Nobody’s Coming to the Rescue

In this episode of Leviathan Must Be Stopped®, I’m joined by my longtime friend Steve Fretwell. Steve and I have known each other for decades through the insurance and pension world, and we begin with what we’re both seeing in our respective practices — the mood of clients, the pressure on business owners, and the sense that something fundamental has shifted in this country.

It doesn’t take much prompting these days for people to explain what concerns them. Wherever they are in Canada, the themes are remarkably consistent: housing affordability, immigration levels, productivity, crime, the general cost of living. What’s different now is that these aren’t abstract policy debates. People are describing their own experiences. They’re describing what’s happening in their communities.

At one point Steve says something that cuts through all of it: “Nobody is coming to the rescue.” 

If Canada is going to regain its economic strength and cultural confidence, it will be because Canadians decide to take responsibility for it.

The conversation then moves to something more enduring. Steve has become a military artist, drawing on Canada’s naval and air force history and interpreting it through an abstract lens. His work hangs in homes and offices across the country, not as decoration, but as a reminder of sacrifice, competence, and a generation that punched above its weight and expected more of itself.

See Steve Fretwell's art at:

https://www.stevefretwellart.com/

Instagram: steve_fretwell_art

This episode moves from business, to politics, to history, and ultimately to responsibility. If we are serious about stopping Leviathan, we must first decide that the work is ours to do.

Trevor Parry has an encyclopedic knowledge of tax and an unmatched determination that you will pay less of it. 

A lawyer with exceptional academic credentials and a profound believer in personal responsibility, he is on a crusade against the overreaching mega-state. 

For Trevor, creating Canada’s most innovative tax-saving strategies is not a job. It is a calling. 

There remain but a few strategies for starving #Leviathan of tax, and but a few experts who can execute them.

