Prospectus

There was a remarkable bit of transparency and humility when Kyle Braatz took the podium to accept his CEO of the Year award for 2022. It came in the form of an anecdote from childhood sports.

“When I think back on my life, I’ve been extremely hard on myself. I’ll give you a little example. When I played hockey, I would get off the ice and come out of the dressing room and my dad would say, ‘Great game, Braatzy.’ I would respond that I was awful because of one pass that I missed. That’s all I could think about. My entire life I’ve felt that I’m not good enough and the things I do are not good enough.”

Not exactly what you expect to hear from the region’s top executive for 2022, especially someone who has scaled a company to almost 1,000 employees and more than US$600 million in annual revenue.

Braatz looped that anecdote back to his take on leadership. Standing before 600 business and community leaders at the Best Ottawa Business Awards, Braatz shared that it’s sometimes difficult to find the confidence to lead. What bolsters him is a north star. Instead of being solely motivated by money or power, Braatz said he is driven by a desire for positive change. That altruistic motivation allows him to lead from an authentic place and increases the likelihood that others will join the Fullscript mission.

As we enter the new year, it’s time for business leaders to take stock and set their sights on the horizon. The leadership equation outlined by Braatz can serve as a model for others who want to lead and make an impact. These days, it’s easy to feel that our local, national and global challenges are insurmountable. Great leadership, admittedly a scarce commodity, can go a long way to rally good people to reframe problems and find solutions.

In 2023, let’s challenge local leaders to step up, find common ground and make headway on issues that confront us. (Sueling Ching at the Ottawa Board of Trade likes to call it “radical collaboration.”) The local challenges are known: fixing the much maligned LRT system, finding a new vision for the downtown core, managing the complexity around the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats, securing a rebound in the local tourism and sustaining innovation in the technology sector.

Inspired leadership and this building momentum around “team Ottawa” could make 2023 more about solutions than problems. Probably every holiday season when we reflect on the past and look to the future, we see an outgoing year of great change and a coming year of tremendous uncertainty. After all, seismic shifts in society, singular turning points in history, and issues of global import are nothing new.

So humour me when I suggest that the bridge between 2022 and 2023 seems particularly tenuous, fraught with potential missteps but also shored up with much promise.

In this edition of OBJ, we look at 10 stories to watch over the next many months. While it was not easy to keep the list to 10, these 10 stories jumped off the page in an unmistakable fashion.

Perhaps the biggest issue on the menu is how we will work together to reimagine this city we call Ottawa. Let’s be clear: the civil servants are not coming back, at least, not in the full-time, everyone-in-the-office way we knew. The HMS GoC has sailed. So, yikes, this leaves a yawning gap. It also exposes a twinkling array of possibilities. Who will step up to people the downtown with workers and professionals? What kind of new buildings and infrastructure can we create, both in the downtown core and in our suburbs? What kind of city can we become? With all the beautiful trappings that accompany almost any national capital, surely we can’t mess it up that badly.

Many of our top 10 stories are related to this theme. Undoubtedly, we will be watching every twitch and shiver of our new mayor and council. What path will they follow? What decisions will they make? What cow patties will they step in?

Publisher

Hopefully we can offer them more support than disparagement as they pick their way along.

Of course, at the fringes of our downtown issue and at the forefront of our national obsession with hockey is the future of LeBreton Flats. Let’s just hope it goes better than the last time — and possibly the time before that. Will a sparkling new sports venue be part of the downtown puzzle? It certainly seems that the stars are aligning for a stunning new development in this rubble-strewn lot.

And at the heart of the downtown issue is our complicated love/ hate relationship with the federal civil service. How will their plans for hybrid work pan out (grumble, grumble)? What will the future be for millions of square feet of office space divested by the federal government? Will it all be a wonderful environmental boon, or a vacant and haunting boondoggle? In this city of innovative and entrepreneurial citizens, surely we can do more to propose solutions rather than simply identify problems.

So what comes next? Well, that’s the big question — one that I’m sure we will all be waiting and watching to find out the answer. Or, even better, finding a way to make it happen, together.

Editor in Chief