Five Key Ideas to Improve Canada

Significantly reducing costs in a few sectors and being innovative in others

I have worked in many sectors for various groups and have tried to push each sector to think and act differently, more effectively. Perhaps now is the time for these ideas to grow.

Social Services
My Background: I was an Executive Director for two social service agencies in Toronto and GTA. I founded and ran one in Toronto. I expanded another and was thrilled that one of our health programs was picked up by York Region. They were the right choice.

1) Integrate existing services rather than duplicate them. Our “wrap-around” approach helped homeless single mothers and individuals with mental health challenges get employed at half the typical cost.
We had a linear process with various stages to help each client achieve the end outcome – a job. Instead of creating all new programming, we researched what was already available and asked them to do their programming at our site. We used outside agencies to provide comprehensive programming such as employment placement, youth sports programming, housing assistance, Second Harvest food and a Toronto School board educator to help our mothers prepare for the GED. This one-stop site combined education, social services, employment services, sports and housing.

2) Military Transition – It seems inevitable that we will need to increase our military budget to 2% of GDP. Here is one way to increase our budget through investment.
My Background: Operated a wellness centre for Veterans with mental Health issues in Petawawa and have authored a book to help Military members transition with purpose and identity.

Create opportunities for veterans and transitioning members to apply their skills and knowledge towards military innovation. Recommend allocating part of Canada’s military budget to support a pre-transition program that values a soldier’s expertise and can accommodate their physical and/or mental health needs AND that keep them from transitioning. They just move to a different department that focuses on military innovations. Apparently, we have one division that does this already in Gagetown. The United States excels in creating innovations that are then adopted by civilians. Why not invest in Canadian talent, keep some members from transitioning and then look to sell innovations worldwide as well?
Military Proposal gained some interest, but had no financial support to begin the program

3) Colleges and Universities
My Background: I taught business courses for five years at two different colleges in Ontario and attended University up to an MBA program
Colleges were beginning to introduce diplomas and insisting that our Masters degrees were no longer enough. We needed PHD’s. Colleges were not meant to compete with universities. They were meant to offer necessary trades training.

We should continue to align business programs with the trades, but make them with a more entrepreneurial focus instead of a general focus that is geared to helping students go to university.

Convert surplus building space in universities and colleges into entrepreneurial hubs for graduates to use to build new businesses, connecting teachers and other students in a team approach and finally force each college and university to specialize and not be everything to everyone.

4) Economic Development
My Background: For twenty years, I have been focused on helping “high risk” clients get jobs so I have spent time researching and following key market trends.
I am currently pitching a large project that will combine the above fields to create numerous small business opportunities to fulfill national and international needs. From my recent experience, governments need to create opportunities for entrepreneurs to pilot initiatives that do not just reflect the going interest such as AI or a few large industries. There are so many other opportunities, but we are ignoring them. For example, a soon-to-be waste crisis could also be an opportunity to create enviro packaging whose current market is about $270 billion and growing.

5) Cross-Sector Integration
My Background- over 20 years of experience integrating all necessary partners to achieve shared outcomes
Canada may be a large country, but we have a small population. This is an opportunity for us to use cross-sectional approaches similar to a domestic supply chain, but exploring partnership opportunities that may not be obvious to one group, but combined becomes something exciting. While bringing more money into Canada is critical, it is also very important to cut costs in the non-profit sectors and actually look for ways that could actually improve client outcomes. Organizations need to return to what they do well and then work with other organizations to offer more for less. The time is right for Canada to not only explore more diversification in our trading, but also explore more ways to partner and diversify our innovating.

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