#leviathanmustbestopped #taxlawyer #taxrelief #taxlaw 

Website:  https://trevorparry.com/

Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-parry/

Follow on X:  https://x.com/realTrevorParry

Transcript

0:06

My friends, as Doug Ford would say. Welcome once again to Leviathan Must Be Stopped. I'm Trevor Perry, and I am pleased today to be joined by a longtime friend of mine, Steve Fretwell. Steve and I have known each other in the insurance and benefits and pension space for a couple of decades anyways. And Steve is also a very accomplished artist, and we're going to get into that in our discussion of Canadian history and business and cross-border wonderful things. With that, Steve, thanks for joining us today. Where are you? Where are you joining us from? You're hearing me from beautiful, cold Toronto, at my house. I may have mentioned to you, I'm actually heading off to warmer climates to discover the island of Barbados for the first time. I'm quite fortunate to go there, so pretty stoked up. Bags are all packed and ready to get on a plane like many of us do at this time of the year. Barbados is a fun place. I was there in 1993, in law school the first time, and then the Concorde is parked there because it used to fly into Barbados from London. I guess we're actually on the advent of supersonic travel again in the next couple of years, but that's a whole other show. You'll have, they do like rum there, I'll tell you that. I've heard that. I have heard that about these guys down there. Rum is important. It's interwoven into history. Anyone who goes to Newfoundland and expects a Scotch tasting, you're going to get a rum tasting, it’s just as good. So, I've got to make my way out there again. So, you're in the insurance consulting space. So why don't you just give us a sort of rundown of what you're up to these days. And then we can talk about sort of the general state of business as we see it in Canada. Yeah, yeah, I'm one of these guys who graduated from university, went right into the career business with the great London Life. I won't tell you exactly when that was, but it was quite some time ago. And I've been blessed to have pit stops along the way, not only on individual life, but employee benefits, consulting some specialty risk pieces, some pension work, over the, that's over the course of my entire career. And in the last five years, I've, I'm actually the rookie, Trevor, at a quiet insurance consulting firm based here in Toronto. And we do work to help organizations solve some of the more pressing problems. And one of the reasons that the need exists for that is the business climate, the political climate that we've seen in our country in the last 10 years, while it has troubled me on many levels, It is also presented opportunity for us. I sort of in eloquently say that as much as I cannot stand the current federal government, from my business perspective, it's the best thing that happened to me because we're in a similar space. I mean, I tell people I never want to be known as an insurance salesman. I'm a lawyer who so happens to be licensed to sell insurance right across Canada. But this environment, this punitive tax environment that we live in has got the phone, you know people are calling there, it's ringing all the time and in a complex, you know some simple situations or what you and I would consider to be simple situations and then into the complex cross-border international space a lot of family business planning that's going on and people are sitting there saying you know I don't know what's going to happen in this country and sort of leads us into our first you know topic. What's your sense as to the, to the business climate in Canada right now on the Main Street and Bay Street side? Yeah, I'll preface my comments on this to raise my hand and say, yes, I am a Carleton University student of political science. Yes, I did work, yes I did work in Mazankowski's office. And you know, yes, I was a card-carrying Conservative for the better part of my life, but I consider myself more to the centre of that tradition. So that's the first thing that I'll say. But talking about today's environment. The thing that never ceases to astonish me, particularly in the last three or four years I think, coming out of the pandemic, I became more, I became more aware of it, is the ability of my friends and business colleagues across the country to articulate the issues that they see in our country. Whether they're living in Victoria, I'm blessed, I've got friends in Victoria, business colleagues in Calgary, people in Montreal, southwestern Ontario, eastern Ontario, and I'm blessed to have a home in Nova Scotia. So, I hear it from you know, tall, short, fat, thin, like every walk of life, and you don't have to pull out of people their thoughts and opinions. No, it's free-floating. It's amazing to me how people can just, it rolls off their tongue. Now most of it is half sensible. It's like I can understand what they're saying. And the list in no, in no particular order, Trevor, most people can get up to six or seven issues when I listen to them. What are the big two? What are they leading with? Now, the big two, I think it's immigration and the economy, but people are very, very versed on things about, you know rational relationship with environmental concerns. Housing issues, healthcare, job security, food inflation, crime, crime sentencing, you know, net zero as a god being a problem. You know, and the interesting thing is all these topics, and I'm hearing it too, I mean, virtually the same sort of hierarchy of concerns, they're all interwoven. They have one common foundation in that, at least in my humble opinion, all of these problems have been created by government. They've been created by just a, you know, moronic policies in certain cases, politically motivated, economic, I wouldn't even say self-interested policies. I mean, immigration is an absolute debacle. And I'm hearing that from immigrants or children of immigrants who are saying, no, no, no, this is not right. We've talked about on this podcast, we’ve talked about the temporary foreign worker thing. And I mean, it makes no sense, you know, to basically disenfranchise young people from their first job. And I bear no malice against the folks who are coming over here. They're polite, they are hardworking, they're coming with the best of intentions. But where prominent Canadian companies, and we know who they are, lining up to basically hire people because they're subsidized by the federal government to do so, is to use one of my, you know, twelve Yiddish words, verkakte. And it goes further. I mean, you had the student situation where now these students whose visas are coming up for expiration are now miraculously all claiming refugee status. We have to get