I don’t consume a lot of right-wing talking points. But every so often I catch one, and if I’m not up to speed on the issue, I like to give it some thought and do what usually amounts to about five minutes of digging. That’s really all it takes to get a reasonable understanding of most issues these days.

And inevitably, I end up calling bullshit.

This Thanksgiving weekend, it was outrage over the fact that before Mark Carney became Prime Minister, he happened to work at Brookfield.

And I’ve got to say, it’s time to stop whining about Brookfield. Or at least the idea that somehow our Prime Minister still holds a corner office on the fiftieth floor.

And before you call me a Liberal sycophant, let me assure you that I went down this particular rabbit hole because I genuinely wanted to know whether what I’m about to lay out for you was something worth getting outraged about.

Spoiler alert! I’m not outraged.

The issue at hand is a federal pledge of about $2 billion to help Canadians retrofit their homes with heat pumps.

What is a heat pump, some of you may be asking?

A heat pump is a proven, energy-efficient way to heat and cool your home. It’s not new technology, but like most technologies, it’s improved considerably over the decades.

Basically, you heat your home by transferring heat from the air outside, concentrating it somehow and bringing it inside. And vice versa when you want to cool the house.

I don’t understand all the thermodynamics involved, but I’m an English teacher, not a physicist.

Anyway, it uses electricity to move heat rather than burning fossil fuels or using electricity to heat an element, which is generally far less efficient.

A miracle, really.

So back to Carney and Brookfield.

The issue is that Brookfield owns Enercare, a company involved in residential heating and cooling, and has investments across numerous industries connected to energy and infrastructure.

So the right-wing outrage machine points to this and shouts, “See! Corruption!”

Mark Carney is cutting a cheque for his bigwig buddies.

And $2 billion is a lot of money.

Except that’s not what’s happening.

The money is being used to provide rebates to eligible homeowners who choose to upgrade their heating systems.

The government is essentially saying that if you’re replacing your furnace and choose a qualifying heat pump, it may help you out with a $2,000 rebate. Some eligible households can receive considerably more.

And I don’t know about you, but a $2,000 rebate on a purchase I might have to make regardless is certainly going to make me learn everything I need to know about changing how I heat my home.

Ah, but now that money is supporting industries in which Brookfield has investments.

To which my response is, yes. But here’s the thing.

Brookfield has a stake in a remarkable number of businesses and industries. If we avoided investing in anything Brookfield had a financial interest in, we’d have a hard time investing in much of anything.

We couldn’t build hospitals, roads or bridges without potentially benefiting some large investment firm somewhere along the way.

Hell, the heating and cooling industry itself includes companies producing everything from traditional natural gas furnaces to modern heat pumps.

Whichever system you choose, there’s a good chance some enormous investment portfolio has a piece of the action.

And here’s what you have to remember.

It’s not a $2 billion cheque to Brookfield. It’s a rebate to the consumer, who then has to hire somebody to supply and install the thing.

The guy who supplied it needs to get paid. The guy who shipped it needs to get paid. And the guys who turn the wrenches, drill the holes and install the damn thing need to get paid.

Those are real jobs, often performed by local businesses employing people in your own community.

Brookfield might benefit somewhere along that chain. Through companies it owns, it might even benefit directly from some installations.

But it isn’t the sole beneficiary, and it certainly isn’t receiving the entire $2 billion.

And hold on a second.

Brookfield is hardly the only investment firm involved. There are plenty of others with investments spanning the same industries.

Your RRSP, your mutual fund, your pension plan. They all might contain investments in companies that benefit from government spending.

Government investment in heat pumps has the potential to benefit all sorts of businesses and investors, not just Brookfield.

How do you feel about it now?

And look, if you want to argue about whether investment firms should be allowed to consolidate so much money, power and ultimately influence, then let’s have that conversation.

I’m in on that.

At what point does diversification become concentration? When does financial influence become political influence? And should a relatively small number of enormous investment firms have so much influence over the economy?

Those are questions worth asking.

But linking a federal policy decision to Carney and Brookfield through some enormous financial spiderweb that practically all of us are caught in, and then calling it corruption, is at the very least disingenuous.

Let’s not forget that we live in a country where ethics and oversight still exist and function reasonably well.

We have a Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner. We have parliamentary committees, access-to-information legislation and independent journalism that, for the most part, still has standards.

None of these institutions is perfect, and legitimate conflicts of interest can certainly go undetected or unresolved.

If anything, one of the problems with ethics oversight is that identifying wrongdoing doesn’t always come with consequences that people consider meaningful.

But that’s another issue altogether.

And look, if you’re concerned about ethics in government, do yourself a favour.

Get involved. Write to your elected representatives. Demand accountability. Support independent journalism. Try actually showing up to vote.

But at the very least, take five minutes to understand what you’re getting outraged about before you let somebody else make up your mind for you.

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I’ve always thought duelling was a weird custom.

I can’t imagine having my feelings hurt so badly, or my honour disgraced to such an extent, that I’d feel the urge to pull off my glove, slap my offender across the face with it, throw it dramatically on the ground and make my way over to my second to choose between foils or pistols.

I mean, even the ancients had lawyers.

And yet, for centuries, otherwise intelligent men decided that the appropriate response to being called a liar or a coward was to meet in a field at dawn and try to kill each other.

We romanticize this stuff now.

There’s something almost elegant about the duel. The early morning mist. The frock coats. The seconds standing solemnly nearby. Ten paces, turn and fire.

Very civilized.

Except, of course, for the part where someone gets a lead ball fired through his liver because another guy questioned his integrity over brandy the night before.

But maybe duelling tells us something about the past that we tend to forget.

Life was pretty shitty.

We have a habit of imagining the past as though we would be living our present lives with nicer architecture.

We picture the manor house and the horse-drawn carriage. Candles burning in the windows. Dinner served on silver.

We don’t imagine the toothache, the infected cut on our thumb, the freezing bedroom, or contaminated drinking water.

Even if you were wealthy, you didn’t have antibiotics, modern anesthesia, or most vaccines. Surgery was extraordinarily dangerous, assuming there was even a surgery capable of fixing what was wrong with you.

And for much of human history, if you became seriously ill, the arrival of the doctor wasn’t necessarily good news.

There was a reasonable chance his plan involved removing some of your blood. Let those demons out.

So maybe people had a different relationship with death because death had a much closer relationship with them.

Disease, infection, childbirth, accidents and violence were constant companions in ways that are difficult for most of us to appreciate.

Maybe that changes the calculation.

If death is something you see constantly, perhaps risking your life doesn’t seem quite as outrageous.

And if your reputation determines your career, social standing, your family’s position and how people will remember you after you’re gone, maybe honour becomes more valuable precisely because life is less secure.

It sounds ridiculous to us:

My honour is worth more than my life.

But perhaps what they were really saying was:

My life is temporary. My honour survives me.

Which brings me, naturally, to Denis Leary.

In No Cure for Cancer, Leary does a bit defending his proudly unhealthy lifestyle by pointing out that all these healthy habits supposedly add years to your life, but the years they’re adding are the ones at the end.

And really, who wants those?

It’s a joke, obviously.

But there’s an interesting idea buried underneath it.

We don’t just want to live.

We expect to.

We have become so good at postponing death that longevity has become our default assumption.

When I turned 35, I remember telling someone that I had officially reached middle age.

They laughed at me.

Really?

Half of 70 is 35.

If that’s not at least the beginning of middle age, you have some pretty high expectations.

If you live to 80, the middle was 40.

If you live to 90, congratulations. You can push it all the way to 45.

The uncomfortable part is that none of us knows the number we’re dividing by two.

You only discover where the middle was after you’ve passed it.

Maybe that’s one of the biggest differences between us and the people standing in those fields at dawn.

We assume tomorrow.

We schedule retirement. We contribute to pensions. We buy 25-year mortgages. We worry about what our cholesterol might do to us twenty years from now.

We have built an entire civilization around the expectation that, barring some terrible misfortune, there should be decades ahead of us.

So of course duelling seems insane.

Someone calls me a coward today and I’m supposed to risk the next forty years proving him wrong?

Fuck that.

I have a dentist appointment Tuesday.

