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Guy Lafleur, who passed away in 2022, was my childhood hero. Watching the Flower fly down the wing for the Montreal Canadiens — that mane of blond hair, the goals that made you leap off the couch — was as close to magic as a kid in Alberta could get. Rest easy, No. 10.

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He was also a chainsmoker who liked his Molson and was famously indifferent to summer training. His long-time coach, Scotty Bowman, said he smoked between periods. None of it seemed to matter.

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You could not get away with that today. Connor McDavid does not show up to training camp to “get into shape.” He shows up to demonstrate he is in shape. Camp is a checkpoint, not a starting line. The veteran who treats September the way Lafleur did gets cut or gets exposed by a youngster who spent his summer with a skating coach. The game changed.

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Most Canadians did not get the same memo when it comes to their tax affairs and financial literacy.

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Personal tax season just ended without much drama for the first time in four years. No underused housing tax mess, bare trust debacle or capital gains inclusion rate reversal mid-season. Canada Revenue Agency call wait times were merely terrible instead of historically awful. Practitioners did not need group therapy.

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By recent standards, this was a quiet April, but that should not be confused with healthy. The past three tax seasons were chaos because of politically driven tax policy.

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The structural problems beneath it are too few qualified practitioners chasing an impossibly complex Income Tax Act. Anyone can hang a shingle and call themselves an accountant in Canada, which leaves the public confused as to who is genuinely qualified to help them. The United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia all have a chartered tax adviser designation. Canada does not.

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Combine that with a public that does not meaningfully engage in their tax affairs until late April and we are exactly where we were a year ago, even without the political chaos.

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But the demand side is what Canadians can do something about today.

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Most Canadians treat April 30 the way old-time hockey players treated training camp. They show up out of shape, dump an actual or virtual shoebox of receipts on an accountant’s desk and hope for the best. Their measure of success is the refund cheque. If money comes back, the year was a win. If they owe money, it’s a loss.

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That is terrible financial planning and literacy. A refund means you gave the government an interest-free loan for up to 16 months. It is not a gift; it is your money returned late. The size of your refund tells you nothing about whether you optimized your tax position, only how badly your withholdings or instalments were calibrated.

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What does year-round tax thinking actually look like? For salaried employees, it is more straightforward than most realize.

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It means contributing to your registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) and tax-free savings account (TFSA) on a deliberate schedule rather than in a February panic. It means understanding which workplace benefits are taxable. It means keeping receipts for medical expenses, charitable donations and employment expenses as the year unfolds, not reconstructing them in April from credit-card statements. It means asking before accepting a raise that pushes you into a new bracket, whether a pension contribution or spousal RRSP makes sense.