On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module and into history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Armstrong long maintained he said “for a man” — the “a” was lost in transmission.)
That line came to mind on June 29, when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that Heather Evans will become Canada’s next Commissioner of Revenue effective July 13 – fittingly, days before the moon landing’s 57th anniversary. Evans has led the Canadian Tax Foundation since 2016 and was previously national managing partner of tax for a Big Four professional services firm. I have known Heather from my years in Foundation leadership, including as its chair before her tenure, and hold her in high regard.
“Revenue Canada”, formerly a government department, was converted into the Canada Revenue Agency in 1999 – freed from Treasury Board’s grip and given its own board of management, precisely to import private-sector discipline. While the org chart changed, the instincts never did. Heather’s appointment is a first: every commissioner since its creation came from within government. She arrives directly from the private tax community. The Union of Taxation Employees is “cautiously optimistic”. So am I, though for different reasons.
The CRA has a vitally important – and very difficult – job administering the Income Tax Act and numerous other statutes. However, it administers the law. It does not write it. Within the commissioner’s administrative authority, though, lie meaningful small steps – and Canadians should insist they be real ones.
Real ones? We’ve just lived through the alternative. Last September, after Minister Champagne publicly declared the CRA’s service delays “unacceptable,” the agency launched a “100-Day Plan”. In late October, the Auditor General released a scathing report on the agency’s call centres, and the plan’s true origin became obvious: the government had the report in advance and was managing the damage. When day 100 arrived on December 11, the results were what I predicted: bureaucratic and political self-congratulation. The 100-Day Plan wasn’t one small step. It was a moonwalk – a performance of motion, with the root causes left exactly where they were.
To be fair, some argue the plan produced real improvements and was the kick in the pants the CRA needed. Perhaps. But practitioners have documented many of the CRA’s issues for years, with no meaningful response. If it took an Auditor General’s report – and a minister’s political need to get ahead of it – to finally administer the kick, that is not a defense of the plan. It is an indictment of the culture – one that responds to headlines, but not to Canadians and their advisors who deal with it daily.
Culture is where the new commissioner’s real small steps lie. Her first test arrives immediately: in February, the government announced that public servants must work onsite four days a week; the CRA will implement the change in late July, unevenly. That lands two weeks after Evans takes office, with the same “cautiously optimistic” union having filed unfair labour practice complaints. I encourage Heather to see this through. Tax – including its administration – is a craft best learned shoulder-to-shoulder, not transmitted through a screen.
Goals measure progress, but vision decides which progress matters. A practical framework for founders who want their companies to create value without consuming their lives.
Next, change how the agency listens. Formal consultations with CPA Canada, the Canadian Tax Foundation and the Canadian Bar Association are valuable but polite – filtered through organizational diplomacy. I’d encourage the establishment of a standing advisory committee of individual practitioners from across Canada to hear, unfiltered, what is actually happening on the ground. Pair that with genuine two-way secondments – Interchange Canada exists for exactly this – and the 1999 promise of an “agency” with private-sector discipline might finally mean something.
Another small step would be to publish an updated formal policy on administering proposed but not legislated tax measures. The 2024 capital gains debacle – taxpayers pushed to file, pay and plan on a proposal that ultimately died – was the worst example. Administration should begin only once a bill is tabled, sunset automatically if legislation stalls, and carry automatic interest and penalty relief when proposals die or materially change. No one is better positioned to champion this than a commissioner who watched the wreckage from the receiving end.
These are small steps. The giant leap – comprehensive tax review and reform – is beyond any commissioner’s reach. The first and only comprehensive review of Canada’s tax system was the Royal Commission on Taxation, which released its report in 1966, leading to significant reforms in 1972. There has been some tinkering since, but tinkering is not reform – and only Parliament can deliver it. Still, a commissioner is not voiceless – she can improve the administrative application of the law and formally recommend improvements to the Minister of Finance. A commissioner from the trenches saying exactly that would be worth a dozen 100-day plans.
