According to a 2024 report by the charity Kindred², which was based on a poll of 1,000 primary school staff in the UK, problems are increasing with school-readiness among the cohort of students entering Reception (which is what they call the first year of primary school, for kids around the age of 4 or 5).

Nearly half (46%) of pupils are unable to sit still, 38% struggle to play or share with others, more than a third (37%) cannot dress themselves, 29% cannot eat or drink independently and more than a quarter (28%) are using books incorrectly, swiping or tapping as though they were using a tablet, according to the survey.

The numbers give some indication of how much extra work teachers are having to do, and they are surprising. I’m not sure what it even means that a kid age 4-5 can’t eat or drink “independently.” But it’s that last statistic that got me. Over a quarter of these kids don’t even know what a book is? That’s scary. Apparently it’s also where the biggest gap in the survey showed up between what parents’ expectations were and the reality of where most kids were at, as over half of all parents thought children should be able to use books correctly upon entering the program. This gives some indication of how under the radar the problem is.

Over at the New Yorker the columnist David D. Fitzpatrick has just done a much-discussed forensic accounting (“How much is Trump pocketing off the Presidency?”) calculating the amount of money Donald Trump has made out of being president. The total he comes to, and this is presented as a conservative estimate, is $3.4 billion. Already.

Many payments now flowing to Trump, his wife, and his children and their spouses would be unimaginable without his Presidencies: a two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto; fees from an exclusive club stocked with Cabinet officials and named Executive Branch. Fred Wertheimer, the dean of ethics-reform advocates, told me that, “when it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close.” Yet the public has largely shrugged. In a recent article for the Times, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent, wrote that the Trumps “have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House.” But Baker noted that the brazenness of the Trump family’s “moneymaking schemes” appears to have made such transactions seem almost normal.

When thinking about numbers like this I think it’s helpful to remember just how much a billion dollars is. A million seconds is approximately 11.5 days, while a billion seconds is about 31.7 years. The scale of Trump’s corruption isn’t just unparalleled, it’s nearly unimaginable.

Who knew this level of profiteering was going to happen? Everyone! Including yours truly, in my immediate post-election post in November 2024:

The main thing I feel confident predicting though is that we are going to see kleptocracy run mad. The looting of the American state is about to begin, on a scale (to borrow a favourite Trumpism) never before seen in the history of the world. Back during his first term Sarah Kendzior characterized the Republican plan for America as being to “strip it for its parts,” and Trump presided over an administration more corrupt and indeed criminal than any the U.S. had ever experienced. Well, expect that to ramp up bigly. The copper wires are going to be ripped from the walls, the plumbing fixtures torn out, and the lead taken from the roofs. Switching metaphors, the cookie jar is going to be wide open and sitting out on the table for at least the next two years.

As the corruption has mounted, here are some other voices (all emphases in bold added). Just to anticipate a couple of complaints in advance:

These are all liberal media sources. If you define liberal as any voice speaking out against Trump, yes they are. But the facts are out in the open.

It’s just the same as what Democrats did (and do) when they’re in power. Not like this! To be sure, corruption is very much part of modern politics. But nothing has been done on the scale of what Trump is doing.

So without further ado:

From “Trump’s Corruption” by Jonathan Rauch (The Atlantic, February 24 2025):

Patrimonialism [the form of government Rauch identifies Trumpism with] is corrupt by definition, because its reason for being is to exploit the state for gain—political, personal, and financial. At every turn, it is at war with the rules and institutions that impede rigging, robbing, and gutting the state. We know what to expect from Trump’s second term. As Larry Diamond of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution said in a recent podcast, “I think we are going to see an absolutely staggering orgy of corruption and crony capitalism in the next four years unlike anything we’ve seen since the late 19th century, the Gilded Age.” (Francis Fukuyama, also of Stanford, replied: “It’s going to be a lot worse than the Gilded Age.”)

