All of us like to think we are coherent and intelligent beings, choosing our actions from well-structured minds, well chosen beliefs, and a clear sense of what is best for ourselves and those around us. This has kernels of truth but is mostly an illusion. Our lives are fraught with competing pressures, ranging from the environmental effects of the physical, practical and mundane through to a complex web of competing emotional, psychological and social forces buffeting us like a storm on a daily basis. Throughout all of this constant barrage emerge various ideas about right action and meaningful choice that we latch onto to bring some sense of purpose to our lives. Mostly – if we are honest, and if we have time to reflect – these emergent moral thoughts and evaluations are velcro'd on and shifted as needed in an effort to identify some meaningfulness within the seeming chaos of our lives.

And yet, ironically, these velcro'd ethical attachments are also the only emergent constant that keeps us together and coherent, saving us from spinning off into meaninglessness and a fully reactive life. The values themselves shift. The work of having values does not. That work – the ongoing effort to make sense of situation and pressure through some structure of meaning – is what keeps the self from dissolving into pure reaction.

At the deepest level, the chaos produces two motives that run beneath everything that follows: fear of losing what is, and hope of becoming more. The velcro is often fear's first answer – grab something, hold on, do not let the storm take it. Hope only enters when we begin to choose the values rather than be assigned them by panic. From this point forward, almost every choice in the ethical life is a choice about which of these two motives we will let do the work.

To fear loss and to hope already reveals a core aspect of who we are and what we value in attachment and points to who we might become. The storm we feel hides this core of our being which lives beneath the surface.

If we actively foster and grow our structure of meaningful values, and attempt to coherently apply them to the competing actions around and within us, we find ourselves on a lonely path where few dare to tread. This path is difficult, but I believe necessary at any cost, in order to emerge mentally and emotionally coherent and stable in spite of the messiness that sweeps through our lives.

But why would anyone undertake this work? This work echoes the dread and despair of a Nietzschean call: to be a diamond, to carve from chaos some fragment of existential clarity, if only for a moment. The honest answer, though, is neither abstract intellectual interest nor heroic existential striving. We undertake it because we care, and because we hope. Empathy and attachment to others make exchange itself valuable. The knowledge we are not alone brings forth hope – in becoming more, in living with more value, in the possibility of free belonging. This makes the slow work worth the risk of what we might lose along the way. The lonely path is not a refusal of connection. It is preparation for it. And maybe in the discovery of others we discover a greater richness in more than our own view.

Cultivation has a shape. The values we initially velcro on – provisional, opportunistic, shifting – through repeated affirmation, examination and use, begin to bolt on. They take load. Other choices begin to depend on them. Over time, what was velcro becomes a structural beam, and the self begins to organize itself around these load-bearing commitments. Identity itself emerges from this slow construction. Self-coherence and solidification become possible. The mess has not gone away. It has met something that can stand up to it, and can begin to recognize something beyond the mess.

What is valuable is not discovered in isolation. It is determined and discerned through the values in our interactions and through the recognition of the other. As we reflect we can see the seeds of values unformed waiting to echo within ourselves and see them echoed in others. This recognition brings forth the lonely path as perceived isolation and exposes a recognition of connection previously hidden.

Through this interaction and exchange, community emerges. Through this, ethics become solidified, bolted on, and eventually become the structural pillars that actions and other choices depend upon. Individuals who have collectively gone through the velcro-bolt-beam process come to recognize one another, not by what they signal, but by what they have built, discovered and focused on. They recognize each other as load-bearing.

This is the structural community that the lonely work was always pointing toward, and the form of belonging it makes possible is free. It is offered through mutual recognition of what has been cultivated. It is not extracted by threat of withdrawal. Within it, two paths to membership open up. Some arrive already cultivated, and find the community reflective of what they have built internally – belonging through resonance. Others are adapted and accepted by being emplaced within the community, formed through participation in its ongoing exchange. Both are real. Both are how the community renews itself across time.

These are not two paths but one path seen from two moments. The cultivated arrival carries within them the echoes of earlier emplacements, of formative encounters shaping what now seeks resonance in others. We arrive already woven from prior belonging — often forgotten, never absent.

There is a parallel path that mimics this from the outside but inverts it from within. It begins at the same place – the desire for recognition, for belonging, for the warmth of being known by others – but it is built by a different motive. Where the structural community is built by hope in becoming more, the parallel path is built by fear of becoming less. Fear of meaninglessness, fear of loss, fear of the unknown. Instead of pairing recognition with the slow work of cultivation, it makes recognition of belonging the sole value, never moving from this. The structural pillars are skipped because building them takes time, and fear cannot wait. Acceptance becomes unconditional with respect to identity and unconditional against difference.

