Juno News - Canada collapsed during Covid. Here’s how we fix it. (Ft. Irvin Studin)

00:00:00.000 Canada needs to come up with a serious and credible plan to move past COVID, to end all

00:00:05.120 COVID-era mandates and restrictions, to get our economy back on track, but also to begin to

00:00:10.160 address the considerable harm done to the social fabric of our country by the unprecedented

00:00:15.280 government overreach. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:30.000 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. So it's become almost like a cliche lately to say

00:00:34.840 that we need to move past COVID. We need to get back to normal. The reality is that we cannot move

00:00:39.600 back in time. We'll never be able to get back to 2019. We need to move forward, yes, but we also

00:00:45.360 need to meticulously study what exactly happened over the past two years. We need to investigate

00:00:51.260 what happened and why. We need to cancel the overzealous government programs, yes, but we also 0.84

00:00:57.360 need to put in place safeguards to make sure that that power can never be abused again, that power

00:01:02.580 thirsty politicians, overbearing governments cannot undermine our rights and freedoms again in the

00:01:08.500 future. So today I'm very pleased to be joined by someone who is working on these very ideas, working

00:01:13.160 on a project to get us to move forward and to get our lives back on track. I'm very pleased today to be

00:01:19.440 joined by Irvin Studen. Irvin is the founder and editor-in-chief of Global Brief Magazine, one of the

00:01:24.720 leading international policy thinkers in Canada. Irvin has been a public policy professor and worked

00:01:29.900 for both the Canadian prime minister and an Australian prime minister in 2004. He was a

00:01:34.680 member of a small team who wrote Canada's first national security policy. In 2006, he did something

00:01:39.040 similar down in Australia. Irvin holds a bachelor's degree from York University, a master's from both

00:01:44.800 Oxford and the London School of Economics, and a PhD from Osgood Law School. Notably, this is really

00:01:50.300 interesting. Irvin has taught foreign policy, both at Ukraine's Higher School of Public Administration

00:01:55.060 in Kiev, as well as at Russia's Academy for National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. So we're

00:02:01.720 going to talk a little bit about the Russia-Ukraine conflict as well. There are a few people in the

00:02:05.660 world who are more qualified to talk about what's going on than Irvin, and I'm really pleased to have

00:02:10.140 him on the show today. So Irvin, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.

00:02:13.480 It's a real pleasure, Candice. Thanks for having me. I enjoy your work.

00:02:17.120 Well, I appreciate it. So you recently chaired and you wrote a national exit plan for COVID. So

00:02:23.120 first of all, take us through what led to this and why you decided to take on this project.

00:02:30.120 Well, we were not exiting. We were not exiting as a country. We were studying COVID. We were

00:02:35.700 living COVID. We were sentimentalizing. And in late 2021, I had a long conversation with the person

00:02:46.580 who is now the co-chair of this national, the Canada Science and Policy Committee to exit the

00:02:51.320 pandemic, Kwaadjo Khermantan. He said, we said we should bring together the leading scientists and

00:02:57.620 leading policy thinkers and do our own science table. And so I turned that on its head and we spoke for

00:03:05.500 for a while. And I said, Kwaadjo, let's actually call it the committee to exit the pandemic, because

00:03:11.580 I'm a policy person. You're a science and medical person. We'll bring together these solitudes,

00:03:16.780 the solitudes that really have not been talking to each other. The medical and science community

00:03:20.780 is clinically strong, but they stink at public policy. I mean, really, they stink because public 0.63

00:03:26.220 policy is a craft. It's not something that can be just made up through pure intelligence.

00:03:31.180 And the policy community, the political community is illiterate in science,

00:03:34.700 largely. So we bring together these solitudes, properly national, specialists across all the

00:03:41.020 disciplines, which is key, and I'm sure we'll get to that. And we choreograph and exit. So we're not

00:03:45.020 there to study or sentimentalize. It really is a policy lead informed by science. So Kwaadjo and I

00:03:52.700 and the committee have released the national exit plan. It is comprehensive, it is regionalized across the

00:04:00.060 second largest country in the world. And it speaks to a policy choreography of exit across eight

00:04:06.540 systems crises, which are important to understand, if you're really going to understand where we are,

00:04:11.180 what's happened, and how to properly get out as a country so that we have a good tomorrow.