They weren’t wrong. “In the first three weeks of his administration,” reported the Associated Press, “President Donald Trump has moved with brazen haste to dismantle the federal government’s public integrity guardrails that he frequently tested during his first term but now seems intent on removing entirely.” The pace was eye-watering. Over the course of just a couple of days in February, for example, the Trump administration:

gutted enforcement of statutes against foreign influence, thus, according to the former White House counsel Bob Bauer, reducing “the legal risks faced by companies like the Trump Organization that interact with government officials to advance favorable conditions for business interests shared with foreign governments, and foreign-connected partners and counterparties”;

suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, further reducing, wrote Bauer, “legal risks and issues posed for the Trump Organization’s engagements with government officials both at home and abroad”;

fired, without cause, the head of the government’s ethics office, a supposedly independent agency overseeing anti-corruption rules and financial disclosures for the executive branch;

fired, also without cause, the inspector general of USAID after the official reported that outlay freezes and staff cuts had left oversight “largely nonoperational.”

By that point, Trump had already eviscerated conflict-of-interest rules, creating, according to Bauer, “ample space for foreign governments, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work directly with the Trump Organization or an affiliate within the framework of existing agreements in ways highly beneficial to its business interests.” He had fired inspectors general in 19 agencies, without cause and probably illegally. One could go on—and Trump will.

From “The Trump Presidency’s World-Historical Heist” by David Frum (The Atlantic, May 28 2025):

Nothing like this has ever been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books, discard people, comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a post-colonial African dictatorship.

The Trump story . . . is almost too big to see, too upsetting to confront. If we faced it, we’d have to do something – something proportional to the scandal of the most flagrant self-enrichment by a politician that this country, or any other, has seen in modern times.

From “Follow the money: Trump’s corruption hits shocking heights” by Juan Williams (The Hill, June 2 2025):

Right now, it is hard to miss what looks like a deluge of pocket-lining as private money swirls around this president. And let’s not mention the free airplane he is ready to accept from a foreign power.

The money grab is so breathtaking that it has left Trump’s critics muttering expletives while the normally reliably loud critics of government corruption, especially congressional Republicans, appear in stunned silence.

Even as Trump’s administration seeks to regulate crypto more loosely, his jaunt into crypto — his $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, plus his stake in World Liberty Financial — has reportedly increased his family’s wealth by billions in the last six months and now accounts for almost 40 percent of his net worth.

New York Times reporter Peter Baker posted on X last week, “Trump and his family have monetized the White House more than any other occupant, normalizing activities that once would have provoked heavy blowback and official investigations.”

Presidential scandals of the past seem quaint by comparison — Hillary Clinton’s cattle futures, Eisenhower’s chief of staff resigning over a coat, Nixon stepping down over a “third-rate burglary.”

The magnitude of Trump’s self-serving actions to enrich himself exceeds anything in our history. Nixon sought distance from wrongdoing, telling Americans that he was “not a crook.” He wanted to be clear that he did not personally gain money from any abuse of power that took place in his administration.

Trump makes no effort to proclaim his innocence as he pursues wealth while in public office. And while Nixon held power during a time of relative economic calm for the middle class, Trump is acting against a backdrop of economic anxiety for most Americans.

From “This is the looting of America: Trump and Co’s extraordinary conflicts of interest in his second term” by Ed Pilkington (The Guardian, June 16 2025):

Trump and his team of billionaires have led the US on a dizzying journey into the moral twilight that has left public sector watchdogs struggling to keep up. Which is precisely the intention, said Kathleen Clark, a government ethics lawyer and law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis. . . .

“People talk about ‘guardrails’ and ‘norms’ and ‘conflict of interest’, which is all very relevant,” she said. “But this is theft and destruction. This is the looting of America.”

Trump returned to the White House partly on his promise to working-class Americans that he would “drain the swamp”, liberating Washington from the bloodsucking of special interests. Yet a review by the Campaign Legal Center found that Trump nominated at least 21 former lobbyists to top positions in his new administration, many of whom are now regulating the very industries on whose behalf they recently advocated.

Eight of them, the Campaign Legal Center concluded, would have been banned or restricted in their roles under all previous modern presidencies, including Trump’s own first administration.

