Robert Brickell

Marketer. Hoops Junkie. Probably designing something. ✌️

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@jinnysims Haha there’s the new NDP campaign slogan.

[Steve Saretsky @SteveSaretsky]

BC housing policy: Buy a second home? Speculator. Leave it empty? Vacancy tax. Sell within two years? Flipping tax. Keep it too long? Hoarder. Buy too nice a house? Luxury tax. Build new housing? Greedy developer.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@mattjdh Imagine saying that the root cause of all our economic, public safety and business investment challenges is Donald Trump.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@Raptors What it 2 babyyy!!!

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@sarobertson_ I understand that emotions are high but this type of response actually emboldens the White House. The correct approach here would be to not acknowledge the “pain” whatsoever. Stay laser focused on building new trade corridors and accelerate those efforts.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@ThomasDrance RJ needs to get on the phone and flip debrusk for #25

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@Dave_Eby lol

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@nucks0 @taj1944 Boys club vibe isn’t the right path here. The need to hire the “right” voices. Not the “familiar” ones.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@shazzer65 @iamkennethchan Because they weren’t helping solve climate change.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jeff Bezos just told you exactly how to price AI.

Nobody listened.

Bezos: “AI is real and it is going to change every industry. In fact it’s a very unusual technology in that regard in that it’s a horizontal enabling layer.”

Horizontal enabling layer.

Three words that reprice the entire technology sector.

The iPhone was a vertical. One product. One new market.

Electricity was a horizontal. One substrate that rewired every market on Earth.

Wall Street is pricing AI like it is the next iPhone. Bezos is telling you it is the next electrical grid.

Right now, thousands of companies are trying to sell AI as a product.

A feature. A tool. A subscription tier.

Every single one of them will be priced to zero.

You do not sell a horizontal layer. You do not compete with it. You build on top of it or you disappear beneath it.

For a century, entire industries survived on one thing. Complexity.

The friction of navigating law, medicine, logistics, finance. That was the moat. If you could not memorize the maze, you could not compete.

A horizontal layer does not navigate the maze. It dissolves the walls.

Electricity did not compete with the candle industry. It erased the need for one.

The most dangerous part of a horizontal shift is how quiet it is. It moves underneath the economy. The surface looks normal. Revenue still holds.

Every day you operate on the old substrate, you accumulate a debt you cannot see and cannot repay.

The internet repriced distribution. AI is repricing cognition itself.

When intelligence becomes a utility that runs through the walls of every company on Earth, the premium on human expertise does not erode. It evaporates.

This is not a disruption. Disruptions replace products.

This replaces the ground you are standing on.

[L. Wayne Mathison @WayneMathison]

CEO French.

Most people think “woke” in Canada is just about being nice. Polite. Inclusive. Harmless. Like putting a land acknowledgement on your website and calling it a day. That’s the sales pitch.

Now watch the behaviour, not the branding.

What we actually have isn’t kindness. It’s compliance with a moral script that keeps changing mid-sentence. One year’s acceptable language becomes next year’s offence. Words get redefined. Intent doesn’t matter. Only alignment does. Miss a step and you’re not corrected, you’re marked.

And here’s the trick. It didn’t spread through loud revolution. It spread through HR policies, university codes, and government frameworks. Quietly. Form by form. Training module by training module. You don’t vote on it. You absorb it. Like background radiation.

Then you get moments that expose how brittle this system is.

Take Air Canada. The CEO offers condolences… but not in French. And suddenly, that’s the story. Not the loss. Not the people affected. The language choice. The compliance failure.

Think about that.

We’ve trained ourselves to scan for symbolic mistakes instead of focusing on substance. The priority shifts from “Was this humane?” to “Was this perfectly aligned with every linguistic expectation?” Miss one box, and the reaction machine spins up.

That’s not compassion. That’s ritual.

People say, “If it’s so bad, why doesn’t anyone push back?”
They do. Just not publicly.

Because the real currency here isn’t truth. It’s risk.
Risk to your job. Your reputation. Your access.

So people do the math. Stay quiet. Nod along. Keep your head down. The classic Canadian move. Keep the peace. Don’t make it awkward.

But silence has a side effect. It looks like agreement.

And that’s how you end up with a system that feels unanimous on the surface and hollow underneath. A lot of people going through the motions. Saying the lines. Not buying the script.

Here’s the part that gets ignored. The original impulse wasn’t crazy. Fair treatment. Equal opportunity. Basic dignity. Most Canadians already agreed with that decades ago. That wasn’t the fight.

The shift happened when it stopped being about fairness and started being about control of language and outcomes. When disagreement became “harm.” When questions became “violence.” That’s not progress. That’s a shutdown of thinking.

And once a system punishes questions, it stops correcting itself. It drifts. Fast.

My take.

Don’t overreact and don’t submit.
Call things what they are, calmly and clearly.

Refuse the language games.
Ask simple questions and keep asking them.

No yelling. No panic. Just steady pressure.

Because systems like this don’t collapse from outrage.

They collapse when enough people quietly stop pretending to believe them.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@KEriksenV2 Do you actually think the majority of votes can be pulled from the far left to the far right in one election cycle? If the conservatives can pull this off it will be with a centre right candidate.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@Howard__24 Could a practice rink fit inside? 🤣

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@iamkennethchan “Major reduction in non essential consultant contracts” is so long overdue. The amount of funds wasted on this is staggering.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@investseekers Regulatory capture at its finest.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@BatchHockey @FarhanLaljiTSN Agreed. None of this makes sense. Even if you had your own stadium the cost to carry the debt associated with building it would eat into revenues just like they are saying the cost to stay at BC Place is. How are all the lower attendance teams surviving???

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@KirkLubimov We are fundamentally a risk averse nation. We overthink, overanalyze everything until our window of opportunity has passed and then we blame those around us for being in the situation we are in. Rinse and repeat.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

💯

[Eric Jackson @ericjackson]

Canada is genuinely world-class at a few things: natural resources, energy inputs, rule of law, and advanced research.

Where it struggles: turning advantages into scaled production — permitting speed, infrastructure build-out, and capital efficiency.

Prosperity comes from converting strengths into output, not just possessing them.

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@RichardDias_CFA Socialism accelerates productivity declines

[Robert Brickell @RobertBrickell]

@KirkLubimov Outcomes > Optics