Maybe people in the past weren’t unusually cavalier about death.

Maybe we’re unusually insulated from it.

And perhaps one of the strangest accomplishments of modern civilization isn’t simply that we made life longer.

It’s that we made tomorrow feel guaranteed.

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If you refer to your school memories as “back in the day,” you probably wouldn’t recognize what’s going on in a modern-day classroom.

Education has evolved, and that’s a good thing. Could you imagine if it didn’t?

“You won’t always have a calculator in your pocket” would still be considered great career advice. Computer class would start with typing C:\ and figuring out where the floppy disk goes. Our maps would still have places like the USSR and Czechoslovakia on them.

So yeah, education needed to evolve.

But did it need to evolve this much?

We can argue all day about what needs to be included and what doesn’t, but am I the only one overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what we expect from kids and teachers today?

When I was a kid, I remember a curriculum that seemed to revolve around reading, writing, math and recess. I’m sure we planted seeds in Dixie cups and kept them next to the window, probably to give us some science or fill time. I’m still not sure.

There was that map of Canada we got every year where we had to label the provinces and capitals and colour them in. Every. Fucking. Year.

If you were lucky enough to have a teacher who was so inclined, you’d get taken down to the gym and play basketball, volleyball or floor hockey. If you weren’t, they’d throw a bunch of dodgeballs at you and let natural selection take its course.

This was physical education.

As I start preparing myself for a return to the classroom, albeit standing in front of it, I keep asking myself the same question:

When the hell did we decide kids and teachers had to do all this stuff?

And look, I’m not asking whether school was better then or now. I’m certainly not falling into the nostalgia trap. I’m not crying for the return of cursive. I stopped using it the second my teachers stopped making me.

Frankly, I’m more concerned that kids today can’t type with all their fingers. I can type faster than I could ever write, and I can change a document to cursive with the click of a button.

Assuming anyone can still read it.

I’m also not pretending we didn’t have science or social studies or any of that when I was growing up. We did.

But put the Grade 3 curriculum from the 1980s beside the Grade 3 curriculum today and you start to understand what I’m talking about.

In 1975, Ontario’s provincial curriculum policy for Grades 1 through 6, The Formative Years, was all of 26 pages.

Twenty-six.

For six grades.

I dare you to try printing the equivalent curriculum today. You’d go through toner faster than quarters at a 1980’s arcade.

If you had a time machine and could drop today’s curriculum expectations into a smoke-filled staff room in nineteen-eighty-something, every teacher in the room would be fighting over the nearest rotary phone to call their union rep.

Great. So we expanded what our kids were supposed to learn to keep up with an advancing world.

Makes sense.

But did anyone stop for a second and think that maybe the system we use to deliver all of this needed to change too?

Back in the day, lesson planning could consist of turning the page in the textbook, writing something on the blackboard, assigning questions from that same textbook and then smoking a cigarette while sneaking whiskey into a coffee cup from a flask buried in the back of the desk while everyone got to work.

Okay, I may not have evidence for the whiskey.

But you know that guy existed.

Compare that with what we expect from teachers today.

They have to build units across multiple subjects they themselves might not be experts in. Tie themes together across those subjects. Differentiate instruction. Support accommodations and individual learning needs. Incorporate rapidly changing technology, digital literacy, media literacy and financial literacy.

Then somehow get coding, STEM, environmental education, citizenship, Indigenous histories and perspectives in there while supporting the social and emotional well-being of as many as thirty kids at once.

And here’s the problem:

Those are all good things.

That’s what makes this difficult.

We kept adding good things.

We just never seemed to stop and ask where the hell we were going to put them.

Sometimes I ask myself why I’m even trying to get back into a classroom.

The answer is that there’s a subset of society compelled towards teaching no matter how difficult we make it. I’m not trying to make it sound noble. We do it because watching the light bulb go off in someone else’s head is euphoric. It’s a high that can’t compare to any drug.

Unfortunately, before you can get to that moment, apparently you have to teach financial literacy, coding and environmental sustainability while simultaneously getting Brayden to stop licking a glue stick.

The problem isn’t that the curriculum has bad intentions.

It’s that we keep loading good intentions onto an antiquated system and then wondering why teachers are struggling to carry them.

And teachers aren’t the only ones drowning.

Students are struggling too.

Because we didn’t just add more things to the curriculum. Somewhere along the way, we also changed what it means to learn something.

Today’s students aren’t just expected to know something. Increasingly, they’re expected to understand it, explain it, apply it, investigate it, communicate it, make connections, solve problems, collaborate, demonstrate their understanding in different ways and then reflect on their learning.

Again, these are good things.

I want a kid to understand something rather than memorize it long enough to pass a test and immediately forget it.

But somewhere in our rush to improve education, I wonder if we started undervaluing the one thing that nearly comprised the entirety of the old system:

Repetition.

A kid gets better at reading by reading.

Writing by writing.

Arithmetic by doing arithmetic.

Spelling by spelling.

Sometimes learning really is that boring.

There are still only so many hours in a school day and so many school days in a year. And more often than not, there is still one teacher standing in front of the room.

I’m never going to advocate for burying kids under worksheets, but at some point we have to look at falling scores in math and literacy and ask ourselves what “getting back to basics” is actually supposed to mean.

Because something has got to give.

Do we scale back the expectations or scale up the resources?

How deeply do certain subjects need to be taught?

Where is exposure enough?

Do we need more educators in the classroom?

And here’s one I don’t think we ask enough:

Do we really need to grade all of it?

I’m not arguing that we get rid of science, stop teaching Indigenous history or throw computers out of classrooms.

I’m asking something much simpler.

What does a kid in Grade 3 really need to be able to do?

What would we like them to know?

How do we effectively get them there?

And maybe most importantly, if we’re going to keep adding things to the list, what are we willing to take off?

Because there are still only so many hours in the day.

And only so many times that poor kid needs to colour in the fucking map.

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Today my son was telling me about a debate he had in his Classical Civilizations class.

It was his job to defend Athena for turning Arachne into a spider for criticizing the gods. Apparently, some of his classmates may have taken offence to his argument.

His defence was pretty simple.

Arachne committed what today we might call blasphemy. She challenged the gods, insulted them and was punished for it. Athena turning her into a spider might seem a little excessive, but divine punishment for blasphemy isn’t exactly something the ancient Greeks had a monopoly on.

And that led him to something else.

All religion qualifies, at least in one academic sense of the word, as myth.

Which shouldn’t actually be controversial.

Myth doesn’t necessarily mean a stupid thing people used to believe that we now know isn’t true. It can simply mean a traditional story through which a culture explains gods, creation, morality and humanity’s place in the universe.

Today’s mythology was once somebody’s religion.

The Greeks didn’t go to the temple and say, “Gather round, everybody. It’s mythology time.”

They believed this shit.

And this is where our conversation took a different turn.

My son has been raised in a household that we’ll politely call less than religious. So he was genuinely baffled by the idea that people could believe the supernatural stories contained within religions actually happened.

Not believe in their meaning.

Not value their lessons.

Believe they happened.

We live in a world where we know considerably more about physics, biology, astronomy and the natural world than the people who first told these stories. We haven’t explained everything about the universe. Not even close.

But seas parting, people rising from the dead, gods speaking from burning bushes and prophets travelling supernaturally to heaven aren’t exactly the kinds of explanations we’d accept for an unexplained event today.

If somebody walked into an emergency room tomorrow and announced that a dead man had risen after three days, I suspect the first call wouldn’t be to the Vatican.

Which got me thinking.

Why does it matter?

Does Jesus need to have actually been the son of God for “love your neighbour” to be good advice?

Does Muhammad’s Night Journey need to have literally happened for his teachings to contain wisdom?

Does Moses need to have received commandments directly from God for “don’t murder people” to remain a pretty solid foundation for civilization?

Why does wisdom need supernatural authentication?

We don’t demand this anywhere else.

Nobody needs proof that Aesop’s animals actually talked before accepting the moral of a fable. Nobody investigates whether Icarus really strapped wings to himself before discussing hubris. Fairy tales have been teaching children lessons for centuries without anyone demanding forensic evidence that a wolf once impersonated somebody’s grandmother.