00:04:16.380 It's excellent. Such a great initiative and so comprehensive. So I want to go through some of

00:04:20.700 the areas that you focused on. One of the things I thought was interesting that you had two different

00:04:24.060 categories, one COVID public health, and one non COVID public health. And I know that it's become

00:04:30.140 a big issue that everyone's talking about the fact that there's so many people have neglected

00:04:33.580 their health so many, so much of this early, early cancer prevention, so much mental health issues

00:04:39.100 have have come up. In some cases, they're far worse than COVID itself. So it could you walk us

00:04:44.620 through those two different public health areas and why you drew that distinction?

00:04:49.020 Well, there are actually eight systems, and those are two of the eight. So I'll walk through the eight

00:04:55.500 and then explain what those two mean and why we came to that divination. It's COVID public health,

00:05:02.780 non COVID public health. A couple of years ago, you might have said public health as a generality,

00:05:07.660 one system, but we divided it to be a little sharper. COVID public health, non COVID public health. Then

00:05:12.780 there's of course, the economy and business, education, institutions, national unity,

00:05:21.100 social fabric, then the and then the international, I might be missing one. I'm a systems thinker,

00:05:30.940 and the only proper way to have dealt with the COVID pandemic at the start, this is how the best

00:05:35.980 countries dealt with it. But certainly on exit is to think of the country and systems. At that point,

00:05:41.820 we would appreciate that while COVID was a shock to the country, it was not the only system going in

00:05:47.260 the second largest country in the world in a big society. We always have many balls in the air.

00:05:52.300 That's the appropriate way to think of a complex country. In the early pandemic, through some of the

00:05:59.500 solitudes we discussed, and also through social media, and the general inexperience in Canada in

00:06:04.300 dealing with crises of this scale, we reduced all of our reality to COVID counts, for better or worse.

00:06:13.020 And I'm not sentimentalizing, I'm just recounting what was. But then we began to think that COVID was

00:06:18.620 our only condition, and that solving COVID, whenever that meant, would bleed favorably into all these other

00:06:26.300 systems, which we neither appreciated nor understood. As a result of that reduction of all our reality to

00:06:35.420 the COVID public health pandemic, we collapsed the other systems, I mean, literally collapsed.

00:06:41.420 Education, which is near and dear to my heart, and which we've been working on separately through the

00:06:45.260 Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids, was a total collapse. I mean, kids started being ousted from all

00:06:52.060 education in total. 200,000 kids plus across the country in the Oliver Twist condition, not in any

00:06:59.420 school at all. Businesses were being collapsed and bankrupted and ousted for no reason other than we

00:07:06.220 imagined that the only thing happening was the pandemic. Whereas other countries had an appreciation,

00:07:11.580 the pandemic is here, we put an accent on it, but there are other fish to fry. We have a big country,

00:07:17.340 we can't collapse the economy, kids should still be educated because tomorrow is going to be

00:07:21.740 difficult. We have to keep the country unified, we have to keep our international standing, we keep

00:07:26.700 diplomatic and intelligence activities, and we didn't. The government closed the society, and the

00:07:32.860 government itself retreated. And betwixt these two solitudes, in the de-energization of the society,

00:07:42.220 we had disintegration. And so the systems approach commends a reconstitution of these systems that were

00:07:48.220 collapsed. That's why when we say COVID public health, we're at an endemic stage. For all practical

00:07:54.300 intents and purposes, the pandemic is over. For Canada, it is endemic. That means it will be seasonal

00:07:59.420 in character. It will be managed seasonally as we do other maladies. And for comorbid or aged or

00:08:07.500 vulnerable populations, we project that much more energy. That's appropriate. That's how an intelligent 1.00

00:08:14.460 society thinks. But in non-COVID public health, which we collapsed, we must provide surplus energy.

00:08:21.180 So all the things that were not diagnosed, all the procedures and processes that were neglected or

00:08:26.940 marginalized, the new mental health conditions that were created over course dependent, the physical

00:08:32.940 health conditions, the general societal angst, children, all of this thing requires energy.

