It’s simple to say that Canada needs a good leader to get ahead. Of those running, who would not call themselves a good leader? For Canada, a good leader is a French-speaking, investor-minded, clear-speaking, insightful-thinking, and quick-acting seeker of excellence with strong managerial skills.
I’m so excited that there is someone who fits that tall order.
To be transparent, today, I am a card-carrying Conservative. I bought one of Pierre’s sweatshirts and a three-year membership. I bought a baseball cap when the federal government refused to turn over unredacted documents about taxpayer dollars spent.
When Trudeau prorogued government—which means we have no government—I bought a jacket.
When he refused to bring back government to get all parties involved in a solution to Trump’s tariffs and said he had all the power he needed, it was never more obvious that his approach isn’t Team Canada but Team Trudeau. I’ve never been more scared that we are so beholden to this guy. RIP, democracy.
That said, I voted Liberal every time Trudeau was on the ticket. I did so grudgingly, but I did so. I am not a lifelong anything, but I choose to greet every election based on the issues and people of the time.
Bolder, Braver, Better
Today, I am enthusiastic that there is a candidate who does what I would do, only better, wiser, faster, and in all the other ways I can easily say, “Yes, I trust you, and I will follow you.”
To hear Mark Carney copy the same messages makes me worried that some voters won’t know he is lying. Once in power, he will do what he wants to do, which is exactly what Trudeau has done and is doing.
To me, a leader is someone you are willing to follow. To the military, a leader is someone to whom they are willing to pay their lives. I pay my taxes, and that’s as far as I will go for this government.
A Philosophy of Leaner is Better
I think the government’s philosophy toward taxes matters. Do they make them simple or complex, easy to abuse, or excessively nickel-and-dime?
When I worked for a living, I was trained as an expert in cost reduction and efficiency. So-called Lean Manufacturing was one of those things. I didn’t like it, as I thought it was cumbersome and overly formulaic and tended to reduce people to robots.
If I despise its practices, I liked the Lean philosophy. I believe that administering a business should be as minimal a spend as possible and no less.
Applying the same idea to government, a conservative believes a government should be as small as possible and no less.
A Track Record of Accountability
Once bitten, twice shy. Once, I took my sister up on her offer to babysit the electrician while I scooted off on holiday.
I was happy to be able to accomplish both, as it had been difficult to secure an electrician and orchestrate a vacation from work.
After, my sister claimed that the electrician had stolen her brand-new smartphone.
I knew that if I took the matter to the electrician, he would deny it, and there was no proof. I also knew she had a talent for mining an opportunity to get someone else to pay for something. For all I knew, it was a story.
Still, I offered to give her $500 to replace it, and that’s what it cost me to adhere to a convenient timeline.
When someone has proven themselves able to weasel their way out, they will, every time. They do not learn, and they do not change.
Some people face the truth, apologize, and attempt to do differently, and some even pull it off, but not everyone. Some never try. You can just spot a weasel a mile away and stay away.
A Clear Communicator
A leader should sound like it when they speak; you know the difference when you hear it. They are clear and confident and don’t rely on word salads to avoid an answer or buy them time to think of a way out. Like the infamous apple-munching Poilievre, a leader pushes for the truth, accountability, and ownership.
Unlike Christy Clarke, who said she was “never” a Conservative, when, oh look, there is the receipt with her name on it, she then says she thinks it’s not beyond them to fabricate it, only to see a video of her face talking about her actions within the Conservative party.
She misspoke? This is her explanation when Canada is just meeting her, and all we now know of her is that she is a two-time mud-slinging liar on an insignificant issue.
Christina Clarke also didn’t take accountability for the outright lie and secondary lie; instead, she said, “sh*t happens,” an expression I reserve for when mother nature takes its course or someone else’s mistake splashes on me.
Whose fault was it that an answer other than the easily verifiable truth came out of her mouth?
Did she send a robot in her place, and was there a bug in the software? Would you put this person in charge of anything of consequence? I wouldn’t let her sit my cat, let alone my country.
The Possible Mission of Privacy, Protection, and Pride
What to do with a bloated government? Defund it, just like Pierre Poilievre said he’d do to the federally funded news organization, the CBC.
