Juno News - April 14, 2022


Can Canada become a global power？ (ft. Irvin Studin)


Episode Stats

Length

38 minutes

Words per Minute

177.38652

Word Count

6,767

Sentence Count

382

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

26


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Can Canada become a global superpower? Only if we learn to think for ourselves.
00:00:04.180 I'm Candice Malcolm and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:17.420 Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
00:00:21.540 and his deputy Christia Freeland have a rather small view of Canada when it comes to our role
00:00:26.080 in the world and on the world stage. They love to repeat their silly little talking point that
00:00:29.980 Canada is back when the Liberals returned to power in 2015. To them, Liberals are the only ones that
00:00:35.380 can represent Canada on the world stage. Their perverse ideology that puts internationalism
00:00:40.340 ahead of Canada's own national interest rules the day. They believe in something called stakeholder
00:00:45.260 capitalism, where companies as well as governments aren't focused on things like innovation, jobs,
00:00:50.660 growth, taking care of the population, taking care of the people who work for the companies.
00:00:53.980 No, no, instead they focus on social justice, climate change, mass redistribution of wealth,
00:00:59.040 and something called equity. The more woke, the better, according to them. Canada is one of the
00:01:03.900 only countries in the world, one of the only countries in the history of the world to routinely
00:01:07.700 sacrifice its own national interest in order to virtue signal. We tie one hand behind our back
00:01:14.180 economically, refusing to develop our own natural resources. And rather than focusing on a grand
00:01:19.200 vision for Canada, rather than focusing on big national projects, we instead focus on little small
00:01:24.780 things like gender ideology, climate alarmism, censoring the internet, and recently stoking
00:01:29.900 division over the issue of COVID. Back in 2017, in a speech that was much applauded by the legacy
00:01:35.940 media, then foreign minister and World Economic Forum executive Christia Freeland gave a speech
00:01:41.480 calling Canada a middle power. That's how they see us, an irrelevant third-line role player,
00:01:47.040 not a superpower, not a relevant figure on the world stage. Well, my guest today has a much,
00:01:52.260 much bigger vision for Canada. His latest book is called Canada Must Think for Itself,
00:01:57.120 10 Theses for a Country's Survival and Success in the 21st Century. And in it, he lays out his
00:02:02.340 vision. So I'm very pleased today to be joined once again by Dr. Ervin Studen. Ervin is the founder and
00:02:07.860 editor-in-chief of Global Brief Magazine, one of the leading international policy thinkers in Canada.
00:02:12.660 He has been a public policy professor and has worked for Canadian Prime Minister as well as an
00:02:16.780 Australian Prime Minister. He holds a bachelor degree from York University. He's a Rhodes Scholar with
00:02:22.040 master's degrees from Oxford University, as well as London School of Economics, and a PhD from
00:02:27.760 Osgoode Law School. So last month, we had Ervin on the show to discuss Canada's post-COVID recovery
00:02:33.760 strategy. It was a great interview. I really encourage you to go check that out. And we also
00:02:37.120 talked a little bit about Canada's role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. So, Ervin,
00:02:42.940 welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.
00:02:45.000 It's great to be back. I enjoy your work.
00:02:46.380 Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what differentiates yourself and your vision for
00:02:52.400 Canada from the current government and people like Chrystia Freeland who call us a middle power.
00:02:58.480 Well, I offer 10 theses for people to consider, not on a discrete basis, but altogether in terms of
00:03:07.440 our ability to really survive, which is not obvious, and succeed in this century coming out of the
00:03:13.960 pandemic. Now, the starting point, of course, for the book is my worry about the very survival of
00:03:20.320 the country before success. And that is counterintuitive to us in Canada, at least it was
00:03:25.400 before the pandemic, the idea that Canada may not survive in the coming decades. And one just needs
00:03:30.340 to do a calculation, which I do in the book, about the average lifespan of modern states. And they tend
00:03:35.720 to be 60 years old or younger, after which they collapse through one of two forces or two forces
00:03:44.020 combined. One is domestic collapse, constitutional collapse. The second is external collapse, war or
00:03:51.020 something like a pandemic. And God forbid you should have two of them combined, you'll collapse that much
00:03:55.420 faster. Now, Canada is well over 150 years old. That means we're pressing our luck on the logic of
00:04:02.260 things. That means beyond luck, we'll have to be very hard working. Underpinning that hard work is
00:04:08.380 thinking, we just can't work. And we can't just say we're thinking because we're educated, really has
00:04:12.600 to be combined in a strategic framework. And that's the overall spirit of the book, I offer the
00:04:18.440 architecture of our exit from the pandemic, and how we can really survive given the wicked, domestic and
00:04:24.160 external circumstances, and then really flourish as a major country this century.
