By Stan Chung

Op-Ed Commentary

Have you ever spoken at a public meeting, received awesome agreement, and gone home thinking something would get done?

Maybe you met your mayor, MP, MLA, or school trustee. They listened. They were likeable. They seemed genuinely moved. Perhaps they even said, “I agree with you.”

What happened next?

I was talking recently with someone who had done almost everything we tell citizens to do. They had spoken publicly, gone to the legislature, met elected officials and told their story with enough feeling that sometimes people cried.

They couldn’t understand why the idea wasn’t moving. And they were once an elected representative!

They were talking about being heard. Yeah, well, I was talking about execution.

Getting it done. Taking it across the line. You know what I mean?

We tell citizens to use their voice. We don’t explain nearly as well what has to happen after somebody listens.

I call it the last-mile problem.

Your wicked idea can be worthy, popular and supported by powerful people and still become an orphan.

Everybody cares. Nobody carries. No goal line celebration.

I have spent much of my working life around boards, First Nations organizations, governments and large public institutions. One thing I have learned is not to be fooled by the likeable, the listening and the photo ops.

Sure, warmth matters. Trust and listening skills matter. But a person can listen carefully, understand your problem, and sincerely agree without setting anything in motion.

Perhaps we have to ask this more: “What happens next after our nice little coffee?”

Who has authority? Who gets the next call? Does this require a budget decision? When will somebody report back?

A leader who can answer those questions is telling you something more useful than “I couldn’t agree more, pass the TimBits.”

The last mile is difficult because everyone may actually be working hard.

They held the meetings. Wrote the dramatic letter. Met the minister. Maybe capture a funding commitment. Maybe even hinted at a sweet plan.

Maybe they did 90% of the work.

Unfortunately, the remaining 10% may contain most of the difficult terrain.

The last mile includes the final budget decision, government relationships, administrative approval, staffing, procurement, compromise, and persistence required to keep an idea alive after everyone has moved on to something else.

This is why I don’t assume public officials are deliberately misleading us. Something more interesting can happen.

A warm meeting can fool the citizen and the leader at the same time.

“We heard you.” “We wrote the minister.” “We’ve been advocating for years.”

All may be completely true. How in the heck do we know whether the idea is getting closer to reality?

Letters are a good example. A forceful letter to government may be necessary. But a board can write letters for years and have very little influence.

How do we get it?

I have learned that much of effective lobbying is almost invisible. A minister takes your call. An assistant deputy minister trusts the information coming across the table. Someone knows where a decision is stuck.

Here is a biggie: relationships survive disagreement. Even bigger: when an opening appears in a budget, the case is already understood.

There isn’t usually a smiling selfie of that.

I serve as a public board chair, and I think the same test should apply to me.

Community engagement isn’t completed when people tell us what matters. Their voices must travel and land in priorities. Priorities must hit budgets. Budgets must become someone’s responsibility to actually deliver.

Otherwise, pretty words can become a nice little circle.

Listen. Agree. Thank everyone. Repeat next year.

As voters, perhaps we should care more about the last mile.

Not simply: Did you fight for it?

We should ask leaders: Did you understand how to get it? How far did you move it? Where is it stuck? Who owns the next step?

Government can still say no. Budgets change. Good proposals fail. Heck, execution does not guarantee success.

But we should be able to tell the difference between an idea that lost and an idea nobody knew how to move forward.

That is the last-mile problem. We need people who can take the ball across the ten yards.

Ninety percent effort can still produce zero percent of the thing people were expecting

Get it done.

– Stan Chung, PhD, is a Cranbrook writer, strategic advisor, speaker and 2026 Governor General’s laureate.

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