The story isn’t less valuable because it isn’t history.

Of course, for many religious people, whether these things actually happened matters enormously. Christianity isn’t simply a collection of nice things Jesus said. Islam isn’t simply a collection of useful teachings attributed to Muhammad.

Fair enough.

But that only makes the question more interesting.

Why?

Why does compassion become less meaningful if the person teaching it wasn’t divine?

Why does mercy require a miracle?

What exactly disappears if we stop demanding that the story be factual?

You could still have Christmas, Eid, Passover, Diwali and Easter. You could keep the rituals, meals, music, community, family traditions and cultural identity we’ve built around religion.

You could pray if prayer gives you peace.

You could read scripture and find wisdom in it.

You could teach your children the stories.

You could even believe in God.

If we’re taught that God is within us, maybe that’s real enough.

What might disappear is the need for everyone else’s story to be wrong.

Because once my supernatural claim has to be literally true, your contradictory supernatural claim becomes a problem.

My God said this.

Your God said that.

My book is revelation.

Your book is mythology.

My prophet spoke to God.

Yours was mistaken.

And somehow, conveniently, the religion I happened to inherit from the family and culture into which I was born tends to have gotten the universe exactly right.

Funny how often that happens.

I’m not naive enough to think removing religious literalism would bring world peace. Human beings have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to find reasons to hate each other. We’d manage.

But we’d have one fewer reason to believe God wanted us to.

Maybe mythology isn’t an insult.

Maybe that’s where religions eventually go when enough time passes and nobody is left who needs the stories to be facts.

Athena turns Arachne into a spider and we call it mythology.

A god performs a miracle and we call it religion.

Maybe the difference isn’t the story.

Maybe it’s whether anyone is still around insisting it really happened.

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I've loved martial arts for most of my life. They've been an integral part of who I am, which is probably why I've become increasingly suspicious of the mythology we build around the people who teach them.

Because sometimes a guy in pyjamas who has spent forty years punching and kicking his friends is just a guy in pyjamas who has become exceptionally good at punching and kicking his friends.

And that's okay.

Mastering a martial art is an accomplishment. So is mastering yoga, tai chi, Pilates, dance or any number of other mind-body disciplines. They require years of practice, patience, sacrifice and repetition.

But mastery deserves respect. It doesn't demand deference.

Somewhere along the way, we have a tendency to make a strange leap.

This person knows something I don't.

Therefore, this person understands something I don't.

Therefore, this person understands life better than I do.

Why?

Your karate instructor might have read a shelf full of Buddhist philosophy, watched every kung-fu movie ever made and made pilgrimages to Japan Okinawa, China or whatever far off land. He may have spent decades contemplating discipline, fear, ego and violence.

There may be real wisdom in what he's learned.

But he's not a therapist.

He's not a psychologist.

He's not a doctor.

And the black belt around his waist doesn't make him any of those things.

Even the spirituality associated with martial arts deserves some perspective. The philosophical traditions surrounding the martial arts developed within particular cultures and historical circumstances. Warriors wrestled with questions of violence, death, duty, fear and impermanence. Modern budō later incorporated ideas of education and character development.

There's value there.

But why would we assume this is somehow the path to spiritual enlightenment? Particularly, in today's modern age.

The problem becomes more serious when you consider how loosely regulated much of the mind-body world is.

There are organizations, federations and certification systems, but there is no universal authority deciding who gets to call themselves Sensei, Master or Guru. There is certainly no universal body deciding whether someone who claims moral or spiritual authority actually deserves it.

So legitimacy can become remarkably circular.

Why should I listen to him?

Because thousands of people listen to him.

Why do thousands of people listen to him?

Because he's someone worth listening to.

Followers aren't evidence of legitimacy.

They're evidence that you can attract followers.

And these environments can create a dangerous progression:

Expertise becomes title.

Title becomes hierarchy.

Hierarchy becomes deference.

Deference becomes personal authority.

Eventually, the person who once corrected your stance is telling you how to live your life.

Worse, questioning the teacher can itself become evidence that the student is wrong.

You don't understand.

You're not ready.

Your ego is getting in the way.

You need to learn respect.

It's a beautifully closed system. The teacher's authority proves the teacher's authority, while questioning that authority proves why you still need the teacher.

And there's another problem with an unchecked hierarchy: there's nobody above you to tell you when it's time to step aside.

So the reign of the guru too often ends one of two ways: death or disgrace.

Meanwhile, an entire generation of talent can be left standing in the cold, waiting for its turn.

You can tell someone a million times that they're the future. Eventually, though, the future has to arrive.

When that promising young student or instructor starts pushing fifty and they're still being told to wait their turn, the promise starts ringing a little hollow. At some point their potential begins drying up right alongside the promise that someday they'll finally be allowed to use it.

The twenty-year practitioner will always have less experience than the forty-year practitioner. The student will always have fewer years than the master. But experience doesn't automatically remain relevant simply because you keep accumulating it.

The world changes.

Teaching changes.

Students change.

Knowledge changes.

Sometimes the person with twenty years of experience has the better idea.

But in a hierarchy built around seniority and deference, they may never get the opportunity to prove it. The people underneath the master aren't being prepared to surpass him. They're being taught to remain underneath him.

That's not mentorship.

That's preservation.

And when the person at the top finally disappears, everyone suddenly discovers the problem: instead of spending decades developing successors, the organization spent decades developing followers.

Is it really surprising that the worlds of martial arts, yoga and other guru-centred communities periodically produce stories about revered teachers abusing the people who trusted them?

It's something I consciously tried to resist throughout my own career.

Let's train together.

Let's build a community.

I'm in charge because my name is on the lease, not because I've elevated to another plane of existence.

Ask me questions.

Let me say, "I don't know."

Let me ask you for advice.

I'll fix your kata.

But Victor over there is actually a doctor. Maybe talk to him about your sore back.

That's what I think we sometimes forget about expertise: it has boundaries.

Knowing more than me about karate means I should probably listen when you correct my karate.

It doesn't mean I should let you choose my career, repair my marriage, diagnose my depression, raise my children or explain the mysteries of the universe.

And none of this means we shouldn't have teachers.

We need teachers.

We should respect people who dedicate their lives to mastering something. We should listen when experience has given someone something valuable to teach us. Sometimes our teachers will profoundly change our lives.

But a good teacher doesn't need you to believe he's something more than human.

He can be wrong.

He can learn from you.

He can tell you when somebody else knows more than he does.

And perhaps most importantly, he can eventually watch you walk out the door without needing you to spend the rest of your life believing you still need him.

Find great teachers.

Just be very fucking careful about finding gurus.

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Today I had a moment of zen.

It started—or rather, it hit me—as I followed my wife into the house.

We had just gotten home with the boy after being out to do basically nothing. Just a random Monday evening. The boy comes in and asks if I want to go for a ride.

“Yeah, why not? Let’s go.”

Pretty soon the three of us are in the Impala, riding—no, cruising—down the street, talking about nothing and headed to Walmart. Something about Pokémon cards that never actually happened.

A woman’s jaw drops as we drive by. You can always tell who recognizes Baby.

We all laugh about it.

Cruising the aisles at Walmart, the missus and I both notice two guys exchanging signals as they seem to be shoplifting a rotisserie chicken.

I'm unsurprisingly okay with it.

We all got something sweet. The boy grabbed peanut butter cups, my wife some overpriced freeze-dried something covered in chocolate. Me, icing sugar and marshmallow fluff.

My coworkers are in for a treat.

Then it was back in the car and off to Dairy Queen.

“Why is this place always crowded?”

Nothing for me. I sit in the car posting a snarky comment on Substack while they get whatever they came for.

We drove home more philosophical than we were on the way there.

Meanwhile, I’d sipped more of someone else’s milkshake than I care to admit.

And as my wife skipped into the house, I saw a carefree lightness in her step that bordered on cliché.

One better.

I felt it.

For the first time in—I can’t remember how long—I felt like I had done all that I could do today.

And that was enough.

I think somewhere along the way we forgot how to feel finished.

Even rest has become something we're supposed to optimize.

Apparently even doing nothing has homework now.

But tonight, for once, my brain wasn't negotiating with tomorrow.