00:08:39.020 One of the working hypotheses of the exit plan is high energy, high energy at the front. So no

00:08:46.780 sentimentality, high energy, not because I have a fetish for energy or because I like high energy,

00:08:53.020 it's because we collapse the systems. So we need to reconstitute the systems even to 2019 levels,

00:08:59.500 2019. We have to provide that much more energy. So it is all the systems at once,

00:09:05.260 high energy at the front, including that vulnerable population COVID, but especially

00:09:10.620 in non-COVID public health, huge surge, reach out to the population who's not well, who hasn't been

00:09:16.700 diagnosed in the business area, in the business sector, business system as well, reach out to all

00:09:23.180 the companies who's in trouble, who hasn't been able to access working capital for whatever reason,

00:09:29.740 who's on the verge, who needs to be reconstituted. It's not because government has a central role in

00:09:36.140 business, but because government was responsible for the original ouster. And even if government

00:09:40.860 removes restrictions, tens of thousands of businesses are either on the edge or disappeared.

00:09:46.140 So it's not enough to just remove restrictions, even though that's a key first point in the strategy.

00:09:52.780 All things need to be worked in a simultaneous choreography.

00:09:56.780 But Irvin, we're left with this struggle. So the very people who were in charge, who failed to have

00:10:01.500 the foresight to understand all of these complicated systems, who let them all collapse and focused

00:10:06.620 entirely on COVID, I can kind of understand that in March, April 2020, when we just didn't know what

00:10:11.820 this was, we didn't know how bad it was going to be. But at some point, we realized the limited

00:10:16.300 scope of COVID, that there are certain populations that are very vulnerable, and the rest of society,

00:10:22.300 not so much the fact that little kids were punitively punished by COVID policies, even though

00:10:28.780 they're at such small risk. So the very people who let all that terrible things happened and led the

00:10:33.500 charge on that, are now the ones that we are going to expect to come up with this plan to sort of

00:10:39.980 move past it. How can we trust these institutions and these people who allowed this to happen in the

00:10:45.100 first place?

00:10:50.860 What I call thinking, we're at the core of their absence, the absence of leadership and thinking,

00:10:56.060 we're at the core of our collapse. And it was really a calamitous collapse for Canada, I've never

00:11:01.980 seen it. Some people will have difficulty accepting, once they see what's happened, that this could have

00:11:08.060 happened in our country. Now, obviously, many of those people are, are still in decision making roles.

00:11:14.140 At all levels of government, at all levels of public health across all parties,

00:11:18.140 and the professions. We did this plan for them. We did the thinking for them. And many of them,

00:11:24.780 I should say, I could now say the public, fed quietly into parts of the plan, because they said,

00:11:29.500 Irvin, you guys do the thinking, you do the structure, we don't exactly understand what the

00:11:33.900 problem is. What, by the way, many people don't understand what the problem is. They think our

00:11:38.220 problem is COVID and masks and vaccines. That is one widget of a larger systems collapse. You know,

00:11:46.540 it is the key original impulse for collapse. And we need to fix it, but we need to fix it in tandem with

00:11:52.540 all these other systems. So once we have that broad structure, structure, again, the, the exit matrix is

00:12:00.380 eight by 21. Across all the systems, several months out, across all regions of Canada, with an endpoint,

00:12:07.820 with a strategic endpoint. Once people understand that that is the choreography rather than mask on,

00:12:12.540 mask off. Obviously, it's mask off, I should just stress, but, but that's just a tweet.

00:12:17.260 Right. Once they understand that they can start to implement, we've done the thinking,

00:12:22.460 they fed their parts in, they felt it fed us intelligence across the country because the

00:12:26.140 country is very big. So the regional, the regional character of the exit is very important.

00:12:31.900 We have to trust that they will execute. And I see in bits now that they are co-opting or directly

00:12:39.180 using our, our elements, even though many of the systems collapses require really heroic energy in a

00:12:46.860 number of areas because of the depth of the collapse. So that we're talking really national

00:12:51.820 leadership, provincial leadership coordination amongst the leaderships. And I hope that that

00:12:58.380 happens. I'm certainly browbeating them quietly behind the scenes. And we've fed this to all the

00:13:02.780 medical office of health and deputy ministers and different political parties. But it is, it remains

00:13:08.620 a paradox of the time that we need better leadership for the times. It's not obvious that Canada will

00:13:16.540 survive 10 years out. It's just not obvious. We really have to up our game. Most countries,

00:13:23.180 given the performance of last two years, would not have a tomorrow. And we see this around the world,

00:13:29.020 different countries are in difficult straits. And we maybe have been forgiven by history,

00:13:34.860 maybe we do have a tomorrow. But God forbid, we should repeat this performance in the next calamity,

00:13:40.620 because it will be more, more dire. This was not a world historical pandemic

00:13:45.660 on the mortality count. I'm sorry to say it was not. It was a pandemic. It was global.

