0:18 On September 23rd, 2024, Janice Stein,
0:20 founding director of the Monk School of
0:22 Global Affairs and Public Policy, joined
0:25 CSPS President Tisantakis for the
0:27 opening session of the Geopolitics and
0:29 National Security Development Program
0:33 for federal government executives.
0:35 The discussion provided an overview of
0:37 the global strategic context within
0:40 which Canada's public servants operate,
0:42 from the state of globalization and the
0:44 world order to the implications of
0:46 living in a world of rapid technological change.
0:59 The conceptualization of the course was
1:03 that to be a good public servant going forward
1:04 forward
1:07 uh you had to match the requirements of
1:11 your age uh with the requirements of the
1:14 environment. And historically
1:16 we've been not too bad at that in the
1:18 government of Canada. uh when the
1:21 environment was safe, we acted in a
1:23 certain way. When the environment was
1:25 growth oriented, we acted in another
1:29 way. Um it was kind of clear four or
1:32 five years ago that the environment was
1:36 about to go through dramatic changes and
1:39 a lot of the mental models that we have
1:41 in the government of Canada uh and in
1:45 the public service are really mental mo
1:48 mental models from a previous age. Uh
1:50 and that previous age wasn't that long
1:53 ago. It was like a couple of years ago.
1:58 And so all of a sudden security
2:02 started becoming important in ways that
2:03 we never would have thought that
2:07 security would have be been important in
2:09 the 80s and the '9s during globalization.
2:11 globalization.
2:15 Uh, and so we wanted to kind of shake up
2:18 the mindset a little bit of of key
2:20 people to just kind of say, you know
2:23 what, even though you work in forestry,
2:26 forestry,
2:28 you have something to understand about geopolitics,
2:30 geopolitics,
2:34 uh, even though you work in science, you
2:36 have to start thinking a little bit more
2:39 about security. Uh if you work in an
2:42 economic department, you can't just stop
2:45 at economics. Uh in order to serve
2:47 Canada and Canadians in this new
2:50 environment, you have to start understanding
2:51 understanding
2:54 that the people that you interact with
2:58 around the globe uh are
3:00 different than they were a little while
3:04 ago. Maps uh are pieces of paper that
3:08 have lines on them. uh that line we've
3:10 been told for virtually all of our
3:12 lives. Uh from the moment that we were
3:15 born uh till we went to grad school,
3:16 when we came into the government of
3:18 Canada, we were told those lines don't
3:21 really matter. Uh manufacture anywhere
3:24 in the world. Trade with anybody in the
3:27 world. Don't worry about intellectual
3:30 property. Don't worry about where your
3:34 pagers and your cell phones come from.
3:37 The world is different now and to be a
3:39 good public servant to serve your
3:43 country well you have to kind of absorb
3:45 that difference and it's something that
3:48 all of our predecessors did in the past.
3:50 uh to be a good public servant you have
3:53 to understand the environment around you
3:57 and then use that knowledge to inform
3:59 your files whether those files are
4:04 social, economic, regulatory, security,
4:08 etc. So um we're let's talk a little bit
4:10 about the world. We we live in a world
4:14 that's dramatically different say from
4:17 the 1990s. So what are some of the
4:22 differences between 2024 and say 1994?
4:24 >> Okay, that that's really a great
4:27 question and maybe we can come at it
4:32 Tiki through a story. All right. Um
4:35 pagers and walkie-talkies,
4:38 which I think everybody probably paid
4:41 attention to in the last five or six
4:43 days. And why is that such an
4:48 interesting story? Um, and I I um find
4:51 it absolutely
4:53 fascinating because I think it brings
4:57 home to people the breaking down
5:01 entirely of some boundaries and the
5:04 firming up of other boundaries in ways
5:06 we wouldn't really expect. Where's the
5:08 boundary breaking down? Which is the
5:10 first question.
5:12 This just puts the period on something
5:16 that's been happening. There is no
5:19 defined line anymore between civilian
5:21 and military.
5:25 Um those those spaces are now completely integrated.
5:26 integrated.