Tomorrow can ask things of me when it gets here.

Right now, my family is healthy. We're together. My wife is skipping into the house.

And I've got marshmallow fluff stuck to my fingers.

That's enough.

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There is a common idea that for success to mean anything, it needs to come with a struggle.

You have to grind. Work your way up the ladder. Put your time in. Pay your dues.

And yeah, the truth is success often requires a lot of hard work. But somewhere along the way, we started treating the struggle itself as part of the accomplishment.

Naturally gifted? Had support? Took advantage of help when it was offered? Suddenly your success is somehow invalidated.

But let's be real: that stigma mostly exists for those of us trying to crawl our way up from the bottom.

The people at the top take advantage of every opportunity, every leg up and every helping hand available to them. They call it networking. Mentorship. Investment. Connections. Family support.

Then, when they make it, we clean up the origin story.

Bill Gates is a good example. The popular mythology has him starting Microsoft in humble circumstances, but Gates grew up in a wealthy and connected family, attended an elite private school where he had extraordinarily early access to computers, and his mother served on the national United Way board alongside IBM chairman John Opel.

None of that means Gates wasn't brilliant. It doesn't mean he didn't work hard.

Maybe it means something much more important.

Look what can happen when a talented kid has access.

If we really want to see what society is capable of, maybe we should try eliminating some of the struggle.

How many people never get started because they don't have the luxury?

We count on a remarkably small portion of the population to bring us innovation, expand our knowledge, create art, start companies and solve problems because so many of those pursuits require something we don't like talking about:

Privilege.

Time to study. Money to survive. Good schools. Connections. Someone to help when you fail. The ability to spend years becoming good at something without worrying about whether you're going to make rent.

Every once in a while, someone crawls out of nowhere and does something extraordinary anyway.

And we fucking love those stories.

Because they sell us a dream.

But worse, they teach us to believe we're operating on a level playing field.

If anyone technically has the ability to make it, we stop questioning who actually does.

We point to the person who worked three jobs while going to university instead of asking why someone should have to work three jobs while going to university.

We celebrate the entrepreneur who built a company while sleeping in his car instead of asking why someone trying to build something had to sleep in his fucking car.

The exception becomes evidence that the system works.

But technically possible and statistically probable are not the same thing.

Maybe struggle doesn't build all this talent.

Maybe it wastes it.

How many scientists never became scientists? How many writers never wrote? How many businesses were never started? How many discoveries weren't made because somebody with the ability to make them was too busy surviving?

Bill Gates had talent, access and opportunity, and we got Microsoft.

Imagine what we'd get if everyone had a shot.

Hell, maybe we'd have something better than Windows.

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There’s a reason why it looks like immigrants are getting all the good jobs.

It’s because they are.

And before you get your panties in a bunch or your knickers in a twist, it’s not because of some replacement conspiracy theory. It’s not bleeding-heart liberal woke ideology.

It’s the simple fact that every year that goes by, we are choosing to make education less and less accessible to our own citizens.

You want your factory jobs? Great. That’s the best your kids can hope for.

Because in a world where knowledge is compounding and growing exponentially, access to education is everything. And if we’re being honest, much of the rest of the world is doing it better than we are.

Think about it.

Your head of IT is probably Indian. Your nurse is Filipino. Your doctor is from China. The engineer building the bridge is from Nigeria.

Because sometimes whether a homegrown citizen has access to a quality education depends on whether or not they can afford the tuition. How far they’re allowed to take it depends on how long they can afford to stay out of the workforce.

Because education, done properly, is a full-time occupation.

Education may not be one hundred percent free in every country, but other countries take education much more seriously than we do. Education is seen as a necessity, where we too often treat it like an entitlement.

We’re still coasting on the fumes of our postwar supremacy, when much of the rest of the world was either in shambles or still trying to industrialize.

When the world gained access to cheap, instant information through the internet, it somehow made most of us dumber while much of the rest of the world got smarter.

The cost of feeling superior, I suppose.

In other countries, show enough aptitude and your ride to higher education can be free or close to it. You might even get paid to go.

But here, in all the wealth of our country, students fight for scholarships that will only partially fund their education at universities that have come to rely on higher foreign-student tuition rates as part of their business model.

And then you wonder why your doctor comes from a country the name of which you can’t pronounce.

Which also says something about the state of our education.

My kid came home from his first day of Grade 12 this week to tell us that his school was operating with $100,000 less in its operating budget.

Teachers are not allowed to distribute paper.

He’s now spending half the time in math class copying lessons into his notebook instead of being handed the lesson by his teacher.

Because, oh yeah, apparently we’re also trying to move away from having all work done on devices.

So we’ve somehow arrived at the point where we don’t want kids doing everything on screens, but we also don’t want to give them paper.

Couple that with Doug Ford’s OSAP cuts, and no matter how much his government spends on TV ads, it’s hard to believe they aren’t, in fact, waging war on education.

Personally, I’m at a junction in my life where I’m trying to pivot, update some skills and join the workforce in a new way.

One thought was to upgrade some of my teaching qualifications.

For me, that comes in the form of ABQs—online, more or less self-study courses that consume all of eight or nine weeks.

I’m signing up for Intermediate English so I’ll be qualified to teach at the high school level.

The cost?

Seven hundred and thirty dollars.

And I’ll only be qualified to teach up to Grade 10.

To get my Senior qualifications, you guessed it: another seven hundred and thirty bucks.

So I’m already a certified teacher. I already have an English degree and a Bachelor of Education. I want to become more qualified to teach a subject we apparently need people to teach, and the privilege of adding two relatively short qualifications will cost me almost fifteen hundred dollars.

We don’t even support the teachers trying to teach our kids in the system we broke.

The fact that we have RESPs should tell you everything.

You better start squirrelling away money as soon as your kid is born, like you’re paying a mortgage or saving for retirement, otherwise they don’t stand a chance.

Think about how insane that is.

We’re telling parents that alongside housing and retirement, they need to spend eighteen years building a fund so their kid can afford the education increasingly required to compete in the modern economy.

In one of the richest countries on the planet.

So next time you complain about immigrants taking all the good jobs, just remember why that is.

They didn’t take the good jobs. We stopped preparing our own kids to get them.

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I think what I love most about football is the way it's organized in most of Europe and other places around the world.

I grew up in Canada, where every sport—hockey, baseball, basketball—seemed to have endless games all season that didn't mean much. One game blurred into the next. The season itself never seemed to be the point. The goal was to make the playoffs, which turned out to be another tournament filled with—you guessed it—more endless games.

I mean, best of seven? Who are we kidding?

Why am I sweating through my underwear with the air conditioner blasting in May watching ice hockey on TV?

Football is different.

Outside closed leagues like MLS, the season is it. In the major European leagues, you know the schedule, you know when it's going to end, and everybody plays everybody home and away. There is no playoff waiting at the end to decide whether the previous nine months really mattered.

Every match matters.

And there's something to play for almost everywhere in the table.

The top clubs fight for the title. Below them, clubs fight for places in competitions like the Champions League and Europa League, bringing prestige, money and the possibility of attracting better players.

At the bottom, they fight simply to stay.

Relegation may be one of the greatest ideas in sports. Finish at the bottom and you don't get rewarded with a better draft pick. You get sent down. Somebody from the league below gets your place.

Your place has to be defended.

But that's what makes the other side of the equation so beautiful. You don't need to start with a multibillion-dollar stadium, league approval and owners wealthy enough to buy their way into the club.

You can rise.

Money still rules football at the top. Let's not romanticize it. The richest clubs have enormous advantages and the gap gets harder to cross every year.

But the door isn't completely closed.

Leicester City proved that in 2015–16. They had only returned to the Premier League two seasons earlier and narrowly avoided relegation in their first year back. The following season, a team that bookmakers had offered at 5,000-to-1 to win the league somehow became champions of England.

A perfect storm carried their players, their city and their supporters all the way to glory.

It didn't last.

Who cares?

What a fucking ride that must have been.

And you don't need to win the Premier League for football to mean something.

In North America, minor-league baseball and junior hockey have passionate supporters, but those teams aren't going anywhere. Win every game you want; the system has already decided where you belong. There is no path from the minors to Major League Baseball or from junior hockey to the NHL for the club itself.

