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Getting to know you: a new card game and immigration issues

January 13, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

Dave Pollard has written a piece of fiction containing instructions for a new game that seems fun and interesting at first but goes deep.

“It’s a game board, Dev. I’ve invented a new game based on ikigai. It can be used as an ice-breaker, to help people who don’t know each other discover things they enjoy in common. Or it can be used by people who do know each other to learn more about each other, and see how well they know each other.”

The Ontario government is making it harder for immigrants to attain citizenship. Under the guise of fighting fraud in the immigration system, the province is changing things which is throwing thousands of people into limbo and lots will leave as a result of the goal posts changing. This is cruel. Our immigration system has a major problem in that it promotes the fact the we need skilled people to work in all of our economic sectors. Yet when those skilled people choose Canada they get here and face multiple barriers to making their offerings. And then governments change the system from under them. It amounts to withdrawing a promise. One person quoted in the story says this:

“It’s like a broken promise… If they didn’t need us in the first place, they should not have invited us,” he said. 

He’s right. And whatever systemic changes happen, it will not stop fraud. Fraud is the result of clever operators cheating the system. Every system has cheaters. It’s clear to me that the reasons for these changes are purely political, feeding into an increasing thread of xenophobia that wins partisan political points but throws yet one more barrier up in front of the people who have chosen to come here and be a part of this national project. It’s transparently racist and should be called out as such.

The system is broken, not the people. At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of refugees fled to Canada where we welcomed them. Now some are being told that they will have to wait 50 years for their permanent residency.

Sports this weekend

January 11, 2026 By Football 2 Comments

One of the cool things about living on the west coast is that most of the global football that I enjoy watching happens early in the morning, especially on weekends. I can squeeze in a match or two before getting on with my day. Likewise, the Toronto Maple Leafs, the only NHL hockey team I follow, usually play in the afternoon, while I am wrapping up work and preparing dinner.

This weekend I snuck a few games in. The Africa Cup of Nations has progressed into the Quarter Final stage, and I watch Nigeria v Algeria yesterday morning. Nigeria put on an absolute clinic and look to be favourites for the cup going forward. Having missed out on World Cup qualifying, this is their chance to acquire some national silverware this year, and they are taking it. They were brilliant. They kettled Algeria into their own end for most of the match, with their defenders playing an extremely high line and a persist press forcing turnovers. The midfield was a quagmire of peril for Algeria trying to break out, and times when they managed a counter attack, Nigerias defenders were too fast and too strong to allow anything to develop. It was a fantastic display of individual and collective intent and the west Africans won 2-0 but it could easily have been 4-0.

ALos yesterday morning, the classic FA Cup third round happened in England, which is the moment that the Premier League teams join the competition. This makes for fun match ups as there are still a few lower league teams in the mix and these matches provide historic events for the smaller clubs, sometimes even resulting in giant killings that will define a club’s identity for generations. The biggest mismatch of the round might have been Manchester City v Exeter City, which the Premier League team won 10-1, but other matchups in the round were alos interesting. Grimsby Town, a team I have some connection to, needed 86 minutes to beat Weston-Super-Mare 3-2, a semi-professional side playing in the sixth division of English football, the National League South. Despite the loss, Weston-Super-Mare will remember this day forever. Making it this far in the FA Cup is a huge accomplishment.

Tottenham lost to Aston Villa, in a match that seems consistent with our recent run of form. I wasn’t able to watch it as I didn’t have a feed to the game, but I’m not sad. The game was strange. Afterwards, a brawl broke out between the teams and that seems to rather capture the mood at the club at the moment. The wheels have come off and changes re going to be needed, or we will have to consign ourselves to a future of mid table football.

Tottenham were trying to commemorate the 125th anniversary of our first FA Cup win in 1901, still the only time a non-league has won the trophy, and they did so with a a kit that was all white. The badge and sponsor logos were white and the players had no names on the back. It looked strange and in retrospect after the match was over, one couldn’t help feeling that instead of a throw back it rather represented a deletion and erasure of everything. Our elimination from the competition at the first opportunity means we won’t see those kits again.

Later in the day The Leafs took on the Canucks at home, in a game that had family implications. Despite my best efforts both of my children have adopted other NHL teams as their favourites and Finn is a moderate Canucks fan. I can’t blame him as that is the team he has grown up with, and last year when we went to see the Leafs’ visit to Vancouver he walked away with a 2-1 win shining in his eyes. Last night was vengeance. The Leafs looked really good in an unstoppable 5-0 win. Vancouver is bad this year, but the Leafs seem to have overcome some of the troubling apathy that plagued the first half of the season, and despite some key injuries, they are clicking at the moment.