5:29 Um and why does that matter for all of
5:32 you in this room? We have a large apparatus
5:34 apparatus
5:37 that we built up not only for 30 years
5:41 Tiki but for 200 years that distinguish
5:43 between civilian and military. Think
5:46 about all of international law. All of
5:49 international humanitarian law that's a
5:53 fundamental distinction. The UN
5:55 um you know we have a very very
5:57 elaborate institutional infrastructure
6:00 which makes this distinction.
6:02 It's gone.
6:05 And if and I think everybody can relate
6:07 to that. And that's why in so many ways
6:10 this is a foundational story. What you
6:13 all watched happen last week. Your cell
6:16 phone. Everybody in this room has a cell
6:20 phone and that becomes weaponized. Um
6:22 Um
6:25 and it's and there's it's so difficult
6:29 to draw the boundaries. weaponized for
6:33 what purpose? Against civilians? No.
6:36 Against members of an organization that
6:38 is committed
6:41 um to use force. And it's distributed by
6:43 the senior leadership in the
6:45 organization to its own members
6:48 as a way to get around the previous
6:50 generation which was too vulnerable
6:52 because we could listen in on everything
6:54 that's said. And then these things be
6:59 become powerful explosives in the hands
7:02 of the people who hold them and their
7:05 family members become bystanders who are
7:08 injured and killed because you leave
7:10 this weapon on the table. If we if we
7:14 thought about a gun that a parent left
7:18 on the table and a kid picked it up, we
7:21 all know what we would say. But
7:24 we're in that world now because
7:26 something that is so important in your
7:30 civilian life has becomes a weapon. So
7:34 that border has gone away. And we have a
7:37 huge amount of work to do to figure out
7:40 where law goes, where institution goes,
7:43 how we make these fit for purpose in a
7:46 new world where there's it's just these
7:49 are blended. Where is the boundary
7:51 firming up, Kiki, but I'm coming back to
7:55 you and you alluded to it. Supply chains.
7:56 chains.
8:00 Supply chain. You don't have this story
8:03 without a global supply chain that
8:05 starts in Taiwan,
8:09 goes to Germany. This is just in time
8:11 manufacturing, which is what we lived
8:14 with from the 1990s on. And it was
8:17 really efficient and it led to growth.
8:19 We could we could we we can all point to
8:22 its failures. But wow, it lifted a
8:24 billion people out of poverty in India
8:28 and China. It reduced the cost
8:33 of of much of what we buy and consume.
8:36 Um, it led to growth
8:40 even in the developed world, but it made
8:42 us vulnerable.
8:45 And that's what you saw play out.
8:49 >> Yeah. And it's not um don't think about
8:51 it just in terms of very highly
8:53 sophisticated people doing something
8:56 with a cell phone. It is not that at
8:58 all. If that's what you're thinking,
9:01 that's the wrong message to take away.
9:06 your garage door opener, a light bulb,
9:11 uh your pace maker, a car, those are all
9:15 potential weapons. If you are connected,
9:17 you have a vulnerability. And the
9:20 internet, which is one of kind of the
9:24 the keystones of globalization,
9:27 has connected us. But when it connected
9:29 us, security wasn't even an
9:32 afterthought. It was about connectivity.
9:34 It was about getting online. It was
9:36 about, "Oh, isn't this great? My front
9:40 door now is connected. The light bulb
9:45 above my uh above my bed is connected to
9:47 about 4 billion people because about
9:50 four billion people are on the internet.
9:53 So, the world has changed underneath our
9:56 feet very very rapidly. The question
10:00 becomes in your costbenefit language,
10:02 how much are you willing to pay for
10:05 greater security? So if you're nervous
10:08 now that your cell phone
10:10 can become a weapon that somebody uses
10:13 against you and it can be a weapon in
10:15 multiple ways. They can listen to what
10:17 you're saying. I can tell you every
10:19 single one of you and you know it if
10:21 you're from some of our agencies,
10:23 nothing you do on your cell phone is
10:26 private. Nothing. absolutely nothing.
10:29 So, just take a moment of panic there to
10:32 say how you would feel if all your texts
10:35 and your emails and your conversations
10:37 were made public. Uh were there things
10:40 that you wish you hadn't said or done?