Football allows people to dream of greater glories.

Third-tier clubs can fill stadiums because third tier isn't necessarily where their story ends. Get promoted. Stay up. Build. Go again. Maybe someday reach the top flight. Maybe draw one of the giants in a cup and beat them on a rainy Tuesday night.

Maybe none of it happens.

But you're allowed to dream.

And at those smaller clubs, there are still lads on the pitch who aren't so different from the people in the stands. Football has stories of players who worked ordinary jobs before climbing through the lower leagues and eventually playing in front of tens of thousands.

That matters because a local football club isn't just some frivolous piece of professional entertainment.

For towns and working-class communities that have spent generations being ignored, the club carries their name into places they may otherwise never be seen.

Sometimes glory isn't lifting the Premier League trophy.

Sometimes it's getting promoted.

Sometimes it's surviving relegation.

Sometimes it's watching some ordinary lad score a goal that means your little town gets another year on a stage nobody expected it to reach.

The football pyramid doesn't eliminate inequality. Far from it.

It just refuses to make inequality absolute.

Football doesn't promise the underdog will win.

It promises the underdog is allowed to try.

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I saw an old woman on the side of the road holding a cardboard sign:

I HAVE 99 PROBLEMS AND ALL OF THEM ARE THE PATRIARCHY.

My immediate response was:

“Huh. Same.”

Because somewhere along the way we started treating the patriarchy like a gender war. Men on one side. Women on the other. Whatever one side gains, the other must lose.

But I don't think that's what this is.

For every woman who feels trapped in the work and stress of domestic bliss, there's a man killing himself at a job he hates to pay for it.

The patriarchy traps women inside the home while locking men out.

We all know the stereotype.

Come six o'clock, Mom's clawing at the walls trying to get out of the house while Dad's sitting in the garage trying to muster the strength to go in.

She resents that he gets to leave every morning.

He resents that he has to.

Maybe neither of them really resents the other. Maybe they're both just exhausted from playing the roles they were assigned.

I was lucky.

My wife and I built a life we did our best to share. We took turns going to work while the other stayed home with our son. We both cooked. We both cleaned. We both played chauffeur.

Things didn't always shake out equal, but the spirit was there.

And that gave both of us something.

It allowed her to have a life outside our home.

And it allowed me to have a relationship with my son inside it.

That's why when I see women fighting for things seemingly meant to benefit them—childcare, healthcare, pay equity, parental leave—I don't see a war of the sexes.

I see people fighting for a better society.

I see the possibility of stronger families where men and women don't have to spend their lives playing characters somebody else wrote for them.

We fucking love freedom.

We put it on flags and bumper stickers. We fight wars over it. We build entire national identities around it.

But what kind of freedom tells a woman where she's supposed to be?

What kind of freedom tells a man who he's supposed to be?

How much strain do we put on a man's mental health when we teach him that if he falls, he's a failure?

How much strain do we put on a woman's when we teach her that being good means learning to submit?

Different rules.

Same message.

There is a person you're supposed to be. Stay in your lane.

And then we have the audacity to call that freedom.

And let's be real about who benefits from keeping those lanes in place.

The fat cats controlling our labour aren't all men anymore. They wear pants and skirts. A woman sitting in the corner office is perfectly capable of exploiting the guy working himself into the ground, just as a man can benefit from a world where enormous amounts of caregiving and domestic labour are performed for free.

The employer benefits when Dad believes working himself to death makes him a good father.

The system benefits when Mom believes sacrificing herself makes her a good mother.

And everybody at the top benefits when those two exhausted people look across the dinner table and blame each other.

Patriarchy and economic power aren't exactly the same thing. But they've spent a hell of a lot of history working together.

Maybe that's why I've never understood treating the fight against patriarchy as something men are supposed to reluctantly support on behalf of women.

I'm not giving something up.

I want out too.

I want women to be free to build careers, make money, lead companies or stay home with their kids.

I want men to be free to provide, stay home, change diapers, cry when they're hurting, ask for help when they need it and fall down occasionally without believing they've failed at being men.

Maybe freedom isn't deciding which gender gets the better deal.

Maybe freedom is getting rid of the fucking deal.

So, yeah.

To the old woman standing on the side of the road with her cardboard sign:

Huh. Same.

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We’re trying to keep AI out of the classroom, and I think that might be a huge mistake.

I understand why.

AI has been framed as a cheating machine because it can do the work for a student without the student learning anything.

Take a picture of a page of long division and it can solve the whole thing in seconds. Five-hundred-word book report? It doesn’t even break a sweat.

Assuming it could sweat.

That obviously needs to be addressed.

But as I prepare to return to teaching academics after nearly three decades out of school, I’ve been using AI to brush up on some long-forgotten skills.

Long division. Fractions. Parts of speech.

The other day I created a prompt to drill me on identifying adverbs.

AI gives me a sentence. I identify the adverbs. It scores my answer, corrects my mistakes, explains what I got wrong and gives me another.

And it adjusts.

When I’m flying, it increases the difficulty. Before long I’m feeling pretty smart and wandering into grammatical territory that starts looking more like professional linguistics than an elementary school refresher.

Other times I’m hungry, tired and just not getting it.

So it slows down.

It brings me back to my operating level and starts building again.

That got the teacher in me thinking.

I had a Speak & Spell when I was a kid. At the time, it seemed like magic. It gave me words, I spelled them and it told me whether I was right.

But that’s all it could do.

AI can notice that a child keeps struggling with a particular type of word. It can isolate the problem, explain it differently, create new examples and drill that specific skill. With the right prompt written by the right teacher, it can make the whole thing feel like a game.

My Speak & Spell could play a game someone had programmed into it.

AI can build the game around the kid playing it.

And I was one of those kids who could have used that.

I wanted to learn. I wanted to pay attention.

But my mind wandered.

When you’re a kid sitting in a classroom and you stop understanding what’s being taught, eventually the teacher starts sounding like an adult in Charlie Brown.

Wah wah wah wah wah.

I’d be following along with fractions, my mind would wander somewhere around reciprocals, and by the time I tuned back in we’d somehow moved on to Indigenous migration patterns.

I wasn’t refusing to learn.

I’d just lost the thread.

And in a classroom full of other kids, the lesson can’t always stop and wait for you to find it again.

AI can.

I lost you.

It can go back.

No, before that.

Back again.

It can keep working backwards until it finds where understanding stopped and start rebuilding from there.

We’ve talked about individualized learning forever. The problem is there might be thirty individuals sitting in the room and only one teacher.

AI changes that arithmetic.

The student who needs more time can take more time. The student who already understands can move ahead. The kid who needs to work at a lower grade level, gets to sit in the same class as their peers, without shame or stigma. A kid fascinated by some tangent can chase the rabbit hole and then be guided back to the core knowledge they need.

For a mind that doesn’t always travel in straight lines, AI can be an engine and a compass.

None of this means handing every kid ChatGPT and getting the teacher out of the way.

The teacher decides what needs to be learned. The teacher designs the exercise. The teacher recognizes when the AI is wrong. And the teacher decides when the tool needs to be put away.

If I’m assessing whether a student understands long division, having AI solve the problem defeats the purpose.

Put it away.

But after the student tries, could AI identify where they went wrong, explain the mistake and generate another problem targeting it?

Pick it up.

If I’m assessing whether a student can construct an argument, having AI write the essay tells me nothing.

Put it away.

But could AI challenge the argument the student wrote, ask questions and force them to defend their reasoning?

Pick it up.

Maybe that’s the distinction we’ve been missing.

Use AI when it expands the thinking. Put it aside when it replaces the thinking.

We don’t need classrooms without AI.

We need teachers and students who understand when to use it and when not to.

Because the most interesting thing I’ve discovered while relearning adverbs isn’t that AI can give me the answer.

It’s that the worksheet can finally notice the student.

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It must have been a Sunday when I was stung by the wasp near my right eye.

My brother and I were swinging off the branches of the weeping willow tree that hung over the fence at the back of the yard. We would grab fistfuls of branches, give them a tug to see if they'd support our weight, and swing back and forth over a ditch filled with all manner of rubbish — leaves, tree branches, rusty fence posts and lead pipes, the sort of things you'd expect to give you tetanus.

