Working Notes
Arguments on the record before they are finished
These are working notes rather than publications. Each one puts an argument on the record with a date attached, so that it can be checked, corrected or contradicted before it is repeated anywhere else.
Notes are never silently edited and never backdated. If one is revised, the change is recorded in the site updates log below. There is no publication schedule. To be told when a new note appears, follow the RSS feed. Shorter dated events, one line and one source each, are listed On the Record.
Site updates
A running record of changes to this section, kept separate from the notes so each one opens with its argument. A note that has been revised ends with a line pointing here.
- 1 November 2026 Everything on this site is now licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). It was always free to use, adapt and reproduce with no permission and no fee, and that hasn't changed. The licence adds one request: credit to Angela Lindow, The Second Emergency. On "Don Valley West: Safe at Home", we added Toronto Police 53 Division (416-808-5300, open 24 hours) and *TPS (*877) from cellphones to the key numbers, removed "from the Bridle Path to Thorncliffe Park" from the opening line, and added that the guide is an independent community resource, not endorsed by the City or any level of government. The same independence line was added to "If Your Private Information Is Leaked." The front page was rebuilt as a plain-language welcome: what an emergency is, the 5 parts of emergency management and how The Plan follows each one, why AI belongs in emergency planning, and 3 recent incidents and warnings with their sources. A new page, Why the second emergency, explains the name and lists 7 dated incidents and warnings from 2026, each marked as involving AI or not. The full argument that used to open the front page now has its own page, The full argument, with no change to its wording. Every page now carries a short note at the bottom of the menu: in an emergency, call 911, and follow official guidance from your municipality, Ontario and the Government of Canada. The author note on the front page was rewritten to say plainly what the author's experience covers and what it doesn't, and to invite corrections. The examples on the front page now open with payments, and the recent incidents and warnings show the date they were last checked. Toronto Crime Stoppers remains paused as of this update. Cosmetic only: new colours and images on the front page and a light grey side menu.
- 31 October 2026 Published the first annex to The Plan, "If Your Private Information Is Leaked," after 4 Bay Street law firms were breached by callers posing as IT staff. Published "Don Valley West: Safe at Home," a local household safety guide built on Ontario's 5 parts of emergency management (prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery), with sections on keeping daily life running and on young people, parties and weapons. Both note that Toronto Crime Stoppers paused all tips on 21 October 2026 after a data breach. Both are listed in The Plan's contents under E, "Extra pages." Also made the whole site easier to find your way around and easier to read: a menu down the left side of every page (a Menu button on phones), with The Plan first and every section listed; The Plan now opens the front page; each section of The Plan has its own colour; text is larger, grey text is darker, and dark backgrounds are lighter. No wording in any note, document or the plan was changed.
- 1 October 2026, evening Published Working Note 09, "Who Checks the Water?," on the Cyber Centre's warning about AI and water controls, its 29 September reassurance about government websites, and who has been told what to do when AI fails. Added two entries to On the Record. Also corrected two details in Working Note 07. The Cyber Centre's warning about AI and the controls of water, energy, food and chemical systems was given as dated 8 September 2026. That date could not be confirmed. The page itself shows it was modified on 14 September 2026, so the note now reads "by 14 September 2026." The OSFI bulletin was given as 13 July 2026 and quoted as saying AI helpers can "act autonomously with limited human oversight." Those words came from a law firm's summary. The bulletin itself, published in July 2026, says AI systems "can act with limited human oversight," and the note now quotes OSFI directly. The argument of the note is unchanged.
- 1 October 2026 Published Working Note 08, "Three Months Later," on the week the builders added brakes and governments began asking questions, and the gap between an AI incident and the public hearing of it. Added On the Record, a running list of dated events with one line and one source each, so the Working Notes can stay for arguments. The question box on the front page now answers from both. Cosmetic only: the timeline table in Working Note 07 now fits on a phone screen without sideways scrolling. No wording changed.
- 29 September 2026 The Plan is now on the site. When the Things You Count On Stop Working, a household emergency plan for outages and wrong answers, is published today at TheSecondEmergency.com/plan as a public review draft, in English and French. It has not been reviewed or endorsed by Emergency Management Ontario, by any municipality, or by any other emergency management authority. A copy is being shared with Emergency Management Ontario, the Association of Municipalities of Ontario and the Ontario Association of Emergency Managers, with an invitation to review it and suggest corrections. Every change to the plan will be recorded in this log.
- 29 September 2026, afternoon The Plan: added an Important notice at the end of the plan and at the front of every download, and a short acceptance step before any download. The first steps and the two household sheets are now also available in Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Tagalog, Arabic, Spanish, Tamil, Persian, Urdu, Korean and Russian, as machine translations being checked. The full plan in those languages will follow once native speakers have checked it.
- 29 September 2026 Published Working Note 07, "Even If You Never Use AI," a plain-language explanation of AI helpers such as OpenClaw and of the Cyber Centre's September 2026 warning. The question box on the front page now answers from it.
- 27 September 2026 Published Working Note 06, "Not a Drill," with an eleven-minute film, also on YouTube. The question box on the front page now answers from it. Added a sitemap and search labels to every page so search engines can find each note and each film.
- 24 September 2026 Published Working Note 05, "We Have Seen This Before," with a short silent video. The question box on the front page now answers from it. Added an RSS feed so readers can be told when a new note appears. Later the same morning, one card was added to the Note 05 film, setting out that each system was run at a different level of government or by a company, while the harm landed locally.
- 23 September 2026, afternoon Corrected a statutory reference. Section 2.1(3) of Ontario's Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act requires every municipality, when developing its emergency management program, to identify and assess the hazards and risks to public safety that could give rise to emergencies, and to identify the facilities and other infrastructure that could be affected. Earlier material cited section 4 for this duty; section 4 concerns the declaration of an emergency by the head of council. The two Volume One documents carry the earlier reference. Corrected Working Note 03: the card for the Ministry of the Solicitor General no longer says Emergency Management Ontario sits there. Emergency Management Ontario is part of the Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and Response. Moved revision notes from the top of each working note to this log, so each note opens with its argument; each revised note now ends with a line pointing here. The question box on the front page now answers from Working Notes 03 and 04, the contact page and this log.
- 23 September 2026 Added a contact page, with a form and the public emergency management contact for every province and territory, checked against each government's own pages. Removed the repeated author signature from all four working notes; readers are now pointed to the institutions able to act on this, not to the author. Notes 03 and 04 gained card layouts for the ministries that own each service, the four parties who would need to be in the room, and the five mechanisms a provincial requirement would need. Three headings in Working Note 04 were reworded to read less like a list of grievances and more like a build toward the fix. Working Note 03's emergency-management cycle was corrected from four phases to five: prevention and mitigation, previously folded into one line, are now stated as the distinct phases they are. Cosmetic only: the entity-card rows (who owns each dependency, the four-party room, the five mechanisms) were changed from narrow side-by-side columns to full-width horizontal rows, for legibility on wide screens. No wording changed.
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