10:42 Right. But if you think somebody's going
10:45 to weaponize that, how much more would
10:47 you pay to have that cell phone
10:53 manufactured entirely in Japan or Korea?
10:55 probably not in the United States or
10:56 Europe frankly because we don't have
10:59 discipline enough labor forces. I can
11:02 tell you the cost would probably be what
11:04 twice three times as much.
11:07 That's the discussion we're having now,
11:09 which is so different from what we had
11:11 then, but it still leaves out some of
11:13 the important things that we have to consider.
11:14 consider.
11:17 >> If we could do it at all, because it's
11:20 uh it's very very difficult to make a
11:24 pencil in uh one place without a supply
11:28 chain, let alone an iPhone or um an
11:32 Android phone. So we took efficiency and
11:35 we raised it on the gold uh the platform
11:38 the gold platform at the Olympics. We
11:40 dropped some other things. We dropped
11:42 you mentioned a few of them justice
11:45 fairness. We also dropped some other
11:48 things that are in a way kind of closer
11:52 to economics. We dropped redundancy. >> Yeah.
11:53 >> Yeah.
11:59 >> We dropped kind of security of supply.
12:04 We dropped kind of having something made
12:07 by somebody that loves us rather than
12:11 somebody that doesn't love us. talk a
12:21 did damage to us and maybe we'll we'll
12:24 bring a little bit we'll ease into co a
12:26 little bit because I think
12:29 >> co is a wonderful wonderful
12:32 manifestation of that philosophy that
12:35 not only can we all see we've we've all
12:36 lived through
12:38 >> you know I think co is a great example
12:41 and as you were asking asking a question
12:44 Tiki that's where uh my mind went to
12:47 first because I think every one of us knows
12:48 knows
12:54 that in March of 2020 when we finally
12:56 understood the beginnings of what we
13:00 were facing we did not have
13:04 um the most basic supplies we and and
13:07 let's talk about masks
13:10 masks were not manufactured in Canada at
13:13 that point, surgical masks because it
13:16 was cheaper to have a supply chain and
13:20 when the world shut down the way it did,
13:23 we for the first two or three months of
13:29 CO were scrambling um to import masks.
13:31 Now, it is not complicated to
13:35 manufacture masks, right? So, we had no
13:40 redundancy. we didn't have um a backup system
13:42 system
13:45 uh which could take over if the main
13:46 system broke down. That's what
13:49 redundancy is. I would bet that there's
13:52 not a single one of you that hasn't
13:54 backed up your computer. I don't know
13:55 what you do in the office, but let's
13:57 talk about the one you have at home,
13:59 your personal computer. It's backed up
14:01 somewhere. If you don't worry about
14:03 security, it's backed up on the cloud,
14:06 right? which is eminently hackable. Let
14:09 me just tell you that. So again, it's up
14:12 to you what you care about. Um if you
14:14 don't trust the cloud like me, you back
14:16 it up on an external hard drive, but
14:18 that's not very good if there's a fire
14:22 in my house. Okay. Um but we we
14:24 understand that we need backup. We need
14:28 redundancy. We have no redundancy. We
14:30 had no redundancy in our health care
14:33 system. We didn't have it in supplies.
14:35 We didn't have it in emergency room
14:38 capacity. You know, some of the most
14:42 basic things we absolutely had no
14:47 redundancy. And it became so clear, Ty,
14:50 that we have to trade off. We have to
14:54 give up some efficiency for some redundancy.
14:56 redundancy.
14:59 How much? That's a political debate.
15:01 It's a security debate, but it's a
15:04 larger political debate. And by the way,
15:05 how much better are we at mask
15:13 >> but the the issue so much and I don't
15:15 want people to take kind of the wrong
15:17 lesson away from here. It's not become
15:21 inefficient. It's kind of become
15:23 cognizant of your vulnerabilities.
15:26 That really is the key lesson. And if
15:29 you think in terms of vulnerabilities,
15:32 you do your job better. One of the
15:35 entities that
15:39 um actually had masks and had medical gowns,
15:41 gowns,
15:43 uh can anybody take a guess?