One caution: excellent tax credentials do not automatically make an excellent leader of one of government’s largest organizations. Moving from a Big Four firm, to leading a small but influential foundation, to leading more than 50,000 employees is a different order of challenge – given the stakeholders: the public, her employees, practitioners, academics, the justice community from the Tax Court to the Supreme Court, international peers, and her political bosses. But the Foundation job is itself an exercise in balancing competing constituencies, and Evans has done it with distinction. Few outsiders arrive better prepared.
Armstrong’s small step only mattered because of the giant leap it represented. Ms. Evans takes her own first step on July 13. If her steps are real ones – measured in outcomes rather than press releases – and if the government supplies the reform ambition that only Parliament can, then one small step for the CRA might yet become a giant leap for taxpayers: a better tax system for the benefit of all Canadians.
This time, let’s lose nothing in transmission.
The Humility Paradox
Popular culture trains us to picture great leaders as bold, magnetic, larger-than-life: the person who dominates the room and never doubts themselves out loud. It’s a compelling image. It’s also a myth. According to some of the best research ever done on the subject, largely wrong.
Jim Collins ran into this directly while researching Good to Great, his study of companies that went from merely good to truly exceptional and stayed that way for decades. He and his team expected to find swaggering, celebrity-style executives at the helm of these outliers. Instead, they kept encountering something almost unremarkable: quiet, modest, occasionally even shy people who deflected credit and shouldered blame. Collins named them Level 5 Leaders – the top rung of a five-level hierarchy of executive capability, above the merely “highly capable individual,” “contributing team member,” “competent manager,” and “effective leader” who can drive strong short-term results but nothing more durable.
What makes Level 5 leadership unusual is that it isn’t humility instead of ambition – it’s humility fused with an almost stubborn will. These leaders are ferociously ambitious, but the ambition points outward, at the institution, the mission, the team, rather than inward at their own reputation. When results are good, they credit their people, circumstance, even luck. When results are bad, they look in the mirror first. That’s a near-total inversion of how most of us are wired to explain success and failure – we tend to claim credit and externalize blame – which is exactly why this trait is so rare and so hard to fake.
It’s also frequently misread as weakness.
Humility in a leader often gets mistaken for a lack of conviction, or an unwillingness to make the hard call. The research says the opposite: the professional will inside a Level 5 leader is often steelier than that of their more self-promoting peers. They just don’t need anyone to witness it.
Quiet resolve, not the absence of resolve.
I’d add one practical observation from years of watching entrepreneurs and executives up close: humility compounds trust in a way that charisma cannot. Teams forgive an honest “I got that wrong” far more readily than they forgive a leader who can never be wrong. Ditto for leaders who are quick to admit their failings. And customers, partners, and boards extend the benefit of the doubt to people who’ve shown they don’t need to inflate themselves to be taken seriously.
Humility isn’t a soft trait bolted onto leadership – properly understood, it’s one of the load-bearing walls.
Elbows Down: When Boycotting the United States Isn’t Bravery, It’s Bad Math
Canada just recently celebrated its 159th birthday on July 1, 2026. The United States recently celebrated its 250th birthday on July 4, 2026. Both are amazing milestones and to be celebrated for sure. The two countries have a long and varied history. It’s fair to say, however, that both countries have relied on each other during the years and that’s not changing anytime soon.
I was thinking of this history recently when some friends told me they have cancelled their annual trip to Arizona this coming fall. Not because of cost, or scheduling, or anything to do with the destination itself – they just couldn’t bring themselves to spend money in a country run by Donald Trump.
I’ve heard versions of this story dozens of times over the past eighteen months or so: the neighbor who switched wine merchants because their government-controlled liquor store pulled American labels off the shelf, the acquaintance proudly telling me he’s “elbows up” on principle. I wrote about the shallowness of this thinking in a previous newsletter, and nothing that’s happened since has changed my mind. If anything, it’s gotten worse – because now it’s not just individuals virtue-signalling at the liquor store, it’s supposedly serious national policy.
Let’s start with what’s real. The tariff war Trump has waged against Canada is genuinely damaging. Canadian goods exports to the U.S. fell nearly 6% in 2025, and our overall goods trade deficit widened to its largest since 2020. That’s not imagined grievance – it’s showing up in the numbers, and it’s reasonable for Canadians to be angry about it.