When this happens at scale, the individual's reactivity does not dissipate in community. It concentrates. It is given direction. What was personal turbulence becomes a collective movement of reactionary being, the storm of the individual amplified into the storm of the crowd. The same human need that produces ethical community here produces its pathological double. The distinction is not warmth against coldness. Both have warmth. The distinction is whether belonging is free – earned through cultivation and offered through mutual recognition – or whether it is fearful, conditional on signals of affiliation and held under the threat of being lost.

But the structural community itself is not a final resting place. It carries its own pathology. The pillars that were once cultivated can be inherited rather than examined. Recognition can drift back toward signaling. What was hope's slow building can become fear's tight holding. The velcro-bolt-beam process, treated as completed, calcifies into tradition that no longer remembers how it was built.

This is where the lonely path returns. The individual who continues to cultivate honestly will sometimes develop beyond, or in a different direction from, the community of belonging. Often, this divergence is not because the individual has stopped examining, but because the community has. The individual is now examining what the community no longer does. The dissenter is often the one in whom hope has not yet been overtaken by fear of loss. This is a different loneliness than the first. The first was undirected, foundational. The second is positional, lonely with respect to the very belonging that the work was meant to make possible. It risks the recognition already earned. It is harder.

But it is necessary, for the individual and for the community. The individual needs to grow. The community needs to be called forward by individuals who can see what it has stopped seeing. Without dissenting growth, the structural community ossifies into something closer to reactionary mass, load-bearing on inheritance rather than on cultivation. Without community to grow toward, the dissenting individual has no ground for the growth to land.

The honest community is the one that can tell the difference between growth and defection. Between the dissenter who carries new structural commitments worth examining, and the dissenter who is simply velcroing onto a new affiliation or abandoning the work. The diagnostic is the same one that built the community in the first place: is the divergence load-bearing? Does it pull the community forward, or does it just leave?

Underneath all of this is empathy and attachment, and underneath those, the two motives that move us at every level: fear of losing what is, and hope of becoming more, and of finding the free belonging that only cultivation makes possible. The cultivation is hope acting against the fear of dissolution. The community is hope made structural. The dissenting growth is hope refusing to let fear close down what has been built. Conditional acceptance, agreement to adjust and explore and adapt, individual and communal willingness to understand, engage, adjust and mutually care for the wellbeing of the group and the individual: these are not byproducts of the architecture. They are the architecture, in its lived form.

I cannot help but see another emerging pattern at the largest scale of this conversation. All religions of the world emerged from the intuition that there was another being or a greater existence outside of the self and beyond other selves, one that calls for acceptance and inclusion within the bigger conversation around value and community. This may well be the largest expansion of communal discovery and dialogue that everything else points toward, a journey of becoming that does not stop at the human community but extends outward toward whatever else participates in the conversation.

This reaching outward carries its own intuitive rightness in our experience. The values we recognize at the largest scale echo those we first intuited at the very beginning, and those we have met in others along the way. The outward expansion is less the finding of something new than the widening of something we were already in.

The same view forward can be held two ways. The unknown can be met as possibility of richness, or as fear of loss. The whole pattern below repeats itself here: cultivated hope opens to what is beyond, while fear closes around what is already held. The work we do at every smaller level is also, in the end, the work of choosing how to stand before the largest unknown.

I believe this journey, from the first uncertain attachment through to the largest conversation we can enter, is the great work of all humanity. We are already within it. Our task is not to begin but to recognize, and grow in recognition of, how truly connected we are — embracing hope and dialogue, accepting each other's differences as part of the great conversation rather than as threats to our place within it. This, I believe, is what leads us forward.

What the Ford Government Is Really Building

There is a pattern emerging in Ontario politics that deserves more attention, not because any one decision tells the whole story, but because the same governing logic keeps appearing in one public system after another. Education. Post-secondary institutions. Municipalities. Health care. Land use. Labour relations. Public assets. Even local street design. Each file has its own details, its own politics, and its own stated justification, but taken together they point toward something larger than ordinary conservative government, ordinary fiscal restraint, or even ordinary privatization.

The Ford government is moving Ontario toward a command-and-control model of public administration.

