A Book by Glenn Koskie
Did I Just Say That Out Loud
The Hidden Rules of a Steered System — and How to See Through Them
The Hidden Rules of a Steered System — and How to See Through Them
Canada's inequality problem isn't the result of bad luck or neutral market forces. It is the result of Guided Drift — sustained, consistent pressure from resourced actors, over decades, producing outcomes that appear natural but aren't.
Since 1976, Canadian wages and productivity have decoupled. Workers became more productive. Their wages didn't follow. That gap — quietly accumulated over forty years — didn't happen by accident. It happened through policy: trade structures, labour law changes, tax treatment that favours capital over labour, and a political culture trained to accept the outcome as inevitable.
The tax code was written to reward wealth over work. If you earn a wage, every dollar is taxed at your full marginal rate. If your money earns money, you pay roughly half. That isn't the result of oversight. It's the result of choices — made repeatedly, by people who benefited from them.
Housing became a financial instrument. Media consolidated until a handful of ownership groups controlled what most Canadians read, watched, and heard. Public services eroded — not through incompetence, but through deliberate underfunding that made the private alternative look inevitable.
Guided Drift doesn't have a political colour. It just has beneficiaries. It holds whether you vote NDP or Conservative, whether you're a tradesperson or a teacher, whether you live in Vancouver or Moose Jaw.
"The system wasn't ruined. It was steered. And once you can see the steering, you cannot unsee it."
This book names the mechanisms. Not as conspiracy — as structure. Because once you can see the pattern, you can start to ask the right questions about what comes next.
All 14 chapters, available free. Listen chapter by chapter or start anywhere.
A plain-language summary of the book's core argument. No jargon. Just the mechanisms, explained clearly — and what they mean for ordinary Canadians.
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Glenn Koskie spent his career inside the institutions this book is about. As General Manager of a Saskatchewan credit union and a board member of Credit Union Central of Saskatchewan, he watched policy decisions play out at the ground level — not as theory, but as outcomes that affected real people in real communities.
This book isn't built from the outside looking in. It's built from someone who was in the room, watched the mechanisms operate, and decided to name them. The Guided Drift framework didn't come from academic research. It came from recognizing a pattern that kept repeating — in finance, in policy, in the slow narrowing of options for ordinary Canadians — and realizing it wasn't random.
Koskie lives in Dalmeny, Saskatchewan.