Final thoughts: the one thing that surprised Fitzpatrick the most in his investigations is the frantic pace at which Trump and his family are exploiting the office of the presidency to line their pockets. So keep in mind we’re only 8 months in and the number is going to keep going up, perhaps at an even accelerated pace. Also: the guardrails against corruption have been entirely torn down and with all the bodies meant to keep an eye out for such behaviour and even call it to account either disbanded or staffed with figures whose only loyalty is to Trump, it’s now become a free-for-all. In terms of high-level graft and corruption the U.S. is effectively a lawless state, already experiencing a level of profiteering, in terms of the dollar amounts involved, unparalleled by any modern government, with the possible exception of what happened after the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Putin-era oligarchs. America’s oligarchs took notes on that, and are on board for the same ride. I mean, they already got a $3 trillion dollar-plus tax cut (conservatively estimated) in the Big Beautiful Bill. That’s trillion. Or, to use my earlier analogy, 31, 689 years. The mind boggles.

And now they have crypto to play with too.

So my next totally predictable prediction: the looting of America is going to get worse.

Update, April 23 2026:

From Alternet:

President Donald Trump’s corruption, especially in his second term, is hardly a secret to anyone, but according to a new analysis in the New York Times, it represents a “profound violation” that is worse than almost anyone has imagined so far.

“To say that President Trump is corrupt is to somehow understate the size, scope and magnitude of his corruption,” columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote in a piece published Wednesday morning. “It is as if you were to describe a modern thermonuclear device as a ‘bomb.’ That is true enough, but it is not quite the truth. It does not capture the nature of the thing in full.”

As Bouie argued, Trump’s level of corruption, which has netted him and his family $4 billion in his second term, is “so vast as to be a new phenomenon in American politics.” This includes investments and gifts from “large corporations, foreign nationals and state actors,” all blatantly attempting to gain his favor, as well as unprecedented amounts of money made from “branded cryptocurrency assets.”

Not all of the words I feature here are ones I come across when reading. This one struck me when I was at the gym, watching the Weather Channel. Which is actually one of the more interesting shows on cable these days.

A virga (plural virgae), also known as a “dry storm,” is a streak or shaft of rain that evaporates before it hits the ground. As I read up a bit about virgae I found it necessary to understand the concept of a “precipitation shaft”: a highly localized precipitation event. It’s not a whole front of rain then but a sort of column, which ties into the Latin root of virga: a rod, staff, sprig, or twig.

This is not a word I can imagine myself using, ever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a virga, so I’d have to employ the word as a metaphor. Looking it up online, however, I did come across this amazing picture of a virga in the sunset over the Russian city of Saratov. That in itself seemed worth a post. (You can click on the pic to make it bigger.)

Words, words, words

Almost as soon as stories about ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence started breaking a few years ago there were people commenting on the impact it might have on education. It wasn’t hard to imagine even the earliest chatbots writing essays better than most students were capable of, and in a world where they were doing all of their essays and taking all of their tests on screens we were immediately tossed into a massive multiplayer Turing test, with teachers being challenged to see whether the work they were grading was real.

Students took to AI like fish to water, with one survey saying that within a year or two 90% of them were using the assistance of AI in writing papers. The one figure I found for Canadian students said that well over half were using AI to do their homework in 2024. I wasn’t surprised by this, or the speed of AI’s adoption, or by the way an increased use of AI led to questions being asked as to what the worth or even the point of an education was if it could so effectively be faked without any effort. There was always another side of the story, however, that I thought all of these reports were missing.

When news of the impact of AI on education started breaking I understood that students were going to make use of it. What I don’t think many people appreciated, because I didn’t see anyone talking about it, was that their teachers would too.

Even when I was at university it was clear to me that many of my professors’ lectures were basically just cribs of other people’s work. In some cases they were adding nothing to decades-old secondary literature that they were almost reading verbatim. Since I graduated I’ve listened to many lectures online, even ones that have been highly recommended by top profs from prestigious institutions, and thought that they could have basically been written by an AI. In an adult education program I’ve been involved in that creates lecture series on topics of interest one such course, on AI, was designed by AI as a sort of cheeky proof of concept.