That may sound like a strong claim, so it is important to be precise. This is not an argument that every provincial intervention is illegitimate. Provincial governments have responsibilities. When a school board fails students, the province should act. When a college is mismanaged, the province should act. When health care is fragmented, the province should act. When municipalities block housing indefinitely, the province should act. The question is not whether the province has a role. The question is what kind of role it is choosing to play, how transparent that role is, whether the remedy is proportionate, and whether the province is accepting responsibility for the systems it increasingly controls.

Across Ontario, the pattern looks increasingly familiar. First, public systems are placed under fiscal, legislative, or political pressure. Then, when instability appears, that instability is framed as local failure. Finally, the province uses that failure to justify moving authority upward into the hands of ministers, Cabinet, appointed supervisors, special administrators, or executive offices aligned with provincial priorities.

This is not a return to conservative roots. It is a move away from them.

Traditional conservatism, at least in its institutional form, has usually claimed to value local decision-making, limited government, stable institutions, fiscal prudence, predictable rules, and skepticism toward concentrated state power. Conservatives have historically warned that central governments often do not understand local conditions, that institutions evolve for reasons, and that rapid restructuring can produce consequences the centre did not anticipate.

That is not the model Ontario is seeing now. The Ford government often uses conservative language. It talks about taxpayers, parents, traffic, affordability, discipline, red tape, bureaucracy, and efficiency. But the operating model is increasingly not conservative in the traditional institutional sense. It is executive managerialism. It is a belief that public life should be reorganized from the centre, that local institutions are obstacles, that dissent is delay, that consultation is friction, and that broad ministerial discretion is the fastest path to results.

In other words, the government wants the state to be smaller when people ask it to fund public capacity, but stronger when it wants to command public institutions.

The clearest example is public education. Ontario’s school boards are not perfect institutions, and no serious person should pretend they are. Some boards have had governance failures. Some have had financial problems. Some have had leadership dysfunction. Some trustees have behaved poorly. There are legitimate reasons for provincial oversight. But oversight is not the same as takeover, and accountability is not the same as centralization.

Recent education legislation gives the Minister of Education broad authority to investigate school boards, directors of education, and trustees where the minister has concerns about the “public interest.” Those concerns can include finances, governance, asset management, parent engagement, day-to-day administration, and the delivery of education. The minister can issue directions. The minister can place a board under provincial control. The minister can vest control over a board’s administration, spending, assets, liabilities, borrowing, property, and appointments.

That is not a minor correction. It is a major shift in where democratic authority sits.

School boards are local democratic institutions. Trustees are elected. If the province believes trustees are failing, the public deserves a transparent explanation, a proportionate remedy, and a clear standard for when local democracy can be suspended. Instead, we are watching Queen’s Park increasingly treat school boards as branch offices of the ministry.

The funding context matters here. The Financial Accountability Office reported that real provincial operating funding per student reached its lowest level in 10 years in 2024-25. It also projected that education spending would fall below cost-driver needs in the coming years unless the province found further efficiencies or added funding. On capital, the FAO estimated a 10-year school-building capital need of $31.4 billion against planned funding of $18.7 billion, leaving a $12.7 billion shortfall.

That creates a troubling sequence. The province underfunds the operating and physical capacity of the system, boards show strain, and then the province points to that strain as evidence that local control must be reduced. The result is not simply fiscal conservatism. It is a cycle of tight funding, local blame, and central control.

The same logic is now visible in post-secondary education. Alex Usher’s recent piece on Conestoga College is important because it shows that this pattern is not limited to K-12. The province removed Conestoga’s board and replaced it with a single appointed administrator after an audit identified governance and financial concerns. Public reporting highlighted executive compensation, severance, travel, meal expenses, layoffs, and broader concerns around financial management.

Some of those issues may be serious. They should be examined. But the question is not whether Conestoga was well governed. The question is why the remedy is increasingly direct provincial control.

If the audit justified removing an entire board, the audit should be public. If executive compensation was a major concern, the province should explain its own oversight role. If the issue was governance, then the public should understand the standard being applied and whether it will be applied consistently across the sector. Otherwise, scandal becomes the doorway to command authority.

That is where accountability becomes unstable. Accountability requires evidence, transparency, standards, process, and proportionate consequences. Command only requires authority. When those two are confused, the public may be told that institutions are being held accountable when, in practice, they are being brought under tighter political control.

Health care shows the delivery problem with this model. Ontario has repeatedly reorganized health governance. Agencies change. Structures change. Responsibility moves. Authority centralizes. New delivery channels are introduced. The language is always about efficiency, modernization, access, and reducing duplication. But the real test is not whether the org chart changed. The real test is whether people get care.