away from this sacrosanct idea that criticizing immigration is somehow racist. It's not. Under Stephen Harper, immigration was Canadian-focused. It was fair. It had a point system. And under the “Little Prince”, quite the opposite happened. And now we have a debacle, and it's caused, you know, as we know in healthcare and in housing, it's just a complete, a complete morass. And there's, it's going to take some serious political cojones to fix it. But I hear it, Canadians across the country, regardless of race, colour, creed, they're all saying it's too much. It needs to be stopped. It needs to be reversed in certain cases, and it's got to be Canadian-focused. Are you seeing that too? Yeah, first of all, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're more in tune to this than sort of the average person just by the nature of your personality, the way you, appreciation for history and your connection to the subject matter. But I could hear exactly the same thing from somebody in Nova Scotia or somebody in Alberta. The language may change, but the concern about it and the ability, I guess the other part I wanted to add to that is it's one thing to be able to rattle off the list. It's another thing to be able to speak to it on a personal level. This happened to me. I know someone whose car got stolen. I know someone who had a crime committed against them or their business and the people were let out. I know people who can't afford housing. It isn't some article that they read somewhere about that's happening in some place that is distant to them. And more often than not, these things impact people in their own communities. It’s true. People are, they have real life experience right now. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Years ago, I was at a town hall for a federal candidate and got into a discussion of affordability this is couple of years ago. And it and we talked about a whole bunch of issues, and I was asked to speak, and I said the way this country is going, what concerns me as a father of three daughters who are all doing exceptionally well in school. They're young, you know, in the next five or six years, we're to start thinking about university, is that Canada, if it continues along its current pronounced slide, and anyone who thinks that Canada isn’t in decline is engaging in self-delusion of the first order. My fear is that when my kids finally finish school, they have but two choices, work for government or leave the country. Now add to that fact that the housing mess that we have created, and I work with a number of builders who will tell me it's a simple cost of producing or building a house, the regulatory costs are absolutely insane. We are in a situation where a generation or two of Canadians will not and will not be able to own a home nor consider owning a home. And what that does to the foundations of a society, I think is deeply malevolent. And Canadians need to get attuned to that. The only ones I hear who don't get that are the what I call, “we've-already-got-ours generation”, which are the folks older than us who unfortunately put this government back in office. Yeah, well, I know some of them. And I'll just back you up a little bit. So, call me in a few years when your kids are ready to go off, because I have three of them in university. And my first observation is that, so my peer group, whether professionally or personally, have children who are in that boat, either in or just getting out. And one of the things that astonished me is that many people said that their kids didn't want to stay in this country. No. They admit it very readily. That was the first thing. The second thing that they admitted was that the rudimentary addition that's required to figure out how much money do I need to save each and every month in order to be able to add up to enough money for the down payment on a home, a modest starter home, as we know them to be, was completely out of reach for people, for the majority of people. And that, when you listen to that being repeated again and again and again on a personal level across the country, it drives towards this, this idea of first is, is this an insurmountable, impossible solve? Like, can we get ourselves out of this? Have we gone too far? I'm a natural optimist Trevor, so I think the answer to that is yes. I think we can do it. It often begins with awareness. So, I'm happy that people can rattle this stuff off. I'm happy that people can dictate, or sorry, list off on a personal level what's happening. What seems to be a mystery to me is voting behaviour at the time that the polls are there, where this idea of all these issues and grievances somehow magically disappeared. It's like somebody came with a magic wand and said, just forget about all that kind of stuff. Forget about everything that we've done. You know, and we'll just go on, so you know, that one's a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't really get it. Exactly. I mean, Canadians like you had Pierre Poilievre in the Conservatives 20 points ahead and managed to pull defeat out of the jaws of assured victory. And I still think he needs to atone for that to become more grounded and palatable to the Canadian voter. I think he can still win. But he faces this, you know, the labours of Sisyphus. He's got to push a massive boulder up a hill because you have a stacked media against you and then you have the boomer generation that believe that Mark Carney is the second coming of something. The populism that's there and we certainly see it in the United States. I'm not, I’m not against that. I think that people becoming more attuned and maybe visceral about issues is a good thing. And I think it's here in Canada. I mean, I'm not a complete populist, but listening to the people is the exact opposite to what this current government is doing. As you see Mr. Carney traveling around the world and talking about this and that and really nothing to show for it. And he still maintains the same cabal of quislings that the “Little Prince” kept in. But what's your sense on, you know, mood and populism in Canada? Can it be a positive force? First of all, yeah, again, as I mentioned, I'm an optimist. I think that we can get out of this thing. I think that our neighbours, I refer to them as loud, our neighbours are loud and they want a significant change in their country. And that change is going to impact a lot of people around the world. There's nothing we can do to stop it. It's their thing. We have to control what we can control. And going back to my opening comment about awareness, and people being able to articulate things, if you want to call that populism, that's great. I'm fine with that. I'm actually, I've grown a little bit tired over time. My family will tell you that having a concern