We'd swing on the willow, doing our best Tarzan cries, before crashing into the neighbour's chain-link fence, where we'd push off, making it back to the bank of the ditch where we started.

I don't remember seeing a wasps nest, but it's no surprise it was there. I don't remember the moment it got me, but I remember running to the house crying. My mom, the nurse, watching my face start to swell up.

The next thing I remember, was being bundled into the front seat of my dad's '81 Corolla, racing up the street. Sitting on my mom's lap with a homemade ice pack pressed to my face, there was no fear or anxiety. With my mom's arms wrapped around me, I could never feel anything could ever be wrong.

I wonder if all kids being held close by their mothers feel the same way.

I can't remember my little brother in the car and wonder if he'd been left at the neighbour's.

We hadn't made it halfway up the street when my mom peeked under the ice pack. The swelling had subsided, an emergency apparently averted.

I remember feeling disappointed when she told my dad to turn the car around. Going to the hospital at that age was an adventure, one I could use a lot less of these days.

Eventually, I found myself sitting on the living room rug in our basement watching CHiPs on our black-and-white TV — for those of you who remember what that was.

I'm sure there was a glass of milk and some of my mom's homemade cookies. They're a staple in our diets even today.

My mom could say I love you in so many ways, but I think baking has always been her favourite.

After a while, we were permitted to go back outside.

That's where I found my father standing at the back of the yard on the edge of the ditch, gas can in hand, smoke and flames rising.

My father enraged, the wrath of hell being directed at a nest of creatures that didn't know they had done anything wrong.

A father seemingly willing to burn down the neighbourhood to avenge his son over something as innocuous as a sting by a solitary insect.

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I'm tired of sunny days

Give me drear and rain And the trees bare of leaves Cool days And a cornucopia on my kitchen table

Give me a place For my melancholy To roost

Dried-out cornfields And mud under my feet Soggy days that Give way to cloudy Sky nights

Let me chop wood For a fire I may not light

I want the ghost of Guy Fawkes To free us from our own personal tyrannies

Let me tell spooky ghost stories While drinking bad whiskey And strumming Gordon Lightfoot poorly On my beat-up guitar

Let the minstrel carry away Our regrets for the lives we never led

Let me root for the monsters I watch on screens in the dark And pumpkin spice And Saturdays at farmers markets Hand me my sweater With the hole in the sleeve

I want to stuff my face With tiny candy bars And my mom's caramel apples While the discipline Of my workouts Falls by the wayside

Let's complain about Christmas decorations On shelves before October Has loosened its grip

My wife will change the wreaths Four times in three months As I carry them Up and down the stairs

Then let me play Blue Christmas On November 1st With that record that sat in my parents' home For as long as I can remember

Let it give way To Nat and Frank Duke and Ella

Let me taste lips That familiarity Could never temper My desire for

I'm going to sit down for ramen While the kid who carries my last name Orders in Japanese— The Chinese waiter Staring blankly

Let friends come and go And guess who'll still be here Come New Year's

Shorter days Giving way to longer nights And an excuse To hide under the covers And sleep like a bear in winter

My soul hibernating Sustained by the wine And chocolate Turkey and lamb That will flow through Easter

Learn to put down The loads that have been accumulating For years

It made no difference If you carried them Or no

Let death draw breath So life can begin again.

Nostalgia is a bitch, and I’ll tell you why.

We spend so much energy trying to recapture moments that are gone. They’re done. They ain’t gonna happen again.

And that’s okay.

Open the photo album. Put on the record. Remember the glory days. Let the nostalgia wash over you. The problem starts when we spend so much time looking in the rear-view mirror waiting for an opportunity to make a U-turn that we forget to watch the road ahead. We run a red light, almost get T-boned, eventually rear-end a police car, then blame the accident on the fact that things aren’t the way they used to be.

But were they really that great?

I grew up in the 80s. Dudes wore crop tops and I had that business-up-front, party-in-the-back haircut. Sure, they were “simpler times.”

Every generation says that.

In the 80s, we were already nostalgic for the 50s. It was everywhere. Television, movies, music, cars. Happy Days was still on television. Billy Idol was taking sounds from early rock and roll and smashing them into something new. Mr. Miyagi had Daniel waxing a collection of beautiful old cars while teaching him karate.

We were nostalgic for the past while living through the period we’re nostalgic for now.

And to quote one of the most underrated films of all time, Hot Tub Time Machine:

“We had Reagan and AIDS.”

That pretty much sums it up.

We remember the music, the arcades and riding our bikes until the streetlights came on. We forget the parts that weren’t so wonderful.

Take medicine alone. We’ve made extraordinary advances in a single generation. Nobody is jumping into a DeLorean to go get their cancer treated in 1985.

That’s the thing about our fantasy of going back. We want 1985, but we’d like to bring 2026 with us.

We want the records, but we want Spotify too.

I like putting a record on a turntable as much as anyone. Hell, I’m one of the last people with cable and I’ll still flip through the channels just to see what’s on. We can argue about whether subscription models and algorithms have made entertainment better or worse.

But do we really want to give up the internet? Laptops? Cell phones?

If you woke up tomorrow and suddenly found yourself transported back to 1983, I guarantee the first thing you’d do is reach into your pocket and ask Siri what the hell is going on.

Then you’d realize there’s nothing in your pocket.

So you’d find a payphone.

Then realize you don’t have a quarter.

Then realize you don’t know anybody’s fucking phone number.

Welcome to the glory days.

And technology isn’t the only thing we conveniently edit out.

I grew up during a remarkably progressive era, but the battles hadn’t been won. To pretend otherwise is ignorant at best.

I remember standing on picket lines with my mother while nurses fought for pay equity. For those too young to remember the term, the fight was about addressing the systemic undervaluing of work traditionally done by women.

They had to fight for that.

Today everybody complains about “wokeness.” And sure, some ideas being pushed today seem extreme to me too. We should be able to argue about them.

But back in the day we called it “political correctness.”

And people complained about it then exactly the way they complain about wokeness now.

“You can’t say anything anymore.”

“Everybody’s too sensitive.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to offend somebody.”

Political correctness pushed us to reconsider language and behaviour around race, women and other groups. But the boundaries of acceptable cruelty were still much wider. Gay people could be openly mocked in ways mainstream society largely accepted. Trans people were routinely treated as punchlines.

That’s the time you want to go back to?

Because here’s something nostalgia conveniently forgets:

The person telling the joke and the person who was the joke may remember the exact same decade very differently.

Maybe the past wasn’t actually better.

Maybe we were just younger.

Of course life seemed simpler when somebody else paid the mortgage. We weren’t worrying about our parents getting older, our bodies changing, careers, retirement or whatever fresh disaster appeared in the morning news.

We were ten.

The adults weren’t having nearly as carefree a time as we remember having.

None of this means we should stop being nostalgic.

Quite the opposite.

Open the photo album.

Remember the people. Remember the music. Remember that ridiculous haircut. Remember the summer nights that seemed like they’d last forever.

Let it wash over you.

Then let it charge you.

Because the purpose of remembering a life well lived shouldn’t be convincing yourself that the best part of it is over.

It should make you want to create more days worth remembering.

The rear-view mirror is there for a reason. Look into it once in a while. Remember where you’ve been. Smile at everything disappearing behind you.

Then put your eyes back on the road.

We’ve got problems in front of us that need solving. We’ve got places we haven’t been yet. And if we’re lucky, twenty years from now we’ll glance into that rear-view mirror and today will give us the same warm feeling yesterday does now.

Nostalgia isn’t the problem.

Just don’t let it drive the fucking car.

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I had a long day.

I spent most of it on the road, and by the time I got home all I wanted was to eat my Tuesday taco and lie down in bed.

But Daisy hadn't had her evening constitutional.

Rather than start an argument about whose turn it was, I grabbed the leash and we set off.

My mind still firmly on the Old El Paso waiting for me at home, I decided to take the short route and cut through the park rather than walk around it.

The park was empty.

Well, almost.

There was a guy sitting alone on the ball diamond bleachers, reading a book and smoking a cigarette.

It was the cigarette that caught me.