00:13:53.180 We survived it as a country won't survive the next one. We won't survive the next war, 0.84

00:13:57.900 the next international conflicts, we have to up our game and understand that

00:14:00.940 we have to draw the right conclusions, right? No feeling sorry for ourselves. And so the exit

00:14:07.180 is to prepare for tomorrow. And that is certainly part of our thinking in the choreography.

00:14:11.580 Okay, well, I have two questions that come from that. I'm not sure which to ask for. So I'll ask you

00:14:15.580 them both. And then you can you can decide which one goes first. So number one, you said that Canada

00:14:21.020 almost collapsed, and we might not survive. We're lucky to survive 10 years from now. So what is the

00:14:27.020 threat? What what might happen? Or what could have happened? You're talking about from a perspective of

00:14:30.780 national unity of separatist movements of vulnerability from foreign attacks. Can you

00:14:35.260 describe what you mean by the risk, the existential threat to Canada? And then the second thing is you

00:14:42.620 said that we have to make sure that governments can't do this again. So how can we guarantee how can

00:14:47.180 we protect our citizens? How can we ensure that future governments don't give themselves this power

00:14:51.820 to act in a way to just declare an emergency to say something's a bigger threat than it actually is.

00:14:57.340 And and be able to go through and destroy our institutions like that in the future.

00:15:01.020 Let me start with the latter question is a great question. The latter question is more difficult

00:15:06.620 to understand and to to to guarantee we can't guarantee that we'll have the right leadership

00:15:11.580 for the right for for the next calamity, although I suspect that becoming calamities will be much

00:15:17.660 more pressure for pressure full for for for Canada externally and domestically than this one.

00:15:24.460 We overreacted or underreacted, right? Leadership in many cases and leading leading provinces

00:15:30.780 pretended that they were just one of us rather than leading. When there were closures, whether

00:15:35.900 the closure were right or not, government took all the energy out of the society and didn't compensate

00:15:40.460 for the energy. Right. All of these things are lessons that a society that is serious about

00:15:46.300 non repetition of catastrophe draws. If we move on in 2022 and pretend the last two years don't exist.

00:15:54.300 And by the way, I worry about that greatly because in the language I hear, I hear that

00:15:59.260 that things are back to normal like nothing ever happened. Whereas a serious society, one that loses

00:16:07.820 a war or almost lose the war or that created or committed grave mistakes of public policy administration

00:16:15.740 does huge introspection, not self-flagellation, not sentimentality. What did we do wrong and what

00:16:22.300 must we never repeat? And that's part of our work. Although we're not there to punish or do

00:16:29.020 accountability that will come in time. Right. I've taken notes, but we need to exit in order to create

00:16:37.420 that intellectual space to draw conclusions. And hopefully the next set of leaders will draw that.

00:16:41.820 We need a higher set of leaders across the professions because that goes to your first

00:16:45.980 question. The circumstances around the bend will be wicked for our country. First of all, the world

00:16:50.460 is coming out of its most serious catastrophe since the Cold War, maybe since the end of the Second

00:16:58.140 World War. Huge economic drop, social conflict, collapse in a number of of public administration

00:17:05.820 systems in major countries, destitching of global structures. And we're the second largest country in

00:17:12.540 the world. So we can collapse because history suggests, as I've calculated, that countries last

00:17:19.580 about 60 years. Countries last about 60 years after which they collapse either through constitutional

00:17:25.340 domestic collapse or war. We're going on 150, 354 years plus means every year on top of that is good 1.00

00:17:36.860 luck and work, hard work. And we see many, it's very tragically around the world, many countries that are

00:17:43.340 on the verge of collapse, disintegration or fighting for their lives, some in war, some through COVID

00:17:50.060 collapse, thrown through domestic circumstances. And that is not foreign to the Canadian future.

00:17:57.740 We just imagine it. So the pandemic should bring to roost the idea that Canada is just as real as the

00:18:03.820 other countries. We're not exceptional. We've had exceptional good luck. We come out of the pandemic

00:18:09.100 with four major domestic pressures, any of which on its own could tear the country apart. The Quebec

00:18:15.660 question is still alive, whatever people realize structurally. If Quebec should ever go for whatever

00:18:20.540 reason, there's no rest of Canada, the country disintegrates. The Western question is very, very sharp.