00:04:28.060 I remember there's a very famous essay written by Francis Fukuyama in the 90s called The End of
00:04:33.720 History. And the idea was that everyone will come to the position of Western liberal democracy. And
00:04:39.220 that's kind of the end point. And there won't be much left in terms of disputes and those kind of
00:04:45.300 things. So I think people have that mindset is a very influential essay. And people just think,
00:04:51.220 you know, Canada is a stable country, we're a Western liberal democracy, we've got it figured out.
00:04:54.800 And now it's just about kind of managing what we have and not letting it go. They don't really
00:05:00.320 think of Canada in terms of having threats, having enemies, that there being existential threats to
00:05:05.660 our country, aside from perhaps secession movements, separation movements. Whereas even then,
00:05:11.440 the idea of Quebec would leave and Canada would continue to be a functional country. But you see
00:05:17.060 things a little different that we do have threats, that there are potentials that could end Canada as
00:05:23.200 we know it. So maybe you can walk us through what what you think the biggest threats are to our
00:05:27.680 country. Thank you very much for painting it. Thus, that is a famous essay. And my father, who's an
00:05:34.160 immigrant to this country, used to say Canada is a country where you need to invent problems. So one of
00:05:39.560 the differences between my thinking to go back to your first question, thinking of the current
00:05:43.180 government, indeed of recent governments is that is that I start analytically rather than saying I have a
00:05:48.580 good idea for Canada. And the analytical point needs to say what are our existential problems and
00:05:54.340 challenges? What are the problems then to us succeeding the over and above existence, the
00:05:59.860 existential consequences are wicked. Coming out of the pandemic, we have, as I mentioned in our last
00:06:05.980 interview, which I enjoyed, seven or eight systems crises, really wicked systems crisis that we need to
00:06:12.820 manage concurrently, and their existential in nature, if any of the systems really collapse
00:06:17.700 outright, I mean, we're talking about mass, not just death, but the collapse of the country.
00:06:22.660 Domestically, we have four national unity problems, which any of which could collapse the country in the
00:06:28.020 coming decades. First, the Quebec question, which is alive and well and could turn at any point.
00:06:34.020 It's an ongoing thing to manage, but it is quite sharp coming out of the pandemic because a pandemic
00:06:39.620 because Quebec has had a very different psychological pandemic than the rest of the country. But for
00:06:44.340 certainty, if Quebec should ever leave, whatever one feels about that question, I love Quebec.
00:06:49.460 If Quebec ever leaves, that's the end of the country. That's the end of the country.
00:06:53.060 The second pressure point is the Western question, which is less existential and more affecting our
00:07:00.580 ability to succeed and thrive as a country. But it's a wicked question, which I'll address,
00:07:05.140 I think, in my remarks in the keynote at Civitas in Calgary. The Indigenous question makes it very
00:07:11.540 difficult to govern the country coming out of the pandemic. And the final one is that we have these
00:07:15.540 internal borders pockmarking the country physically, psychologically, and in regulatory terms coming
00:07:22.100 out of the pandemic, such that New Brunswick could close off one day, say only New Brunswickers welcome.
00:07:27.380 The North could close off to the rest of the country. Well, we have a country we don't,
00:07:30.900 and it takes a century and a half to smooth out this, this federation, and only a couple of years
00:07:35.860 to collapse its internal cohesion, which before long could could tend towards separatist movements
00:07:41.220 and disintegration. Externally, you mentioned Fukuyama's famous essay that liberal democracy had won,
00:07:48.180 but I think, in retrospect, Fukuyama was was gravely mistaken. Because if you ask who between
00:07:55.220 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev won the Cold War, my answer would be Deng Xiaoping won the Cold War,
00:08:01.540 that it was not the Soviet Union or the West democratically. For now, it's China and the
00:08:07.700 Chinese model that that is central coming out of the pandemic, whether one likes it or not,
00:08:12.500 it's irrelevant. It's an objective fact. And in the way I paint our geography, China is very close to us on
00:08:20.260 our Western borders. The geography between Shanghai and Whitehorse or Shanghai, where you're originally
00:08:27.220 from Vancouver or Prince Rupert or Victoria or Shanghai or Nuvik or Shenzhen Yellowknife is smaller.
