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Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module on July 20, 1969, and into history: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

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Armstrong long maintained he said “for a man” and the “a” was lost in transmission, but that line came to mind when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced last month that Heather Evans would become the next commissioner of revenue on July 13, just a week before the moon landing’s 57th anniversary.

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Evans has led the Canadian Tax Foundation since 2016 and was previously national managing partner of tax for a Big Four professional services firm. I have known Evans from my years in foundation leadership, including as its chair before her tenure, and I hold her in high regard.

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Revenue Canada, formerly a government department, was converted into the Canada Revenue Agency in 1999, freed from the Treasury Board’s grip and given its own board of management precisely to import private-sector discipline.

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The org chart changed, but the instincts never did and every commissioner came from within the government. Evans, though, arrives directly from the private tax community. The Union of Taxation Employees is “cautiously optimistic.” So am I, but for different reasons.

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The CRA has a vitally important and very difficult job administering the Income Tax Act and numerous other statutes. However it administers the law; it does not write it. Within the commissioner’s administrative authority, though, lie meaningful small steps and Canadians should insist they be real ones.

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Real ones? We’ve just lived through the alternative. Last September, after Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne declared the CRA’s service delays “unacceptable,” the agency launched a 100-Day Plan. In late October, the auditor general released a scathing report on the agency’s call centres, and the plan’s true origin became obvious: the government had the report in advance and was managing the damage.

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After day 100 arrived on Dec. 11, the results were what I predicted: bureaucratic and political self-congratulation. The 100-Day Plan wasn’t one small step; it was a moonwalk, a performance of motion, with the root causes left exactly where they were.

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To be fair, some say the plan produced real improvements and was the kick in the pants the CRA needed. Perhaps. But practitioners have documented many of the CRA’s issues for years with no meaningful response.

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If it took an auditor general’s report — and a minister’s political need to get ahead of it — to finally administer the kick, that is not a defence of the plan; it is an indictment of the culture, one that responds to headlines, but not to Canadians and their advisers who deal with it daily.