It’s time for us to grow up, to be the serious and successful country that our founding forefathers knew we could be. Pictured: Mark Carney. Photo Credit: Mark Carney/X.
“Well, they look like normal people.”
Such was the thought that sprung to mind while watching Republican politicians, vehemently clapping and cheering during President Donald Trump’s address to Congress last week.
It is a tough concept to grasp, that seemingly normal individuals could support such disastrous economic policies being haphazardly directed at Canada, a friend and ally. If this was a movie script, it would be on the science fiction channel. But here we are, there is no waking up from this nightmare.
At the same time, it is a well-deserved wake-up call for Canada for ignoring our economic, political, diplomatic and military weaknesses for the past decade.
One of the growing priorities for corporate boards of directors these days is risk management – identifying all the things that could possibly go wrong for your company and figuring out how you would deal with them.
It is a skill set sadly lacking in the majority of our politicians.
Since Trump launched his tariff war, newspaper columns, broadcast commentary or on-line newsletters, have been filled with all the things we must do to try and accommodate, prevent or compensate for the new regime.
The list is long. Of course, the first priority is to stop the tariffs, whether through negotiation, threats, retaliation or a combination of all of them. With a lame duck federal government and an about to depart Prime Minister, leadership has largely fallen upon the Premiers, particularly Ontario’s leader Doug Ford.
Fresh off his historic election win, Ford appears to be largely leading the charge against the tariffs both here and in the United States. Through a combination of escalating actions and threats of retaliation, coupled with advertising and strategic appearances on U.S. talk shows, Ford has laid out a course of action that may be starting to have an impact. Time will tell.
But what is truly heartbreaking, is to read and listen to all the things we should now be doing “immediately” — scrap interprovincial trade barriers, cut regulatory red tape, reform our tax system, strengthen our infrastructure, build pipelines, expand our trading relationships beyond the U.S., strengthen Arctic security, rebuild our military and intelligence capabilities, improve productivity, balance the federal budget, the list goes on.
The fact that we have not done it, to any significant degree, is on us. Not Trump. None of this is new. Any good risk manager would have paid attention to long standing American complaints about our deplorable lack of support for NATO, our deteriorating military capability and our refusal to expand security in the north.
Canadian business leaders have been warning for years about the lost opportunities caused by our poor investment environment, our too-restrictive regulatory and tax regimes, the hobbling of our energy industry, the barriers to building infrastructure or trade among provinces and most importantly, our inability to control government spending so we would have the fiscal flexibility to handle a crisis.
Oh, our Prime Minister and his ministers paid lip service to it all, many, many times. And we, the complacent public, so secure in our assumption that Canada’s privileged existence was somehow guaranteed to continue, that the bad things that happened to other countries could never happen here, let them get away with it, time after time.
So yes, the existential threat to our economy and our sovereignty is very real. The entire world order we have grown up with and taken for granted is being upended, literally, on a daily basis.
But if Trump has shaken us out of our naïve belief that this was how it was always supposed to be, some good may come of it. But if we think it is only about Trump, that if only we can hold on until his term is over and the world returns to normal, we are kidding ourselves.
Last week, there were a roomful of “normal” looking people, wildly applauding their leader’s vision. The galleries were full of his cabinet secretaries and agency heads, enthusiastically implementing his executive orders and repeating his outrageous talking points. They aren’t going away.
It’s time for us to grow up, to be the serious and successful country that our founding forefathers knew we could be. It was a grand vision, let’s make it happen.
Janet Ecker is a former Ontario Finance Minister, Minister of Education, Minister of Community and Social Services and Government House Leader in the governments of Premier Mike Harris and Premier Ernie Eves. After her political career, she served as the founding CEO of the Toronto Financial Services Alliance, a public-private partnership dedicated to building Toronto region into an international financial centre. She currently sits on a number of corporate and non-profit boards, agencies and advisory committees.
Ms. Ecker received the Order of Canada for her public service contributions and was recognized as one of the “Most Influential People in the World’s Financial Centres” by Financial Centres International. She also received a “Canada’s Most Powerful Women: Top 100 Award” from the Women’s Executive Network and the Richard Ivey School of Business, among other awards. She is also one of the founders of Equal Voice, a national, multi-partisan organization working to elect more women.