Partly because you just don't see that many people smoking anymore, but mostly because it has been illegal to smoke in our parks for years.

There was even a sign about five feet away from him.

So, naturally, I did what any responsible citizen would do.

Nothing.

I kept walking.

I could have pointed out the sign. I could have reminded him that smoking wasn't permitted. I suppose if I was really committed to civic responsibility I could have reported him.

But why?

There was nobody around.

He wasn't blowing smoke into a playground full of children. He wasn't bothering anyone. He was a guy sitting alone on some bleachers, reading a book and having a cigarette.

The rule existed.

He was breaking it.

And somehow society survived my decision not to enforce it.

Rules are important.

We need rules. They're part of how millions of strangers manage to live together without everything descending into chaos.

But knowing when rules need to be enforced is just as important as having them.

Because sometimes we become so concerned with making sure the rules are followed that we forget why the rules existed in the first place.

And this week I read a story that reminded me how dangerous that can become when the stakes are considerably higher than a cigarette in a park.

A man had lived in Canada for decades after coming here as a refugee. He had permanent resident status. At some point, he returned to the country he had fled to care for an ailing family member.

That decision eventually put his status in jeopardy.

Not because he had committed some heinous crime.

Because he had broken the rules.

What stayed with me most was the reasoning attributed to the judge. The outcome wasn't necessarily fair. It wasn't necessarily just.

It was what the law required.

And that's where I have a problem.

Law and justice aren't the same thing.

We should know this by now.

We've had plenty of perfectly legal injustices throughout history. Saying that's the law explains why something happened. It doesn't establish that what happened was right.

Judges can't simply ignore legislation whenever they dislike an outcome. Nor should they. A society in which every official gets to personally decide which laws count isn't much of a legal system either.

But if our laws produce outcomes that reasonable people—including the people tasked with applying them—recognize as unjust, then somebody needs the power to ask whether applying the rule actually serves the reason we created it.

And if nobody has that power?

Then perhaps the problem isn't the judge.

It's the law.

Rules are tools.

We create them to protect people, maintain order, resolve disputes and make society function.

They are not sacred objects demanding obedience for obedience's sake.

Sometimes justice requires enforcing the rule.

Sometimes justice requires making an exception.

And sometimes it requires looking at the guy sitting alone on the bleachers with his book and his cigarette, looking at the No Smoking sign five feet away...

and continuing your walk.

Fact check me.

As summer winds down and my family gets ready to send the kid off for his last year of high school, we can't help but start considering what comes next.

And since this kid is so much smarter than his old man, he has some lofty goals.

I've realized he's not going to get there on his own.

So I'm sitting here with a laptop, researching university admission requirements and figuring out a strategy to give him the best chance of success.

Because with everything he's already got going on—making the grades, working the summer business he started, engaging in extracurricular activities—he can't possibly be expected to have the bandwidth to strategize his admission plan too.

I had supportive parents. They wanted me to succeed. But they were completely ignorant when it came to the workings of university admissions.

I went through it on a whim and a prayer.

I want my kid to have the leg up I never had.

And there's good reason for me to put in the effort, because all those kids at the top, snagging the best spots?

They're not doing it on their own either.

Private schools. Extra tutoring. Professional admissions advisors. Parents who already understand the system.

The idea that a kid should bear all the responsibility for his own success and stand entirely on his own two feet is some working-class bullshit.

What surprised me was how much strategy there actually is.

Which courses should you take? When should you take them? Which marks count? When are offers made? What does one university value that another doesn't? What can you do now to put yourself in a better position a year from now?

None of this is secret.

That's what makes it interesting.

The information is available to everyone.

And we have somehow confused access to the system with equal opportunity within the system.

The elites don't have to put up walls anymore and tell the rest of us we're not welcome.

Everyone can apply.

There's the website.

There's the application.

Good luck.

But we're not running the same race.

One kid arrives knowing the course. His parents have run it before. Someone has helped him train. Maybe his school has been preparing him for this since Grade 9. Maybe his parents hired someone whose entire profession is understanding university admissions.

The other kid just knows he needs good grades and should probably apply somewhere.

Nobody cheated.

Nobody bribed an admissions officer.

Nobody bought a building and put their name on it.

One kid simply knew how the system worked.

That's privilege too.

And it starts long before the application.

Do we really think a kid in an underfunded public school with an overwhelmed guidance department gets the same university preparation as a kid at an elite private school whose reputation depends partly on getting graduates into elite universities?

Of course not.

The private-school kid isn't doing anything wrong. Neither are his parents.

If I could give my kid every one of those advantages, I would.

That's why I'm sitting here learning the system.

The problem isn't that some parents help their kids navigate it.

The problem is that a child's opportunity depends so heavily on whether someone in his life knows that there's a system to navigate.

We like to look at the results afterward and call them merit.

And maybe the kid who got the spot worked his ass off.

Privilege doesn't erase effort.

But effort doesn't erase privilege either.

My parents loved me. They supported me. They would have done anything they knew how to do to help me.

They just didn't know how this world worked.

Neither did I.

So I went through it on a whim and a prayer.

My kid won't.

Because opening the starting line to everyone doesn't make the race equal.

Not when some kids showed up with a coach and the rest of us never got the rulebook.

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I made a comment about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the other day.

If AOC ever makes it to the Oval Office, we will be living in a very different world.

And it might just stand a chance.

Then again, that's too much hope to hang on one person.

That last line bothered me.

Because I don't actually think my hope is in AOC.

What excites me is that there seem to be more people talking about government differently. AOC. Elizabeth Warren. James Talarico. Pete Buttigieg. They aren't the same politicians. They don't agree on everything, and I certainly don't agree with everything any of them says.

That's kind of the point.

What interests me is the larger idea taking shape around them: that government should actually function. That it should solve problems. That a society can decide there are certain things its citizens shouldn't have to fight for alone. That healthcare, housing, education, wages, infrastructure and affordability aren't just individual problems to be survived but legitimate questions for all of us to solve together.

If that movement continues growing, does it really matter which one eventually sits behind the Resolute Desk?

Maybe we've been thinking about the presidency all wrong.

We've become so accustomed to Donald Trump behaving as though the presidency were something approaching a throne that we've almost forgotten democracy isn't supposed to work that way.

America doesn't elect a supreme leader.

It elects a government.

Hundreds of representatives and senators are elected by people across the country. Governors and state legislators have their own mandates. Judges aren't supposed to take orders from presidents. Members of Congress aren't employees of the White House, including those who happen to belong to the president's party.

They aren't supposed to bow to authority.

They're supposed to challenge it.

That's the entire fucking idea.

Power checks power.

Congress tells presidents no. Courts tell governments no. Opposition parties challenge governing parties. Members challenge their own leadership. Journalists challenge all of them. Citizens challenge everybody.

Somewhere along the way, we've started treating that friction as evidence that government isn't working.

Sometimes it's evidence that democracy is.

And that makes me reconsider what I originally said about AOC.

If she ever becomes president, perhaps we won't be living in a different world because she got elected.

Perhaps she'll get elected because we're already living in a different world.

Because enough people will have decided they expect something different from their government.

And if that's happening, AOC herself becomes less important.

Maybe it's Warren.

Maybe it's Talarico.

Maybe it's Buttigieg.

Maybe it's somebody we've never heard of who is sitting in a city council meeting somewhere right now waiting for their turn.

That's what a movement is supposed to do.

If your entire political project depends upon one extraordinary person winning one election, you don't have a movement.

You have a hero.

And heroes are fragile.

They lose elections. They make mistakes. They disappoint you. They retire. They die.

Ideas don't have to.

Ideas spread.

They get picked up by another candidate, another generation, another voter. Eventually the radical thing becomes the thing everybody takes for granted.

That's the world I find myself hoping for.

Not one where we finally find the right person to wield enormous power on our behalf. That's dangerously close to wishing for our own benevolent king.

I want something far less exciting.

Thousands of people throughout government representing millions of citizens, arguing with each other, negotiating, challenging authority, checking power and slowly moving society toward something better.

Messy.

Frustrating.

Slow.

Democratic.

Then perhaps presidential elections wouldn't feel like we're deciding the fate of civilization every four years.

