Restorative justice is the promising pathway to restoring community, and my friend Sally Swarthout Wolf is in the final stages of finishing a book on the topic. This is a collection of stories from the field, and having had a first peek at the galleys, it is a promising illustrative collection to show and inspire what is possible when we put relationship at the heart of conflict resolution. Pre-order it now.
If you don’t live in Manitoba, PEI, British Columbia or Yukon, your provincial government has not yet enrolled in the national Pharmacare program and you are being left out of funding to support drugs and medications you are otherwise paying more for. All Canadians fund this program. All Canadians should have access to it, but it requires provincial governments to get on board. (Most of the provinces not yet enrolled are led by conservative and populist parties, who are not good on public health stuff, PEI being the refreshing exception).
My enduring curiosity about complexity and constraints extends every day to public policy realms. Looking through a complexity lens helps me to understand governance and how we might address public policy challenges (and why we get it wrong, so often). Brian Klass today has a really fascinating read on dictators, central bankers, decision-making and constraints.
My enduring curiosity also extends to the night sky, and I’m not the only one who looks up, obviously. What I didn’t know until now is that a species of endangered moth uses the Milky Way to guide its migration to a place it has never been before. They have been determined to be the first invertebrate discovered to use celestial navigation.
Growing little brain avatars by reversing time in skin cells to create the building blocks of neural networks sounds – possible? It’s being done right now at Stanford University. This is where complexity takes us, pure experimental research into living systems, and watching how self organization can enable researchers to discover new treatments for brain issues.
Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
If you were popping around here on Nexwlelexwm (Bowen Island) over the past couple of days, you might have remarked to folks that the weather seems a bit weird. We’ve had a volatile week of spring weather, with heavy rain, different kinds of winds, a front of thunderstorms and clear skies.
It is interesting to listen to people talk about the weather. The patterns are different. The air is warmer, but has a bit of a chill on the breeze. The wind is coming from different angles and the trees are moving differently. In fact southerly and westerly winds on our part of the island blow against the trees’ natural leaning direction, and yesterday on a late afternoon walk, we hear a couple fall in the forest. The thunderstorms that passed over Vancouver Island were a clue to the weirdness.
Today, in our complexity inside and out course we taught a module on pattern spotting and working with constraints. Complexity workers know that all patterns in complex situations are held by constraints. Change the constraints and the pattern changes. So weather wise, in the last couple of days we had a strange set of constraints in the upper atmosphere that resulted in a lot of convection, meaning that warm air at the surface was mixing with cold air aloft and that is what drives thunderstorms and other volatility including strange winds.
These aren’t uncommon kinds of atmospheric conditions on the coast, but they are uncommon enough that folks sense that the weather is “weird.” And its gets to the point now where I can tell you that there is a lot of convection in the atmosphere by how many people are confused by the weather pattern. Forecasting weather using a mass perception of how people make meaning of the situation is exactly how we work in complexity.
The weather is indeed strange. a few days ago I made bunch of posts on my blog “private.” I have done this once before, when people I worked with in another country were detained in part because of work we had done together. In that case the ruler of that country is a known autocrat who had survived a coup attempt and was taking it out on his enemies and anyone he thought was organizing against him.
Here in Canada we have entered into a short election campaign and although the parties have not yet released their platforms I have already decided who I am voting for, and it is a party I have never voted for in my life. This is an election between two conservative parties. One, the Conservative Party of Canada, is the legacy of the old Progressive Conservative Party which merged with the populist western-based Reform Party (and lost “progressive” from it’s name) and then lost its most lunatic fringe to the further right People’s Party of Canada. Still, they are led by the populist Pierre Poilievre who is a career political party wonk, who has made his living off of immature name calling (a la the man to the south) and slogans like “Axe the Tax” which sound good when you chant them once or twice and then they start to get boring. Plus they are just covering up terrible policy.