about rational relationship with the environment, right? Sort of a traditional, you know, hunting and fishing and treating the environment with respect and not polluting, if I don't, I'm that person, but if I don't bow to the god of net zero, I somehow am dumping poison toxins into the creek by my house. Exactly. Right? Or if I think that some of the populism notions that are existing in western democracies are good and overdue, I'm labelled as whatever label they want to put on me today. And they'll put a different one on me next week. And I get the sense, Trevor, that a lot of people from all kinds of walks of life have gotten beyond the blame game. The how did we get here, who's to blame? People have concluded what that is. I think where they are now is we need to figure a way to dig ourselves out of this. Right. Nobody else is gonna come. I remember a famous line in the movie, the did the name just to expa…, Zero Dark Thirty. Right. Where the commander comes in and all the people are sitting around the table and they're tasked with, you know, finding this terrible person. And his point was, nobody's coming to the rescue. That's what he said to the group. There is nobody else that's going to do this. So, I think Canadians are at the point where they're saying, yes, we'll do this ourselves. And I think the more they look at the track record of the guy who happens to be in charge right now, the more disappointed they are that we don't see something more material happening. And you can rattle off the list. I don't know why that is that they haven't got a whole bunch of things done. Hopefully it's not purposeful. Hopefully it's just, you know, another case of government incompetence. But I think people are looking for practical wins. We gotta put the puck in the net, as our hockey friends say, right? And we're not, we're not doing it. Yeah, we're not even getting shots on the net. Yeah, we're not doing it on the municipal level, we're not doing it at the provincial level, although somewhat less. We're certainly not doing it at the federal level, and I think the tolerance for that to continue is running very, very, very, very short. I hope, I hope you're right. I’m, my fear is that, well, my observation is that Mr. Carney's government exists but for one reason, and that is the creation of a boogeyman in the form of Donald Trump. And if, I mean, my position is if you listen to the people around Trump, like Bessent and things like that, I don't think what they're complaining about or arguing for is anything terrible. I think Canada would be a far better place if we discovered the Holy Spirit of productivity. Because that's sadly lacking in this country and enjoyment and celebration of profit and initiative and all that kind of stuff. And with tax, a tax system like we have, we're not getting it and cradle to grave everything care of which nothing works. You've created the nanny state of all nanny states. I see us following more in the Keir Starmer mode unless we arrest it. And hopefully by the time this thing airs, he's no longer the prime minister in the UK. But I do have some hope that Canadians can turn it, but I don't think it's with this current government. Alright, okay, we are completely in alignment with that thinking. I'm hopeful, but I think we've got to, we’ve got to, you know, put the backpacks on and get to work. It has to happen with us. Exactly, to change gears. One of the fascinating things I think that you have, you know, moved into is this, is the space of art. Now we're both committed, you know, love the history of Canada, particularly the military history of Canada. Can you tell, and what we'll do is we'll make sure that we'll post some of your, some of your work with your, with your contact when this goes to air. But can you tell us about what you're doing? I find it fascinating and I love the whole idea of you smoking a cigar, sitting in your studio, creating. Yeah, yeah, well, let me start by saying the, I failed the colour wheel in grade eight. And it was not a natural orientation for me. Then through a confluence of circumstances, against the backdrop of some of the things that were concerning in our country, I found myself picking up a paintbrush and trying to be self-taught to create a series of portraits. And I knew, I was a big fan of military history, so I started painting military type portraits. People with uniforms and hats and stuff like that. No, it was the brute force and ignorance method, Trevor, I can assure you. And then because of the technology and the pandemic, I was able to stand up a webpage, stand up an Instagram page and share my work with the world. The world, I say, that's kind of, but I shared it with people and to my surprise people liked it and they wanted to buy it. But I had no context of, was it bill, the number of hours I put in, the cost of goods, like I was like, how do you price this stuff? So, I hired a business manager and she gave me coaching. She talked and I listened and I did what she said. And then my work evolved over time where I became fascinated with this initially the subject of the Canadian Navy and the Canadian, Royal Canadian Air Force and its effort to combine air and sea assets to fight World War II's scourge of U-boats. And the mathematics and the mapping and all the technology. So, you know, I'll read a bunch of books, and I look for just a grain of an idea that I can then interpret. I decided early on, Trevor, that literal interpretations of the HMS Bonaven… HMCS Bonaventure or the Iroquois or a Canadian aircraft or something, while it has a strong place in military art. I didn't think that those kinds of literal interpretations would stand much of a chance of being on the living room or the dining room of a child or a grandchild of somebody. Like they were just too, it was too much. So, I adopted a, through trial and error, I adopted a point of view of looking at military maps and aerial reconnaissance photographs. So, the perspective I take is, the Canadian airmen looking down onto the North Atlantic following the geometry that was set in their flight plan to try and find U-boats. And overlaid that with the mapping that was done by the escort vessels. Became quite obsessed about the whole thing. And that's a series called Experiments in Blue. It's all about that. And then the next one that I did was looking at aerial reconnaissance photos of the beaches of Normandy. There's millions of these things. A day didn't go by where they weren't photographing it. So, I was quite successful with that series. Again, the idea of looking down upon the landing beaches and interpreting that. I also did a fun, a fun one which is called Rings of Our Forefathers, which is based on the idea of looking down at the pub, the bar rail at the pub and you lift your beer off