Ask for the hours now. October will thank you.
Two versions of the same ask — one for you personally, one for any workplace, union, school, congregation, or association to adopt as its own.
Here is a small, boring, powerful thing you can do for this city today: open your work calendar and book time off for October 7 to 26.
Not for a protest. Not for a party. For the season when Toronto decides things: the city election is Monday, October 26, and the weeks before it are when the conversations happen — at tables, after services, on blocks, in school gyms — the ones where neighbours actually figure out what they want.
Why now, in August? Because time off is won in advance. Shift bids, vacation calendars, clinic schedules, course timetables — they all lock weeks or months ahead. The people with the least flexible jobs need the most lead time, and they are exactly the neighbours these conversations most need to hear. Booking the time now costs you nothing; discovering in mid-October that you can't get a Tuesday evening free costs you your say.
What you do with the hours is yours. Host a dinner. Sit in on an all-candidates night at the library. Interview your grandmother about what this city shouldn't lose. Walk your block. Vote — and if your work hours that day would leave you without three consecutive free hours while polls are open (10 a.m. to 8 p.m.), Ontario law entitles you to paid time off to make up that window, timed at your employer's convenience — one more reason to ask early. None of it needs a membership, a ticket, or anyone's permission but your own.
The ask, in one line: before this week ends, request a few hours of leave — an afternoon or two between October 7 and 26 — and tell one co-worker why. That second part matters more than the first.
Kids welcome. Food shared. Nobody pays. — uniteTOlove.ca
The Civic Hour: a policy any workplace can adopt this month
📄 Print this policy (PDF, letter, black-and-white-safe)
The offer to your people, in one sentence: every member of this organization gets one paid (or freely scheduled) hour, plus reasonable flexibility for personal-leave requests, for civic participation between October 7 and 26, 2026 — no questions about how, no approval of what, no record of which.
What counts as civic participation is the member's own business: a neighbourhood conversation, an all-candidates meeting, helping an elder get to a poll, voting itself. The policy is strictly nonpartisan by construction: the hour attaches to the season, not to any candidate, cause, or organization — including whoever handed you this page. An employer who grants the hour endorses nothing except its people's standing in their own city.
Why an institution would do this: turnout in Toronto's last municipal election was 29%. The scheduling friction of ordinary life is a real, fixable part of that. A workplace that fixes its share of the friction — publicly, cheaply, once — buys more civic health per dollar than almost anything else it could do this fall, and its people notice.
How to adopt it this week:
- Copy the one-sentence offer above into your own voice, on your own letterhead, under your own name. Change anything. It is yours.
- Name the window (Oct 7–26), the mechanics (how to book the hour), and the privacy rule: nobody reports back what they did with it, and no list of who used it leaves the schedule.
- Remind staff of the legal floor: an employee eligible to vote whose October 26 work hours would leave them without three consecutive free hours while polls are open (10 a.m.–8 p.m.) is entitled to paid time off sufficient to create that window — timed at the employer's convenience, with no pay deduction (Municipal Elections Act, 1996, s. 50). The Civic Hour is on top of that floor, not instead of it.
- If you want it counted, say one aggregate sentence in public — "we adopted a civic hour for N people" — anywhere you like. A count of institutions and covered people may be published in aggregate; no institution is ever listed without saying so itself, publicly, first.
Kids welcome. Food shared. Nobody pays. — uniteTOlove.ca