The fact that professors were cheating didn’t surprise or upset me. Many academics don’t make a lot of money but work on short-term contracts. Why wouldn’t they use AI to prepare some of their lectures? And why would tenured faculty be above taking such shortcuts? In some cases I’m sure that using AI might even make their lectures better.

I recently had lunch with a professor friend where I mentioned this and he seemed surprised and a bit horrified at the thought. I thought he was naive. And a couple of weeks ago a news story that caught my eye gave me some support. According to the story a student at Northeastern University in the U.S. had requested a refund of her tuition after discovering that her professor had been using ChatGPT to prepare his lessons.

Wondering if it was just an isolated incident, she found more signs of AI usage in previous lessons, including spelling mistakes, distorted text, and flawed images.

Because of this, she decided to request a refund for the tuition she paid for the class, since she was paying a significant amount to receive a quality education at a prestigious university. For that course alone, she was paying $8,000 per month.

She pointed out that the same professor had strict rules regarding “academic dishonesty” by students, including the use of artificial intelligence. However, shortly after graduating, Ella was informed that she would not be reimbursed.

Speaking to The New York Times, Rick Arrowood, Ella’s professor, said he had uploaded the content of his classes into AI tools like ChatGPT to “give them a new approach.” While he explained that he reviewed the texts and thought they looked fine, he admitted he “should have looked more closely.”

Arrowood also said he didn’t use the slides in the classroom because he prefers open discussions among students, but he chose to make the material available for them to study.

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Northeastern University stated that the university “embraces the use of artificial intelligence to enhance all aspects of its teaching, research, and operations.”

Several U.S. universities are adopting similar positions, arguing that the use of AI tools is seen as useful and important by faculty. But not all students are convinced.

On websites like Rate My Professors, a platform for evaluating instructors, complaints about professors using AI are also on the rise. Most students complain about the hypocrisy of teachers who ban them from using AI tools while using them themselves.

Furthermore, many question the point of paying thousands of dollars for an academic education they could get for free with ChatGPT. The topic remains under debate, but most students and faculty agree that the main issue is the lack of transparency.

I don’t agree that the main issue is lack of transparency. I think the main issue is that AI may be better at this than the professors who are using it not just as a time-saving technology but as a crutch or surrogate already, with their numbers “on the rise” given that it’s such a “useful and important tool.” And it’s not just being used in the preparation of lectures. Another story I found in The Byte online talks about a program called Writable that “is allowing teachers to use AI to evaluate papers, which the company says saves ‘teachers time on daily instruction and feedback.'” As the story concludes:

It’s a bizarre new chapter in our ongoing attempts to introduce AI tech to almost every aspect of life. With both students and teachers relying on deeply flawed technology, it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future of education.

Bizarre indeed! The future of education may have AI programs grading essays written by AI, based on lectures prepared by AI, with nobody being any the wiser. In fact, that may not even be the future. It’s almost certainly happening already.

We should be concerned about where we’re heading. But my point is this: don’t just blame the kids.

My grandfather was a village postmaster, and my mother had fond memories of working at the post office with him when she was a kid. My father was a stamp collector, and while this wasn’t a hobby I stuck with I did have stamp albums as a boy that I’ve held on to, along with the boxes filled with my father’s highly eclectic (and I’m afraid not very valuable) collection.

When it comes to my affection for all things mail related, however, what stands out the most is the fact that I lived on a farm most of my life and we received rural mail delivery. I was always impressed by the job these people did, even in bad weather on what were the worst of roads. Living in rural isolation, the arrival of the mail was an event that meant a lot to family and neighbours.

But times change. When I was young there were few courier companies and no Amazon delivery vans (much less drones). There was no Internet and email. There were no flyers or junk mail. People sent Christmas cards. In other words, everything came to you through the mail, and if it wasn’t always something you wanted it was at least something you knew was important.

This is no longer the case, which is why Canada Post, the Crown corporation that handles the mail in this country, is facing such a host of problems. Chief among these problems is their high labour costs and the fact that a lot of what made the mail not only useful but essential is gone. The result is a corporation that is, according to one recent study, bankrupt. Apparently they lost $300 million in just the first quarter of 2025. That’s not sustainable.