15:47 Complete non-medical entity.
15:51 Apple, Facebook, Google,
15:56 Amazon, they all had stock piles of
15:59 masks and masks that actually worked.
16:03 Masks where the rubber uh hadn't snapped
16:05 where and the reason why is they kind of
16:07 looked around at their business and
16:10 said, "Where are we vulnerable?"
16:13 Uh we're vulnerable if there's an
16:17 internet outage. We're vulnerable if
16:20 there's a cloud outage. We're vulnerable
16:24 if our employees can't come to work.
16:27 We're vulnerable if our employees are
16:30 subject to an epidemic of bird flu or an
16:34 or a serious case of the flu or what
16:36 have you. So, it's about
16:39 vulnerabilities. It's about thinking consciously
16:41 consciously
16:45 >> about where am I vulnerable
16:48 >> now one of the things Go ahead Janice
16:52 >> it is exactly right it's how much
16:56 greater cost am I willing to pay less
16:57 efficient it's not about being
17:00 inefficient it's how much greater cost
17:04 am I willing to pay to reduce the
17:07 likelihood that I will be vulnerable in
17:10 this way because once you're vulnerable,
17:12 it's too late.
17:15 >> And we've been vulnerable on some
17:17 interesting things over the last couple
17:20 of years. Not because
17:23 we are, you know, we're dramatic
17:26 proponents of taking risks. We've been
17:29 vulnerable on very kind of baseline
17:32 things that somebody has just kind of
17:36 said this is now a security issue. Uh
17:41 steel is a security issue coming in. Uh
17:45 baby food is a security issue going out.
17:49 Uh it's talk to us a little bit about
17:51 >> EVs. EVs.
17:54 >> Yeah. Batteries. Uh talk to us a little
17:57 bit about how people are now I don't
18:00 want to say gaming the system, gaming
18:03 trade, but I'm not sure I can find a
18:05 better word than that.
18:07 You know, this is a probably the biggest
18:10 debate right now in the United States
18:13 and Canada. I think it's one of the big
18:16 debates that's going to be with us and
18:17 it affects every department of
18:21 government, frankly, because
18:25 and again, how do we balance?
18:29 So we could securitize everything in our
18:31 economy because if you want to go way
18:34 out along the frontier, everything is
18:38 potentially a security risk. Um let me
18:40 take one which is very very
18:43 controversial. Um and I'll tell you how
18:45 hard it is to deal with and it's going
18:47 to come to our government. I can tell
18:50 you if it's not there already. Tik Tok.
18:54 Okay. What's Tik Tok? Tik Tok. um
18:55 looking around at the faces on the
18:57 screen, you are not primary Tik Tok
18:59 users. But if you have any young people
19:02 in your life, you know how much it is
19:05 the network of choice, the platform of
19:07 choice for them. And what are they
19:10 watching? Videos that people are
19:11 creating, right? And you say to
19:15 yourself, that's not a security threat.
19:18 How can that be a security threat?
19:22 There is a very strong group of people
19:24 in this country in Canada who are saying
19:27 to the government Tik Tok is a security
19:30 threat to Canada. And why is that?
19:33 Because they're collecting data about
19:36 Canadians who use that platform. So when
19:40 your kids or your teenagers use Tik Tok,
19:43 that data goes back to China. There's no
19:45 question about that. Even though there
19:49 have been commitments. So I say, "Okay,
19:51 do I care
19:54 if the data about how often somebody
19:57 watches a cat video goes back to China?
20:01 Is that high enough on my list of
20:03 security threats and I'm really going to
20:06 worry about it?" Well, let's up the
20:10 argument. Tik Tok also transmits videos
20:14 that people uh can access. And what is
20:16 becoming clearer that there are actors
20:22 like Iran who use Tik Tok to make videos
20:25 that are entertaining but also have a
20:28 political message uh embedded in them
20:30 and they're downloaded and they're
20:34 downloaded by the largely young group of
20:37 people who use Tik Tok. Do we care about
20:40 that? Does that elevate the whole
20:43 discussion to a different level? There's
20:44 one other piece of information we'll put
20:46 on the table because we could argue
20:48 about this for the rest of the hour we
20:51 have together. Tiki, if you look at the data,
20:53 data,
20:58 uh Tik Tok is eating Instagram's lunch
21:01 in terms of user numbers, right? So more
21:04 people are using Tik Tok, fewer people
21:06 are using Instagram.
