A Resilient Canada: How Canada Bounces Back

Tent cities. Lines at food banks. Poverty as a way of life, with a bloated deficit and an unrealistic real estate market. There are too many news stories about people choosing to die instead of living in the conditions they must endure. People dying in emergency rooms and willing to line up around the block and overnight to secure a family doctor.

A federal government that seized bank accounts of people who disagreed with their point of view. People who felt that they weren’t being heard or respected, an act that was later declared illegal.

The federal government has been seized since the beginning of October. Paralyzed by its failure to hand over documents despite being ruled to have to do so. Instead, government procedures stopped. Confidence votes were tabled and fell. Finally, with mounting pressure and increasing threats, Justin Trudeau announced he would step aside. Not today, but when the party picks a new leader.

A new leader for a party with the support of only 2 out of 10 Canadians. A party that may not even exist after the next election.

A New Reputation on the World Stage

Today’s Canada has embarrassments, charades, scandals, and shameful examples everywhere. Worse, these aren’t fleeting moments of whoops but long-term, lasting chaos, waste, and disorder that the grandchildren of today’s first-time voters will still be paying for.

Gaffs that were so shocking that the world noticed. The freezing of bank accounts. The woke agenda is taking center stage, and you’ll be sued if you don’t comply. The decimation of free speech. The funding of the propaganda to keep Canadians in the dark, all while introducing such words as misinformation and disinformation.

An Eroded Sense of Pride

As a young student in Ottawa, I learned, perhaps more than I would have in other cities, about our political history and two-language culture. Later, as a student in Alberta, I learned, perhaps more than I would have in other cities, about our rich resources and vast lands. I used to be able to sing the anthem in both languages.

As an engineer in Fort MacMurray, I learned about both sides of the resource debate and witnessed first-hand what it looks like and what it does. I lived in a city tormented by floods, fires, and frostbite, yet I also saw the beautiful northern lights.

Canada is a complex country without easy answers, and as such, mistakes are made. When you don’t know about them, you repeat them until you get the idea.

Ten years ago, I was proud to be a Canadian and would’ve argued that Canada was the best country in the world. Today, I look around at Canada like I looked around at the store where I used to work right before I walked out.

On my last day of part-time employment, the summer employees entertained each other with gossip and stories while customers went ignored, boxes sat in aisles waiting to be unpacked, and shelves were picked bare in places.

Unshared Values

At the front of the store, empty boxes were heaped in a mountain, requiring customers to warily skirt their way around it. Carts littered the parking lot. Floors were smeared with dirt, but also with tell-tale black smears where there was a poor mopping job after a clumsily handled bottle crashed on the tile floor.

Worse, the manager was sitting in his office, much closer to the two millennials than I was. If their giddy laughter and focus on each other didn’t bother him, and I was rather opposite, very bothered, then clearly, this was a place I didn’t belong. I walked out.

If I was no longer proud to work there but relegated to feeling used and abused, the same can be said for how I now feel about Canada. Our money isn’t going toward things that make me proud, but it is going toward a well-hidden globalist philanthropist agenda. As a taxpayer, that makes me feel abused.

If it were not for alternative media, like Northern Perspective, Moose on the Loose, Mr. Sunshine Baby, Rebel News, and True North, I might not know.

If I was busy working, studying, or raising a family, politics might never cross my radar, being so low on an essential list of priorities. Which is why it is so important to like, share and subscribe. The word must get out, as short and sweet as possible, to help those busy people get informed enough.

Get involved enough, if only to read, share, and vote.

Remember that the government is not a business, but if you want to think of it that way, their revenue comes from taxes.

In a Ponzi scheme, someone takes your money and tells you that they’ve invested it when, in fact, they turn around and give it to someone else.

A Ponzi Scheme of a Government

Money was given—to Ukraine, Africa, many, many causes, and other places in the world—to friends and family, to their workplaces and businesses. It was spent on philanthropy, global philanthropy, while Canadian citizens starved, frozen in tents, and suffered in waiting lines for passports, doctors, and anything else required from the federal government.

It was money we didn’t have. The Canadian Taxpayer’s Association helps us understand the amount Canada owes with its debt clock, showing that your share is about $27,000.

When we create a deficit, money gets spent on interest, and in 2023/24, Canada is expected to spend 46.5 billion on debt servicing charges. This is more than is spent on childcare benefits.

A Job Creation Machine

Just as Bernie Madoff, the criminal behind the largest Ponzi scheme in history, had at least 25 staff and nine directors, you need people to do all the dirty work. The more, the merrier, because the more finite you can make the job, the less likely anyone is to put the whole picture together.

To give money away, you need people to do it, so they spend it creating government jobs, and those government jobs provided and administered grants, spending wildly. The government’s payroll hit a record $67 billion last year, up 68% since 2016.

Canada is in so much debt that generations yet to be born will be paying it. In this way, someone has a nice, cushy job with a pension and benefits on the back of someone who isn’t even born yet.

Bloated Programs and Useless Spending

Justin Trudeau’s legacy is massive spending and record debt. He never once balanced the budget, but every year, he spent more than the government took in, including an astonishing $61.9 billion deficit so shameful that no one in government was willing to talk to it.

