Leadership In The 21st Century

I have been a proud Canadian for 70 years. I have had a great career here, raised a family of good and successful kids here, and am hoping my grandkids grow up to be proud Canadians too.

But something is happening here. It started with the creepy, dead-eye sociopath, Harper, who tried his best to turn this country inside out and bend it to his will.

But the country fixed that, at least temporarily, because while we are good people, we also have a pretty strong sense of who we are. Most of us don’t give a shit who’s in power as long as they don’t fuck with the basic rights and freedoms that make Canada a pretty damn special place to live.

But the stench of Harper lingered on, like the stench in a car where somebody died and wasn’t found for a while. You can spray it and scrub it and air freshen the shit out of it and it still smells like death.

And now the same stench of conservative obsessive/compulsiveness is starting to rear its ugly head again. And you know what? That would be fine if the people who are running these little right wing extravaganzas actually had any sort of ideas of their own about how to run the country.

But they don’t. They don’t appear to know shit from shinola.

Take Ontario for instance. Here you have this semi-useless Toronto city counsellor, whose only claim to fame is that he is the brother of an almost totally useless former mayor.

He’s a student of the racist pig currently in charge of the United States and pretty much mimicked his election campaign. Man of the people. Blah blah blah. And he manages to beat both the NDP candidate, which is understandable, since the NDP never win anything, and the Liberal incumbent, who actually had a huge mess to clean up and botched a couple of big deal things.

So he pretty much becomes the default winner. Not because anybody really likes him, or not even because of some enlightened Conservative ethos he was espousing. Nope. He was the hold-your-nose-and-vote winner, just like the moron in charge of America was.

Now we have the Federal Conservatives. Some idiot with less than no personality is running that shit show, and trying to poke holes in our handsome Prime Minister’s plans to foster economic development and a whole bunch of other shit. He’s also trying to parrot the asshole in Washington on immigration. But of course, it’s just a lot of miscellaneous noise at the moment. Like I said, no real vision.

But this dude is bush league, barely articulate and really looks more like the guy nobody wanted on their baseball team.

Then there’s this other asshole, who very much appears to be politically right of Attila the Hun, and an angry French Canadian to boot, who wants to start his own ‘alt-right’ party because the regular conservatives are way too wishy washy for his taste.

The trouble is that all these yahoos are so busy playing political games, that they have forgotten that there are 35 odd million of us who really don’t give a shit about any of that.

Just tell us what you’re going to do to help us manage our growth, attract investment and good businesses, make sensible and fair trade deals, and keep our country firmly in the ‘good guys’ category.

But no. They’re all consumed with chasing their tails, and trying to figure out how to beat the handsome Prime Minister at his own game.

There is so much political bullshit out there right now that I can hardly see a foot in front of me.

I like the current fed government, because, at least, they are trying to do the kinds of things that will benefit Canadians and make the country stronger

Canadian conservatism, in whatever dreadful flavours it comes in these days, has become exactly like American conservatism. It’s all designed to benefit the wealthy and screw everybody else.

So these people really need to get their shit together and start looking seriously at what they can do for the country, not just the chosen few or the uber nationalists.

This is one world right now and the countries that survive and thrive going forward are the ones whose vision is aligned with this new reality.

Fuck your petty politics. Fuck your cults of personality. Fuck your ass-kissing of the rich. Fuck it all. Grow a set of patriotic balls and start figuring out how Canada becomes a real player in the new world order.

That’s what leadership in the twenty first century is all about. And right now I don’t see a whole lot of it anywhere.

That’s all for now.

Jim lives in St Catharines Ontario (AKA The Quiet Side Of The Lake) and is still working with companies in Toronto whence he came. He is also currently a partner at Bullet Proof Consulting. www.bulletproofconsulting.ca

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