Judgment, Purpose, and Leadership
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May 21, 2026
My former boss, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, once observed that all Canadians agree on two things: that Canada is the best country in the world, and that their region does not get its fair share.
Like many of Mr. Chrétien’s best lines, it was funny precisely because it was true.
Canada has always been a country of strong regions, distinct identities, competing economic interests, and recurring grievances. Geography alone almost guarantees it.
A federation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic was never going to agree on everything all the time. Our politics reflect that reality.
Western Canadians worry that their interests are ignored — or worse, deliberately thwarted — by the federal government. Quebec seeks protection for its distinct language and culture. Atlantic Canadians fear economic marginalization. Ontario and Alberta taxpayers often feel they carry a disproportionate share of the national burden. Northern Canadians rightly insist that decisions affecting them are too often made from far away. Indigenous peoples across the country continue to remind us that their rights and interests have too often been treated as secondary when governments pursue national objectives.
And yet, despite all of this, Canada remains one of the world’s most stable and successful countries.
More than that, Canada has often succeeded precisely because its leaders were able to persuade Canadians to think beyond region, beyond ideology, and beyond immediate political advantage. The great achievements of this country were rarely the product of unanimity. They were the result of leadership capable of assembling coalitions around larger national purposes.
That, in my view, is the enduring challenge of leadership in our federation: building something that transcends grievance without dismissing the legitimacy of regional concerns.
At moments of relative calm and prosperity, this challenge can appear routine. At moments of global instability, it becomes essential.
We are entering one of those moments again.
The world has become less predictable, less integrated, and more competitive. Economic strength and national sovereignty are increasingly intertwined. Supply chains that once seemed permanent now appear fragile. The assumptions of open markets, reliable trade agreements, and stable geopolitical relationships can no longer be taken for granted.
Countries everywhere are rethinking resilience, industrial capacity, energy security, technological sovereignty, and defence preparedness. Canada is not immune from these pressures. Indeed, in some respects, we are unusually exposed to them.
At precisely the moment when Canada needs greater national cohesion to seize opportunities in energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and trade diversification, the centrifugal forces inside democracies are becoming stronger.
Politics increasingly rewards outrage over compromise, performance over institution-building, and grievance over governance.
It is easy to lead with anger. It is much harder to build a country.
Every national initiative in a diverse federation like Canada creates uneven benefits. Every major project affects regions differently. Every compromise leaves somebody dissatisfied. The temptation for political leaders is always to narrow their focus to the immediate interests of their own political base.
But great countries require something more from leaders. They require the ability to persuade citizens that there are goals worth pursuing together.
Canada’s history offers important reminders of this.
The building of the national railway was controversial and enormously expensive. The creation of modern social programs involved fierce debates over jurisdiction and taxation. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement divided the country politically and regionally. Fiscal recovery in the 1990s required difficult decisions that affected Canadians unevenly. None of these moments produced consensus at the outset. None emerged from the absence of disagreement.
The test of leadership in a federation is not whether divisions exist. They always will. The test is whether leaders can prevent division from becoming disintegration.
What made progress possible was leadership willing to take risks and argue that the national interest could not simply be defined as the sum of regional demands. Polls are useful to understand public sentiment at a given moment, but they cannot substitute for judgment, purpose, and leadership.
That truth matters even more today.
Canada faces a serious productivity challenge. Major projects, and even minor ones, take too long to approve and build. Interprovincial barriers continue to weaken the economic union. Capital investment has lagged. Prosperity measured by GDP per capita seriously trails that of the United States. At the same time, other countries are moving aggressively to secure supply chains, attract investment, develop strategic industries, and strengthen domestic industrial capacity.
Canada also possesses enormous advantages. We have abundant natural resources, a highly educated population, stable institutions, access to global markets, and a reputation for reliability at a time when reliability has become strategically valuable. We have opportunities in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, critical minerals, digital infrastructure, and artificial intelligence that many countries would envy.
But advantages alone are not enough.
Countries succeed when they can execute. Execution requires governments willing to make timely decisions, institutions that retain public trust, and citizens prepared to see national success as something larger than the advancement of any single region or sector.
That does not mean suppressing disagreement. In fact, disagreement is natural — and healthy — in democracies. Nor does it mean asking Canadians to abandon regional identities. One of Canada’s strengths has always been the coexistence of strong local identities within a broader national framework.
The challenge is ensuring that disagreement does not become paralysis, and that regional advocacy does not devolve into permanent fragmentation.
The test of leadership in a federation is not whether divisions exist. They always will. The test is whether leaders can prevent division from becoming disintegration.
That requires a certain kind of political maturity. It requires resisting the temptation to treat every issue as a zero-sum conflict between regions. It requires leaders willing to explain complexity honestly, rather than amplifying grievance for short-term advantage.
In an age that increasingly rewards certainty and outrage, compromise is often portrayed as weakness. In successful federations, it is usually the mechanism through which progress becomes possible.
Most importantly, leadership requires ambition.
Canada has succeeded historically when it has thought boldly about itself: when it built national institutions, expanded trade, opened itself to immigration, invested in infrastructure, and embraced larger projects than the politics of the moment might have suggested possible.
The question facing Canadian leadership today is whether we still possess that capacity.
Can we still build projects that Canadians see as larger than themselves? Can we still act with enough confidence and cohesion to compete in a more fragmented and uncertain world? Can we still persuade ourselves that there are national purposes worthy of shared effort and shared sacrifice?
Every successful generation of Canadian leaders has ultimately faced some version of that test.
Ours will too.
Hon. John Manley, P.C., O.C., is former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada and former President and CEO of the Business Council of Canada. He currently serves as Chair of Jefferies Securities Inc. He served in various roles in the Canadian Parliament from 1988 to 2004.