00:18:26.140 It is much sharper than before the pandemic and is not understood by the rest of Canada.

00:18:30.060 The Indigenous question is massive and it has centrifugal pressures across the country that 1.00

00:18:38.140 could make it impossible for the country to be properly governed, even as we imagine ourselves

00:18:42.940 to be doing a national reconciliation, to which I'm sympathetic. And then finally, we've created borders

00:18:49.820 from jurisdiction into jurisdiction, province to province, province to territory, territory to territory,

00:18:56.140 city to city that have disunified a structure that took over a century and a half to make cohesive.

00:19:04.860 So there are real, both physical borders and also regulatory borders that have been created through

00:19:10.460 COVID restrictions, COVID borders, COVID thinking, COVID mental structures that need to be unwound

00:19:18.780 with great pace. And that's in the national exit plan as well. Within the next couple of months,

00:19:23.740 we need to bury all of those borders. It needs to be reunification of the national economic, social

00:19:30.380 and political space. That takes work though, however. If not, these borders become sticky.

00:19:35.020 And at any point in time, New Brunswick can say, you guys aren't New Brunswicker, not welcome here.

00:19:40.700 Or same with Alberta, same with Northwest Territories. And that's completely contrary to the original

00:19:46.780 ethic of federalism, of confederation. We create a unity across the second largest country in the world.

00:19:52.540 Now internationally, it's even more wicked because, as I described the post-pandemic world,

00:20:00.460 Canada now has four major borders, all of them populated by great powers. And we're not one of

00:20:08.140 them. We imagine everything is America, the A-axis. But we're close to China. You're from Vancouver,

00:20:15.660 colleagues from Vancouver, Victoria and Whitehorse up north will appreciate that they're closer to Beijing

00:20:21.420 than our Brisbane, Australia, Canberra and Sydney geographically. China's the major country of the

00:20:27.420 post-pandemic world. Whatever people think about China, it's just an objective fact and we're close

00:20:32.860 to them. So China is our Western border. Russia is our Arctic border. Russia's at war with Ukraine,

00:20:38.940 but we're, that means we're at, we're immediate neighbours with a country that is at full-on war,

00:20:45.820 with the final E-axis to the, to our east. So ACRE, that's our rectangle, ACRE, America, China,

00:20:52.940 Russia, Europe. At any point in time, these borders could crush us or pull us apart. And if one does the

00:20:59.580 math, it's 15 combinations of push and pull that could disintegrate us as fast as any of the countries

00:21:04.940 that are in trouble today are, are being pressured. And that could happen on any given Wednesday.

00:21:12.540 That's such an incredible way of thinking about Canada and looking at the situation. Irvin, I don't

00:21:17.340 think that many people, you keep it at the front of mind that we're, that we're so close to Russia,

00:21:21.820 that we're so close to China in the way you describe. And I know, I know you have a whole book

00:21:26.220 on this topic and I'm going to get you to come back and, and we can really dive into the strategic

00:21:31.740 importance that Canada plays in the world and how we can really grow to our full potential.

00:21:36.060 So we're going to save that topic for the next interview. But I do want to ask you while we're

00:21:39.740 on this topic of disintegration, and you mentioned how we are on the border with a, with two countries

00:21:46.380 at war. I have to ask you while you're here, you've lectured and taught in both cities, you're very

00:21:51.740 familiar with the sort of underlying issues of the conflict. So can, can you sort of give us

00:21:57.340 us an idea of what do you think Canada can do in this conflict to be a force for good in resolving

00:22:05.900 or helping to mitigate or helping to end this conflict between Russia and Ukraine?

00:22:11.180 Especially at the outset, it's a, it's a, it's a painful conflict to, to behold and watch.

00:22:16.460 It's a, it would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. But professionally speaking, I've been writing

00:22:26.220 about these tectonic plates of conflict for the last several years. So it's not completely

00:22:34.380 unanticipated. All of the scale is, is, is horrendous and inappropriate. The, there are two

00:22:41.180 questions that are implicit in your one question. Canada's force for good. Let's park that for a

00:22:46.940 second because my own thinking, and it's in the book, and it's also part of my own professional

00:22:51.740 work is first Canada must think for itself and about itself. Nobody owes Canada anything. There's

00:22:58.300 nobody around the world. And there are too few people in Canada saying, what does Canada need?

