Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. Trust has been at the core of my professional life as a lawyer for over a decade now. You can't ask someone to come to you and share with you something that they may not share with anyone else in the world if they don't trust you. You then have to take that and move it forward, but it's not just about the clients that I'm serving who are sharing their personal stories with me. In order to get anything done, I have to have trust with someone who is on the opposite side of a file with me; someone with whom I may have an adversarial relationship. We will get more done if we can actually trust each other.
Trust is built and trust is easily broken and, as I developed relationships with other lawyers, with clients, with judges, with other decision-makers, it's how you engage. It's how you do things. It's, when you make a promise that you're going to do something, you do your best to follow through. If something changes and you can't do it, you need to tell them why and you need to be straightforward and upfront, and you develop a reputation very quickly as someone who you can or cannot trust.
I think it starts at the top and so, for that reason, I'm speaking about how I would present relationships that are full of trust, but it has to go to the front lines, as well. So, to me, as a leader of a department or a ministry, I would expect to be walking the front lines of whatever ministry I'm in, developing trust with people at the front, and I would expect whatever DM or assistant DM to be alongside me along the way so we can develop trust, starting at the front lines of the department all the way up to the top. Thank you.