Opinion: How Mark Carney is offering CEOs a chance to rebuild trust with Canadians
After last month's throne speech, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet lamented that he feels Prime Minister Mark Carney 'sees himself culturally as the CEO of Canada.' With his background in corporate finance, it's no surprise Carney has been likened to a stereotypical finance boss.
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But is bringing CEO-type leadership to the federal government a bad thing, particularly at such a precarious moment for our country economically?
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Canada has been starved of this style of leadership. But this goes beyond a culture change in Ottawa. Carney is also opening the door for CEOs to take on critical leadership roles in the execution of his agenda. With his aggressive economic development platform and the charge to 'build, baby, build,' our prime minister has turned on the CEO bat signal.
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Not since the depths of the pandemic has business had such an extraordinary opportunity to contribute to the greater good, and for CEOs to offer leadership that offers impact well beyond their workforce.
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However, the unfortunate reality is that Canadians don't trust their business leaders. The latest Edelman Canada Trust Barometer results, released in March, revealed that only 37 per cent of Canadians trust business leaders — 16 points lower than the average of the 28 countries the firm studies, ranking them near the bottom of that list.
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How have our business leaders run so afoul of Canadians? Rationalizing food inflation in front of a parliamentary committee doesn't help, nor does the massive gap between CEO compensation and that of the average worker. It also doesn't help that two-thirds of Canadians feel business leaders are actively trying to mislead them, according to the recent Edelman study.
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This crisis of trust is made worse by the fact that most Canadians feel the system is failing them — that no matter how hard they work, the next generation will not be better off. Business leaders have become a lightning rod for that grievance.
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It is in this context that CEOs are trying to make sense of the role they should play in a country that needs more from them. And they should play a role. While there have been some well-documented missteps that have led to this extraordinary level of distrust, for years the data has pointed to a growing expectation that they step up and step into the current void.
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