Last year the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) went on strike for a month before being ordered back to work in the hope of finding a solution somewhere down the road. That solution hasn’t materialized and as I write this another strike is expected.

I don’t think anyone on either side, workers or management, is under any illusions as to how grim the future is for Canada Post. That said, I do think the mail has a future. I don’t mind that such a valuable service is operating at a loss. I still think a country, especially one as big as Canada, needs a public, national mail system. What has to be faced though is that a dramatic restructuring of the mail, what it does and how it does it, is going to be required.

And when I say restructuring what I mean primarily is contraction. I probably get more mail than most people. But I don’t need daily mail delivery. If they even cut delivery back to once a week I think I’d be fine.

I don’t know how workable this is, but there have been various studies done and other recommendations made that can be picked from. The bottom line though is that in order to avoid collapse some contraction in service will be necessary. I can’t see the current postal service with its over 70,000 employees surviving long.

There’s a lesson here for other sunset sectors of the economy. I’m thinking in particular of universities. These grew at an unreasonable rate during relatively good economic times, but even back in the 1990s there were reports on how necessary some contraction was. In a period of declining enrolments and now caps put on foreign students (the lifeline that was keeping a lot of higher education afloat in this country) I don’t see a bright future for many of these institutions. And again, the alternative to contraction is collapse: just keeping on doing things the way we have until the whole system breaks down. I know it’s become an expression that’s meant to trigger a fierce reaction, but at this point we have to learn how to manage the decline.

Normally with one of my after-the-election posts I’d be looking back on what happened. But with the results of yesterday’s vote being so close it looks as though the story of the 2025 federal election is just getting started.

Some observations can be made. As expected, both the NDP and Green Party did very poorly, though the Liberal margin of victory as of this writing is tight enough that the NDP may still have some role to play. They’ll do so, however, without Jagmeet Singh, an articulate and intelligent fellow who never broke through and ended up outstaying his welcome. He lost in his own riding and his political career, I suspect, is over.

Also as expected the Liberals found Ontario, and specifically the Toronto area, to be a rock of support. Whenever that block begins to shift, and it will, that will be the end for their remarkable run.

In a first-past-the-post electoral system it’s always going to be hard for third or fourth parties to make an impact outside of specific regions. Despite slipping badly, the Bloc Québécois may have an outside influence in what happens now. Which leads me to confess that I don’t pay any attention during elections as to what their platform is as they don’t run candidates outside of Quebec. Essentially I see them as being a party of the right, though it’s an old right in a lot of ways and there were parts of their platform, when I started digging into it, that I found myself agreeing with. I’ll never give up on the dream of abolishing the Senate, for example.

It looks as though Pierre Poilievre wants to stay on as Tory leader (assuming he manages to win his own riding, which was still very much in doubt the morning after). I don’t know if this is a good idea, as he seems like one of those politicians with a hard ceiling due to his personality and campaigning style. On the other hand, Mark Carney doesn’t strike me as a skilled politician and he lacks any common touch, but he made an effective foil to Trump, which is all he needed to be in the present moment. He got a boost from being able to present himself as an outsider and a responsible steward of the economy due to his banking background, but I don’t think that’s going to last long. The default impression he gives is of an arrogant establishment technocrat. In any event, what mandate he’s been given will be to manage the economy through what I think is going to be the stormy weather. I wish him the best of luck, which I think he’ll need.

Update:

Poilieve did in fact lose his home riding, complicating his plans to stay on as Conservative leader.

Political punditry potpourri

Over the years I’ve done a number of posts on Canadian federal elections. This is an index to my penetrating reportage.

Just as a heads-up, I would describe my own political leanings as leftish. But I’m  what’s known today as the “old left,” which leaves me without a stable home in terms of a political party. In any event, I think most political systems in the West, if not broken, are in a bad state of disrepair and almost certainly not up to the challenges we face in the twenty-first century.