21:09 Are we surprised
21:13 that in the United States, the home of
21:16 Meta, which owns Instagram, there is
21:18 enormous pressure on the United States
21:21 to ban Tik Tok? And Meta is at the
21:23 forefront of the campaign arguing that
21:27 Tik Tok is a security issue. Now,
21:29 depending where you are in this debate,
21:31 either you see, and and that's where the
21:33 debate is going to come to you. I can
21:35 tell you it's coming to you. Either you
21:39 see this as lobbying by a
21:43 self-interested econ powerful economic
21:46 firm that is using security arguments to
21:48 get what it could never get if it just
21:52 used economic arguments. Or you say, how
21:56 naive is that? If messages are coming in
22:00 that are political propaganda on Tik
22:02 Tok, that's a security issue and that's
22:06 enough for me. I'm gonna bat it.
22:10 >> In 2018 when I took over the school, I I
22:13 a precursor to this was I revamped uh
22:17 the ADM uh development program and I
22:20 brought you to come and speak at the ADM
22:23 development program very early. And you
22:26 started off with a sentence that kind of
22:29 shocked the participants back then, but
22:32 now people would kind of yawn. And your
22:35 sentence was the following. You said the
22:39 liberal economic order, world order is
22:42 over. Period. Pale.
22:47 Get over it. What did you mean by that?
22:49 >> And that was
22:51 I think Tai is underestimating the
22:54 controversy of that statement when I
22:58 made it. And you can imagine how well
23:00 received that was by some of the
23:04 ministers in the contemporary government
23:09 because I certainly heard from them. Um
23:11 what did I mean by that? In a sense I
23:14 could see sometimes you get things wrong
23:17 te I get them as wrong as often as
23:20 everybody else gets them wrong. But I
23:22 could see
23:26 uh the growing securitization
23:31 of the global economy and we've see you
23:33 know this is not the first time that
23:36 we've seen it in history and what
23:39 happens then is that the borders we'd
23:42 erased and erasing those borders
23:44 fundamental to the liberal economic
23:46 order. We don't want to really talk
23:48 about that. But that's why, you know,
23:53 all the jokes about a global elite that
23:56 is at home everywhere and lives nowhere
23:59 has a grain of truth. The global economy
24:03 integrates it. It weakens borders and it
24:06 does it through trade where we have very
24:08 elaborate supply chains where one
24:10 product may be made in 40 different
24:13 countries. Frankly, even pencils as you
24:15 just said, Tiki, uh we do it through
24:18 foreign direct investment where capital
24:23 moves frankly um across borders and it
24:27 does so uh not subject to the kind of
24:29 tax regimes that we would normally think
24:31 of. And of course the third thing that
24:35 moves is labor where we had a big
24:37 increase in mobility of people moving
24:40 across borders for jobs. That was the
24:43 height of the liberal economic order. By 2018,
24:45 2018,
24:47 you could already sense
24:51 um that this was beginning to change. It
24:55 starts with China and Trump's tariffs on
24:59 China. This was the beginning of
25:04 um a a view of the world in which um
25:07 getting the best product at the lowest
25:10 cost was no longer the most important
25:13 value. There were other issues and it
25:15 was driven in fact and I think it's
25:18 important to put this on the table. It
25:21 was driven in fact that the those years
25:27 when China joined the WTO which was 2001
25:29 and this is long gone long gone by now.
