WORLD - Climate Change & Biodiversity Loss: The argument worth having is about speed, and about protecting the people who cannot afford to escape heat and flooding. Whether it is real is settled. Wildlife and wild places need a case made on their own terms, because cutting carbon does not automatically save them and no industry speaks for them. I keep my own flying, driving and buying at a level I would be willing to state out loud, and I won't offer that as my contribution. Internationally I back the 2030 targets countries have already signed and the money that helps poorer countries adapt. Federally, the live fight is the price large industrial emitters pay for carbon: Ottawa put it on a path to $140 a tonne by 2040 in May 2026, but whether it bites depends on the cap on oil and gas emissions and on the deal being negotiated with Alberta. I support both, and I want the National Adaptation Strategy funded rather than reported on. I won't accept that staying competitive means weakening the industrial carbon price. - Nuclear & Great-Power Conflict: This is the one problem where the worst outcome is instant and total, and it gets almost no attention because nothing has happened yet. On 5 February 2026 the New START treaty expired with nothing to replace it. For the first time in about fifty years there is no legal limit on American or Russian nuclear arsenals, no inspections, and no talks underway. Russia says it will hold to the old limits until February 2027; after that, nothing. I intend to raise this in conversation rather than let it pass as a subject nobody mentions, because public indifference is part of what lets the arsenals grow. Internationally I want a replacement treaty, or at least a return to mutual inspections and shared data. Canada has not joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and does not attend its meetings even as an observer, and I mean to ask an MP why. I won't accept that rebuilding weapons is serious and rebuilding arms control is naive. - Ungoverned Artificial Intelligence: The problem is not what these systems can do. It is that nobody can hold them to account when they go wrong, and the gap widens every time capability gets funded and rules get postponed. It matters most where governments use them on their own citizens, which is already happening ahead of any law. I use AI openly and describe how I use it, so my own work isn't quietly dependent on something I say needs better rules. Federally, Canada's attempt at AI legislation died in early 2025 and nothing has replaced it; the only binding rule on federal use is a Treasury Board directive requiring departments to publish an impact assessment before automating a decision about someone. I want that directive made law rather than policy, and the assessments published before deployment rather than after. I'd oppose buying any system where the vendor's model is a trade secret but is being used to decide things about people. - Uncontained Disease & Resistant Infection: Preparedness is not being cut. It is being wound down by expiry, which is worse than a cut because there is no decision to argue with. The least I'll settle for is a floor of capacity that cannot be quietly lowered between emergencies. Internationally I want Canada to ratify and fund the pandemic agreement the World Health Organization adopted in 2025, and I want the surveillance and manufacturing capacity in poorer countries supported, because that is what determines how early anyone finds out about the next outbreak. I stay vaccinated, I treat public health advice as something owed to other people rather than a personal preference, and I say so. - Water Scarcity: Water is handed out on the basis of who claimed it long ago rather than how much actually exists, and that arrangement will break before the water runs out. It is a governance problem before it is a scarcity one. Internationally, what I'd push for is that rivers shared between countries get binding agreements that adjust to real flow rather than to historic entitlement. Federally, the Canada Water Agency was set up in 2024 and remains thinly funded, and I'd back its mandate over the Great Lakes and the prairie river basins. At my own scale there is nothing meaningful beyond using water sensibly, and I won't pretend otherwise. - Poverty: The poverty lines in use are set so low that clearing them still leaves people with almost nothing, so progress measured against them flatters everyone involved. I want to know what the numbers look like against a decent life instead. I give regularly and unglamorously, to organisations that hand cash directly to people rather than to whatever cause is currently visible. Internationally I treat the World Bank's extreme poverty line as a floor for survival, not a target. Federally, Canada's official line is the Market Basket Measure, and what I watch is whether it keeps pace with actual rents. The 2025 federal budget cut $2.7 billion from international assistance over four years, falling hardest on global health, and I want that reversed in the autumn 2026 budget. - War & Civilian Death: I hold the same standard on the killing of civilians no matter which side is doing it, and I try to notice when I am tempted not to. The lasting damage is that the rules protecting civilians get weaker every time they are broken without consequence, so I intend to name a breach as a breach rather than as politics. Internationally I support the International Criminal Court's ability to investigate without its staff being sanctioned for it, and I want the same standard applied to allies. Federally, the concrete lever is arms export permits: Canada joined the Arms Trade Treaty in 2019, which bars exports where there is a serious risk the weapons will be used against civilians, and the fair question on any permit is whether it meets that test. - Exploitative & Unsafe Work: This is hard to see because supply chains were deliberately built long, so no buyer has to look at the far end. I buy less, I buy things that last, and