00:08:36.100 The distance is physically smaller than that between Sydney and Shanghai, Australia. So if the
00:08:42.180 Australians say they're in Asia, which they have for the last several decades, we're even more in
00:08:46.980 Asia on the Western border. Through our northern front, the Arctic is melting. I'm not here to say
00:08:53.700 we're going to reverse climate change. Climate change is a reality at our north. So the north is
00:08:58.420 opening up. The neighbor that we're exposed to all of a sudden is the one that's at war with Ukraine,
00:09:05.300 we imagine, to our east, but is immediately to our north. That's Russia. We have America to the south,
00:09:11.540 and we have Europe to the east. These are four new wicked borders in their totality. ACRE, America,
00:09:19.220 China, Russia, Europe. And I want to commend that to all your listeners because it's a key part of my
00:09:23.940 second thesis in the book. Our borders are ACRE. These are all great powers. They're far bigger than
00:09:29.460 us. They're far more energetic. And in their combination, they could crush us or pull us apart
00:09:35.460 very fast in 15 different combinations. So the domestic pressures and the external threats
00:09:40.900 combined mean that we're going to really have to up our game. And that's where the thinking for
00:09:45.060 ourselves happens. Because no one, as you'll appreciate Candice, no one around the world is
00:09:49.780 saying, how can we do something for Canada? How do we help Canada survive? Only we can think for
00:09:57.060 ourselves. And it's not obvious that we're there, we're going to really have to up our game and fight
00:10:01.460 for our lives. And then I suggest later in the book, and we can get to this, that in fighting
00:10:06.580 for our lives, we will become a major power in our own right, if we make it.
00:10:10.740 Well, you definitely lay out the threats that we face. And in them could easily be opportunity,
00:10:17.780 I mean, to go back to the idea that Western separation is a threat, perhaps not an existential
00:10:23.540 threat. I would say that it's a more serious threat than any of the other ones. I mean,
00:10:28.580 well, I think also the Aboriginal one, because it undermines the very legitimacy of Canada by calling
00:10:36.660 us a colonial settler state and saying that Canada is illegitimate. I mean, I don't know how you can
00:10:42.340 really survive if you think that way. And it seems like many, many people in our institutions, leading
00:10:46.980 institutions believe that Canada is illegitimate over this Aboriginal question. When it comes to the West,
00:10:52.580 though, the idea that we have this resources, natural resources sitting there untapped, undeveloped,
00:11:00.420 intentionally, purposefully, we have a leadership in this country that does not want to develop our
00:11:05.780 natural resources, because ideologically, it feels that we have some other greater responsibility to
00:11:13.380 the planet. No other country thinks that way. No other power thinks that way. In some ways,
00:11:19.540 I think Canada is very stuck. But when you look at the North and conceptualizing Canada in the way that
00:11:26.100 you do, I wonder if that could create more opportunities to develop natural resources,
00:11:31.460 more export paths to the North, to Russia, to China. That way, do you see it as a potential
00:11:38.740 opportunity? And how can we take advantage of that opportunity?
00:11:41.060 A hundred percent. It is the actual fourth thesis of the book. I start with our pressures,
00:11:47.460 our crises. Then I say that we have a dyad of futures, and none of them is that of a middle
00:11:55.380 power. A middle power is a slogan, but I prove in the book, I hope, that middle powerdom is impossible
00:12:01.540 for Canada. It is either major power, I'm not even saying great power, major power amongst these major
00:12:07.700 powers at our borders by virtue of surviving, or a deep vassal state really crushed and through all
00:12:15.380 these major powers playing across our territory, our information space, our geography, crushing us,
00:12:21.140 doing all the thinking on their terms. And in the end, because some of these major powers are either
00:12:26.500 cynical or in the United States case, not sufficiently wise to do all our thinking, we could live very
00:12:35.300 miserably. And I would argue in the book that we are tending towards the latter, whereas the preferable
00:12:41.220 is to be a major power. And in doing so, lifting our boat, but requiring huge thinking. So the thinking,
00:12:49.700 and you intimated very correctly, is that amongst these threats, there's real opportunity. And the
00:12:56.820 opportunity is through the north. And what I say is that this northern border, they are part the C,
00:13:06.260 part the A, is the Arctic border. Now in the south, in Vancouver and Ottawa and Toronto, we imagine the
00:13:12.340 Arctic as this frozen wasteland. But I want us to imagine the Arctic as Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver,
00:13:19.300 just another border because it's opening up.
00:13:21.140 And that territory is as large as the entire European Union.
