THREE FILES, ONE QUESTION
I took an oath once, for the protection of the people of Ontario. Nobody has ever come round to take it back. That is the thing about an oath. It does not expire when you change jobs, and it does not check whether anybody is still paying you.
I have done a great many things. Provincial government, policing, emergency management, municipal work. I have put my name on a ballot. I build storyworlds, and there is an animation in me still waiting its turn. For a long stretch in the middle of all of it, the most demanding job I had was raising five children and running a home.
A life arranged like that gives you a particular kind of eyesight. I have sat inside institutions and watched how they actually make decisions. I have also sat outside them, on hold, like everybody else. You end up knowing exactly where things fall between the cracks, because you have stood on both sides of the crack.
So that is what I do now. I go looking for the place where something important has landed in the space between the people who could carry it, and where the honest answer to who owns this is nobody, yet.
THE THREE FILES
The work, and where to start.
One
The Second Emergency
A sustained failure of connected infrastructure is critical infrastructure failure, and therefore municipal emergency management. Almost no Canadian municipality has planned for what happens when it reaches the local level.
Watch the filmTwo
Whose money. Whose risk. Whose say.
Every paycheque feeds one of the largest pools of capital on earth. You cannot opt out, choose the manager or withdraw your share. The open letter to the Prime Minister, the numbers, the Maple Fund and four airports.
Open the pension fileThree
The Quiet Standard
Municipalities cannot buy what nobody has specified. A model by-law and a specification for quiet pickleball equipment, written in my own name, given away free under attribution.
Read the standardSO,
between us
Not the work. Opinions, arguments, and the things that followed me home and refused to leave. Nothing on this page has been cleared by anybody.
ASK RIO
An interactive version of me,
so you do not have to wait for the real one.
Rio answers from what I have published here. My work, the arguments, the projects on this site, and a few things about me that I have chosen to share. Anything else, she has my full permission to mind her own business.
Ask me about the pension argument, the emergency management work, the quiet standard, or why anyone would mix two different brands of ice cream.
Rio is an AI assistant. She speaks for the documents on this site, not for me. She gets things wrong sometimes, the same as the rest of us.
CONTACT
Write to me. I would rather read than meet.
Email is the best way to reach me. I am a self-diagnosed hermit since COVID, I work from home, and I have never once come away from a video call thinking that could not have been an email.