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    Provincial propaganda

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    CKirkby

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    In the context of an ongoing project offsite, I wrote the below today and thought it was perhaps worth sharing more widely. One of my current topics of interest is propaganda, which I think the Doug Ford government calling Bill 33 the “Supporting Children and Students Act” most certainly is.

    (Note also: I added minor updates to ongoing projects Bell and Bags. The wrongfully punished driver got unbanned, but otherwise there has been no satisfactory resolution anywhere. (I might try to figure out small claims court.))

    One of the things that came up [on this Ontario law project] today is a change in vocabulary in recent years, from “publicly funded” universities to “publicly assisted.” Source: https://academicmatters.ca/how-the-student-choice-initiative-seeks-to-silence-student-voices/

    The “Tuition Fee Framework and Ancillary Fee Guidelines” published in 2019 by the Ontario Ministry does use the language “publicly assisted.” https://www.tcu.gov.on.ca/pepg/mtcu-university-tuition-framework-guidelines-mar2019-en.pdf

    The Ontario Court of Appeal struck the framework down because the relevant provincial legislation didn’t authorize the Ontario government to make law that way; they had to amend the law first. https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onca/doc/2021/2021onca553/2021onca553.html

    Then the Ontario government amended the relevant legislation, giving themselves the authority to make regulations on [student fees], through “Bill 33,” which they propagandized as the “Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025” https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/bills/parliament-44/session-1/bill-33?tabSelected=view-bill#BK5

    Amendments to statute law in Bill 33 also allow police forces in schools and give government control of school boards (see: the Education Act https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90e02), plus the government gets to dictate in law to universities and colleges what counts as “merit” for the purposes of admission to higher education. See, not yet in force, sections 16.0.2 and 21.1 of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities Act: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90m19#BK31.

    So at the moment we’re waiting to see what the regulations say. In theory they will be published on the Regulatory Registry for a period of public comment before coming into force. https://www.regulatoryregistry.gov.on.ca/home

    In case any of that is of use or interest to anyone.

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    For your convenience, I fired the driver

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    CKirkby

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    This week my main medium seems to be postcards. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to talk about those. Probably shouldn’t put my handwriting on the internet?

    I’ve also posted another update to the grocery bag saga, which is about not just environmental waste and food safety but also workers’ rights under capitalism. This week I’ll try including the full update here in this post, which is duplicative but maybe more helpful than just a link to the project page? No clue if the formatting will hold in the email. On verra.

    Escalation (13 August 2026)

    No one “internal” to Metro has gotten back to me. My latest email:

    I have still not received a refund for the [X] unused days of the [Y]-day delivery pass I paid for, and Metro’s legal department has not yet returned my phone call.

    Let me be very clear: if the Metro corporation requires me to enlist a court to explain that Metro does not have the legal right to unilaterally change the terms of its subscription service and then refuse to refund customers who object, I will be seeking more than [X/Y x cost] plus tax.

    Also a distressing update on the replacement grocery delivery service I tried on August 4.

    I had phoned the replacement service’s call centre that day when my picked order went undelivered throughout the entire delivery window, to try to get my order delivered and also to understand what happened. I was told the issue would be escalated, and over the next few days I got a few emails that said nothing useful (including “your feedback has been shared with the appropriate department for immediate attention” and “your feedback has been documented and will be taken into consideration to help improve our service and prevent similar issues from occurring in the future”).

    Given the purpose of escalation, I asked for specifics. Why was the perfect order that was picked before 9 am not delivered by 10? Why was it necessary for a second order to be picked, with substitutions and missing items, and only delivered after 11? What was the actual problem in the chain and how can it be addressed to prevent this issue in the future?

    The latest email from customer service ran through a partial chronology. It seems the driver who actually succeeded in delivering my items got the subcontract somewhere between 10:20 and 10:45, two hours after the original order was picked, half an hour after the delivery window ended, and corporate’s solution to “the inconvenience caused” was to ban that driver from their platform.

    This is, to understate things, fucked up. The driver was not responsible for the shitshow. This response is corporate scapegoating, with disregard for gig-workers’ ability to feed themselves.

    Are other customers satisfied with this kind of response? Nothing will get better next time, but at least someone got beheaded? Most people, I know, just don’t have the time and energy to fight these battles.

    I called the replacement service’s phone line again this morning, to communicate that banning the driver from the platform was not the solution and the driver should be reinstated. Will that happen? I don’t know, but my feedback has been escalated.

    I asked today’s agent a few operational questions to try to pinpoint where the actual problem was that day (again: not the driver) and she sounded like she desperately wanted to get off the phone. So then I started worrying that my inquiries about how things work would get her fired too. Don’t ask questions, is the message I’m getting. Innocent low-wage people will be blamed.

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    The remains of the dark

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    CKirkby

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    The only new writing on the site lately has been an update on too many grocery bags (not really progressing) and three new poems (not 100% depressing).

    Neither of those types of writing generates a notification, so here is a post about them that does.

    And here, since I’m writing anyway, is a link to a survey about the impact of satellite constellations on astronomy, from the Group of Friends of the Dark and Quiet Sky for Science and Society: https://cps.iau.org/group-of-friends/

    I filled it out. It’s the fuckin’ sky, man.

    (Re: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/reflect-orbital-approval-fcc-9.7287535)

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    Test of the new notification system

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    CKirkby

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    Apologies to anyone who got strange-looking emails from my website recently. There’s been a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on, including the setting-up of a less frustrating way to send notifications, and it may have been confusing to anyone who received all the different formats, and hopefully it is better now.

    Still no new substantive post this week but I did updates on both https://ckirkby.ca/projects/letters-to-parliamentarians/ (two letters about the climate apocalypse) and https://ckirkby.ca/projects/too-many-grocery-bags-again/ (I may have to write to another legal department).

    I’m considering publishing a poem later! Been a while since I looked at that area of the website.

    [Update to the update: Ugh, sorry, that was twice as many emails as I meant to send. I have now deactivated the spammy clipart post notification, lesson learned.]

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    Contrasting choices

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    CKirkby

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    Update to Too many grocery bags (again): The problem grows (10 July 2026).

    I wonder how silly my photographs will get before corporate responds.

    A project I’m mulling over has to do with asking people about democratic values.

    I’m not sure what exactly it would be, but I like the idea of calling attention to contrasting choices.

    Like:

    Would you rather a government chose transparency or secrecy in its operations?

    Would you rather a government listened to experts and those with lived experience or to corporate interests?

    Would you rather a government supported human rights or authoritarianism?

    Would you rather a government funded data centres or knowledge and service workers?

    Would you rather a government built pipelines or solar panels?

    Would you rather a government invested in human well-being or in weaponry?

    Stuff like that. Maybe with lots of footnotes to the actual choices our governments are making.

    Voting once every few years (in a first-past-the-post system that benefits two largely interchangeable corporate parties) is obviously insufficient in terms of democratic principles.

    This idea might connect to the plan of lobbying the Senate to stop endorsing what the House of Commons is doing (17 June 2026). Yeah, sure, the institutions of Parliament have a long history of declining to become involved in what’s happening in “the other place,” a euphemistic tradition of “respect.” But at a certain point, rubber-stamping becomes complicity in an abuse of process. Respect for democratic principles, my argument goes, requires other than a politely blind eye.

    (I’m aware that the PM is appointing explicitly partisan people to the Senate, for the purpose of steamrolling opposition there too. Might as well go out screaming about democratic principles.)

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