00:13:29.940 Yukon is as big as France, Northwest Territory is as big as France, Germany and Ukraine combined,
00:13:36.500 and none of it bigger than each of the other two. All told, the size of the European Union almost
00:13:41.780 exactly, do the calculation. What is the population for that territory? It is 115,000
00:13:49.460 strong for a territory that is opening up objectively. That's the size of Ajax Ontario
00:13:55.060 facing these giants at our border. Russia, 150 plus million people. China, a billion and a half. The
00:14:02.100 United States, 330 million. The European Union, 500 million. They're all at our borders and all of them
00:14:07.620 touching the Arctic. So we need to up our energy, that is human energy first, our demographic footprint,
00:14:14.500 our political footprint up towards the North, almost a shift away from the South, which we imagine to be
00:14:21.140 the existential game that's relevant. We need to up it. And instead of imagining that we're going to
00:14:28.900 war against Russia, China or the United States or the North, we embed them in a framework that is of
00:14:33.860 our own divination. We create the thinking. And that's why the fourth thesis called Canada becomes
00:14:40.180 the center of the world through a city like Whitehorse, Dinuvik or Yellowknife. We imagine
00:14:45.380 they become the Singapore of the North. And so we imagine 10, 15 years from now,
00:14:50.100 business people, businessmen and women taking regular flights from the North to Shenzhen,
00:14:55.860 to Shanghai, to St. Petersburg, to Oslo, to Chicago, just as we do through the South, because it's
00:15:02.820 opening up. And if we don't do the thinking, other powers will do it for us. But if we do the thinking,
00:15:07.700 we become filthy rich. And we also embed these countries in a framework of peace,
00:15:13.860 because the total market through the North is seven times larger than continental North America alone.
00:15:20.100 And we have geographic proximities that favor us. We just need to invest and do that thinking,
00:15:25.860 have the courage to build the framework where other countries are favored to have that courage. They are
00:15:32.180 the thinking countries, the term setting countries like the United States, like China, like Russia.
00:15:37.860 These are countries that are hyper energetic. They're ready to build a framework and they're
00:15:41.620 ready to vassalize us psychologically first. And I say, we up our game. We will embed them in our
00:15:47.460 own framework. So we have to move fast, but we need to see our geography and the opportunity first.
00:15:52.020 I remember when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to go on an exchange program to
00:15:56.980 Europe. And so I was flying from Vancouver to Frankfurt. And, you know, at the time I was 16,
00:16:02.420 I imagined flying in an airplane all the way across Canada, all the way across the Atlantic,
00:16:06.660 and going to Europe. And I remember watching a little airplane on the screen. And at one point,
00:16:12.260 the pilots look out the window, you can see the Arctic ice caps. And it's like, oh, no,
00:16:15.940 we didn't fly across the continent. We flew over, right? And that's how you get from the West Coast
00:16:20.980 over to Europe in a flight. We don't really conceptualize Canada that way. Why aren't
00:16:26.180 there flights that go through the North? Why don't we have more development up there? Why don't
00:16:29.940 we have airports? Why don't we have the basis of the infrastructure up there? And how do we get that
00:16:35.300 built? For the same reason that you articulate that the West is the most wicked of our national
00:16:42.820 unity problems. I concur. It's the first national unity problem I identified. The capital is in
00:16:47.620 Ottawa. The capital is in Ottawa originally because the strategic threat of Canada to go back to our
00:16:53.460 genesis and this idea of our borders was the United States. In 1867, Canada is created as the antithesis
00:17:02.340 to the American project. That is just a constitutional reality. It's particularly in the first paragraphs
00:17:07.700 of the Constitution. That is why all of the major cities and all the major economic activity limb the
00:17:16.820 southern border, not because it is warm. Anybody who's been to Winnipeg or Ottawa at any particular
00:17:23.940 time outside of summer knows that we're not there for meteorological reasons. We're there because all
00:17:29.060 the forts limbed the southern border because the Americans were the threat, all the way to the West.
00:17:34.660 The railroad went east-west and the cities followed and the economic activity followed thereafter. And
00:17:41.220 then the mythology of climate as the reason that we're there because it's warm in the South and not
00:17:47.060 in the North. And then the idea that the current mythology that the Americans are enduring friends.
00:17:52.580 Well, the Americans are our friend today, but in my read of things, they are just another country
00:17:58.340 and they are thinking in their own interests. And one day that could turn against us,
00:18:02.820 right? And even in annexation terms, and that should be understood, including through the North.
00:18:07.540 So now we understand the North is opening up in a way that was not true over the last 150 years,
00:18:12.660 just as China is relevant in a way that was equally untrue over the last 150 years. When Canada's created,
00:18:19.220 China is just recovering from the opium war. So it's destabilized for the entire modern existence of
00:18:25.140 Canada. Now Russia and China are right at our borders, as I just depicted. And so that border
00:18:31.780 alignment, that border thinking needs to be shifted up from the American axis up to that AC axis. And
00:18:40.020 Ottawa is not there psychologically. Ottawa, as we discussed, I think in the last interview and even
00:18:45.620 offline, has been self-isolating for two years. I mean, literally they've been zooming the entire country
00:18:51.700 and imagining that they're governing through their intellect, purely the second largest country in
00:18:56.420 the world, not even understanding our geography, neither intellectually nor in a felt way. And I
00:19:02.100 want, I commend to all colleagues, all patriots of Canada, that to feel our geography. It is huge.
