I recently read Jamie Watt’s book entitled “What I Wish I Said - Confessions of a Columnist”. It’s an excellent collection of columns he’s written for the Toronto Star over the past five years, with extremely honest, refreshing and candid takes looking back on his work.
Jamie wrote a column on January 5th of this year that I think is extremely noteworthy, looking back through the lens of our activities at that time with Centre Ice. The title of the column was “In 2023, Canadians Deserve a Grand Vision from our Political Leaders”.
At the time that column was published, Centre Ice had been around for nearly 10 months. We had quickly evolved from a Conservative platform to one that represented a wider scope of Canadian voices. And so we changed our name to reflect that.
We were getting ready for the third of our three policy conferences that attracted speakers and attendees from all three major federal political parties to sites in Edmonton, Halifax and Toronto. And, most importantly, as our numbers swelled from a dozen of us who started this in March of 2022 to more than 2,000 people who’d signed up on our email list by January of 2023, we were hearing loud and clear the desire for this movement to evolve into a political party. It’s clear that everyone on board Centre Ice was already contributing to a national conversation on a vision for the future of Canada.
Without knowing it, Jamie Watt wrote an article that essentially captured the essence of where Centre Ice was at the time, and where we were going. He called for a grand, national vision for Canada, and wrote that was too important a task to leave for today’s political leaders. His op-ed was a call for someone to start this conversation, and act on it. We were already doing the heavy lifting on this conversation.
Here are some key passages in his column that stand out for me:
“Politicians can, and will, skirmish around the issues of the day. But those debates only take us so far…Now what? What does Canada’s future look like? What are we going to commit ourselves to?...As we’ve seen, the answer is not one we can leave to the politicians to divine. In fact, we’d be fools if we waited for them. Let’s not forget that our political system militates against transformation
“Rather, it is time we got to work and did it ourselves. It is time for us to have that great national conversation - much talked about but not yet initiated.
“When we do, can we ground it in something other than hopelessness and despair? Let’s undertake the discussion with the fundamental belief that this is a great country, one with a rich history of punching well above its weight, with a population that is one of the most diverse in the world, and with natural resources that are the envy or many.”
A few weeks after that column was published, after our federal budget preview policy conference in Toronto in late February, we did indeed get to work at Centre Ice Canadians.
We invested what, for us, was a lot of money in a national survey to see if there was support for our efforts. And we found that there was - in a huge way.
We launched a process to identify volunteers, financial support and leadership that would be necessary to start a new party from zero. And we found it all.
We raised money to sustain our operations and assured that our budget was balanced, our expenses fully paid off and we wound up our efforts with a clean slate. We checked that box earlier this week.
And on September 20th, a group of Centre Ice supporters led by our Advisory Council Chair, Dominic Cardy, took the first step in launching a new party.
I’ve never seen or experienced anything like this in my 30+ years of political activity in Canada. We’re doing something special. We’re engaging in a national conversation, similar to what Jamie Watt wrote about. We are drawing up a grand vision for Canada. We are offering, with Our Canadian Future, something tangible, real and full of potential for Canadians to see and judge in the months and, hopefully, years ahead.
It’s been more than a pleasure to be on this journey with you. It’s been the honour of a lifetime. We’ve still got work to do, but we’ve already accomplished something that I think is of historic proportions in the realm of federal Canadian politics: a truly national, grassroots movement of Canadians who want to do politics differently.
Thank you again for everything you’ve done for Centre Ice Canadians. And we’ll see you over at Our Canadian Future, where I have become a Founding Member.
I hope you’ll join me.
Rick Peterson
Co-founder & Director
Centre Ice Canadians
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