To every candidate in Toronto’s 2026 municipal election

Any office, any ward. Every candidate receives this same document, unchanged.

What this is

A free public library of civic information — uniteTOlove.ca — built for this election and for the city after it. It is written by one Torontonian, under the name The Unknown Soldier, using modern tools including AI — stated plainly, because authors and tools don’t earn trust. Sources do. Every factual claim in the library carries a citation you can check, every source is archived, and every correction is published.

The library holds no money, sells nothing, and belongs to no campaign — including any campaign that likes it. It is not an organization to join, and it does not ask you to join anything: it is one synthesis, offered, sitting alongside the city’s own existing organizations and institutions. Nobody is recruited into it, including you.

What the library offers you

Free, and identical for every candidate:

• Verified issue briefs. 145 researched issue leaves, each carrying checkable claims and a sourced citation — housing, homelessness, transit, drug poisoning, and more, measured honestly. Each brief maps who holds the lever: what City Hall can do alone, what requires Queen’s Park, what only Ottawa can move.
• Evidence bases — the world’s proven solutions, cataloged. For nearly every problem on the map, some city, village, or cooperative has already solved it. The library catalogs those solutions with their conditions attached — what it took, what it cost where that’s known, and why it might or might not transplant here.
• The day-one standard — your homework, done in advance. The single hardest question any candidate faces — what would you actually do in office? — arrives with worked support attached: draft instruments, staff-report-format examples (every page labeled an illustration, never a city document), verified authority maps, honest costings. 144 day-one narratives are already rendered toward full packages. This exists to prove the standard is possible — not to write your answer for you. If an unfunded volunteer library can draft it, a candidate for the office can publish it.
• The Question Bank — citizens’ own questions, sourced and sealed. A published, 66-question, verify-sealed set of citizen questions exists as a single citywide resource — replacing gotcha media with an identical, checkable set every candidate can answer in the open. How and when it reaches you is not yet finalized — release mechanics and any non-response policy are an acknowledged open design question — but the bank itself is real and sealed today.
• The people’s plan — coming, and identical for every candidate. The city’s own conversation about its future is being gathered now, in thousands of rooms across Toronto, and drawn together into one collectively-agreed plan for the city’s future. It does not exist yet. When it does, every candidate receives it identically, with one equal question attached — see the adoption offer, below.
• Ward-level facts. Turnout, candidate counts, and residents’ mapped problem cards for your ward, as they are gathered and verified. This layer grows through the campaign; what’s published is checkable on the day it’s published.

Use any of it, all of it, or none of it. Adopting a plank, citing a brief, or ignoring the whole library — none of these changes how the library treats you.

Standing offers — open to every candidate, identical terms

1. Adopt the Honest Briefs. Link your platform claims to the library’s sourced briefs — free, no attribution required, no permission asked.
2. Answer the Question Bank. The 66 citizen questions, verify-sealed. You answer in writing; answers are published verbatim, side by side, equal space, unedited, candidate-by-candidate — never as a ranking or a scorecard. (Release timing and format: design-pending — see above.)
3. Take planks from the platform commons. Verbatim, free, no attribution required.
4. Submit a vision statement. The same public form every resident uses; your statement is clustered with everyone else’s, not featured.
5. Sign the Servant-Mayor Covenant (mayoral candidates; concept draft, offered to all equally) — five commitments: govern transparently with reasons published; adopt assembly-informed agenda-setting and respond to its recommendations on the record within a stated time; table the day-one package; honour the statutory duties in full and reserve discretionary strong-mayor overrides for genuine emergencies, publicly justified; act as the city’s chief facilitator, not its ruler. The covenant is voluntary and cannot legally bind a mayor or council under Ontario municipal law — its only enforcement is electoral: a public record of what was promised, kept as receipts, judged by voters next time. Sign publicly, decline publicly, or stay silent — each is recorded candidate-by-candidate, next to any statement you attach, never as a leaderboard.
6. Publish the day-one standard. State, in detail, what you will table in your first weeks in office — the motions, the budget lines, the staff directions. The library’s packages stand beneath any candidate who wants the floor raised.
7. Walk a block as a listener. Where residents have organized a Block Circle, visit under the no-speeches rule — you listen, they talk. Visits are logged publicly, identically for all candidates.
8. Answer the Problem Map. Your ward’s top resident-filed problem cards: your position, and which proven solution you would copy. Answers are pinned to the cards, verbatim.
9. Open your calendar. Post public office hours to the shared civic calendar residents can see in one place.
10. The Either-Way pledge. Win or lose, the library and the six-week civic sprint proceed either way — this was never only about one ballot. Candidates who want to show up in their own ward for whatever coordinated work residents choose after the election are welcome to; no candidate is asked to commit to anything beyond this brief’s own terms.
11. Adopt the people’s plan. When the crowd’s collectively-agreed plan for the city exists — built from thousands of conversations across the city, drawn together and published as one shared document — every candidate in every race receives it identically, with one equal question: “Will you commit to implementing the people’s plan — and which parts?” You answer in your own words, at whatever length you choose; your answer is published exactly as you wrote it, candidate-by-candidate, beside every other candidate’s own answer, at equal prominence. This is not a ranking and not an endorsement — the library endorses no candidate, ever, and this offer changes nothing about that. It is a public record of your own commitment, on your own terms — weighable at the ballot box, reviewable all term. Declining or staying silent is recorded the same way, as your answer, not as a failing grade. (This offer is not yet live: the plan itself does not exist as of this writing. Release mechanics and timing are [ADOPTION-INSTRUMENT RELEASE MECHANICS — design-pending]. Anything beyond publishing the plan and publishing your answer to it is a different legal question that waits on counsel; until that clears, this library publishes records. It does not campaign.)