Federal election 2015: Before

“I sense a growing divide between public (unionized) and private sector workers both in Canada and the U.S. that could make for a coming split between a party of the state and a party of everyone else. If there is a future for the right it may be here.”

Federal election 2015: After

“It didn’t have to be this way. Canada is, in many ways, a conservative (small “c”) country. But the party’s leadership has been hijacked in the twenty-first century by angry freaks. Stephen Harper like Tim Hudak in Ontario, or even Rob Ford in Toronto could have been a more successful, effective political leader if he’d just been moderately reasonable. But being reasonable isn’t what any of these guys signed on for. They preferred to play ideologues and idiots (or actually were ideologues and idiots). Not one of them could be considered, and this is an important quality for a politician, normal. As I also indicated in my earlier post, the same thing can be said of the current Republican field in the United States. The right has spent years pandering to its base. That base now holds it hostage.”

Federal election 2019: Before

“We’re locked into a nineteenth-century political system, components of which were archaic in the nineteenth century. I don’t like it, but the system is never going to change itself, and indeed will do everything it can to resist any change happening.”

Federal election 2019: After

“One observation I’d make is that we are becoming a more regionally divided nation, which I see as being a sort of work-around of the archaic first-past-the-post electoral system.”

Federal election 2021: Before

“Heaven knows the environment should have been a strong issue to run on this year, but it hasn’t happened. I’m beginning to wonder if it ever will.”

Federal election 2021: After

“So there you have it. An election that nobody wanted ending with a result that will make nobody happy. Which will lead, I am sure, to more anger. A forecast of sunny days ahead.”

Federal election 2025: Before

“The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. ”

Federal election 2025: After

“But with the results of yesterday’s vote being so close it looks as though the story of the 2025 federal election is just getting started.”

 

 

We’re less than a week out from another federal election here in Canada, so it’s time for another of my super-perceptive and unerringly prophetic political posts.

The story of this election has been the crazy reversal of fortunes in the polling. Up until the beginning of January the Conservatives were predicted to be on their way to winning in a walk. Then . . . well, here’s the graph (you can click on it to make it easier to read):

That is crazy. The way the election flipped on a dime (if that metaphor makes sense) represents one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history. In fact, for its speed and for the size of the swing it probably is the most dramatic turnaround we’ve ever seen. How did this happen?

I don’t think there’s any mystery to it at all. There were three drivers.

(1) On January 6 Justin Trudeau announced he would be resigning as prime minister. It was time. People were tired of him. I said in my notes on a previous election that he made me sick. The rap against him was that he was a pretty boy with great hair who looked good on TV but was a mental lightweight. I think that’s pretty accurate. What I could never understand is how poor a retail politician he was. As his critics never tired of pointing out, he’d been a drama teacher. Why was he such a lousy communicator?

Was he a bad prime minister? He didn’t have an easy time of it what with dealing with Trump and a pandemic. But even so it’s hard to think of his having much of a legacy. Not that this is always a bad thing.

Anyway, getting rid of him gave the Liberals a big bounce. Personally I think Mark Carney is a smart guy but also an arrogant establishment man of the type that the Liberal Party has always elevated to positions of power. I doubt he’ll wear well, but for the moment he’s been able to sell himself as a change candidate as he’s never been a politician. That he’s been the creature of politicians, running the central bank in Canada and then the U.K., seems not to have hurt him yet.

(2) Also on January 6 the American congress certified the election of Donald Trump, beginning his second term. This was probably the biggest factor in swinging the race, for two reasons. First of all, Trump has behaved in an unhinged manner right out of the gate, swinging wildly in terms of foreign policy while managing to insult and offend everyone. It’s hard to overstate how despised a figure he is outside of his base.

This has affected our election not so much because Trump has tainted the political right in Canada (Doug Ford successfully ran against Trump in winning Ontario’s provincial election) but because Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, has made a career out of acting like a Trump Mini-Me. Every part of his campaign has been drawn from the Trump playbook, down to saying that Carney was somehow illegitimate for being chosen by a party congress. And the fact is, Canada’s Conservatives just aren’t as good at this stuff as the MAGA movement. Their commercials this cycle, for example, have been terrible. But the bottom line is that while Poilievre has tried to put some distance between himself and Trump, the stink is on him too deep, and it’s shown in the polls.