00:23:02.940 How does Canada survive? And no country has a suicide pact, meaning that no country must do anything

00:23:08.940 for any other country at its own expense. So we will help the world, but we will crumble while

00:23:14.620 we're at it. My thinking is the reverse is that if Canada thinks for itself at the right level,

00:23:21.180 we can by extension be a great force for good, for humanity, which is of course in historical

00:23:27.420 terms, the better condition. We're all human, but our vehicle for the goodness is a Canada that thinks

00:23:34.940 for itself, strong, big Canada that survives. So let's take them on in, in, in sequence. Canada

00:23:43.820 thinking for itself, vis-a-vis Russia, first and foremost, must understand our basic geography.

00:23:50.700 And I commend to all your distinguished listeners, as I do to my son, every second day, look at the map,

00:23:58.700 look at our geography. The Arctic is opening up. Everybody should go visit the Arctic, especially

00:24:06.220 our young. And then you will see that there are two Arctic giants this century.

00:24:13.180 One is Russia, which controls over 50% of the Arctic space. And one is Canada. The second is Canada,

00:24:19.580 which controls over 25% of the Arctic space. So the two giants, the United States, the European

00:24:25.980 countries are far behind. So what are we going to do? Our posture could be directly confrontational

00:24:32.780 with Russia. And I understand that at the moment it is such, right? And we owe ourselves the imperative

00:24:41.740 of defense. But for the remainder of the century, the more intelligent posture is that of embedding

00:24:50.620 these major countries at our borders, Russia, China to the West, but also increasingly to some extent

00:24:57.980 with the Northern interest. And of course the United States, which by the way, I look at as just another

00:25:03.980 country for in strategic terms, not our friend, not someone who will protect us. I think quite the

00:25:10.700 reverse in strategic terms. I look at them as just another major country that acts like a major country.

00:25:15.660 So what does a smaller country like us do with that wicked, now wicked geography?

00:25:22.700 We embed them, we embed them in a framework of peace and prosperity with defensive assets at the

00:25:28.620 plate, but not imagining as we do by Twitter, that we're going to war with them because they will

00:25:33.580 all crush us fast, all of them. And in any combination will crush us even faster. And God forbid,

00:25:40.700 they should fight war across our territory, right? Or play diplomatic or information space or 0.58

00:25:48.140 intelligence games across our territory. We need to up our game. And I guess this will be in a future

00:25:54.300 interview or in the book that I have, I've written about Canada creating the Singapore of the North that

00:25:59.340 embeds all these major countries, including Russia, including China, including United States, Northern

00:26:04.940 European countries in a framework whereby we're the center of an international market, a framework

00:26:10.940 connecting four continents of 2 billion people. That's seven, a seven to one ratio, I think, of the

00:26:18.780 continental North American market alone. And we're at the center of that because we've constructed it. So that's

00:26:23.900 a way of saying, yes, Arctic sovereignty, but Arctic sovereignty, vis-a-vis the Russians is not building up

00:26:29.660 basis. We can build up basis. But on top of that, we create markets, we create people to people

00:26:34.060 relationships and travel and all that's coming out of this terrible war. In respect of the war itself,

00:26:43.180 I do not see it as an ancient conflict between Ukrainians and Russians. We could talk about the

00:26:48.380 history. I see it as a post-Soviet conflict about territory and borders and critically,

00:26:56.460 the legitimacy of two very young post-Soviet states. I mean, both Russia and Ukraine are old

00:27:04.620 cultures and civilizations, but both of them, we forget, are very young countries. They're just over

00:27:11.740 30 years old. And each of them across huge geography is trying to secure legitimacy.

00:27:18.060 In the Russian case, they're trying to secure legitimacy across the biggest territory in the world

00:27:21.980 with 14 land borders and three maritime borders. It is the most complex country in the world,

00:27:27.100 and it is extremely difficult to govern. I'm convinced that the Russian governors

00:27:31.100 do not even have an appreciation of what's happening in their territory. It's just too big.

00:27:35.340 And they're all in Moscow. Ukraine is also huge. It is bigger than Germany. But it has a very,

00:27:43.740 very young self-government culture. And if I may be direct, very, very weak governors.