and there's a ring of moisture that's left behind. Cause, you know, there's a lot of depth about how, following the path of Canadians, I did another series called Keukenhof, which is the aerial point of view of the beautiful Tulip Gardens and the relationship that we have with that country. And those pieces of work are in aggregate, I think I probably sold maybe 65 paintings, right, right, so far. And I'll close off and put it back to you for another question on this in a second. When I listen to people tell me why they buy my work, like why they collect it, it's because when they look at it, it reminds them of something that they value. And what I found is, people value the contribution of that generation. People don't want to forget it. People want to pass those stories on to their children and to their grandchildren. But they want to do it in a way that's interesting and somewhat abstract. And they want it in their home, and they want it in their office because of the way that it makes them feel. And again, I'll add one other piece to this. Earlier in our talk, I talked about the things that people can easily list off, the concern that's going on in our country. And somewhere on that list, people always say to me, I'm very concerned about the perspective that people have had in the last 10 years on the role of our military. And wearing a poppy. It, people they, comes out of them organically. I don't have to pull it out of them. It's, I mean, you're singing, we're singing off the same hymnal. And on that note, I've got to say Don Cherry needs to get his Order of Canada. But it's, I mean, military history is near and dear to me. I've been a member of Royal Canadian Military Institute for, oh gosh, 30 years. I'm ex-Toronto-Scottish. Toyed with going back into the military after law school, have a pretty good background in defence policy. And it's critical that this country remembers the great deeds and the failures on the battlefield, both sea, air and land, that is part of our collective history. And my fear is, and I think it's fairly widely held, is that we are, we’re allowing people to mischaracterize it. We are allowing it to become a football in sort of woke politics because you'll celebrate this group and not that group. Canadians did a truly Herculean thing in both World Wars. You know, we, in terms of percentage of our population that willingly went to war and slogged through, you know, both World War I and World War II and then Korea. And then we have to sing the praises of our guys at Kandahar because that was punching way above our weight class. And I wish that President Trump would stand up and, you know, recognize that because his comments were certainly hurtful to Canadian veterans. But I mean, amen to you brother, for going out and telling people, in your way, with a thought provoking, you know, permanent, a permanent monument that will proudly hang on a wall in a dining room or a study or living room. And perhaps, you know, a young Canadian sits there and said,“what is that?” And it recalls the stories. I mean, I vividly remember, I was 10 years old at my first dinner at RCMI sitting across from a World War I vet and telling, telling the stories then. I mean, I'm 59 years old. It's never left me. That is how history gets transmitted. It's through spoken word. It's through stories. It's through art. And more power to you. Well, thank you, Trevor, yeah. And we're going to, we’re going to get the word out with this podcast. It's a, it’s a... I don't know if you can see it in the background of my, but I actually, as I was going along that journey and getting advice from people about what to do and how to do it, someone said to me, you should put together a coffee table book. So, I did. So I became an, I was an artist and yeah, I'm an author. So, I put together a coffee table book, it weighs about five pounds. I probably overdid it. But my coffee table book is called Finding Peace. And I think as a person who tried to interpret that, I found myself in situations in malls where people wouldn't have a poppy on. And I heard, I heard a story about Nova Scotia where they didn't want, a school didn't want veterans to come in on Remembrance Day with their uniforms on because a certain group of people would be triggered by seeing people in uniform. And I thought to my, I go what can I do about this? Because sometimes against the backdrop of all these things, lot of Canadians feel helpless. What can you do, right? Because you're busy raising your family, making some money, trying to save for this, dealing with your aging parents. We're busy people. So, I thought, if there's any way that I can bring a story or help launch a story around a dining room table, or around an office water cooler, because something that I've created goes up on the wall and helps someone remember something. I'm happy to do it. And I'll give you an interesting example. A couple, the collector's dad flew in Lancasters, and they saw my work and they asked me to do, I think it was six feet by four feet, a pretty big piece, as a tribute to the old man. And we got his flight logs. So, we knew the date that he flew over Juno Beach. We knew the type of aircraft he was in. We knew the time of day, right, that this was going on. So, they put this in their dining room and beside it they placed a shadow box with the old boy’s medals. Wow. So, when somebody comes into the dining room, you see this painting, you say, this is kind of an interesting thing. It's a very touching, and they're wonderful people, great art supporters. You see this wonderful thing, but it's not about me. It's about what he did, and it's about that family's willingness to try and bring something into their lives that will keep that alive. And that's done through art and through story and through documentaries and reading books and, you know, me asking my kids, hey, do you want to come and learn about the Juno Beach Centre again? My kids are like, okay, dad, no, no, no, thank you. We're okay. Five times is enough. I was there in 2012. I strongly urge every Canadian who goes to France to visit it. And of course, Vimy, which is, you know, yeah, I've been there, yeah, in sovereign Canadian territory, you've got to visit it. But all I can say is keep up the great work. This is the way we're going to engage Canadians to think about their country in a positive light, to love it again, to respect those that gave, that paid the ultimate sacrifice. And from that, we shall go, as Mr. Churchill said, “into broad sunlit uplands” and take back our history and restore a sense of Canadian prosperity and accomplishment. And with that, Steve, thank you so much for joining us today and we'll look forward to carrying our conversation on again. All the best, my man. Keep your hands up. Cheers. Take care.