00:19:09.300 Canada, we must appreciate. That's why I reject the idea of us ever being a small country. If you,
00:19:16.260 if you total the country, the geography of Canada, we are as large as the Roman, Persian and Ottoman
00:19:22.180 empires combined. That is the territory of Canada. That's how big we are. We are, we are empire size.
00:19:27.540 We don't have an imperial mentality. Fair enough. I'm not for that, but we need to think commensurately
00:19:32.900 with our geography because it is now opening up and we will be dominated on that geography if we don't
00:19:38.260 play at the right level. As it's opening up, Ottawa needs to think pushes thinking up, up north. And
00:19:45.380 in so doing, I also argued that they can address in a very meaningful way, the Western problem,
00:19:50.740 because much of the West is collected, connected to the North in psychological terms, particularly
00:19:55.460 Yukon and parts of Northwest territories, Nunavut a little less. And there is a huge energy proposition
00:20:00.900 there. There's a huge scientific proposition. There's a huge transport proposition. There's an
00:20:07.220 environmental proposition. We have a new university that's just come online through Yukon University.
00:20:12.980 In 10 or 15 years, I'd like to see five major universities across the North, literally in the
00:20:18.020 Arctic, one of them offshore. I'd like to see 10 million people living across the Arctic as it opens
00:20:24.420 up by the end of the century. That's perfectly normal for geography that opens up and they'll have,
00:20:29.460 we'll have some major cities. Just as a century ago, Vancouver was a village and Montreal was superior to
00:20:36.340 Toronto. These things change. So we don't imagine that tomorrow everyone will move to Toronto. I
00:20:41.860 find it less attractive than other parts of Canada today anyways. But for strategic reasons, we're
00:20:46.580 going to have to shift our energy and get out there, get out there en masse and see the country and build.
00:20:54.100 One of the things that I took interest in, and this is really well documented in the US,
00:20:58.660 was migration during COVID. A lot of people in the US left sort of poorly governed blue states,
00:21:04.980 states governed by Republicans, places like California and New York that had really
00:21:09.220 restrictive COVID policies. And they were also dealing with wicked crime increases and just a
00:21:15.380 growth in the cost of living. A lot of families left those kind of places and went to so-called
00:21:19.700 red states, places that had lower taxes, that had more job opportunities, and that were incentivizing
00:21:26.020 people to come. I know both Florida and Texas saw huge increases in their population. At one point,
00:21:32.260 Florida was offering $1,000 bonuses to any police officer who wanted to move to that state. We
00:21:37.780 didn't see much of that in Canada though. There wasn't really a lot of migration. There wasn't
00:21:41.940 really a lot of option when it came to where can I go to escape restrictive COVID policies? Where can I
00:21:47.860 go to raise a family in a way that I can afford? I know a lot of people leave Toronto because they
00:21:52.820 just cannot afford a house. When I was reading your book and talking to you last time, thinking about the
00:21:59.380 north, thinking about all of this land that we have, and yet not a lot of people, I wonder if there
00:22:05.060 could be some kind of incentive for people like in terms of, you know, a place where you can go and
00:22:10.660 raise a family, you can afford a single family home, you can have a kind of more traditional simplistic
00:22:16.820 lifestyle if you were willing to move up north. I wonder, have you seen any politician talking
00:22:23.700 about this kind of stuff, any sort of grand idea of how to move people to places in this country
00:22:31.220 where they can have a better lifestyle aside from, you know, everyone sort of congregating in and around
00:22:37.060 places like Toronto and Vancouver? Well, we had a collapse in thinking over the last two years.