The other conservative party is the Liberal Party of Canada which really hasn’t changed over the past 5 decades or so. They occasionally drift to the left on social policy, and we have just come out of a period of ten years where Justin Trudeau brought a Gen X approach to social policy and swung the party left on those issues. Everyone got tired of him though and after a fall of running on fumes with a hobbled House of Commons, he stepped down at the beginning of the year and made space for a short Liberal leadership campaign. The victor was Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He is an economist, a pension fund manager, a banker and a technocrat. His landslide leadership victory (more than 85% of the party members voted for him) instantly moved the Liberal back to their more traditional centre right position. They now have a banker in charge, with a fairly intact social conscience and a lot of experience leading government institutions and economies through rapidly changing crises. He was the BoE chair during Brexit. He knows how to play a bad hand.
One of these two men will be Prime Minister on May 1. Neither of them are true progressives; their campaigns both began with announcement of tax cuts. Carney has been prime minister for less than two weeks during which time he made a trip to Europe to shore up trading support and defence options against the unpredictable chaos coming from our south and then he came home and dropped the writ. Poilievre has continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau (who is long gone), he continues to rail against the consumer carbon tax (which Carney has effectively repealed) and he continues to promote a tax cut for the lowest tax bracket (which Carney also did, although at a lower rate and more tied to a policy decision to replace the carbon tax rebate, ANYWAY…).
Poilievre was standing 25 percentage points ahead in most polls until Carney was chosen as leader of the Liberal Party. He now sits 5 points behind Carney. The progressive conservatives who could never vote for Trudeau’s Liberals seem to have come home to the only conservative party will to occupy the centre of the political spectrum: Mark Carney’s Liberals.
So we have an election, but it is not to be one contested on progressive ideas. It will be one that will elect a party and a prime minister that can best respond to the unprecedented volatility and existential threat of this strange time. That is not the bellicose and sloganeering Conservatives. That party will be the Liberal Party of Canada. There is a lot at stake in this election and a lot of strange political weather happening now. Call it volatility in the upper atmosphere, but it is about to hail some.
I’m here in Columbus, Ohio doing my annual gig with the Physcians’ Leadership Academy. Every year I get to run a half day complexity workshop for local physicians. It’s a fun gig and gets me a chance to see friends in this region and make a stop in Toronto on the way.
Today was a weird day to cross the border though. For the past month, and especially the past weekend, the conversation that almost everybody in Canada is having is about the US tariffs that came into effect at 12:01 this morning. Blanket 25% tariffs on everything that crosses the Canada-US border. The US tariffs instantly triggered a trade war and Canada retaliated with about two thirds of a full tariff schedule which will rise to 25% retaliatory tariffs on about 1200 US products. It’s anyone’s guess whether this is a permanent state of affairs or not. The tariffs were imposed – under dubious legal authority it must be said – through a Presidential executive order which is nearly unheard of in US governance. It is usually Congress that does these things, but the President has the power to impose tariffs for national security reasons if these are the result of a declaration of a national emergency. Donald Trump made 23 pounds of fentanyl and some unknown number of migrants crossing from Canada to the US into the national emergency that has allowed him to by-pass Congress and impose tariffs, and threaten the future of our country.
So naturally in Canada, everybody has been talking about this. It is the single topic of conversation. American liquor is being romped from store shelves. “Buy Canadian” website have popped up everywhere. Premiers are talking about cutting of electricity to millions of Americans. And while we have had trade spats with the USA in the past, Trump has also signalled his intention to annex Canada, if not militarily then certainly economically. You just have to watch what he is doing to Ukraine to see what the plan is.
But the moment you cross the border, nothing. No one is talking about this. Very few people even really know about it. A few might have seen Justin Trudeau or Doug Ford on CNN today but hardly anyone has any context for what they are saying or how it might affect them.
So it’s a bit like those weather moments when it’s pouring rain on your side of the street, but your neighbours are in full sunshine, enjoying the afternoon. I don’t blame Americans for this state of affairs. Unless you follow politics closely and these kinds of things interest you, your average Ohioan is probably not giving more than a few minutes thought to this. The President is giving a State of the Union address tonight, so it’s unlikely that any of the protestations from north of the border will show up in the news cycle.
