Day 1 — a public campaign to unite Toronto
A dispatch, published as written — dated August 10, 2026, by The Unknown Soldier. This is one person’s voice, not the site’s; the claims in it carry receipts anyway.
42 days ago I began a research sprint to explore the tens of thousands of reports, articles, studies, and other work conducted by Torontonians and Canadians and experts around the world about the problems and solutions facing us, with the goal of producing the world’s best civil-society research library to inform the debate around the upcoming municipal elections.
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 making the world a better place, working on solving the biggest and hardest problems I could find. I’ve lived in developing countries for nearly twenty years, living 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 because on the internet, safety first.
Here’s all that matters for now: I’m an information manager and problem solver with experience managing complexity across multiple domains, countries, levels of government, scales, roles and functions. I’ve spent my life learning about all the ways I can improve myself, my community, and the world around me. I love learning, especially all the great ways we’re ideating about and working towards making the world a better place.
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 and I’ll come to you.
Now it is time for me to lead, teach and share. I’ve been training my entire life for this. Who I am shouldn’t matter — the ideas should stand on their own, and I don’t even claim ownership of them, as I’ve crowdsourced them from you. 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.
I’m on a mission to unite Toronto → GTA → Ontario → Canada → World to have a proper conversation about the world we want to live in, and I need your help.
How do you unite 8 billion people? You show them how 3 million people can do it.
How do you get ready for 3 million people to have a conversation about the future? You practice ten thousand times at small scale, in as many different contexts as possible, learn, and get better.
None of this is untested. Cities and countries have already run pieces of it at scale, in public, and Toronto has run pieces of it itself — we’ve gathered the receipts, the assemblies, the platforms and the methods that have already worked, here and abroad: how a million people agree.
And the moment is bigger than one city. On October 26, Ontario votes everywhere at once: 2,289 races across the province’s 414 directly-electing municipalities and their school boards — 3,180 mayors, councillors and school trustees chosen in a single day [our research]. Add the municipal elections in British Columbia, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island and Quebec’s provincial election, and more than three in four Canadians — about 78% — live somewhere with a scheduled election this fall. Check the math yourself; it’s all public.
If we do things right here in Toronto — where we can coordinate in person, in high-trust environments, and move at the speed of trust — we could unite all of Ontario and even the rest of Canada by the end of 2026.
The stakes are high. This is Toronto’s last municipal election before 2030 — the council and school boards we choose on October 26 will sit until the next municipal vote in 2030. And by then, the most important decisions of our lifetimes — about AI, climate change, geopolitics, war, representative governance, technology’s autonomy — will largely have been made [our research].
If we don’t decide the future we want for ourselves, the corporations, their owners, and their political minions will make all the decisions for us by 2030. Election 2026 is our last chance to change things. I propose a once-in-a-lifetime all-in effort from everyone, every organization, and every tribe in Toronto. From our places of worship to our nursing homes to our schools and universities, everyone needs to come together, get to know each other better, listen, share, learn, and start working together on our future.
We don’t need to wait for the election.
We start now.
I don’t have all the answers — nobody does. I do, however, have access to some of the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence tools, access to every report and study I could reach on the open internet, and I want to find the best answers we as Torontonians can come up with, together with our experts and AI. It’s the future — let’s adopt it, in public, the right way.
For the last 42 days, I’ve put my nose to the grindstone with the help of the world’s most advanced AI models to help me understand Toronto’s problems and their solutions. I set out intending to make all the research I did as understandable and digestible and scalable as possible. I succeeded in some ways and failed in many others.
I learned along the way, though, as I always do, and now it’s time for the next phase of the process.
Today I am going public with this project and releasing a large amount of my research and writing.
It’s time to start listening and engaging at scale. I’m going to lean into my strengths — asking questions.
I’m going to continue to ask the world’s best AI for background research on Toronto’s issues, and I’m going to ask AI to identify Toronto’s best minds on each subject — and then I’m going to ask those people for their opinions, and hopefully they’ll let me share them with you in full.
The thesis
Trigger + vision + inflection points = crowd.
Crowd + truth layer + tech platform + methodologies + facilitators = crowd decisions.