Defunding essentially means that if the organization wants to continue to exist, it must begin functioning like a business. Make profits, and use those profits to pay for everything on your own. This is a reality for most people, small businesses, and many businesses.
CBC has been warned. There are steps it can take to get there, but many yet-unborn children would be angry to know that they are working to pay the bonuses of these executives a generation after the signal goes to static. Bonuses out of the taxpayer’s wallet? We don’t even want to tip or pay for you, let alone bonus you.
A great leader inspires with a brand-new vision, with a bit of risk, but only enough to make it compelling, and lets everyone see themselves in this new world.
It’s a conceptual framework, and there’s enough for people to fill in the gaps. The leader describes a concept, but the listener can imagine a picture.
Imagine excellence in government. Not merely operating as a business but as an excellent one. One you’d be proud to be a part of in any way you could. I would feel confident about laying down my life for that government, knowing it wouldn’t be wasted.
Highly Sought-After Jobs
A high-tech, high-spending approach to the CRA helps retain talent in Canada and funnels government spending toward what everyone wants and needs—simple and safe transactions.
As a concept, administering taxes involves accountants, auditors, internet security, and privacy protection professionals. It could and should be recognized as a top STEM employer of these latter two.
Gone are the paper-pushing bureaucrats. They can’t figure out how to make the new budgets work. They don’t know how to hit the new monthly performance metrics. They aren’t even sure what all this new language means, and some aren’t willing to learn.
New high-paid tech jobs are coming in, with room for creativity and autonomy, geographic freedom, and the opportunity to continue to grow and learn.
More, these careers are easily paired with the right learning path so that employees can show up ready for work on day one. The transition could be smooth and seamless, from the moment someone decides on the career path to the day they call it their own.
Of course, people come and go and change their minds. To an economy, that is breathing.
Operating with Excellence
Within four years, a leader who pursues operational excellence can produce a highly functioning and well-staffed government agency that operates at a record-high performance level.
Timely. Fair. Accurate. Sweeping. But let’s not stop at the CRA.
What if it’s you with a newly landed federal job? It might be you, the graduate student, or the professor at the university who just got a $25 million donation.
If you are a student, you were moving on anyway, but for the salaried pension earner, it’s back to the job market, which might mean back to school or early retirement. Hopefully, you have choices.
For a new leader to slam the brakes on so many careers at once might be hard on the market, so a new leader must know about change management and engineered economic decision-making. They should be able to design and provide programs targeted to specific groups with predicted uptake rates.
A well-operating government connects a problem on the horizon with a crafty idea to minimize it, avoid it, or take advantage of it.
They know how to design options so that outcomes are not disastrous surprises. They never have to say things like, whoops we left the taps on too long. If you ever literally did that, you would feel the consequences, as should the government who did that.
Maybe they should consult experts like Dan Ariely or his Canadian counterpart instead of their friends, their wedding parties, or their donors.
A Newly Surging Housing Market
To help Canada show its resiliency, these ex-employees can be helped into new and better careers that, in turn, help Canada. They take their skills and interests and find a place in the newly bursting home-building scene.
New careers can be found directly involved with houses themselves – construction, administration, furnishing, and finishing – but also everything needed for these new communities, like schools and hospitals, with teachers and nurses.
With a heads-up plan and the involvement of every individual affected, it would be like staffing the future, hiring for things that don’t yet exist but are specific to matriculating. It’s a conceptual framework, and people can see how it would work for them, wherever they reside in Canada or want to relocate.
Stimulating the home construction industry helps shepherd some of the population into a new and better future, kicking and screaming or going happily.
There is a four-year runway for voters to get used to the new reality and become calm and clear in assessing it, long after the hot-headed ego has had time to subside and the child has had time to process.
In the long run, it will be better, and everyone will agree, even if they don’t currently. It’s not a threat but a promise.
Identifying the Bottleneck
It’s pivotal to have a leader who understands and identifies the bottleneck.
In terms of housing, we got here because demand exceeded supply. Supply halted while demand soared. There were more people in Canada than Canada was built to take.
You know what it’s like when more people want to visit you than you have beds or rooms for: you get a trailer, you pitch a tent, and if you have to, you will beg, borrow, or steal. Sadly, this is Canada.