00:27:49.660 To this day, no great president has arrived, including with the greatest respect, the current

00:27:56.380 president, who was a very, very good comedian in Russian language. I would listen to him once in a

00:28:02.060 while. But until the war, he was a terrible president. And the one prior to him, even worse.

00:28:06.460 And, oh, he's heroic today and appropriately so. He loves his country. But the question is now,

00:28:15.180 for a proper exit, one that serves Canada and the world and these countries, the only exit can be one

00:28:20.700 that re-legitimizes or re-legitimates both the Ukrainian state and the Russian state side by side,

00:28:28.860 both strong, both living in peace. There is no other solution. Whatever we say on Twitter,

00:28:35.100 whatever our sentimentality, every other solution will conduce to disintegration of

00:28:40.700 Ukraine first. And if Russian goes second, then it takes Ukraine with it. 0.99

00:28:45.500 Repeat. If Russia disintegrates, it takes Ukraine with it. If Russia and Ukraine disintegrate, 0.70

00:28:51.340 they take Europe with it. If Europe disintegrates, the world is in trouble. We're back in the 20th

00:28:56.700 century. And that's bad for us because they're at our border. What is the exit? There must be immediate

00:29:03.900 mediation. The mediation must come from outside of NATO and it must come outside of the Soviet space.

00:29:11.900 I've recommended Asian countries, some West Asian, some East Asian, because they're neutral 1.00

00:29:17.180 and they're respected by both Kiev and Moscow. So Israel has stepped up. I don't know whether they

00:29:21.500 have the assets to do it. I am talking about India, China, maybe Singapore, but in a consortium,

00:29:29.820 they can help to negotiate two countries that are largely fraternal, that are fighting for different

00:29:35.500 teams, that are really are warrior nations. I mean, both the Ukrainians and the Russians know how to fight

00:29:42.060 and they will fight for a long time. And it is tragic. So Canada must push for that diplomatic

00:29:47.900 settlement. There need to be peacekeepers, in my view, in the end, I think I recommended Indian 1.00

00:29:55.260 peacekeepers, again, third force under the UN umbrella to provide a separation of the belligerence.

00:30:03.100 In terms of the Canadian play, I think the solution, one thing that has been mooted even today about

00:30:11.500 flights for refugees to Canada, we should have done that two weeks ago if we're a serious

00:30:15.660 country. We did it with other countries. Israel is looking at that. Poland has been heroic on refugees.

00:30:22.700 We must save maximum lives. In any conflict, we save lives and Canada has all the capacity to do that.

00:30:29.020 We're just slow. Much like in the pandemic, we were slow to mobilize. Internationally, we're even slower.

00:30:34.780 It's a couple of things on the future look of Ukraine. Obviously, it must be a sovereign state,

00:30:41.580 but it will be a neutral state if it survives. And it has to have a character that is, and I've

00:30:48.300 talked about this in the book, interstitial. It must be a segue between the European Union and the former

00:30:53.660 Soviet space. It cannot be part of a hard block because otherwise, these major blocks will be 0.72

00:30:59.100 fighting across this geography. Much like we wish to avoid the North American blocks and Chinese blocks 1.00

00:31:05.260 and Soviet blocks, post-Soviet blocks fighting across a weakly governed Canadian territory, which

00:31:11.260 will, again, tear us apart. Oh, wow. I mean, there's so much there. And I really appreciate

00:31:17.100 you breaking it down for us. I completely agree. Ukraine has always sort of been a buffer zone. And 0.83

00:31:21.500 even the population itself is a mix of Ukrainians and Russians. And for a long, long time, they lived

00:31:26.620 together in one country or one empire. And so it's such a shame to see them break out. But I really

00:31:35.020 appreciate your time, Irvin, your clear thinking on this. I hope that world leaders will take the

00:31:40.380 advice both on COVID and the geopolitics in Europe and the importance of coming to a resolution sooner

00:31:48.380 rather than later. So thank you for all your wisdom. And we'll certainly have you on again to talk

00:31:52.780 about building up Canada and the potential that we have here in our country. My great pleasure.

00:31:59.740 All right. That's Irvin Studen. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is The Candice Malcolm Show.

Juno News - March 21, 2022

Canada collapsed during Covid. Here’s how we fix it. (Ft. Irvin Studin)

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