00:22:44.820 The collapse in thinking over the last two years that you
00:22:47.140 articulate is built on the general absence of real thinking in the years prior because we
00:22:55.380 weren't forced by circumstances. As I mentioned, my father rightly said, until the pandemic had Canada
00:23:00.420 had to invent its problems in a comparative sense. We had small public tragedies, but we didn't have any
00:23:07.540 war on our territory for the entire 20th century in any meaningful way. And we didn't have the Quebec
00:23:14.980 collapse in the mid 1990s or the early 80s that could have also torn the country asunder. And
00:23:22.340 all of the other continents of the world had it. So now it's our turn. We are following the laws of
00:23:28.020 history. So to think a country that thinks also says, how do we make sure that we have the right
00:23:34.340 quantum of population, the right quality, and that people in our country are happy and dynamic and also
00:23:41.540 are mobile across the territory. By the way, when I talk about people moving to the north, I don't
00:23:47.140 just talk about foreigners necessarily. It could be Canadians that see opportunity. And one of the
00:23:52.740 things quietly, maybe even cunningly, that I have in the book is that the north makes the demographic
00:23:58.020 about which I'm most worried in Canada dream again. That's the young people. When you talk about
00:24:02.340 the north and the future of the country, as I see it, that excites young people who have really
00:24:07.780 suffered most over the last two years in Canada, in my view, unforgivable. It's exciting. You see
00:24:13.940 the entire world, it is close to us, and we have the wrong imagination, wrong imaginary from the south
00:24:20.340 of the north. We imagine to be a frozen iceberg that's unlivable, and it's exactly the opposite.
00:24:25.220 It's to be built, it's to be tamed, it's to be connected to the rest of the world. As I mentioned,
00:24:30.980 the north connects us to a market of seven billion people, seven, sorry, two billion people
00:24:36.020 through the north, which is seven times larger than continental North America, and four continents.
00:24:42.660 So then imagine a young person living in the north can live just as well as perhaps you did,
00:24:49.220 or I did growing up in the big cities of the south, with as much culture, with as much mobility,
00:24:54.900 but proximity, they would take an overnight trip to St. Petersburg, or Shanghai, or Chicago, or Oslo,
00:25:00.420 as I mentioned, you want to go to London, or you go to another part of the north, because I imagine
00:25:04.660 the three territories connected so easily you go from Whitehorse to Inuvik overnight, and you have
00:25:12.340 a nice stay, you eat in a nice restaurant, you'll have some reindeer for dinner, you'll take a course
00:25:19.780 at the university in northwest territories, and you go back home to a nice lifestyle. Now the cost of
00:25:27.220 living is high in the north, it's actually higher than in the south. That has a lot to do with
00:25:32.580 geographic distance, the fact that all the economic activity is imagined to be in the south, but also
00:25:39.540 through a lack of density of populations, we're gonna need more people in the north, more people
00:25:43.140 actually will reduce the unit costs of housing and food in the north, not the south, and also the unit
00:25:52.420 costs of transportation, and make my life more interesting. It also serves our interests for
00:25:57.540 sovereignty purposes and for the opportunity, I suggest, to have more people eventually move to
00:26:02.900 the north. But as I say, it's not a painful proposition. I find it very exciting once someone
00:26:08.340 understands that it is opening up much like Canada did in the late 19th and early 20th century for
00:26:15.460 people who want to build life for themselves. One of the things you hear about is that back then,
00:26:21.220 the government was offering land plots, like people were given a plot of land or some kind
00:26:27.220 of a bundle incentive to go live in the west to develop Saskatchewan or, you know, given some farmland
00:26:32.820 in Alberta. Could you see a program like that where Canadians, maybe even First Nations Canadians,
00:26:38.180 are incentivized by being given land that they could go develop? Or what other kinds of things can
00:26:44.180 we do to get to get this plan in motion? A hundred percent. And you began to hint at that when you
00:26:52.180 said that over the last few years, we've actually lost a lot of people, a lot of good people in
00:26:55.780 Canada, and no one's keeping track. And we're loath to get them back, because they were
00:27:00.020 psychologically, they've moved on. It's a big loss for us. We've not had to work hard. And this is an
00:27:04.260 area in which we're going to need to work hard to get the right quantum and the right talent. And there needs to be a very
00:27:09.620 deliberate choreography. Can't just be just fill the place up. I'm not for that even for the south.
00:27:14.260 I'm for very bespoke choreography. And that means business leaders, civil society leaders, and
00:27:22.020 government leaders getting on the phone, getting out into markets, into other countries, into other
00:27:28.660 parts of Canada, and recruiting actively. Make them offers that they cannot refuse because we want them.
00:27:34.180 Now, we also have a very intuitive but incorrect psychology in Canada in respect to recruitment. We say,
00:27:40.740 well, we'll come to the north when there's a job. And I say, no, we want the job makers in many cases.
