I created this site in 2020 as a place to share ideas and perspectives shaped by a long career in public policy, strategic planning, communications, association management, government, and politics.
When I launched it, I did not fully appreciate how constraining to self-expression it could be to work within Ottawa’s mainstream policy and institutional ecosystem.
Writing carefully, moderating tone and always colouring within the lines may be necessary, even appropriate, but over time it is also limiting. That is why this site did not become the safe place for unvarnished expression I had hoped it would be.
As I write this, I’m in a different place, I’ve left full-time association management and have moved to a different stage of my professional life: One where I can choose, who I work with, what projects I lend my time to and the causes I advocate for.
And with that, I’m reclaiming my own voice — the ability to write and think freely, without the need for perpetual moderation and compromise. This site now reflects that intention more clearly.
I still expect to post the occasional quick take on breaking news, but the emphasis will remain on more considered opinion and longer-form analysis, written honestly and in my own voice.
While the news cycle will shape some of what appears here, my focus will increasingly be on a smaller number of issues of particular concern to me: governance and leadership, mental health and wellbeing in institutional settings, public policy and democratic practice, and the human consequences of how we design and manage our institutions.
And from time to time, I may still share thoughts on a book or two that have little — or nothing at all — to do with public policy.
This site is, at its core, a place to think out loud — freely, honestly, and for me, in a reclaimed voice.
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The Carney government’s new digital safety legislation — the Safe Social Media Act — is a step in the right direction. Ottawa now acknowledges that digital technologies can cause real harm and require public guardrails.
But it would be a mistake to view this week’s announcement as the last word. If anything, it should mark the beginning of a national conversation.
The federal government’s AI Strategy and its online safety legislation reveal a blind spot that must be addressed in the way Canada is approaching this technological revolution.
Over the last three weeks, Ottawa unveiled two relatively coherent digital policy frameworks. The first focuses on AI adoption, productivity, economic competitiveness, skills development, investment and digital sovereignty. The second focuses on risk: child safety, harmful content, exploitation, cyberbullying, problematic online behaviour and platform accountability.
Both matter.
But what remains unanswered — and unacknowledged — is a third question: how will our institutions, communities and democratic culture adapt to a technology capable of fundamentally transforming the flow of information, the exercise of judgment and the very forms of civic participation upon which democratic life depends?
This question is far from theoretical. And it’s one that Ottawa doesn’t seem prepared to entertain.
For more than a decade, social media has transformed the Western public square. Algorithmic polarization, emotional amplification, fragmented narratives and the weakening of shared informational authorities have all contributed to undermining our relationship with a common reality.
Artificial intelligence does not arrive in a vacuum. It enters an ecosystem already shaped by business models that reward outrage, emotional escalation and attention capture.
The danger is not limited to misinformation, disinformation or toxic content. It also lies in the gradual isolation of individuals within increasingly personalized information environments. Ever more sophisticated systems are already learning to anticipate our preferences, validate our biases, flatter our emotions and present us with the content most likely to capture our attention.
A society cannot remain cohesive when its citizens increasingly inhabit isolated and personalized versions of reality.
It is precisely here that Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical on artificial intelligence deserves attention.
By dedicating his first major encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to AI — and by releasing it on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the influential text through which Leo XIII confronted the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution — the Pope is sending a clear signal. He views artificial intelligence as something far more consequential than a technological innovation.
The parallel is not accidental.
Rerum Novarum was not primarily about machines. It was about their human, social and political consequences — how a technological revolution was transforming work, communities, institutions and the conditions of collective life itself.
One can reject the Church’s religious foundations outright. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the question the encyclical raises: what becomes of a society when the technologies that structure information, attention and collective judgment increasingly escape civic control?
Where Ottawa primarily sees issues of innovation, adoption, safety and economic competitiveness, the Vatican is asking what AI means for human dignity, social cohesion and the conditions that make collective life possible.
The Carney government deserves credit for beginning to address some of the risks associated with digital technologies.
But the central question is not simply how to make artificial intelligence safer for one demographic or another. It is what kind of common world we can preserve — or build — as these systems become increasingly powerful intermediaries between citizens and their understanding of reality.
If the social media revolution taught us anything, it is this: the most profound consequences of a technology are often the ones we discover too late.
It should be telling — and troubling – for Canadians, that Rome, rather than Ottawa, has chosen to place those broader social questions at the centre of its reflection on artificial intelligence.
Victor Hedman, Tampa Bay Lightning, Mental Health Champs
Organizations issue statements. Logos are changed. We tell people, often with the best of intentions, that it’s “ok not to be ok.” And that’s good, because words do matter.
We teach our children that early: Angry words hurt; caring words heal. But we don’t teach them everything about words. We don’t warn them about the ones we use like a coat of paint over the cracks in our lives.
“It’s ok not to be ok” has become one of those phrases. Necessary. Comforting. But it leaves the heavy lifting to the person that is suffering. Because the real test isn’t whether we say it. It’s whether we act on it when it costs us something.
Hedman wasn’t a depth player. He’s the captain. A Conn Smythe winner. The kind of player whose absence changes the odds, and in the series against the Montreal Canadiens it did.
And still, he left – with his organization and his team’s blessing — to take care of himself, after months of trying to work around something that wasn’t going away. His organization didn’t just tell him it was ok; they gave him the time and space to get better – on his terms.
My workplace wasn’t the hockey rink, but I’ve been there. The slow accumulation. The quiet accommodations you make with yourself. The belief that if you just push a little harder, past the next big deadline, you’ll be able to pause. Except you keep going. Until you can’t.
For a long time, I didn’t have the language for that. Like many people, I managed it privately and avoided naming it at all. It wasn’t until later in my career, when the bottom fell out from under me that I acknowledged my chronic mental health struggles.
That’s when I learned the importance of real, unquestioning, support. The kind that helps shake the self-stigma that keeps too many people suffering in silence and alone.
In the workplace, that kind of space is rare. Because most organizations still operate on a different principle: it’s ok not to be ok—right up until it affects performance.
Hedman and the Tampa Bay Lightning crossed that line. His mental health didn’t just exist in the background — it took him out of the lineup.
The team put a cone of silence over his situation and gave him time. And, when he spoke publicly after the series, his team said that he had done the right thing.
In his comments to the press, Hedman thanked a therapist who “has no clue what hockey is”, someone who focused on him as a person, not as a player. There’s a lesson in that: If the only version of you that matters is the workplace one, you will eventually run out of yourself.
We still struggle with that truth. Behind the good words and social media celebrations of mental health, the truth is that we celebrate resilience. We reward endurance. We quietly penalize absence. And then we wonder why people wait too long.
Hedman didn’t. He made a decision that protected his long-term ability to lead, even at the cost of short-term outcomes. And his organization did what most say they would, and few do: they gave him space.
If Mental Health Awareness Month is going to mean anything, it has to mean this: Not just telling people it’s ok not to be ok. But building teams, institutions and most important, cultures, that can act on what that requires.
Because the real test isn’t whether we say the right things in January or May. It’s whether we can afford to mean them in every single day of the year.
