Attempting to get a voice with the mainstream Financial media

Submitted the following text to this notorious Toronto based Canadian publication for consideration. It's an election year at the Federal level in 2019 so perhaps pure political motivation will be a catalyst to solve the problematic issue with Defined Benefit Pension Plans.

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Dear B2G IT start-up. We’re the Government and we don’t want your technology nor your money!

The summary journey of an entrepreneur determined to solve the Defined Benefit (DB) pension plans crisis around the word, with the collaboration of the Canadian Federal Government and by the same token, get our own house in order.

Tom Charette's piece on December 13th addressed to small business owners struck more than a cord; more like a number of cords and notes on a Gibson. Here’s my story as an IT start-up trying to make inroads with the Federal governments under both the Harper and Trudeau regimes.

 For close to the last 5 years, with some ‘’slowing down’’ periods to take some contractual mandates as a project manager so I can eat and pay the bills, I have been rocking the cages of all three levels of governments to get visibility on solving this very unstable house of cards in Canada.

 With the Trudeau government it ended up backfiring on me. Big time!

The objective was essentially, to introduce a completely collaborative innovative idea via a PPP commercial agreement with my government by using the R&D work done to develop the architecture of an IT e-solution resting on business and artificial intelligence technological foundations to revolutionise the financial and administrative management of DB pension plans. Starting with the ones provided by the Federal Government to its employees and via government sponsored supplemental retirement income programs make strategic sense to get the provinces and the Canadian private industry on board! We could even consider PPPPs - an approach gaining traction and introduced by Professor Henry Mintzberg - Public, Private, Plural, Partnerships. Canada can become a global beacon by introducing this wonderful unifying idea as opposed to the very divisive initiatives that seem to be introduced in various parts of the world. 

These types of agreement are done regularly in more traditional tangible civil engineering projects. Other countries have developed them to support very large virtual engineering software/solution development endeavors. Said types of agreements are even more relevant and needed when the pain points we are attempting to solve span all Canadian business sectors, in a highly regulated product, that needs a complete regulatory overhaul. Such is the scenario here with DB plans.

As I was attempting to get visibility via the front doors of different Ministries in Ottawa – Finance, Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Small Business, without any influential lobbying, I got invited to a 1500.00 CAD $ price tag cocktail to become member of the Liberal Party of Canada’s Laurier Club which I refused to attend for various reasons.

The media coverage on December 7th, 2016 gives a good synopsis of the entire saga….  Globe and Mail, CTV National News, CBC Radio 1 the Pay to Play section although there are numerous typos in the transcript unfortunately - you will nonetheless get the gist.

So not only is our government making it extremely difficult for small business owners to survive amidst the heavy bureaucratic layers, when you try to conduct business based on the merit of the project versus joining the ‘’political elite’’ to get it done, then the entrepreneurs essentially end up cutting off their noses to spite their faces. This is what I did!

Oh! and last option join the Council of Canadian Innovators for a mere 10 K.

Incidentally, I did get accepted by a Silicon Valley-Montreal based accelerator back in October 2016 – a few weeks before the US Presidential elections. With a two-year commitment for both parties, and the fact that no Republican government (State, Local and Federal) would even contemplate implementing such a far more transparent and seamless technology than the existing antiquated ones used to manage DB plans in the US, we had commonly decided to place the project on ‘’ice’’ at that moment.

So, the fork in the road when it comes to large IT projects targeting the public sectors is either the Phoenix pay system on track to costs taxpayers $2.2-billion in unplanned costs by 2023 and provided by IBM aka The Big Blue, or working with innovative small entrepreneurs whose vision is just to solve the problem as opposed to making billions off the taxpayers' backs.

 Shall we let the constituents decide?

__________________________________________________________________________As always I welcome comments, suggestions and constructive feedback with my thanks in advance to all.

Waiting to hear from the editor of the Financial Post.

Sylvie