00:27:47.940 I remember being at a conference in the Middle East, and they were more curious about the Arctic than we
00:27:53.700 are in southern Canada. And they said, well, if I look at that geography, I think I could employ a thousand
00:27:59.700 people within a year. And that's the type of person we want in the north. We want the term setters. They come and
00:28:05.700 we're as perhaps I and someone else don't see a job, a discrete job to be filled. They say, I'm going to employ a thousand
00:28:13.460 people in the community from across Canada and from across the north within a year and multiply that. These
00:28:19.380 are term setters that will help us make a term setting future. And you talk about the indigenous population. They are in many
00:28:26.100 cases, the term setters that will need or they're the ones that will want them. There's some very, very
00:28:31.060 energetic, ambitious, self-governing First Nations in the north that are very practical, that are
00:28:37.300 interested in talent. We just in a very Canadian way don't know how to make offers. We don't know how to
00:28:44.020 sell. And now we're going to have to learn to sell. Selling involves the thinking that I command in the
00:28:48.420 work and thinking is goes hand in hand with the work that is needed to build up that huge territory.
00:28:54.500 Well, one of the things that I read in your book, and I've seen this argument many times,
00:28:59.460 and I instinctively reject it and disagree with it, is this idea that Canada should deliberately
00:29:04.340 grow its population to 100 million people. Whenever I hear that argument, I think of people who just
00:29:10.260 sort of want to wholesale bring other people, other cultures and displace Canadians or sort of
00:29:16.100 ignore the Canadian population or is sometimes so condescending. It's like the idea is that we need
00:29:21.380 to bring other people in to civilize us and enlighten us on other cultures and other values.
00:29:26.100 And it seems that the people who lead these kinds of discussions almost have a dislike of the original
00:29:34.340 Canadian population. I'm wondering what your vision is and why we need to import people from around the
00:29:41.140 world in order to, why we need to get to 100 million and why we need to import people from around
00:29:46.020 the world to get there. A lot of the 100 million arguments over the last decade and a half start
00:29:51.540 with my own work. It started as an idea proposition, just a thought experiment. But now I mean it very much
00:29:57.300 in strategic terms. That is to say, on the current population of 38 million, we will be vassalized and poor.
00:30:05.940 And that is our current trajectory. So we can tweet as much as we want. We love Canada, we're patriotic,
00:30:12.020 we're democratic, but on the ground, we will become non-vital in economic terms, politically
00:30:19.860 less connected. And you mentioned the connection between Ottawa and the West, which also has to do
00:30:24.100 in part with demography and non-sovereign on our own territory and vassalized by other countries that
00:30:30.740 are larger and more energetic. So it is also an energy proposition, human sense, more people, more energy,
00:30:37.300 bigger companies, bigger markets, more transportation. I have, I think a powerful
00:30:42.580 table in there, which I talk about the basic thing of high-speed rail. We have, the Japanese created
00:30:48.500 their first high-speed rail lines in the 1960s. And how many have we got in Canada in the year 2022?
00:30:56.980 Still zero. And zero for any foreseeable future. We're even, where high-speed rail is already passé.
00:31:03.300 And there's nothing possible on that, on current demography. But with larger demography, we can
00:31:10.820 not just have that, we can have, we can have larger capital markets, larger intellectual markets,
00:31:17.060 better, a better cultural space. But let's talk about the North. I mentioned that there are 115,000
00:31:23.220 people in the North for a territory that we control for now, the size of the European Union. That is a
00:31:29.940 strategic nonsense. It is strategic nonsense given that the surrounding market is 2 billion people,
00:31:36.980 that the immediate strategic neighbor, for now a threat, I see before long an opportunity. The
00:31:42.420 Russians have 115 million people. If you juxtapose, as I do in the, in the, in the book, the distribution of
00:31:49.860 their population, of their 150 million people, they have 2 million plus in, on the, on the Arctic front,
00:31:57.380 facing our 115,000. And although they're larger, they're not that much larger to command such a
00:32:04.180 disproportionate superiority in ratio. So we're going to need many more people simply to govern
00:32:09.780 ourselves in the North. How many more? I'm actually indifferent between 80 million, 100 million, 120.
00:32:16.660 Those are just quanta to make people think it could be 70 million. But we're going to need about 10 million
00:32:22.660 in the North to govern ourselves, to manage this huge geography that's opening up. And 10 million
00:32:27.940 in the North means that we're going to need proportionate larger bases in the middle of
00:32:32.260 the country. Now we're talking about places like Thunder Bay, or even Churchill, Manitoba, further North,
00:32:39.300 and down to the current large metropolises where we imagine, whether we imagine,
00:32:44.340 once we imagine everybody, whether we imagine everybody immigrating. We'll imagine that everyone's
00:32:48.820 going to come to the GTA. I don't want everyone to come to the GTA. I don't want more neighbors.
00:32:52.660 I want people to be properly distributed across the country through choreography. And I do want to
00:32:58.420 maintain the majority minority equilibrium that you talk about. There needs to be a very bespoke
00:33:02.980 choreography. But we're not doing that. Even on the current immigration structure, it's very lazy.
