Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.The decline of merit is the story of modern Canada. It began as a slow corrosion under Justin Trudeau, whose rise was fuelled by name recognition and emotional politics rather than achievement. It deepened under Chrystia Freeland, who turned fiscal management into performance art. And it has continued under Mark Carney, whose credentials might suggest competence but whose actions have proven the opposite. These are not isolated examples; they are milestones on a national journey away from merit and toward mediocrity.Meritocracy is not a privilege but a safeguard. It ensures that those entrusted with power can understand and manage the systems that sustain a country. In the private sector, failure leads to replacement; the incompetent are fired, not re-elected. In politics, failure now often leads to promotion. A government cabinet should resemble a company’s board of directors — people with relevant skills able to provide the guidance needed for success, not failure. A functioning democracy depends on one principle above all: that responsibility should be earned, not gifted, and that credentials without competence are as dangerous as charisma without integrity.Trudeau’s tenure marked the point where Canada began to confuse representation with qualification. His vision of a cabinet “that looks like Canada” was framed as progressive but in truth marked a rejection of merit as the standard for leadership. Diversity of identity replaced diversity of thought. In practice, appointments were made not to balance skill but to project inclusivity. The results were predictable: ministers unable to defend their portfolios, unprepared to handle crises, and uninterested in learning. Policy was replaced by messaging; economics by emotion. Canada’s productivity stagnated, debt ballooned, and the federal bureaucracy expanded without direction. Trudeau’s personal background — thin, theatrical, and devoid of economic or managerial experience — set the tone for an administration that treated governance as an extension of performance.Chrystia Freeland’s rise within that system symbolised the triumph of narrative over knowledge. A journalist by training, with no formal education in economics or finance, she inherited the most demanding portfolio in government. Her experience in storytelling became a substitute for technical skill. A nation’s budget was treated as a moral tale rather than a balance sheet. Deficits were reframed as “investments,” and fiscal restraint as cruelty. The result was a sustained pattern of overspending that eroded competitiveness and tied the central bank’s hands. During the pandemic, Freeland’s ministry blurred the line between fiscal and monetary policy to the point that the Bank of Canada became a financier of government priorities. Inflation — predictable and predicted — followed..Freeland’s defenders argue that she is intelligent and articulate, which may be true. But intelligence is not expertise, and articulation is not understanding. Her tenure revealed the cost of political appointments untethered from meritocratic principles. The Finance Minister’s job demands analytical rigour, quantitative discipline, and a grasp of trade, credit, and capital markets. It is not an internship in storytelling. Freeland’s decisions reflected ideological alignment with Trudeau, not economic competence. Canada’s debt load, productivity decline, and regulatory paralysis were symptoms of a government that did not understand how economies grow.Mark Carney’s ascent was supposed to be the correction — the moment when expertise returned to Ottawa. On paper, he is the ideal candidate: a Ph.D. in economics, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and a veteran of international finance. In practice, his leadership has been technocratic, insulated, and disappointingly familiar. He inherited the Trudeau playbook and followed it faithfully. His government continues to expand spending beyond revenue, entrench overregulation, and subordinate private enterprise to ideological compliance. For all his credentials, Carney has governed like a bureaucrat, not a reformer. His approach to trade, particularly with the United States, has been reactive and ineffectual. His handling of Canada’s fiscal imbalance shows the same disregard for market reality that defined his predecessor’s tenure.The irony is sharp: a man trained in economics appears not to grasp its simplest law — that prosperity cannot be decreed. Regulation without productivity, spending without growth, and taxation without restraint lead inevitably to decline. Carney’s government has doubled down on the regulatory burdens strangling Canada’s resource sectors, from forestry to energy to mining. These industries once anchored the national economy. Now they are treated as environmental liabilities rather than strategic assets, killing the golden geese that sustained prosperity. The result is visible in stagnating investment, job losses, and regional alienation. An economist who understood comparative advantage would work to restore competitiveness, not bury it under red tape.What unites Trudeau, Freeland, and Carney is not ideology but detachment from consequence. None have been required to live by the results of their decisions. Trudeau was insulated by privilege, Freeland by narrative, Carney by institutional pedigree. Each rose through systems that rewarded image, loyalty, or credentialism — not performance. Their governance reflects that insulation. Canada is ruled by people who have never had to run a business, balance a budget, or endure the market consequences of failure. Without that grounding, abstract ideals replace empirical judgment..A true meritocracy selects for competence, not conformity. It does not ask what a person looks like or believes but what they can do. Its test is objective: performance. Canada once upheld that standard. Its civil service, universities, and industries were led by people who earned authority through results. That ethos produced both prosperity and stability. But over the past generation, merit has been redefined as privilege, and excellence treated as exclusion. The result is a governing class that apologizes for success while mismanaging the very institutions that once embodied it.Reversing this decline requires more than new leaders; it requires new rules. Merit must be measurable. Cabinet appointments should be subject to objective qualification reviews, including professional and academic assessments relevant to their portfolios — much like the rigorous vetting process required for US cabinet nominees. Public accountability must shift from rhetoric to results, with clear, quantifiable performance metrics for ministers and departments. Parliament must reclaim legislative authority from the courts by defining, in law, the boundaries of judicial interpretation. The bureaucracy must be downsized—not for ideology’s sake but to restore responsiveness and competence.The private sector can no longer be treated as an enemy. Economic sustainability depends on productive capacity, not moral posturing. Canada’s resource industries, once the foundation of its wealth, have been throttled by regulation justified under the guise of “sustainability.” In practice, this has meant exporting opportunity while importing energy, moralizing at home while investing abroad. A government grounded in merit would distinguish environmental stewardship from ideological paralysis. It would recognize that only prosperous societies can afford to protect nature, and that growth and conservation are not enemies but partners when governed by reason.The re-establishment of merit also requires cultural change. Citizens must again expect competence, not charisma, from those who seek power. Elections must become contests of ability, not contests of identity. That will not happen until voters themselves value knowledge and discipline as civic virtues. The decay of political literacy has enabled the rise of leaders who cannot lead. Rebuilding a culture of meritocracy means rebuilding a public that demands it..Some may point to Canada’s courts or indigenous policy as separate examples of the same drift. Judicial activism has expanded constitutional principles like “the Honour of the Crown” beyond their legal origins, creating parallel systems of entitlement unmoored from accountability. These are not isolated judicial errors but symptoms of the same failure of governance. When legislatures abdicate their duties to define policy clearly, judges fill the vacuum. The result is the same: power without accountability, decisions without measurable success.Meritocracy is not elitism. It is fairness in its truest form — the assurance that opportunity follows ability, and that leadership is earned, not inherited or imposed. It is the antidote to both the tyranny of ideology and the chaos of populism. Canada cannot rebuild its economy, its institutions, or its unity without rediscovering that truth.Just as the Leviathan in myth was meant to guard the depths but eventually turned on them, so too has the modern state grown from protector to predator. Hobbes’s artificial man was built for security, yet through its swelling power it now resembles the dragon from which it once promised shelter. The creature that once guarded order now devours it.But dragons can be slain, or at least tamed, by citizens who remember that government is their servant, not their master. Restoring merit is the first step in reclaiming that order. Canada’s decline is reversible, but only if its people insist that competence once again be the measure of authority.When nations forget that principle, decline is inevitable. When they remember it, renewal begins. Canada still has that choice. It is time to make it.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.
