The Candice Malcolm Show - Can Canada become a global power？ (ft. Irvin Studin)

00:00:00.000 Can Canada become a global superpower? Only if we learn to think for ourselves.

00:00:04.200 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:17.460 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

00:00:21.580 and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland, have a rather small view of Canada when it comes to our role

00:00:26.100 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

00:00:35.400 can represent Canada on the world stage. Their perverse ideology that puts internationalism

00:00:40.360 ahead of Canada's own national interest rules the day. They believe in something called stakeholder

00:00:45.280 capitalism, where companies as well as governments aren't focused on things like innovation, jobs,

00:00:50.680 growth, taking care of the population, taking care of the people who work for the companies.

00:00:54.000 No, no. Instead, they focus on social justice, climate change, mass redistribution of wealth,

00:00:59.060 and something called equity. The more woke, the better, according to them. Canada is one of the

00:01:03.940 only countries in the world, one of the only countries in the history of the world to routinely

00:01:07.740 sacrifice its own national interest in order to virtue signal. We tie one hand behind our back

00:01:14.200 economically, refusing to develop our own natural resources. And rather than focusing on a grand

00:01:19.220 vision for Canada, rather than focusing on big national projects, we instead focus on little small

00:01:24.800 things like gender ideology, climate alarmism, censoring the internet, and recently stoking

00:01:29.920 division over the issue of COVID. Back in 2017, in a speech that was much applauded by the legacy

00:01:35.960 media, then foreign minister and World Economic Forum executive Christia Freeland gave a speech

00:01:41.500 calling Canada a middle power. That's how they see us, an irrelevant third-line role player,

00:01:47.060 not a superpower, not a relevant figure on the world stage. Well, my guest today has a much,

00:01:52.300 much bigger vision for Canada. His latest book is called Canada Must Think for Itself,

00:01:57.160 10 Theses for a Country's Survival and Success in the 21st Century. And in it, he lays out his

00:02:02.360 vision. So I'm very pleased today to be joined once again by Dr. Ervin Studen. Ervin is the founder

00:02:07.660 and editor-in-chief of Global Brief Magazine, one of the leading international policy thinkers in Canada.

00:02:12.700 He has been a public policy professor and has worked for Canadian Prime Minister as well as an

00:02:16.800 Australian Prime Minister. He holds a bachelor degree from York University. He's a Rhodes Scholar

00:02:21.800 with master's degrees from Oxford University as well as London School of Economics and a PhD from

00:02:27.780 Osgoode Law School. So last month, we had Ervin on the show to discuss Canada's post-COVID recovery

00:02:33.800 strategy. It was a great interview. I really encourage you to go check that out. And we also

00:02:37.160 talked a little bit about Canada's role in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. So Ervin,

00:02:42.960 welcome back to the show. It's great to have you.

00:02:45.040 It's great to be back. I enjoy your work.

00:02:46.420 Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what differentiates yourself and your vision for

00:02:52.420 Canada from the current government and people like Chrystia Freeland who call us a middle power. 0.93

00:02:58.440 Well, I offer 10 theses for people to consider, not on a discrete basis, but altogether in terms of

00:03:07.460 our ability to really survive, which is not obvious, and succeed in this century coming out of the

00:03:14.000 pandemic. Now, the starting point, of course, for the book is my worry about the very survival of

00:03:20.340 the country before success. And that is counterintuitive to us in Canada, at least it was

00:03:25.440 before the pandemic, the idea that Canada may not survive in the coming decades. And one just needs

00:03:30.380 to do a calculation, which I do in the book, about the average lifespan of modern states. And they tend to

00:03:35.900 be 60 years old or younger, after which they collapse through one of two forces or two forces

00:03:44.040 combined. One is domestic collapse, constitutional collapse. The second is external collapse, war or

00:03:51.040 something like a pandemic. And God forbid you should have two of them combined, you'll collapse that much

00:03:55.440 faster. Now, Canada is well over 150 years old. That means we're pressing our luck on the logic of

00:04:02.300 things. That means beyond luck, we'll have to be very hard working. Underpinning that hard work is

00:04:08.400 thinking, we just can't work. And we can't just say we're thinking because we're educated, really has

00:04:12.620 to be combined in a strategic framework. And that's the overall spirit of the book, I offer the

00:04:18.460 architecture of our exit from the pandemic, and how we can really survive given the wicked domestic and

00:04:24.180 external circumstances, and then really flourish as a major country this century.

00:04:28.100 I remember there's a very famous essay written by Francis Fukuyama in the 90s called The End of

00:04:33.740 History. And the idea was that everyone will come to the position of Western liberal democracy. And

00:04:39.240 that's kind of the end point. And there won't be much left in terms of disputes and those kind of

00:04:45.340 things. So I think people have that mindset. It's a very influential essay. And people just think,

00:04:51.240 you know, Canada is a stable country, we're a Western liberal democracy, we've got it figured out.

00:04:54.820 And now it's just about kind of managing what we have and not letting it go. They don't really

00:05:00.340 think of Canada in terms of having threats, having enemies, that they're being existential threats to

00:05:05.680 our country, aside from perhaps secession movements, separation movements. Whereas even then,

00:05:11.480 the idea of Quebec would leave and Canada would continue to be a functional country. But you see

00:05:17.080 things a little different that we do have threats, that there are potentials that could end Canada as

00:05:23.220 we know it. So maybe you can walk us through what what you think the biggest threats are to our

00:05:27.700 country. Thank you very much for painting it. Thus, that is a famous essay. And my father, who's an

00:05:34.200 immigrant to this country, used to say Canada is a country where you need to invent problems.

