When Business Feels like Government
A Warning from the Chamber Floor
Last night, I walked into an event hosted by the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce, framed as a listening session. I assumed it would be about business.
It felt like government.
And that should scare the hell out of anyone who actually builds things.
Because when the machinery of enterprise starts echoing the rituals of bureaucracy—when entrepreneurs, operators, and builders are expected to sit quietly while "community leaders" explain their plan for us—we’ve already surrendered something vital.
We’ve let the creative become compliant.
We’ve allowed the customer to become the regulated subject.
We’ve permitted leadership to be confused with management.
Where are you, Victoria entrepreneurs? Don’t tell me you’re too busy. Really—don’t. You’ll just get an education you didn’t ask for and probably won’t appreciate my delivery.
Policy Theatre vs. Systems Reality
Performative policy talk is the background noise of decline. It makes everyone feel heard—but changes nothing. The format is predictable: the panel, the pre-screened Q&A, the PowerPoint deck with soft curves and big promises.
Last night was a case study. Laurel Collins and Will Greaves took turns reciting a parade of tokenism, apologies, celebrations, grievances, reflections, concerns, and ungrounded visions—a soporific stream of words with no relevance to the economic reality faced by builders. Not a single actionable message for business leaders. Not one. And not a single business question from the room. Crickets.
I had to leave for a bit before I made a scene—not because I wasn’t heard, but because no one else seemed to notice we, owners, were being played.
Elizabeth May, to her credit, landed a few grounded insights from her time in legal practice. There was logic there, hints of principle. But otherwise, it was as if Dr. Grant Cool was the only business person in the room—at a Chamber event. That’s terrifying. And exactly why we must stand with entrepreneurs like Grant—people who actually build things that work.
The problem isn’t that our politicians don’t understand business. It’s that most business leaders no longer demand action. They nod politely while their relevance is regulated away.
And here’s the data punch to the gut: business license issuance in Victoria has plateaued and declined, even as cost of living, red tape, and regulatory drag have surged. The city’s entrepreneurial class isn’t expanding—it’s eroding. We’re not seeing a boom. We’re witnessing a slow bleed dressed as dialogue.
To make matters worse, financial disclosures show that many sitting municipal officials have no small business equity, no entrepreneurial debt, and no exposure to the volatility of the private market they claim to steward. Some list only pension-backed income and mutual funds. That’s not skin in the game. That’s insulation.
Zoom out, and the provincial picture is worse. According to the Fraser Institute’s 2025 update:
BC’s per-person program spending jumped 32.5% between 2016/17 and 2022/23, nearly ten times higher than during the restraint era’s 0.5% growth.
The debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to explode to 27.4% by 2026/27—over four times higher than if restraint policies had continued (6.0%).
If the BC NDP had simply followed their own 2022 budget, the province would have run a $26.1 billion surplus over three years. Instead, they engineered a $9.2 billion deficit.
This isn’t just fiscal mismanagement. It’s a decade of decline—beginning under under the BC NDP, and perpetuated by the federal NDP-Liberal Coalition. No meaningful change. Just different captains steering the same sinking ship.
It’s time to put business and Canada first for a change.
Take Back the Room—or Be Erased by It
Entrepreneurs: this is your wake-up call. If you keep treating policy sessions like sacred space and not battlefields, you’ll lose the very terrain you once owned.
Every time you sit quietly in the back row while mediocrity takes the mic, you co-sign your own erasure.
This is not a call for better participation in politics. It’s a call to build something so powerful, so precise, so undeniably useful that it outcompetes policy theater.
Because in the end, history doesn’t remember who had the best opinions. It remembers who built the machine that ran the future.
And we should be building that machine.
This isn’t just a post. It’s a provocation. If it stung—good. Grow a spine, and move.