The neutrality guarantee

Stated as plainly as it can be stated:

• This library serves every candidate identically. Same materials, same offers, same timing, same channel — for every certified candidate, in every ward, for every office.
• No endorsements. Ever. Not of a candidate, a party, a slate, or a side of any question on any ballot. No candidate is treated as an adversary; every sentence about any institution or condition must survive the person being replaced by someone better — critique lands on institutions and conditions, never on persons.
• No coordination with any campaign. No strategy, no data, no volunteers, no introductions brokered for one campaign and not another, no money, no in-kind anything — in either direction.
• No money at all. Nothing is sold to candidates, no donations are accepted from candidates or campaigns, and nothing is spent promoting or opposing any candidate. (The library’s own funding model — optional public merch at a disclosed margin, accounted to-the-dollar — is unrelated to and firewalled from anything here; see the library’s public accounting.)
• No scoring. The library publishes what candidates say, verbatim and side by side. It does not grade, rank, or editorialize. Declining any offer above is fine; declining is never characterized, and there are no report cards.
• A visible record, and the fairness discipline that keeps it fair, fixed in advance. A record of who answered, signed, declined, or stayed silent will be visible — and we say plainly that visibility itself carries weight, so the discipline is locked before any of it publishes: identical questions, identical offers, identical deadlines, and every record rendered candidate-by-candidate as that candidate’s own answer — never as a comparison chart. The crowd is asked to read a decline as an answer to weigh, not a target to attack. The adoption offer (standing offer 11) is held to the same discipline: identical plan, identical question, identical publication rules — nothing about a bigger instrument changes the fairness bar.

If you ever see the library break any line above, say so publicly — and tell us at unknownsoldier@unitetolove.ca. Corrections are published.

What participation looks like, concretely

The Question Bank’s release timing and format to candidates are not yet finalized — [QUESTION-BANK RELEASE MECHANICS — design-pending] — but whatever the mechanism, the governing rule is fixed now: every certified candidate receives it at the same time, answers in writing at the same length limit as every other candidate, and answers appear verbatim, side by side, with equal space and no edits. The adoption offer (standing offer 11) is not yet live for the same reason — the plan it asks you to adopt doesn’t exist yet — but carries the identical governing rule the moment it does: same plan, same question, same timing, same publication format, for every candidate. Factual errors you find in the library’s own materials are corrected in public, with the correction credited.

One request

Before you use anything here, check it. The library’s only claim to your trust is that every claim can be verified — so verify one. If it holds, use it freely. If it breaks, you will have improved the commons for every candidate and every resident, and the correction will say so.

uniteTOlove.ca

This document is informational only. It promotes no candidate, opposes no candidate, and is provided identically to all candidates. It is not affiliated with, and does not represent, any candidate — including any candidate who may personally agree with the vision it describes. Reviewed against MEA third-party rules before any distribution [PENDING counsel-informed check]. The adoption offer (standing offer 11) carries the same caution with added weight: publishing a candidate’s own written commitment, verbatim, is judged closer to pure information than any persuasive act — but this judgment itself is [PENDING counsel-informed check], not asserted as settled.