I accept paying more where the cheaper option is cheaper because somebody was paid badly. Federally, Canada's supply chain law has been in force since 2024, but it only requires large companies to publish a report on what they are doing about forced and child labour. It does not require them to check, and there is no duty to fix what they find. I want a real obligation to investigate, with penalties, closer to what the European Union has adopted. I won't accept a published report as compliance. - Persecution of Minorities: Blaming a minority group for a country's problems is one repeating tactic, not a series of separate incidents. The grounds are arbitrary, which is exactly why the same tactic can be turned on any group later. I mean to say something at the moment it happens rather than afterwards, and to hold the same line whichever group is currently the target, including when it isn't one I feel close to. I want to object to the mechanism rather than only to the instance. I'd oppose any measure that creates a register, a special reporting duty, or a different standard for one group, because those outlive the government that introduces them. - Waste & Overconsumption: This is a design and trade problem before it is a shopper's problem. Products are built to be replaced rather than repaired, unsold stock is destroyed to protect its price, and the leftovers are shipped to countries that had no say in it. I repair what I own, I buy fewer and better things, and I try to ignore the pull of the newest version. Federally, the copyright changes passed in 2024 made it legal to break a digital lock in order to repair something, but there is still no law requiring manufacturers to sell the parts, tools or manuals, and that is the gap I'd push on. Provincially, Ontario makes companies pay for collecting what they sell, and what matters is whether those fees are high enough to change how things get designed. I'd oppose exporting waste under the description of recycling. CANADA - Ageing & Care Shortfall: The money goes to beds and staffing hours while the demographic shift itself is never named as the pressure, which keeps the response one step behind the cause. Immigration is the main lever and gets argued about on entirely different grounds. I intend to take on my share of care in my own family rather than assume a system will absorb it. Federally, what I watch is the annual immigration levels plan tabled each autumn, and whether the health transfer to the provinces grows with real demographic pressure rather than a fixed formula. Provincially, home care is the cheaper and less visible half of this and is usually squeezed first. I won't accept immigration levels being argued as purely a housing question when they are also the main lever on who will do the caring. - Denial of Basic Services to First Nations Communities: Twenty years and more without safe drinking water in one of the wealthiest countries in the world is not a money problem or an engineering problem. It is a statement about who counts. As of mid-2026 there were 38 long-term drinking water advisories across 36 communities. Ottawa promised to end all of them by March 2021, missed that date, and has never set a new one. The fight right now is Bill C-37, tabled in June 2026 after an earlier bill died: it downgrades clean drinking water from a recognised right to an aspiration and weakens protection of the water sources themselves. I want the right restored and the funding commitment made binding rather than best efforts, and I intend to keep asking what the new date is. - Eroded Public Health Capacity: Outbreak capacity is funded in multi-year blocks that simply run out, so it disappears without anyone deciding to remove it and without anyone having to defend the loss. The Public Health Agency's surveillance funding expired in 2025–26, and its funding for buying COVID and flu vaccines expires in 2026–27. Whether either returns is settled in the autumn 2026 budget, on a date already known. I intend to put that date in a calendar and say something before it passes, rather than notice the loss years later. What I want is a permanent baseline for surveillance, wastewater monitoring and vaccine supply that doesn't have to be won again every few years. I won't accept the framing that a lapse is not a cut. ONTARIO - Inadequate Healthcare Access: The province has the right plan and is funding it below what its own accountability office says is needed, so the commitment and the arithmetic point in different directions. The Primary Care Action Plan, launched in January 2025 under Jane Philpott, aims to connect everyone to a family doctor or care team by 2029, with $3.4 billion committed over four years. The Financial Accountability Office, the province's independent budget watchdog, says $6.4 billion of new health spending is needed in 2026–27 just to hold services where they are; the budget provides $3.4 billion, leaving a gap of $3 billion that widens to over $7 billion the year after. I want the plan funded at the watchdog's number, and progress reported as people actually attached to a doctor rather than teams announced. I use the system as intended rather than the emergency department, and I help anyone I know trying to get care without a doctor. I'd resist the drift toward private pay clinics, which is what fills the gap underfunding creates. - Denial of Basic Services to First Nations Communities: Ontario has more affected communities than any other province, and the money being federal doesn't make the province a bystander. It supplies the roads, the power and the environmental regulation those communities depend on. Neskantaga has been under a drinking water advisory for more than twenty years, and Pikangikum declared a second water emergency in May 2026. Ontario opposed the earlier federal water bill on the grounds that it would slow resource development. I intend to raise this with an MPP as well as an MP, because the jurisdictional split is exactly what lets both levels point elsewhere, and to