Are there enough beds? Are there enough nurses, doctors, personal support workers, and community supports? Are hospitals stable? Are emergency departments functioning? Are patients getting timely treatment? Are people receiving care close to home?

The FAO has projected major health-sector funding gaps against cost drivers. It estimated shortfalls of $3.4 billion in 2025-26, $6.4 billion in 2026-27, and $9.6 billion in 2027-28. It also projected declining funded hospital beds on a per-capita basis.

That is the core delivery problem. Centralization does not create capacity by itself. You can redraw the org chart. You can rename the agency. You can move authority upward. You can issue directives. But if the system does not have the labour, beds, facilities, and operating dollars required to meet demand, then central control becomes a substitute for delivery rather than a path to it.

Ontario has too often confused command with competence.

The same shift is visible in municipal governance. Strong-mayor powers were presented as a way to speed up housing and infrastructure delivery, but the design matters. These powers do not simply empower local democracy. They restructure local democracy around executive authority and provincial priorities. Strong mayors can have expanded control over budgets, senior administrative appointments, organizational structure, and initiatives tied to provincial priorities. Bill 39 also allowed certain bylaws related to prescribed provincial priorities to pass with support from more than one-third of council.

That is not normal majority rule. It is a structural change in local governance.

The province’s argument is that local councils move too slowly. Sometimes they do. Housing approvals matter. Delay has costs. Municipal obstruction can be real. But again, the remedy is revealing. Instead of building better planning capacity, better infrastructure funding, better regional coordination, and better democratic accountability, the province is concentrating power in fewer hands. Local government is being redesigned less as democratic self-government and more as a provincial delivery mechanism.

Land use shows the risks of this approach in even sharper terms. The Greenbelt scandal exposed what can happen when public rules become flexible through executive discretion. The Auditor General found that the Greenbelt land-removal process was not transparent, objective, or well-informed. The AG also found the removals were not needed to meet Ontario’s housing target and estimated that affected landowners could see an $8.3 billion increase in property value.

That finding should sit at the centre of any serious discussion about Ontario governance. The government said it was acting for housing. The Auditor General found that the process did not support that explanation.

That is the danger of command politics. When rules become flexible for some actors, and local processes become obstacles to be overridden, the public is left having to trust the executive branch. But trust is not a governance model. Trust must be earned through evidence, transparency, rules, and outcomes.

Minister’s Zoning Orders show the broader trend. The Auditor General found that Ontario issued 114 MZOs from 2019 to 2023, a 17-fold increase compared with the previous two decades. The AG also found weak assessment of necessity, environmental and agricultural impacts, and whether the orders actually delivered promised outcomes. That is not free-market conservatism. It is not small government. It is government by exemption, acceleration, and ministerial discretion.

Bill 5 may be the clearest expression of this model. The Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act creates a Special Economic Zones framework. The province can designate special economic zones, trusted proponents, and projects. It can exempt those proponents and projects from requirements under Acts, regulations, municipal bylaws, local-board instruments, and other legal instruments.

That is an enormous shift. It means the government can create zones where selected projects and selected actors operate under different legal conditions.

This is not deregulation in the traditional conservative sense. Traditional deregulation says rules should be reduced generally. This model says the state should remain powerful enough to decide who gets exempted, where, when, and under what conditions. That is a command-and-exemption state. It is not less government. It is more discretionary government.

Labour relations followed the same script. Bill 28 imposed contract terms on education workers, prohibited strike action, limited tribunal and labour-board remedies, and invoked the notwithstanding clause. Bill 124 capped broader public-sector compensation increases and was later found unconstitutional as applied to unionized workers because it substantially interfered with collective bargaining rights.

Again, the pattern is clear. When bargaining produced outcomes the government did not want, the government attempted to replace bargaining with statutory command. That is not market discipline. It is wage control by legislation.

Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre belong in this discussion because they show how public assets are increasingly treated as executive projects rather than civic institutions. The Auditor General found that the decision to relocate the Science Centre was not fully informed by complete cost information, public consultation, or a clear plan. That matters because public assets are not just land parcels. They carry civic, educational, cultural, and democratic value. When governments move quickly, narrow consultation, limit environmental processes, and treat public institutions as obstacles to a redevelopment plan, they are changing who public assets belong to in practice.

