Retired Halifax police chief pens book on lifelong lessons

After retiring in 2019, the former chief of Halifax Regional Police took the pandemic as an opportunity to collect his thoughts and develop them into something others could benefit from. 

Jean-Michel Blais's book, Working the Blue Lines, compares his time as a police officer and executive with his time on the hockey rink as a referee. 

“For me,” Blais says, “what was important was getting out onto the ice and being able to referee the game to ensure that one, all the players were playing in a safe environment and two, that they were playing in a fair environment.”

“Now, as a police officer and executive, it was comparable because we were there to ensure people were safe and taken care of – that we would be called when things went south.”

Blais told CityNews that while the lessons learned from being in a leadership role was one of the main subjects in the novel, he would like readers to take another significant aspect of the book and learn from it: complexity management. 

Being in a decision-making role, Blais added, can be like a tsunami of information. 

“How do you sort it out? How do you deal with it? How do you make the best decision-making to be able to deal with the challenges that are out there?” 

In his book, Blais offers examples of how he dealt with the challenges of complexity management, lessons he learned from facing those challenges and hopes the information will help others facing similar difficulties. 

“When it comes down to policing in particular, you have the officer who arrives at somebody's house and says listen, you know, what's going on?”

“They have to be able to assess information immediately and make a decision, sometimes right on the spot, and sometimes those decisions can have lifelong consequences.”