But being angry about the disruption and responding to it intelligently are two different things.
Start with scale, because scale is where this entire boycott-and-diversify impulse falls apart. In 2025, U.S.-Canada goods trade alone totalled $719.5 billion. Total EU-Canada trade — goods and services combined — was $178.6 billion. The EU is genuinely our second-largest trading partner, and I have no objection to deepening that relationship. But it is not a replacement for the U.S. market, and no amount of frequent-flyer miles changes that math.
After a year of touring 26 countries and signing a string of memoranda and “strategic partnerships,” the needle on our U.S. export dependence moved from 75.9% to 71.7% of goods exports. That’s a decent shift. Deals with Indonesia, Japan LNG, expanded ties with India are sensible, opportunistic moves. But as a substitute for the American relationship, four points of movement after a year of global theatre tells you everything about the actual scale of what’s achievable here.
And it isn’t just trade flows that give the lie to “elbows up.” Despite the boycotts and the rhetoric, Canada remained a net lender to the United States for the ninth straight year in 2025, according to TD Bank economist Maria Solovieva. In the third quarter alone, Canadian households, businesses, and governments acquired more than $230 billion in U.S. assets, on pace for roughly $255 billion for the year – eight per cent of our GDP. U.S. investment flowing the other way was about $150 billion, or just over five per cent of Canadian GDP. Canadians, in other words, are putting their money into America at nearly double the rate America is putting money into us – even as they refuse to buy the wine. If you want to know what people actually believe about the U.S. economy, watch where the capital goes, not what they say on social media.
There’s also a structural reality that gets ignored every time someone points to Europe as the model. The EU can diversify aggressively because its starting exposure to the U.S. is already low – roughly 20% of its trade. Canada’s starting point is the opposite: our supply chains, especially in autos, energy, and manufacturing, are wired directly into the American economy at a depth Europe never had. Auto parts cross the Canada-U.S.-Mexico border up to seven or eight times before a vehicle is finished. You don’t unwind that kind of integration with a few signing ceremonies in Yerevan and Jakarta. Pretending we can run the European playbook here isn’t a strategy – it’s a category error. And signing trade deals with China is obviously concerning. But, of course, all of this is good politics and good fodder for the financially illiterate voter base.
Which brings me to the boycotts themselves – the liquor store delistings, the discouraged travel, the “elbows up” branding exercise. None of it touches a single trade statistic. Not one. What it does do is cost Canadian businesses – the wine shop that loses a category, the tourism operator who loses American visitors when Washington inevitably reciprocates the cold shoulder – while poisoning the well with the one partner we will absolutely need at the table.
None of this is really a “strategy” being executed with any coherence, either. It’s twenty-six trips, a dozen partial agreements, and a lot of motion mistaken for progress – the appearance of momentum standing in for the substance of a plan. If the actual objective is Canadian prosperity, motion isn’t the metric. Trade volume, investment, and market access are the metrics, and on those, the American relationship still dwarfs everything else combined, by a factor of four.
The alternative isn’t complicated, and it isn’t nostalgic either. Pursue new markets where they make sense – genuinely, opportunistically, without illusions that they substitute for what we have. And simultaneously, work to repair and stabilize the relationship with the country that buys almost 72% of what we sell, shares the longest undefended border in the world, and remains – tariffs and all – the most important economic partnership this country has ever had. That’s just simple arithmetic.
My friends still haven’t been back to Arizona. I don’t doubt their sincerity. But sincerity isn’t the same thing as sound judgment, and a country can’t afford to confuse the two any more than an individual can. Diversification is sensible. Pretending we can economically ghost our largest partner is delusional.
So, skip the slogans and celebrate our two countries’ milestones and its history. And buy your neighbor a beer, a glass of wine, or even a bottle of Crown Royal. American made or not.
Bonus Comment – Attributed To Harry S. Truman – 33rd President of the United States – About Humble Leaders
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
Exactly. Leaders, you don’t need to take the credit for accomplishments to be a great leader. Quite the opposite in fact.
Money sayings can quietly shape fear, spending, and self-worth. Use Garrett Gunderson's Money Language Audit to question old phrases and choose a better rule today.