This is a feature of North American society, by the way. Americans are no more ignorant or apathetic than Canadians when it comes too politics, economics or global trade. I mean, Doug Ford got elected to a four year majority mandate in Ontario with only 19% of the electorate voting for him. There is, however, an asymmetry to this situation that leaves us booing at the US national anthem being played in our hockey and soccer arenas in response to naked threats against our sovereignty, while Americans wonder what bee got into our bonnet.
Now my friends and colleagues here know I’m Canadian, and so our conversations are sprinkled with a bit of humour and maybe some teasing back and forth, but while I love banter generally, my heart isn’t in it. The existential threat is the thing that keeps it serious. And most of my friends here are either solidly progressive or at least thoughtfully conservative and hardly anyone thinks picking a trade fight with Canada or Mexico is a good idea. Still, the words I hear most out of their mouths are “I’m so sorry.” Despite what you read on social media, most Americans are not red-hatted MAGA dupes running around yelling nonsense into the void. Life just seems to go on.
It’s just that, for us, it feels like life has changed quite profoundly. we are certainly facing a recession, we may be facing many years of recession that leaves us economically vulnerable to annexation and it’s unclear if anyone in the US or elsewhere really cares about that. I don’t know what the future holds holds for us. So we wait, because there isn’t anything else to do right now. We are in the dumbest of times and they don;t look to be getting any smarter.
If you scour the pages of LinkedIn, it won’t take long before you begin running into folks from the corporate sector who are attempting to rationalize Elon Musk‘s current approach to organizational change within the US federal government. Many of them are drawing on their experiences, or their veneration of, startup culture, and I have seen posts lately, that I’m not going to bother to link to, which talk about the principle of “move fast and break things“ being worth a shot when it comes to government. Treat it like a startup. That way you get more innovation.
It shouldn’t even require a response. But here we are.
Governments are not businesses. They don’t resemble businesses in any way. From a business perspective, the job of government is to provide a stable social substrate of policies, and predictable regulations and legislation that makes it possible for businesses to operate. On top of that government picks up the costs that businesses externalize onto society as a whole, like education and safety and health care and basic research and infrastructure.
A few blunt examples for these corporate shills.
- When companies are starting up, Society provides them with educated talent, and serviced environments in which they can establish their operations. Companies never have to pay for the investments that all of us make in an educated workforce.
- Companies largely don’t have to worry about how their employees get to work. Roads, public transportation, and a well-regulated telecommunications system provides the predictability and ease that companies require for their employees.
- When economies change or companies go bankrupt, governments are the one that care for the aftermath. Workers are paid compensation, communities who are suffering, are provided resources and local governments take on the work of creating climate for sustained economic activity.
The many functions that governments provide to communities and regions, require them to operate with a continuity of care, especially to those that are the most vulnerable and require special assistance, like children, folks who are ill or disabled, elders requiring long-term care and others. Governments take on the collective responsibilities that are beyond the scope of any of us to care for on our own, including regulating our food supply, managing, and protecting the environment, and our natural resources, ensuring that we have a stable and predictable dispute resolution systems.
It is absolutely ridiculous to me that I’ve had to repeat these points to people that should otherwise know better.
A government‘s obligations are to provide stable and predictable continuity of care to a citizens. A business’ obligations are to provide an ever-increasing return to its shareholders. In fact, many of those advocating for a startup mentality to be applied to “government efficiencies“ don’t even see the irony of the fact that a startup’s purpose is to generate nearly unlimited growth. “Move fast and break things“ is a principle used to maximize profits and expansion in the early years of a startup. And yet some folks are unironically, wanting to apply this principle to government operations, where the thing that gets broken is people and communities and where moving fast threatens the very stability upon which businesses rely. And the cost of repairing those things arenot going to be covered by shareholders.
For my whole life, and especially during the years in which I work for the public service in Canada, I have had to constantly make this argument. It is so simple to understand the differences between business and government, and yet it is those who should know better but who like to project airs of confidence and confidence who seem so willing to conflate the two. I now look upon these folks as pure charlatans.
Understand the difference. The same nonsense may be coming to Canada again too. The metaphors of managing government like a business or, God forbid, a household budget, are not only unhelpful, but they are fundamentally dangerous, and if used to guide actual policy making will result in long-term damage from which people, communities, businesses, and countries may be unable to recover.