25:33 That effect is long gone. A million jobs
25:36 left North America principally from the
25:38 United States. And where were those
25:41 jobs? They weren't in New York City or
25:44 San Francisco. They were in
25:45 Pennsylvania. These states sound
25:48 familiar to you right now? Wisconsin, Ohio,
25:50 Ohio, Michigan,
25:51 Michigan, Georgia,
25:53 Georgia,
25:56 every one of the swing states that are
26:00 at play in the US election
26:02 experienced a rapid decline in
26:05 manufacturing jobs that left the country
26:07 at the height of globalization. These
26:11 are the hollowedout communities. Um and
26:15 so the Trump agenda was a political
26:17 agenda responding to the grievances of
26:21 these communities. Um
26:24 but domestic politics and international
26:27 politics are joined to the hip and that
26:31 was already there um by 2018. >> Absolutely.
26:32 >> Absolutely.
26:34 >> It's much deeper now.
26:37 >> Absolutely. The other you said a couple
26:38 of other things that I think are are
26:41 really important for us. one you said
26:43 there is no more distinction between the
26:45 domestic and the international.
26:49 Everything international is domestic and
26:52 everything domestic is international.
26:56 The second thing you said was that the
27:00 the fact that the rules associated with
27:03 the liberal economic order that is
27:05 passing or has passed
27:09 uh are gone doesn't mean that there are
27:12 no rules. It's just that the rules are
27:16 now different or the rules are emergent
27:20 or the norms haven't codified yet into
27:22 rules. Why don't you take either of
27:24 those uh in any any way?
27:26 >> Absolutely. Let me take the last one
27:29 first because I think it's so important
27:34 because I know that the civil service
27:37 hears often about the rulesbased
27:41 international order. uh it's invoked a
27:44 lot at the political level and I want to
27:46 distinguish between the liberal
27:49 rulesbased international order and a
27:51 rules-based international order. They're
27:55 not the same thing. Okay,
27:57 that gets elided at the political level
28:00 frankly when ministers talk but they're
28:02 not the same thing. The liberal
28:05 rules-based international order is what
28:08 Tiki just talked about. remove barriers,
28:11 rem lower tariffs,
28:17 grow trade. It's um all about um opening
28:21 up so that everything at every level
28:24 moves more easily. That's what the
28:27 liberal international order is. And
28:31 their roles to do that, right? The WTL
28:33 was the epicenter of that, the World
28:35 Trade Organization. as long as it was
28:38 functional, it's not anymore. Um, it's
28:41 paralyzed um by the United States, by
28:44 the way. Not by China, by the United
28:46 States. What's a rules-based
28:48 international order? We've had that
28:51 forever. Let me give you an example.
28:53 Don't kill a diplomat.
28:56 When did that start? That's a rule that
28:57 virtually, you know, and when you
29:00 violate that rule, boy, it doesn't
29:05 matter. Um, that's a rule. Big powers
29:10 make rules. What smaller powers observe.
29:13 So to argue that we are for a
29:16 rules-based international order doesn't
29:19 say very much because we need to
29:22 understand the content of those rules
29:24 that we are either supporting or
29:27 opposing. Rules-based international
29:30 order is what I call contentfree discussion.
29:32 discussion.
29:34 It has no content.
29:39 >> Absolutely. Now, the um
29:41 I'm under 10 minutes. I got the signal.
29:45 So, I've got like about 17 hours of
29:48 stuff I want to ask you. Uh but I'm
29:52 going to ask you um two last questions.
29:54 The first is talk to us a little bit
29:58 about capacity and state capacity. It
30:03 seems to me that throughout
30:05 most of the time that humanity has
30:11 organized itself in states that states
30:13 have had more capacity than civil society.
30:15 society.
30:20 And if even if that wasn't true that
30:24 states could control the capacity
30:28 that was in civil society, has something changed?
30:30 changed?
30:33 >> Yeah. You know, states are relatively
30:36 recent in human history. Um they're
30:38 they're a new invention in the history
30:42 of how humans have organized themselves.
30:43 and they get, you know, the Treaty of
30:46 West failure 1658 and that's fairly
30:51 recent given um how old the humanoids
30:54 are and we um really codified the fact
30:57 that states were the key unit in by
30:59 which we were going to organize the
31:01 world. And if you think about this, how
31:04 did states get made? Armies.
31:06 Armies.
