James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.Watching the news cycle in 2026 is like watching a film played at five times its intended speed. Crisis piles upon crisis, outrage chases outrage, and the public is left breathless beneath a relentless barrage of commentary. There is no shortage of words. No shortage of declarations. What there is, what is now unmistakably absent, is action.That distinction, between words and deeds, has become the central fault line of modern leadership.It would be comforting to believe the noise is accidental, merely the by-product of a crowded media landscape and a hyper-connected world. But one begins to suspect the opposite, that the noise is the point. Distraction as strategy. Exhaustion as governance. Keep citizens busy arguing about tomorrow’s manufactured panic and they will never quite notice today’s failures.Consider the media hysteria surrounding Donald Trump’s comments on Greenland. For weeks, Canadian legacy outlets, CBC foremost among them, have treated speculation as fact, spinning fevered tales of invasion and imperial ambition. Trump has said many things. What he has not said is that he intends to invade Greenland. That inconvenient detail, however, rarely survives long in a newsroom addicted to narrative over evidence.What we get instead is conjecture piled upon conjecture, commentary that reveals far more about the ideological, and dare one say emotional, fragility of the pundit class than it does about Trump himself.Now compare that noise with action..When Nicolás Maduro was captured, the media erupted, not in analysis, but in outrage. Yet what really occurred? President Trump executed arrests based on indictments issued by previous administrations, supported by allied nations, and reinforced by a $25 million bounty approved under Joe Biden. This was not recklessness. It was follow-through.More revealing still was what Trump did not do. He did not topple Venezuela’s government. He did not unleash chaos upon an already suffering population. He acted with force, yes, but also with restraint. That nuance, inconvenient and untheatrical, is intolerable to a media culture that prefers villains to facts.And yet we are asked to believe that this same man would recklessly destabilize foreign governments across the globe, including ours, with idle talk of invasion and tyranny. The claim collapses under even minimal scrutiny, teetering somewhere between fiction and psychosis.Turn next to Europe, those self-appointed custodians of “liberal democracy.”When Trump accuses European governments of suppressing free speech and sidelining political opponents, the response is aristocratic sneers and ritualized moral outrage. But again, actions betray words, and the numbers are instructive.More citizens have been arrested in England for so-called “communications offences” than in Russia for political speech, over 12,000 arrests in England compared to 189 criminal speech cases in Russia. British officials may laugh at Trump’s accusations, but their enforcement record tells a rather less flattering story about the state of democratic tolerance..France fares no better. President Macron has relied on procedural manoeuvres and legal pressure to keep Marine Le Pen and her party at bay. Charges are pressed, not to uphold justice, but to manage electoral outcomes. So much for liberté. Once again, the rhetoric soars while the conduct quietly corroborates Trump’s critique.And then there is Canada.Prime Minister Mark Carney has shown himself eager to emulate Europe’s elite consensus politics while pursuing deeper ties with the totalitarian regime in China, an elbow, if not a thumb, in the eye of our largest ally and most important trading partner. His minority government has constrained him, for now, but not for lack of ambition. He has attempted to entice Conservative MPs to cross the floor in pursuit of the majority he craves. Thus far, the effort appears to be failing.But leadership is not revealed by ambition. It is revealed by action.Carney promised toughness with the United States over tariffs in defence of Canadian jobs. His action, however, has been to avoid meaningful engagement with Washington while enthusiastically courting Europe and China, going so far as to flirt rhetorically with a “new world order.” I would say that a New World Order was a core plank in the Liberal campaign last spring, but that is a joke, of course. The Liberals promised no such thing to Canadians, and Mr. Carney himself once labelled China as Canada’s foremost security threat. Evidently, a great deal has changed since April..Canadians were promised momentum. They received inertia. They were promised fast-tracked, nation-building projects. What they have witnessed instead is bureaucratic paralysis so profound it threatens to make Justin Trudeau’s tenure appear efficient by comparison.Nowhere is this failure more visible than in the pipeline file.The Prime Minister is the one individual in Canada with the authority to move this forward. He could have convened premiers, indigenous leaders, and industry, declared the project a national priority, imposed firm three-month timelines for negotiations, streamlined approvals, demanded results, and driven the process forward.Had he done so, shovels might already be in the ground on the most consequential nation-building project of this century. Instead, not a teaspoon of dirt has been turned.This is not leadership. It is procrastination.Nor has this inaction gone unnoticed. It is observed in Washington, in Europe, in Asia, and most closely of all, in Alberta. Movement was promised. Paralysis was delivered.Albertans are not ideological romantics. They are practical people. If Ottawa will not act, they will. No speeches. No virtue signaling. In the West, action does not require permission or applause.Canada deserved better than this federal government. If action does not come from Ottawa, it will come from elsewhere, and when it does, it will be decisive.James Albers is a Calgary-based management consultant specializing in leadership development.