Even bike lanes became a provincial control issue. Bike lanes are not the largest public-policy issue in Ontario, but they are symbolically useful because they show how far the control instinct now reaches. With Bill 212, the province created an approval framework for new municipal bike lanes where a lane of traffic would be removed. It also targeted specific Toronto bike lanes for removal or reconfiguration. This is local street design. A conservative government that believed in localism would normally leave that to municipalities unless there was an overwhelming provincial interest. Instead, even municipal road design became a Queen’s Park political file.

This is where the usual left-right framing starts to break down. A traditional conservative might say that local institutions matter, power should be dispersed, government should be cautious, rules should be predictable, and the state should not centralize every decision. A progressive might respond that local institutions can entrench inequality, delay necessary change, and fail vulnerable communities. Both arguments contain some truth. Good government has to balance institutional restraint with the obligation to deliver public outcomes.

The Ford model increasingly does neither. It underfunds capacity, attacks local legitimacy, centralizes authority, and then asks the public to treat control as proof of seriousness.

The irony is that this model often does not deliver better results. It delivers more control. And control is not the same thing as competence.

That is the real accountability test. When the province intervenes, is the evidence public? Is the remedy proportionate? Is the local institution being corrected or replaced? Is funding adequate to meet the mandate? Are rules being applied consistently? Are affected communities meaningfully consulted? Are the expected outcomes measurable? Is the government accepting responsibility for the system it controls?

Too often in Ontario, the answer is no. We get the language of accountability, but the structure of command. We get the promise of efficiency, but the reality of undercapacity. We get the rhetoric of local failure, but not an honest accounting of provincial funding choices. We get intervention, but not always transparency.

That is why this moment matters. Ontario is not just debating individual policies. We are debating the model of government itself.

Do we want institutions that are funded properly, governed transparently, and corrected proportionately when they fail? Or do we want a province where every failure becomes another reason to move power upward?

That is the real political argument. Not left versus right. Not public versus private. Not bureaucracy versus efficiency.

The question is whether Ontario still believes in democratic institutions between the individual and the state.

Because once those institutions are hollowed out, the government does not become smaller. It becomes closer, more discretionary, and much harder to hold accountable.

Sources

Higher Education Strategy Associates, “Everybody Hates John Tibbits” https://higheredstrategy.com/everybody-hates-john-tibbits/

Ontario Legislature, Bill 33, Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025 https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-33

Ontario Legislature, Bill 101, Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026 https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-101

Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, Ministry of Education: 2025 Spending Plan Review https://fao-on.org/wp-content/uploads/Ministry-of-Education-2025-Spending-Plan-Review-EN.pdf

Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, School Boards Capital Program Review https://fao-on.org/en/report/school-boards-capital-2024/

Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, Ministry of Health: 2025 Spending Plan Review https://fao-on.org/en/report/estimates-2025-health/

Auditor General of Ontario, Special Report on Changes to the Greenbelt https://auditor.on.ca/en/content/specialreports/specialreports/Greenbelt_en.pdf

Auditor General of Ontario, Minister’s Zoning Orders https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/content/annualreports/arreports/en24/pa_MZOs_en24.pdf

Ontario Legislature, Bill 5, Protect Ontario by Unleashing our Economy Act, 2025 https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-5

Ontario Legislature, Bill 28, Keeping Students in Class Act, 2022 https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-43/session-1/bill-28

Ontario Court of Appeal, Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association v. Ontario (Attorney General), 2024 ONCA 101 https://cuasa.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ontario-english-catholic-teachers-association-v.-ontario-attorney-general-2024-onca-101.pdf

Ontario Legislature, Bill 39, Better Municipal Governance Act, 2022 https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-43/session-1/bill-39

Ontario, Strong Mayor Powers and Duties https://www.ontario.ca/document/ontario-municipal-councillors-guide/10-strong-mayor-powers-and-duties

Environmental Registry of Ontario, Bill 212 and Bike Lane Framework https://ero.ontario.ca/notice/019-9266

Auditor General of Ontario, Ontario Science Centre and Ontario Place News Release https://auditor.on.ca/en/content/news/23_newsreleases/nr_AR_sciencecentres_en23.pdf

My related pieces:

Ideology Over Delivery: How Reform Churn Is Turning Ontario Public Institutions Into Political Instruments https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ideology-over-delivery-how-reform-churn-turning-ontario-alex-dimarco-9ipfc/

A Look at Ontario Government Funding in Education and Health Care https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/look-ontario-government-funding-education-health-care-alex-dimarco-pzeyc/

Money and Values: The Political Argument We Should Be Having