I’m curious why I see places empty and listed for months as I browse the home market. Looking through the pictures, I see, oh, that’s why. It is an obvious problem that requires more than your basic homeowner skills to solve and, in some cases, even begin to diagnose.
Empty houses sit and wait for the one buyer who has the experience and decides to choose them, among all the others that require that one experienced buyer, while the demand for housing is higher than ever.
Managing Effectively
Failure to notice the problem because you are too busy making announcements about new spending, retreats, and vacations is a repeatable problem in the government of a philanthropist.
When a leader says that they left the taps on too long, to cut out the metaphor, it means that they weren’t managing it. To manage something effectively, you monitor and adjust continuously to stay on track to a target.
The targets should be clear, and there is rampant abuse from both sides, who want to claim victory over the grey area.
I was hired once because a manager had a target to hire nine people like me, and she did. However, all she did was hire us. There was no work, no planning, and no one needed help. As a result, the nine of us were fumingly bored, and she didn’t understand how she’d done anything wrong.
What a politician who can deny that they did anything wrong while completely dancing around the point. An effective manager doesn’t add costs when they aren’t needed and doesn’t upend lives without a solid plan.
Philanthropists don’t aim to find the connection between spending money and societal discord – the more discord there is, the more they perceive that they are needed. They don’t see themselves as the root of the problem, but they are the solution in their narrative.
You can’t argue with crazy and can’t cure it. Before they are ready, they will be forced to re-enter the workforce, and too late they will find themselves irrelevant and unwanted.
Speaking Their Language
Clarke says she backed out of the race because her French isn’t up to snuff, although one’s ability in French doesn’t change much within a couple of days.
French is important. After the next election, the Bloc Quebecois might be the official opposition. Francophones are always a part of Canada.
Understanding a people, speaking their language without butchering it, is a mark of someone willing to do the work to see things from their perspective as close as possible.
It’s a skill of respect; yes, it takes time and effort. Quebec wants to know that you will put in the time and effort.
And for that matter, why not do what you can to learn the language of the Indigenous that used to occupy the land that you now do?
With Clarke out of the Liberal leadership race, every single other candidate is unqualified or is related to Trudeau.
You’ve heard that a manager hires the right people and gets out of the way. What do you do when your job posting looks like those DIY handyperson specials on the real estate listings?
That’s when your experience as a people person matters. Pick the one with the best potential and then help them learn and improve. Maybe the Liberals will be a contender in another few elections.
Protecting Future Democracy
Every day is another day of damage. It’s like witnessing a pet unable to reach its food bowl for another day. It’s like watching a fire rage and no water coming out of the hose for another day. It’s hearing that another rapist goes free because there is no evidence. It’s tormenting, damaging, and feels unjust, but it’s legal.
A leader creates legislation not to keep himself in power, but to keep the people in power, even while these two objectives compete. A leader takes the more populated road that isn’t all about himself.
Does a leader have to be an extrovert? No, they just have to understand how a scale works, how a herd works, and how humanity works—many are better than one.
Canada has been crying for an election for over a year, and the leadership race is starting just now. Canada waits and suffers while this happens? The demand for new legislation has never been so apparent.
A Prime Minister, Pursuing Excellence (in French too)
Canada needs an investor for a leader, like a French-speaking David Chilton. Reading his book, The Wealthy Barber, began my life as an investor and one I’d recommend to everyone.
If you want to become wealthy, no matter what your profession is, you can do it. It’s a matter of understanding the system and being the banker, never the borrower. Earn interest, don’t pay it. If you pay it, ensure your net interest is on the plus side. Think like an investor.
Could you imagine if Canada could retire? That is, we would pay for everything we need with the interest we earn on our investments—rather like the reverse of our current situation.
I have never been more hopeful for Canada’s future, and that comes at a time when Canada needs as much help as it can get. One man cannot lift us out of this situation everyone thinks is Canada, but we Canadians can do it ourselves.
I want Canada to return to being the Canada I used to know and love, from coast to coast, and while I haven’t been there yet, coast. Yukon, Nunavut, I’ll see you one day. If you do, too, vote like your kids’ lives depend on it.
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