Where the starting statements came from
Provenance for the thirty-four statements the pilot conversation opens with. → back to the conversation
We wrote them. All thirty-four.
This conversation opens with thirty-four statements. Every one of them was written by the people behind uniteTOlove, drawn from material we have already published on this site — the full vision, the futures library, the issue cards in the research library, and the next actions menu. Nothing was seeded from private notes or unpublished drafts. If you want to check where an idea came from, the source is on this site and you can read it yourself.
No one else's words are in the starting set — and that is a fact about timing, not a choice.
The plan was always that the starting statements would come from Toronto's own paper harvest: the vision and complaint sheets that conversation kits produce in dinners, block circles, after-service gatherings and classrooms. Those kits were published on 5 August 2026. As of the freeze date for this pilot, no room has run and returned a sheet yet. So there is nothing from participants to put in first, and we are not going to pad the set or imply otherwise. When the real citywide conversation runs in October, the starting set is built from the harvest — people's own words, first — and this pilot is part of how we make sure that machinery works.
These thirty-four are a floor, not a frame.
They exist so the conversation has somewhere to start on its first day, not to fence in what it can be about. The statements that matter most are the ones you write. Add your own — that is the whole point of this kind of conversation, and the map it produces is built from everyone's statements, not ours.
We deliberately included statements we expect people to disagree about — on both sides.
A starting set where everyone agrees with everything produces a fake consensus and teaches nobody anything. Some of these will annoy you. That is on purpose, and it is not a position we are taking — a statement appearing here does not mean we believe it.
We also checked the set for a lean, and found one. A first draft gave people who want lower taxes, tighter immigration, more police on the street, or fewer rules on small business nothing to agree with — only things to vote against. Since we report how many people agreed with each statement, that would have made those views look smaller than they are. We rewrote five statements and added four to fix it. It is still not perfectly balanced, and if you think a view you hold has no statement here, the fix is to write it — that is exactly what the add button is for, and it will be published unless it breaks one of the five moderation rules.
Some statements describe today, not 2030.
The question is what Toronto in 2030 should be. You will also see statements about how things are right now — like whether the city already listens, or whether it feels safe to walk at night. Whether we agree about today is part of deciding about 2030.
What we do with this.
Findings from this conversation are reported as agreement rates on individual statements — how many people agreed with each one. We will not publish a claim that "Toronto has N camps." The groupings this kind of software draws are an illustration, and a different run of the same data can draw them differently; the agreement rates cannot change. That is a rule we set for ourselves before running it, not after seeing the results.