And finally this morning, waking early to catch Bayern Munich v Wolfsburg to watch two of my favourite ex-Tottenham players. Christian Erikson captains Wolfsburg and Harry Kane leads the line for Bayern. Kane is on 19 goals this season in the league and the season is only half over. He scored his 20th in one of the prettiest goals you might ever see, a curling shot that bounced of the crossbar and the post in the upper corner to find it’s way in. Bayern won 8-1. In the stadium they play the Can-Can Dance every time they score. It was getting a bit tiresome today.

Now it’s off to walk in the rain, as an atmospheric river has settled in over our part of the coast and it’s dark and warm and moist. Love it.

A course outline for participatory leadership

January 10, 2026 By Art of Hosting, Leadership, Learning No Comments

Just back from teaching participatory leadership to 35 university leaders in Dallas, Texas and arrive home to find this great course outline that Cedric Jamet has put together for his university students.

This stuff is insanely useful. A set pot permanent skills that are needed for applications throughout a person’s life. ESPECIALLY in the university, where academic leaders are rarely offered any leadership training at all. Imagine now, learning how to do this in your graduate work and then putting it to use as you grow in your academic career. And imagine meeting people along the way who know what you are doing and what your are talking about because they understand the reason for leading this way and how it helps to make things better.

The energy of violence and peace

January 9, 2026 By Uncategorized No Comments

Rebecca Solnit puts it starkly:

The carnage associated with fossil fuel is why speeding the transition to renewables is good for international stability as well as everything else. Fossil fuel is inseparable from violence, and dependence on it it has created a brutal world order in which some states have corrosive outsize power due to their possession of oil and gas while others have corrosive dependency on these often-human-rights-abusing regimes. 

This has been true so long it seems normal, but when it is over we will see it as a second cold war that sometimes became a hot war…

This is why the climate movement has always been a peace movement. A movement for peace with nature, since climate chaos is the result of a war against nature and life on earth, but also for the peace that could come after the fossil fuel era winds down. Oil Change International founder Stephen Kretzmann said this morning: ” The fact that wars and lots of blood for oil are somehow an acceptable price to pay for energy has never ever been ok. This alone is more than enough reason to phase out fossil fuels asap.” Sun, wind, geothermal, and hydropower are widely distributed across the earth and will not generate any such conflicts and corrosive geopolitics.

I added the emphasis. it doesn’t matter who is in control. The price we pay for prosperity brought through fossil fuels is violence. Of course scarcity and control are the dynamics that drive these, and those apply to the scarce minerals and materials needed to use renewable energy too. Even in a country of abundant water resources like Canada, the development of hydro electric energy has been the vanguard of colonization for the past 100 years, displacing people from their lands, destroying entire ecosystems by flooding and requiring massive industrialization to produce “clean” energy.

But in a moment when the stark reality is laid bare before us it’s worth remembering this basic truth. There is no peace where there is oil and gas.

Arising out of apathy

January 9, 2026 By Democracy No Comments

My neighbour Don Shafer’s substack is a really good extended exploration of dialogue and democratic participation and today he names an important aspect of the apathy and overwhelm that citizens are feeling.

What many of us experience as chaos is better understood as administration.

Robert Arnold writes that power hasn’t advanced only through spectacle, but through paperwork, procedure, and pace. Executive authority expands while legislatures stall. Oversight is performed rather than enforced. Institutions remain visible, but unreachable. The rituals of democracy continue even as their capacity to interrupt harm thins.

That produces a uniquely destabilizing effect. When the forms remain intact, but outcomes fail, it becomes harder to know where responsibility lies or where pressure can still be applied. In that environment, outrage becomes ambient. Constant. Untethered. And all of it happens faster than it can be named, faster than oversight, faster than response, faster than writing this Substack.

We teach the Chaordic path, the dance between chaos and order that enables self-organization, as an idea that helps leaders and facilitators understand the boundaries of action between those that enable participation and those that induce apathy. At the opposite ends of control and unbounded chaos, which we call “chamos” lies apathy or, as Dave Pollard has written, cultural acedia.

Don nails this. What we can sometimes experience as complete chaos can actually be control and vice versa. It doesn’t matter because the result is the same. I think authoritarians understand this. It’s quite easy push people to apathy through control or chamos. The challenge, especially collectively, is maintaining the structure and form that enables and channels the natural creativity and unpredictability of life towards the emergence of life-giving contexts. Bootstrapping our collective capacity to do that from a place of widespread disenfranchisement and dehumanization is the work right now. As it always has been.