31:10 You know, kings or queens needed armies
31:13 and they had to build a powerful bureaucracy
31:15 bureaucracy
31:18 to raise armies because you have to tax
31:21 people in order to pay for the army. And
31:23 so that's your first big bureaucracy
31:26 that stands up and it's organized and it
31:29 extracts money from the people who live
31:31 on that territory and it becomes very
31:36 powerful. So the action was really um at
31:38 the state level.
31:41 If you look at the more recent period,
31:44 Taiiki really up to the 1980s
31:47 um a lot of the innovation took place
31:50 when it was commissioned by the state.
31:54 So all of modern the modern the internet
31:56 to take one example that that's probably
32:00 the best example was a project started
32:03 in DARPA which is the defense advanced
32:06 research and products agency inside the
32:10 Pentagon which was an accelerator
32:13 located and an innovator located inside
32:16 the Pentagon and so the the state was
32:18 still the most powerful
32:22 innovator most powerful purchaser and
32:24 had an enormous concentration of power.
32:27 That's changed and that changed in fact
32:30 because that technology diffused. One of
32:32 the big things is that the internet
32:35 escaped the Pentagon
32:37 and came to you and me in this room and
32:40 all of a sudden we could access anything
32:42 we wanted and we weren't dependent any
32:46 longer. Uh cell phones spin out, right?
32:50 because we have this broad platform now,
32:52 Wi-Fi platform that we can all connect
32:55 to and it puts all that incredible power
32:58 in each one of our hands. But
32:59 something's happening that we're not
33:02 paying enough attention to. And this
33:06 really starts, it's an old story and
33:08 it's always stunning to me, Tiki, that
33:11 Canadians don't know the story because
33:14 it built our country. Starting with the
33:16 Biden administration, the United States
33:20 moved back massively into what we call
33:23 industrial policy.
33:25 And it moved back into industrial
33:28 policy. Why did it do that? Because it
33:30 looked at the things that the United
33:32 States could not manufacture. It looked
33:35 at the vulnerabilities.
33:38 It said, "We need to address these
33:42 issues before they bite us." And so the
33:43 Biden administration has put
33:47 approximately $2 trillion dollar into
33:49 addressing vulnerabilities through
33:53 legislation. Best known one chips,
33:55 right? Which are so important.
33:58 Everything runs on chips. United States
34:02 is bringing back the capacity to
34:05 manufacture the most advanced chips
34:07 which was previously really only in two
34:10 countries in a very complicated in the
34:12 Netherlands and Taiwan. There are now
34:16 plants in Arizona that can do that and
34:20 they brought um the Taiwan semiconductor
34:24 manufacturing company to Arizona with incentives.
34:25 incentives.
34:28 That's it's across the board. Where's
34:33 Canada on industrial policy? We're old
34:36 hands at it. Because if you think about
34:39 how this country was built,
34:43 the government built the railway that
34:45 went from east to west. That's
34:49 industrial policy. Without that railway,
34:52 no country, no Canada, no way would we
34:54 have exist we resisted the gravitational
34:57 pole of the United States. But we kind
35:00 of forgot about it ti in the years from
35:03 85 to
35:06 probably 2020.
35:10 But every developed democracy
35:13 now has industrial policy where
35:16 governments are steering
35:19 the future of the economy. They are
35:22 actively engaged. True in Japan was
35:24 always true. True in Korea was always
35:28 true. True in the European Union. And if
35:31 you don't believe me, I think compulsory
35:34 reading for everyone should be Mariel
35:38 Draggy's report which Mariel Draggy,
35:41 former governor of the central bank of
35:43 the European Union, former prime
35:47 minister of Italy, just issued a report
35:49 last week.
35:52 Europe is falling behind. Sound familiar
35:55 to anybody in this room? Europe has a
35:58 productivity problem. Europe
36:02 has no companies in the top 20 emergency.
36:04 emergency.
36:07 What do we need to do about it? And he
36:09 lays out a blueprint for industrial
36:13 policy. If you took the world Europe out
36:18 of Mario Draggy's report and put Canada
36:20 in that report,
36:23 it would fit perfectly.
