiders. Fear of others. Fear of the institutions meant to serve us. Fear of AI. Fear of job loss. Fear of the future. Fear of being looked at; fear of not being looked at.
I saw all of these things in what I would still consider one of the best cities in the entire world.
Nearly twenty years ago I left, thinking I was leaving the best country and city in the world and that it’d take care of itself. Boy was I wrong.
But hear this clearly: I am not the story.
The solutions are the story. You are the story. Toronto’s thousands of tribes are the story. We have real-life heroes amongst us who have spent their lives dedicated to a better world — let’s elevate them to super-hero status and learn from them.
For two years I have studied Toronto and our problems from the bottom up. They have spent their lives at it.
Meet me face to face and I’ll happily tell you my story — you can often find me working in public at Union Station, or email me with your number on Signal and I’ll reach out. Better yet, invite me into your room — your congregation, your team, your club, your kitchen table — and I’ll come. I want no title, no position, and I certainly don’t want your money. I want your time and attention — it’s far more important to me than your money.
There is nothing here to join but a conversation, and no one here to follow. What one person can honestly do is this: inspire · inform · connect · equip · guide · hand off · exit. That last word is a promise, not a flourish. I can jumpstart the design, the synthesis, the architecture, the uniting of the ideas — and then it’s yours, because it was always going to be yours. You write the future. You make it better, and you make it real. I’m one of the gardeners — and a gardener is measured by how well the garden grows without them.
I believe humanity has already written its own designer’s guide to the future — it’s just scattered across a million rooms. I’ve been gathering it into one working draft: free forever, open, forkable, and waiting for your hands.
I see AI as capitalism’s final gift to us — the end of any good reason to keep competing in zero-sum games, and the urgent beginning of collaboration as our primary mode. Done right, we the people could harness it together and build a future worth handing to our grandchildren — a third path past both the utopians and the doom-sayers: a world without war, genocide, poverty and exploitation.
How do we do this? Simple: connect, learn, and overcome fear.
Connect with others, connect with yourself, connect with nature, and connect with the higher power however you understand it. Make new friends. Join new organizations. Attend new events. Find your tribes. Open your tribes to others.
Learn about our problems and their potential solutions. Read the research. Read the books. Learn to use the new AI tools — the more intelligences the better: just like people, each one has been trained differently, carries different frames of reference, different mental models.
The rest of the world can watch us, support us, and follow along — or not.
The Matrix handed us one more false dichotomy — blue pill or red.
What if all of Toronto took the green one: working together to co-design and co-create a regenerative future for our communities, from the bottom up?
That’s my challenge to you — sign up for the conversation of a lifetime, about our future.
Day 1 — the dispatch that opened the campaign · Day 7 — unity for Toronto, together · Who is the Unknown Soldier · Everything this became — the front page