Instead of adequately presenting the budget, Chrystia Freeland resigned, and Karina Gould dropped it like a hot potato without a speech, avoiding the debt that normally ensues.

While the COVID response incurred billions of wasted taxpayer dollars, one could argue about tough times and chaotic situations. Still, we all know people who claimed CERB and other government payouts at the time, who weren’t qualified, got the money, and have no plans to pay it back. Some of them even worked at the CRA.

However, the ArriveCan app, which was exposed as a $60 million scam, was initially estimated to cost $80,000. The gun buy-back program, which has yet to buy back a single gun, cost over $67 million. Corporations get billions, and executives get bonuses to $11.2 billion in 2022.

We need an end to the guy and the party who hurt more people than Bernie Madoff ever did.

Madoff’s victims are now 94% recovered, of proven financial losses, due to the US government’s fund. As the government should have caught the fraud, estimated to be $20 billion over many years, lessons were learned.

We can learn too – to question what seems too good to be true. A ten percent return every year? We can learn to question when motive and means collide – you can book your own trades, you say? We can learn to listen to the naysayer, even when, especially when, everyone else is singing praise.

Philanthropy to the Level of the Individual

The federal government was a system that enabled his philanthropy of Canadian funds to his friends and his causes. While he gave away the future tax dollars of generations, I’d personally like the freedom to decide for myself what to donate, to whom, and when, and everything else about it.

I certainly do not support 100% all the causes and recipients of Canada’s future income. I know that those unborn have no clue if they do, and when they become aware and get to decide, times will be very different.

Long gone will Trudeau’s tight control of the storyline. Facts will emerge. Faiths will be tested. Relationships will flip. I’m anticipating being riveted by the future headlines and opinion pieces.

If Canadians get to decide for themselves what to do with their extra money, and today, I don’t imagine that being a thing for anyone, but instead of spending money and advice on how to pay less tax, we happily pay knowing and trusting the government, and like at a restaurant, you pay what you owe and you throw in a little extra.

Instead, we pay experts to tell us how to minimize taxes.

Monitoring Returns on Investment

When that’s how people feel about government, and that’s widespread and accepted, I think it’s a message the government should heed: it’s a clear lack of trust and a disagreement in direction.

People’s behavior toward their taxes and attitudes about them should automatically be a vote of confidence in the government.

At some point, an election should automatically trigger when tax fraud reaches a certain level – and that can go both ways, with payments that shouldn’t have been made or should have been collected.

We should require that the government publish the percent of spending toward investment of the total spend. Giving money to other countries is not an investment. Creating social programs is not an investment.

With this new metric, maybe we could call it the Canada First metric; we’d quickly see that Trudeau gave it all away while Harper created momentum, cared about maintenance, and otherwise spent like an investor, not like a philanthropist.

Simple performance measures should be a part of the government’s monthly scorecard. When they start failing, elections should be automatic. Voters can pick which party won’t make them come back to the polls too soon.

Managing Like a Business

Scorecards are tools used by organizations for a long time, and I’d love to see one in place for the government.

If CBC developed and measured the government’s performance objectively and consistently, they might find a business case. With graphs like those on the stock channel and conversations similar to those taking place in boardrooms all across the country, that is a program I’d never miss.

It’s time for the government to start managing like a business. They need help staying on track, reporting to stakeholders, and being ethically and morally responsible. There are many consultants in this arena and many so-called experts who miss the point.

Hire three of them at random. Pick ones you don’t know and no one has heard of, and certainly, ones you’ve never heard of. Compare what the three have in common, and where they differ, and figure out why.

One consultant might believe that everyone comes to work to behave obediently. Another might believe that work is a necessary step toward self-actualization. A third one might believe that every employee is set to rip him off.

Discuss what you believe, and reflect if that’s the message that is conveyed to your employees. Would they agree with you? That agreement is part of being responsible. Everything else is spin.

Certainly, I’ve never seen the theory come to fruition. With metrics and scorecards in place, it can become easier to skirt the intended work and do what you want instead of what you are supposed to do.

The smarter people are, the more creative they are, and the better trained in statistics, the more proficient they are. I know, because I trained them.

I used to think the vision was like a desert oasis: something you need to believe in, but it vanishes when you think you’ve got there. Ray Dalio might have mastered it. He was being studied for the example proven out in his company.

Dalio wrote a book about how to do it. For mere dollars, you can learn how to organize your organization so everyone is pulling in the same direction and happy doing it. Yet, I’ve not heard of any remarkable pivots because someone helped themselves to such information.

We might need a leader who is humble enough to pick up a book and read it. Then, ask the guy for help implementing it in his cabinet and caucus. Wouldn’t that make for a Canada that’s better than ever?

When it comes to Canada, I cannot walk out. I know of no other home than Canada. I will not leave. It deserves to bounce back to the glory I’ve witnessed, and beyond.

We used to stand up for the national anthem every day, and I felt the pride in the maple leaf. I felt proud of being somewhere so young, so rich, so large, so cultural, so spacious and free. This was the Canada of my youth. We were proud and connected with pride in a global reputation for kindness. Let’s make it true again.