00:33:09.220 It's quite less a fair. And it has no appreciation of our geography and our sovereignty needs and the
00:33:14.980 opportunities that I talk about. Well, and it has no appreciation of the difficult work involved in
00:33:21.700 integration, right? You talk about a threat to Canada being that we could become a vassal state
00:33:26.660 for all of these other more powerful countries. It's like, if we just start importing people from
00:33:30.260 those more powerful countries, and don't give them any guidance, don't give them any
00:33:35.780 integration into our country and just say, yeah, welcome to Canada. We don't really like ourselves.
00:33:39.220 We don't have a lot of confidence. We have this horrible history and we're humiliated by it.
00:33:43.060 Come do whatever you want, basically. And that's kind of the message delivered to newcomers. And
00:33:48.820 I agree that it needs to be more coordinated. It needs to be more deliberate if we're going to want
00:33:54.580 to sustain the unity that we have, or at least build unity, continue towards being one country.
00:34:04.980 So Irvin, just final question for you here. You spent a lot of time thinking about Canada. You
00:34:10.660 kind of boiled it down here to 10 very succinct theses for the country. What is your grand
00:34:16.740 vision for Canada? Where do you see Canada in 2050? Where do you see Canada in 2100? And what do you
00:34:25.300 hope for Canada? In the last thesis, the 10th, my favorite, I paint 10 steps for Canada post-pandemic.
00:34:35.540 By the way, one of which would interest you. Personally, I talk about creating a special
00:34:41.860 economic environmental zone for the entire west and north of the country to really give us energy and to
00:34:49.540 open our wings. I talk about movement of assets up in the country, both political and economic,
00:34:54.820 more to the west and to the north because of the China-Russia axis, which is underserviced.
00:35:01.780 2050, I hope I'm around and vital. In 2100, I plan to be around and vital. I hope that Canada is
00:35:08.980 around. It's not obvious. Canada is my team, so I'm always fighting for it and I'm thinking about it.
00:35:15.860 I'm grateful, but now I realize that it's much more the gratitude that is required for us to
00:35:21.300 to keep fighting. I imagine us to be the second major country in the west in the year 2050, second
00:35:30.500 only to the United States, larger essentially in both demography and power and influence and self-belief
00:35:39.140 than any Western European country, any European country other than Russia, which by that point will
00:35:44.500 have different borders anyways. I also, however, imagine us to be connected very non-ideologically
00:35:52.260 to all the major countries in the world. This is an essential point. I'm very non-ideological
00:35:57.380 in my strategizing for Canada and must be so because if we're too dogmatic, we will get crushed.
00:36:03.380 We can be dogmatic on Twitter, but we need to be, I call it strategically promiscuous in our strategy.
00:36:10.260 We need to have good relationships with all these border countries because otherwise they will crush
00:36:14.820 us. And that's how a cunning, clever, calculating country that's at scale operates. So we'll have
00:36:21.780 good relations, not just with the United States, but with China, with Russia, with all the European
00:36:27.940 countries. And then after that, with India, with Africa, all to our advantage, first and foremost,
00:36:33.940 and survival. And then I hope, and this is my larger interest in the service of humanity,
00:36:39.220 which is the more interesting condition, but first and foremost, we have to do it through Canada,
00:36:44.020 which is, as I mentioned, as I, as I, as I come in in the book, worth fighting for.
00:36:49.780 Well, that's absolutely. I really encourage people to go and check out your book. Where can they find
00:36:55.380 your book right now, Ervin?
00:36:56.420 Well, for the coming months, it's going to be an ebook, so they can check it on, on the Global Brief
00:37:01.700 site. They can, they can purchase it there on the, on the Institute for 21st Century Questions,
00:37:06.500 i21cq.com site. And I hope that they love it. And before long, we'll be in, in print as well,
00:37:14.820 and I'll be, continue to talk about it. It's, it's highly topical.
00:37:19.620 And as Ervin also mentioned, he's going to be giving a keynote address at our Civitas
00:37:24.180 conferences here. So if you're interested in, in coming out to Calgary and, and seeing that
00:37:28.020 conference, checking it out, go, go over to CivitasCanada.ca. You can find out more information
00:37:33.700 about the organization, about the conference, and you'd be able to come and see Ervin deliver
00:37:38.580 that keynote address. So, Ervin, thank you so much for your time. It's always so interesting to talk to
00:37:42.580 you. Thanks for sending me over a copy of your book. I really am enjoying it. I'm not quite done yet,
00:37:46.500 but I'm, I'm enjoying working my way through and I look forward to seeing you in Calgary.
00:37:50.340 Me too. See you soon. Thanks for your work.
00:37:52.580 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.