(3) In a polarized political environment, and with our stupid and outmoded first-past-the-post electoral system, third party support has collapsed. That yellow line on the graph marks the fading fortunes of the NDP. They look like they’re going to get crushed, and all those voters are going to the Liberals, in a strategic shift trying to block the Conservatives.

I don’t think this means the end of the NDP though. I mean, I’ve been predicting the death (even “annihilation”) of the Greens for the last three elections, and they’re still holding on (and good for them!). But I do think Jagmeet Singh is gone after this. Politicians have expiry dates and he’s reached his.

As for predictions, the race is tightening but I’m guessing the Liberals stay ahead and may even pick up a majority. Ontario in particular will be a rock for them, seeing as it just went Tory provincially and voters tend to split the difference. The polls are probably right and I don’t think things will change much between now and election day, in part because there isn’t much time but even more so because this past weekend saw record-breaking turnout for advance polls. My own polling station was just a five-minute walk from where I live so I dropped by on several occasions after I saw the line was too long to bother waiting. I finally voted Saturday night. So the election may already be decided.

Political punditry potpourri

We live in political times, which is an observation that isn’t diminished by the fact that in many democracies a lot of people don’t care about politics at all. We know this because  of voter turnout numbers, a measure of what is the most minimal level of political involvement.

This is a point I first started thinking seriously about twenty years ago while reviewing the pollster Michael Adams’s book American Backlash. “Non-voters are the majority non-party in American politics,” I said in my review. At the time, the most recent presidential election had been in 2004, which felt like another very political time, what with George W. Bush running for a second term after the Iraq War. As a percentage of the voting-age population though the turnout was only 56.7%. In 2024 it was 59%, which was actually down 3.8% from the 2020 presidential election.

In the U.K. general elections in 2024 the voter turnout was nearly the same at 60%, which was the lowest turnout since 2001, when it was 59.4%.

Canada does a little better federally, averaging in the mid-60s in the last couple of decades. But again, these numbers are all national. At the state and provincial level the numbers drop considerably. In Ontario’s just finished provincial election the voter turnout was 45.4% of eligible voters. This was one percent higher than the last provincial election, which was the lowest voter turnout in the history of our provincial elections.

Drill down to the municipal level and the numbers drop even further. In my hometown’s last municipal election in 2022 only 28% of eligible voters voted. A number that was down 8% from 2018! The 2023 mayoral election in Toronto had a turnout of 38%. To take a random municipal election from the U.K., the turnout for the Sunderland City Council election in 2024 was 30.8%. The 2024 mayoral election for London hit 40.5%.

What this seems to underline is the fact that, to invert the famous adage often associated with the American politician Tip O’Neill that all politics is local, today all politics is national. Just as local news media have been dying, leaving no one covering city hall, the public’s attention has been focused more and more exclusively on politics at the national level. And with the importance of the Internet to fundraising this has only become more pronounced.

This is something I find very concerning, for reasons that I’ve talked about before. Chief among these is the fact that a lot of national political debate is of less direct consequence to citizens than what is going on at the local level, and that if no one is paying attention to what’s happening locally you’re opening the door to a level of corruption that (I think) would shock people if they were aware of it. I know I’ve been shocked by it when I’ve had dealings with local government in both rural and urban areas. You know things are bad when a single family has half-a-dozen members filling different jobs on council. But it’s rare to get reporting on this in places that have become “news deserts.”

But to go back to where I started, it’s been locked in for decades now that slightly more than a third of all eligible voters in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. do not vote and will never vote. If non-voters were a party they would win every election. And that’s at the federal level. On the provincial or municipal level the non-voter party would win landslide majorities. Does this constitute a functional democracy?

