I started The Good Guides because I watched services that were supposed to help people I grew up with — my friends, my family — never reach them. Years later, putting this record together, I found the same problem at city scale, in print: the help exists in pieces, the pieces don't connect, and nobody publishes whether the whole of it is working.

That is what I take from this record. It is not that Toronto does nothing for its young people — the spending is real, and some of it is good. It is that Toronto cannot say, from its own published numbers, whether its young people are better off than they were five years ago. Where the numbers do add up, most are moving the wrong way. Where they don't add up, that is not a technical problem. A city that gives young people a seat at the table but keeps the keys — to the budgets, the data, the decisions — has not actually shared anything.

Young people don't need to be counted as guests in their own city. They need the whole house: real authority, real support behind them, and a public record honest enough to say whether any of it worked. Counting is the least of it. We should start there.