learn the specifics of the communities nearest me rather than hold this as an abstraction. - Wildfire Exposure & Response Capacity: Two separate things failed in the 2026 fires — the ability to fight them, and the ability to get people out safely — and only the first gets discussed. It was Ontario's worst fire season on record. More than a dozen First Nations were evacuated, at least two communities were effectively destroyed, and several chiefs said their people had already started leaving before the province told them to. Nishnawbe Aski Nation and the Chiefs of Ontario have asked for an independent public inquiry; the province refused and offered a limited internal review instead. I support the call for the full inquiry and intend to raise it with an MPP, and I treat smoky days in the city as part of the same event rather than as weather. I won't accept the argument that emergencies on reserve are federal and therefore not Ontario's problem, when Ontario runs the fire service and the evacuation. - Unaffordable Housing: Supply is necessary and slow, so everything being promised arrives after the people currently priced out have already made their decisions. Relief later and less relief now is not a housing policy. The province sets the planning rules, the targets and the charges that municipalities build under, so it owns the speed at which anything gets approved even when it points at councils. What I'd push for provincially is approval timelines that are actually enforced, and a share of new supply that is affordable by requirement rather than by hope. I support affordable homes being built near me, including when it changes the character of where I live. I'd oppose relief measures aimed at buyers rather than at supply, which raise prices rather than lower them. - Overdose Deaths: I refuse to treat these deaths as a crime story. Ontario has now closed every provincially funded supervised consumption site and converted them to abstinence-based HART hubs, finishing in June 2026. After the first round of closures, opioid deaths rose again and emergency calls rose sharply. The hubs do offer real services and are running well below the demand for them. I want them funded at the scale promised, and supervised consumption restored alongside them rather than instead of them; federally, I'd push for the exemptions that would let sites operate without provincial money. I won't accept that enforcement is expanding because it works. It expands because arrests can be counted. TORONTO - Homelessness: The city runs more shelter beds per person than anywhere else in Canada and still turns people away every night, which tells me beds are not what's missing. Homes to move people into are. Clearing encampments without those homes moves the problem rather than shrinking it. Ontario's Safer Municipalities Act, in force since 2025, lets police order people out of an encampment and arrest them for not going, and the premier has said he will override the Charter of Rights if a court strikes it down. I'd oppose that, and I'd oppose extending those powers to transit enforcement. I want supportive housing funded at a scale that matches the problem rather than the $75.5 million attached to the Act. I give to and support local frontline organisations, and I try to resist the reflex to want the visible part removed from view. - Unaffordable Housing: Toronto is among the least affordable cities in North America, and softening prices have not changed the structural position. The neighbourhoods people can still afford are the ones furthest from work, care and services, which turns a housing problem into a travel problem. The specific unfinished business is sixplexes, meaning six homes in one low-rise building: council legalised them in June 2025 in only nine of twenty-five wards, with an opt-in route no other ward has used, and in January 2026 the federal housing agency found the city in breach of its $471 million housing agreement and cut $10 million from it. I want the permission extended citywide on one standard, and the council elected on 26 October 2026 will decide it. Fort York already sits inside one of the nine wards, so what's useful there isn't defending my own street but backing the extension into the wards that haven't opted in. - Overdose & Street-Level Crisis: What is visible on the street is where three failing systems meet — housing, addiction, and mental health care — and treating it as a public order problem produces more police spending and no fewer deaths. The Toronto Community Crisis Service resolves about four in five of the calls it takes without any police involvement, on a budget of roughly $35 million against a police budget of about $1.22 billion. The city's own Auditor General has identified six further types of call a civilian responder could handle. I want that expansion funded and those calls moved across, and I intend to ask candidates in the 26 October 2026 election where they stand on it. I want to be the kind of neighbour who does not call for someone to be removed first. - Congested Transportation Network: The traffic is not unusually bad by world standards, but the disorganisation is. Roughly a tenth of the city's streets have been closed at the same time, and that is a coordination failure the city could fix on its own without waiting for anyone. I want a single published construction calendar with real limits on how many closures can run at once. Provincially, the live fight is Bill 212, the law that gave the province power over municipal bike lanes: after the Court of Appeal ruled in the province's favour in August 2026, Ontario began removing lanes on Bloor, Yonge, University and Avenue Road on 1 September, despite its own commissioned analysis finding this would not reduce congestion and could raise collisions by around half. I'd oppose that and the further restrictions on new bike lanes in Bill 60. I use transit and cycling as the default, and I back road allocation decisions that don't favour the car. Last updated: September 4, 2026