If so, I think it’s one that could be improved. In the lead-up to Ontario’s recent provincial election. the Toronto.com website had a poll asking people who seldom or never vote why they don’t vote. 62.5% said their vote wouldn’t make any difference. They are right to be so disillusioned. The three English-speaking jurisdictions I’ve been talking about all use a first-past-the-post electoral system rather than one based on proportional representation. In Germany, which has a proportional representation system, the 2025 general election had a voter turnout of 82.5%, which is the highest since German reunification.

I think proportional representation is a better system, but there’s no chance the political parties will allow it to happen here, as public apathy to it as an issue means there’s no call for change. That non-voting party seems to want to keep their official status of invisibility.

A few weeks ago I found a post on another site where someone had asked an AI to write a film review. The results were what I think you might expect: a bland, clichéd summary of opinion such as you’d get from a review aggregator.

The reason this is what you’d expect is because the way these programs work (and I’m aware that people who understand this field better don’t even consider it to be AI) is to just take all the data there is on a subject and melt it down to something that sounds like a general consensus. So of course it’s going to be clichéd and derivative. Cliché is, by definition, the most common form of expression in the datasets from which it draws on.

What we’re left with is the hive mind, which is where we were heading anyway what with review aggregators and the like. The “wisdom of crowds” is a distillation not of the best that has been thought and said but of everything that’s been thought and said. And I think for a lot of people, and for different purposes, that may be good enough. For people who read genre fiction by the bale, those looking for executive summaries of generally held views, or students looking for a precis.

In the field of aesthetic response or opinion writing, however, is this the best we can expect? I started thinking about this because of an article I read online at the Yahoo! Sports page covering NFL football. I originally pulled a blank on the byline “Castmagic.” Was that a person? People have lots of strange names these days so I thought it possible. But when I clicked on the link to read it I found this:

(This article was written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy. Please reach out to us if you notice any mistakes.)

I immediately had some questions. It was just a short opinion piece, so what did it mean that it was written “with the assistance of AI and reviewed by our editorial team”? My own sense was that it was written entirely by AI and just proofread and copyedited for factual errors or anything that might get Yahoo! in trouble. I also wondered if this was a direction more news organizations, and not just Internet ones, were going to be heading in.

The subject of the piece was the New York Giants football team. The Giants were a very bad team last year, resulting in their having a high pick in the upcoming draft. They don’t have a clear starting quarterback on their roster and it’s usually assumed that a team in such a situation will pick the best QB on their draft board as this is the most important position to have filled. So the question posed to “Castmagic” was “Is it time for the Giants to draft a quarterback?”

Things didn’t get off to a good start: “As the dust settles from the 2024 NFL season, it’s evident that some teams face more pivotal offseasons than others.”

Well, duh. We’re hit in the face with a cliché right off the bat, followed up by an obvious truism. I didn’t need an AI to tell me this.

As “Castmagic” went along it mostly borrowed from an earlier column on the same subject written by one of Yahoo!’s (human) sports writers. But if I’d been that particular writer I don’t think I’d look at this as being the sincerest form of flattery. I’d probably be worried for my job.

Did “Chatmagic” have any original insights to offer on the question of whether the Giants should draft a QB? No. Here’s the conclusion:

In the end, the Giants’ path forward hinges on navigating the delicate balance between short-term success and long-term strategic planning. Whether through drafting a quarterback or trading down to solidify the entire roster, the Giants face decisions that could define the franchise for years to come. Only time will reveal if they choose wisely.

Really? That’s the takeaway? The Giants have options and “only time will tell” if they make the right choice?

Will “Chatmagic” get better? I think it will, if only because I don’t see how it can get any worse. Or less useful. But I think these early, baby steps give some indication of the issues going forward, at least when it comes to this form of writing. How can an opinion of any value on any subject be fashioned out of a dataset that is just a collection of everybody else’s opinion? These programs aren’t interested in original insights or finding out the truth. Are they even capable of that? Only time will tell . In the meanwhile, what we have now reads like a page of Google search results, just the repackaging of random information, some of which is no doubt total garbage, into a paste of content that you can skim your eyes over before clicking onto what’s next.

There were some 50 comments on the article the last time I checked. Most of them piling on the “dummies” who write sports opinions for Yahoo! Only one of them registered that it had been written by an AI.