REACTION – Team Canada Arrives Home

Canada’s best athletes returned to Canada from the Winter Olympics in Beijing, China, more than half way around the world. 

Demonstrating greatness, they delivered gold, silver, bronze medals and personal bests in many of the events while proudly wearing the iconic maple leaf.  Regrettably, back at home, Canada’s good governance performance was far from any personal bests or medal standing.

Canadian athletes are the epitome of excellence, discipline, hard work and resilience – devoting their lives to perfecting their talent through personal sacrifice, financial strain, rigorous training and often-through injuries. 

In addition to high performance training, athletes had to practice resilience on a new level by adapting to public health restrictions, finding alternative ways to train and prepare for international competition.  Athletes embraced vaccinations, mask mandates, self-isolation protocols, and testing during their journey to the Olympics to represent Canada.

By contrast, Canadians and their governments seem to have lost a sense of team, resilience, civility, duty as well as individual and collective responsibility.  

From local, provincial and federal governments – and their elected leaders – there was a fundamental breakdown in coordination and application of the rule of law.  If good governance were an Olympic sport, Canada would be at risk of not qualifying to compete during the almost three weeks that protestors occupied downtown Ottawa and blocked trade and traffic at our borders. 

Canadian athletes are true professionals and committed to excellence and doing their best in they sports they have chosen. 

With the recent revocation of the Emergencies Act, Canadians and their governments would do well to take a page our of our athletes Olympic training approaches – shake off a bad performance and get back to mental, physical and personal excellence, team, and wear the maple leaf with pride.