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that Canadian public servants must adapt their mental models to a rapidly changing global environment, moving beyond outdated assumptions of globalization and efficiency to address new geopolitical realities, technological shifts, and security vulnerabilities.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