36:25 We are living and it's not going to
36:28 matter. And this is hard for politicians
36:30 to understand.
36:33 Regardless of who's in the White House,
36:38 regardless of who's on Sussex Drive,
36:40 Europe, South America, South Korea,
36:44 Japan are all all in on industrial
36:48 policy and we will not be the exception.
36:52 So what skills do we need tiki
36:54 in the public service to advise the government
36:56 government
36:59 on which big bets this country is going
37:01 to make for the rest of this decade?
37:03 What skills do we need in the public
37:06 service to advise the government on how
37:11 we regulate what we invest in and grow?
37:13 What skills do we need to understand
37:15 what's safe and what is not safe? Those
37:19 are going to be the big issues that
37:20 every one of you is going to have to
37:21 grapple with.
37:24 >> Yeah. And Janice has put out a big
37:26 challenge to you as public servants. And
37:29 I think that's a challenge that that we
37:33 all have to internalize. What skills are
37:36 we going to need going forward to serve
37:38 Canada and Canadians? Now, we're going
37:40 to turn this off in a moment, but I want
37:43 to close with something that's really,
37:44 really important. And I want the group
37:51 to hear your thoughts, your distinctions
37:55 between facts, sorry, not facts, uh,
37:58 values and interests because as
38:02 Canadians, we have a lot of values. uh I
38:05 can start talking about them right now
38:09 and I can probably go well into the
38:11 evening but talk to us a little bit
38:14 about the difference and why it's
38:16 important to understand the difference
38:21 between your values and your interests.
38:23 >> Yeah. Uh look this is a great question
38:25 Tiki because it it takes me back to your
38:28 first question on the cult of efficiency
38:30 right these are connected. I think
38:34 everybody understands that we all have
38:36 values that are very important to us
38:39 every one of us and we have values uh
38:41 both individually and we have values as
38:44 a country um that shape our culture and
38:47 give us an identity and who we are in
38:51 the world and they matter. We also have interests
38:53 interests
38:56 where and those interests are things
38:59 like what will advance economic
39:01 opportunity for Canadians. That's an
39:03 interest. No government could stay in
39:07 power for long. If it says I don't give
39:10 a damn about whether this economy grows
39:12 or not. I don't really care about
39:14 whether people have jobs or not. My
39:16 value is justice. How long would that
39:19 person last? Right?
39:20 Not very long. I don't think they'd get
39:23 elected in the first place, frankly. How
39:25 do we make this country secure from
39:28 foreign interference?
39:30 That's an interest because every
39:33 Canadian cares about security, they may
39:35 think they don't, but as soon as
39:39 something becomes insecure, we hear loud
39:42 screaming from Canadians. So those are interests.
39:43 interests.
39:46 The qu the question becomes and this is
39:48 the fundamental political question for
39:50 any government. Where's the right balance?
39:52 balance?
39:57 How much and when do we compromise on
39:59 our values in order to secure our interests
40:01 interests
40:04 and how much of our interests do we
40:06 compromise in order to promote our
40:09 values. The ideal world is when values
40:12 and interests align. But that's like
40:15 saying the ideal world would be if I
40:17 could be paid to think
40:20 and never had to step away from my
40:21 computer and never had to teach a
40:23 student and never had to grade an exam
40:27 and never had to go to a meeting. Right?
40:31 It happens but not that often.
40:33 Most often there's tension between
40:38 values and interests and we and so a
40:41 values-based discussion alone is not real.
40:43 real.
40:46 An interestbased discussion alone is
40:48 real but it's not satisfying.
40:52 So it's about that balance. How much of
40:55 this will we give up for? How much of
40:58 that? And why? Why?
41:00 recognizing that we're not in this
41:02 perfect world where they align. We're in
41:04 another world where they actually
41:07 conflict most of the time on most
41:10 issues. So somebody tells me public
41:11 servant, well I'm doing this because
41:13 we're values-based,
41:15 I'll shoot right back. Yeah, but what
41:17 about our interests? What about our interests?
41:19 interests?
41:21 The Canada School of Public Service
41:23 hosts exciting and insightful events,
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41:28 and national security. To learn more,