The truth layer: citizen briefs and backgrounders built on all existing research and reports, plus expert opinions.
Decisions + the leaders to execute those decisions at the municipal level + the leaders to coordinate the crowd = coordinated action at scale.
The municipal election is the trigger. A Toronto working together, united for a better future, is the vision — and this website is intended to form part of the truth layer. Toronto already has tested technologies, facilitators and methodologies.
We’re trying to drive ten thousand smaller conversations across Toronto over the next three months, leading to one big conversation. The goal: a collectively agreed-upon plan, worked on by tens of thousands of Torontonians and discussed by more than a million, about our vision for the future and how to get there; a suite of candidates we support who agree to implement that plan; and a coalition of thousands of groups agreeing to sprint through the next year together.
The synthesis of the whole research project fits in one sentence: help citizens understand how the institutions that shape their lives actually work and make decisions — so we can elevate the civil-society debate in Toronto — so that Torontonians can unite across their tribes, agree on the future they want, and act on it together, with the October 26 municipal election as the trigger and the pre-2030 decision window as the deadline.
Torontonians come first — residents, voters, people in crisis, people who want to help; then the candidates who will be asked to implement what the crowd decides; the organizations — the tribes — whose uniting is the strategy itself; the journalists and researchers who re-check us; and the cities that fork what works. That said, with more than three in four Canadians living somewhere with a scheduled election this fall, Toronto’s success could scale far beyond Toronto.
Toronto is my home. I was born here. It is my favourite city in the whole world. Despite being gone for nearly two decades, coming home has been the most beautiful experience — I see the best of the entire world here. I see the best food, the best music, the best culture, the best universities, the best institutions, the best civil-society groups, and the best of the world’s peoples: its freedom fighters, human-rights advocates, journalists, politicians in exile, and, perhaps most importantly, their children.
How do we unite 8 billion people and have a global conversation about the future of humanity?
We unite the world’s most representative group of people — us Torontonians — and show them how it’s done. We stop talking about what to do and start doing it.
We are experts in the problems. We know deliberation and consensus-building, and we have many of the world’s best mediators and facilitators. We have some of the world’s best civil-society organizations. We have the country’s biggest banks and financial institutions. We have one of the world’s best AI and technology hubs. And we know how to do fun — festivals, food, community.
We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of expert-hours studying the problems. Enough is enough. Let’s fix them.
Let’s end homelessness and ensure everyone has a safe place to call home. Let’s end loneliness and isolation, ensuring everyone has someone to talk to. Let’s make sure everyone has enough of what they need. Let’s give every mother a village of support.
Let’s stop dreaming about a utopia in the year 2100 and let’s build it right now, this year.
This is not about creating new organizations or new tribes. This is about gathering Toronto’s tribe of tribes and coordinating all of Toronto’s organizations so that we the people know where we can fit in, add value, and help make Toronto the world’s best city.
We all want a better future for our children and our grandchildren. We understand the problems.
We just need to learn how to communicate, coordinate and collaborate at a city-level scale.
We can redesign our city so that nobody is being exploited.
I am just one person, but my vision is your vision. I’ve heard it from tens of thousands of people over thousands of conversations.
I’m just the synthesizer, the integrator, the Yogi of Ideas.
You’re the ones that matter. It’s your actions that matter.
Ask yourself: five years from now, when money doesn’t matter, what do you do with your time? Once you’ve learned, travelled, studied, fcked around and found out, how do you spend your time? What’s your life’s work? How are you going to serve your community and the world? What do you want to be good at?
Join stuff — groups, subreddits, channels, clubs, organizations. Attend stuff — events, conversations, festivals, parties. Make friends — introduce yourself, ask questions. Clean up — yourself and your environment.
Why wait? Get started now.
Change the World. Spread Love. Have Fun. Make Money. In that order. Every time I’ve followed those instructions, life has worked out. Make the world a better place and live your best life. Don’t worry about the money. It’s an illusion, anyway — as anyone who has ever lived through war, disaster, migration or super-inflation can tell you. Resilience is your skills and capacities, and the skills and capacities of your communities.
— The Unknown Soldier · Toronto · August 10, 2026
Day 1 starts with you — sign up for the conversation of a lifetime, about our future.