The person sitting behind the Resolute Desk would still matter.

Of course they would.

They just wouldn't have to save us.

Because democracy was never supposed to have a throne.

We rag pretty hard on kids these days.

They're always on their phones. They consume instead of create. They don't go anywhere. They don't dress interestingly. They don't have great music scenes. They aren't building anything. They aren't rebelling.

And I'm starting to think that's probably undeserved.

I'm one of the last Gen Xers. I grew up at a strange moment in history where I wasn't quite old enough to participate in the glory days of everything, but I was close enough to feel their glow.

I've always felt like I was born about ten years too late.

There were still frontiers, but I could see the footprints of the people who had gotten there first.

Music was still changing. So was fashion. Technology was visibly evolving in front of us. New forms of media appeared. Entire subcultures could seemingly materialize overnight.

The Simpsons were once going to destroy the social fabric of Western civilization.

Now they're wholesome family entertainment.

I can't imagine what it feels like to be born in the new millennium.

Young people today never really had a chance to own their own culture.

That used to be one of the privileges of being young.

Your parents weren't supposed to understand your music. They weren't supposed to like your clothes. They weren't supposed to know what you were doing.

The confusion was part of the fun.

Now a kid discovers Nirvana and Dad says, "Great album."

He finds an old hip-hop record and Mom knows every word.

Baggy jeans come back and their parents tell them they wore them the first time.

I once tried to convince my own kid to get a mohawk for the summer.

He wouldn't do it.

Think about how badly we've fucked this up for them.

We're supposed to be horrified by the mohawk.

Instead we're suggesting it.

We never left.

Culture doesn't seem to replace itself anymore. It accumulates.

Every song is still available. Every movie. Every television show. Every fashion. Every aesthetic. Every subculture.

Punk isn't dangerous anymore. It's a Spotify category.

Everything rebellious eventually becomes something you can buy at the mall.

So what's left for a teenager to take from us?

Maybe that's why they don't seem particularly interested in expressing themselves through fashion. Yoga pants, joggers, hoodies, slides with socks — things that would have been social suicide when some of us were young.

Maybe they aren't failing to express themselves.

Maybe they're asking, what's the point?

Because the same thing has happened to accomplishment.

When I was young, being the best guitarist in your school meant something. You might actually believe you were exceptional.

Today your phone can introduce you to a twelve-year-old on the other side of the planet who can play something you can't even comprehend.

Exceptional has become ordinary because exceptional is what the algorithm shows us all day.

Sports records that once seemed superhuman fall. Kids train with techniques, equipment and information that professionals didn't have a generation ago. What once represented the limits of human performance becomes the starting point for the next generation.

And knowledge has done the same thing.

There was a time when someone with a manual, some intelligence and a whole lot of savvy could teach themselves a computer language and start building things.

Today, before you can reach the frontier of almost any mature field, you have to climb over decades of accumulated knowledge.

Programming isn't just programming.

It's operating systems, databases, networking, security, frameworks, libraries, cloud infrastructure, machine learning and layers upon layers of abstraction built by generations of people who came before you.

The frontier keeps moving farther away.

There was something powerful about the informed amateur — the person who knew enough to start fucking around but hadn't learned enough to know what couldn't be done.

We romanticize those people now.

The garage inventor.

The self-taught programmer.

The kid who picked up a guitar and accidentally created a new sound.

But we've spent decades professionalizing, specializing and optimizing everything.

Before you're allowed to push against the edge now, you're expected to spend years learning where the edge is.

Then we hand young people a device containing essentially the accumulated knowledge and culture of humanity and ask why they aren't more curious.

Maybe having everything at your fingertips isn't the advantage we think it is.

Maybe wonder requires a little scarcity.

Boredom probably did more for us than we realized.

There was fuck all else to do.

So you rode your bike somewhere. You started a terrible band. You built something stupid. You hung around a parking lot. You called somebody. You got lost. You found something.

Not because our generation was inherently more interesting.

Because the world still made us go looking.

Today's kids don't even get the luxury of believing something is impossible.

Artificial intelligence arrives — something that would have been literal science fiction during my childhood — and to them it's another app.

Of course it is.

They were born into a world where impossible things happen through software updates.

But there's one reason I suspect this entire argument might eventually prove wrong.

Every generation probably believes the map has been filled in.

We recognize the frontiers that mattered to us, so when those frontiers close we assume there aren't any left.

Maybe AI will actually lower the barriers again. Maybe young people won't need twenty years of specialization to navigate twenty different fields. Maybe knowing what question to ask will become as important as memorizing how everything underneath it works.

Maybe savvy gets another turn.

Or maybe the next great cultural movement is already happening and people my age can't see it.

I actually hope that's true.

Because if their music sounds terrible to us, their clothes look ridiculous, their technology seems pointless and whatever they're building makes absolutely no sense to their parents, then maybe we've finally done them a favour.

Maybe they'll finally have something that's theirs.

And this time, we should have the decency not to understand it.

We live in a world obsessed with expertise.

We're told to pick a lane. Find a niche. Specialize. Become the person who knows everything about one thing.

The deeper we dig into our little corner of knowledge, the more convinced we become that everything outside of it is someone else's problem.

But knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum.

Science without philosophy builds powerful machines without asking whether we should use them.

Engineering without art creates things that work but inspire no one.

Poetry without history becomes empty sentiment.

Politics without economics becomes wishful thinking.

Economics without psychology misunderstands the people it's trying to explain.

Every discipline borrows from another. Every breakthrough happens where circles overlap.

Knowledge isn't a filing cabinet.

It's a Venn diagram.

That's why I've never wanted to be just one thing.

I've taught karate. Studied literature. Built a business. Learned photography. Read philosophy. Fixed toilets. Tinkered with cars. Written poetry. Spent nights trying to understand economics and afternoons wondering why Hemingway wrote the way he did.

None of those things compete with one another.

They make each other better.

People love quoting, "A jack of all trades is a master of none."

They usually stop before the best part.

"…but oftentimes better than a master of one."

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't knowing too little.

Maybe it's believing knowledge was ever meant to be divided in the first place.

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Canada was an independent nation for nearly a century before it adopted the Maple Leaf, and I think that says something.

Unlike our neighbours to the south, whose flag was born out of revolution and whose national anthem takes its name from the flag itself and tells the story of seeing it still flying after battle, Canada never seemed to define itself by its symbols. American history—whether entirely factual, embellished, or somewhere in between—places enormous importance on its mythology. The symbols came first. The ideals grew around them.

Canada took a different path.

We weren't built on symbols. We were an attempt to build on principles.

That's why we've never been known for grand displays of patriotism or demanding that citizens prove their loyalty through performance. Being Canadian has never required waving a flag. It has required participating in an ongoing project.

Our national identity wasn't declared in a single revolutionary moment. It evolved. Our flag didn't arrive until almost a century after Confederation. Our constitutional framework continued to develop over generations, culminating in the patriation of the Constitution and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We didn't start with a finished identity. We spent decades trying to figure out what kind of country we wanted to become.

That difference matters.

A nation built on symbols tends to protect its mythology. A nation built on principles has to be willing to question itself.

This isn't to say we've always gotten it right. Far from it.

Canada has made mistakes—some of them profound. Indigenous peoples, Chinese railway workers, Japanese internment, the Komagata Maru, the head tax. Our history isn't clean.

The point is that we don't have to pretend it is.

We don't need to insist that every founder was flawless or that every decision made in the past deserves eternal protection. We understand, at least in principle, that a successful country isn't one that never changes. It's one that leaves room for change.

Progress isn't an admission of failure.

It's an acknowledgment that no nation is ever finished.

Our Constitution isn't sacred because it can never be touched. It's valuable because it provides a framework that can grow with the people it serves. A living nation needs living institutions.

Perhaps that's the real Canadian identity.

Not a country held together by mythology.

A country held together by the belief that we can always become a little better than we were yesterday.

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Fact Check Me

Canadians often worry that we lack the patriotic mythology of other countries, especially the United States. Maybe that's because our story was never meant to be about perfect founders or sacred symbols. Maybe our greatest national tradition is believing that the work is never finished.

A flag represents a country.

Principles are what keep it worth representing.

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