00:05:39.060 So one of the differences between my thinking, to go back to your first question, thinking of the

00:05:43.000 current government, indeed of recent governments, is that is that I start analytically rather than saying

00:05:48.100 I have a good idea for Canada. And the analytical point needs to say what are our existential problems

00:05:54.180 and challenges? What are the problems then to us succeeding over and above existence? The existential

00:06:00.420 consequences are wicked. Coming out of the pandemic, we have, as I mentioned in our last interview, which I

00:06:06.660 enjoyed, seven or eight systems crises, really wicked systems crises that we need to manage concurrently,

00:06:14.420 and they're existential in nature, if any of the systems really collapse outright. I mean, we're

00:06:18.420 talking about mass, not just death, but the collapse of the country. Domestically, we have four national

00:06:24.740 unity problems, which any of which could collapse the country in the coming decades. First, the Quebec 0.55

00:06:30.420 question, which is alive and well and could turn at any point. It's an ongoing thing to manage, but it is

00:06:36.820 quite sharp coming out of the pandemic, because Quebec has had a very different psychological pandemic

00:06:42.340 than the rest of the country. But for certainty, if Quebec should ever leave, whatever one feels about

00:06:47.620 that question. I love Quebec. If Quebec ever leaves, that's the end of the country. That's the end of

00:06:52.100 the country. The second pressure point is the Western question, which is less existential and more affecting

00:07:00.020 our ability to succeed and thrive as a country, but is a wicked question, which I'll address, I think,

00:07:05.460 in my remarks in the keynote at Civitas in Calgary. The Indigenous question makes it very difficult to 0.99

00:07:12.100 govern the country coming out of the pandemic. And the final one is that we have these internal

00:07:16.020 borders pockmarking the country physically, psychologically, and in regulatory terms coming

00:07:22.180 out of the pandemic, such that New Brunswick could close off one day, say only New Brunswickers welcome. 0.99

00:07:27.460 The North could close off to the rest of the country. Well, we have a country that we don't,

00:07:30.900 and it takes a century and a half to smooth out this federation and only a couple of years to

00:07:36.020 collapse its internal cohesion, which before long could tend towards separatist movements and

00:07:41.380 disintegration. Externally, you mentioned Fukuyama's famous essay that liberal democracy had won,

00:07:48.180 but I think, in retrospect, Fukuyama was gravely mistaken, because if you ask who between Ronald

00:07:55.620 Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev won the Cold War, my answer would be Deng Xiaoping won the Cold War, 0.50

00:08:01.620 that it was not the Soviet Union or the West democratically. For now, it's China and the Chinese 0.96

00:08:08.180 model that is central coming out of the pandemic, whether one likes it or not. It's irrelevant.

00:08:13.700 It's an objective fact. And in the way I paint our geography, China is very close to us on our

00:08:20.420 western borders. The geography between Shanghai and Whitehorse or Shanghai, where you're originally from,

00:08:28.260 Vancouver or Prince Rupert or Victoria or Shanghai or New Brunswick or Shenzhen,

00:08:33.380 then Yellowknife is smaller. The distance is physically smaller than that between Sydney and

00:08:40.020 Shanghai, Australia. So if the Australians say they're in Asia, which they have for the last 0.96

00:08:45.220 several decades, we're even more in Asia on the western border. Through our northern front,

00:08:50.740 the Arctic is melting. I'm not here to say we're going to reverse climate change. Climate change is

00:08:55.940 a reality at our north. So the north is opening up. The neighbor that we're exposed to all of a sudden

00:09:02.580 is the one that's at war with Ukraine, we imagine, to our east, but is immediately to our north.

00:09:08.660 That's Russia. We have America to the south, and we have Europe to the east. These are four new 0.98

00:09:15.300 wicked borders in their totality. ACRE, America, China, Russia, Europe. And I want to commend that to

00:09:21.220 all your listeners because it's a key part of my second thesis in the book. Our borders are ACRE. 0.51

00:09:26.980 These are all great powers. They're far bigger than us. They're far more energetic. And in their

00:09:31.860 combination, they could crush us or pull us apart very fast in 15 different combinations. So the

00:09:38.820 domestic pressures and the external threats combined mean that we're going to really have to up our game.

00:09:43.940 And that's where the thinking for ourselves happens. Because no one, as you'll appreciate,

00:09:48.420 Candice, no one around the world is saying, how can we do something for Canada? How do we help Canada

00:09:54.660 survive? Only we can think for ourselves. And it's not obvious that we're there. We're going to really

00:10:00.100 have to up our game and fight for our lives. And then I suggest later in the book, and we can get to

00:10:05.460 this, that in fighting for our lives, we will become a major power in our own right, if we make it.

00:10:11.540 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

00:10:23.460 threat. I would say that it's a more serious threat than any of the other ones. I mean,

00:10:29.300 well, I think also the Aboriginal one, because it undermines the very legitimacy of Canada by calling us a

00:10:37.060 colonial settler state and saying that Canada is illegitimate. I mean, I don't know how you can

00:10:42.420 really survive if you think that way. And it seems like many, many people in our institutions,

00:10:46.740 leading institutions, believe that Canada is illegitimate over this Aboriginal question.

00:10:51.700 When it comes to the West, though, the idea that we have this resource, this natural resource is

00:10:58.020 sitting there untapped, undeveloped, intentionally, purposefully, we have a leadership in this country

00:11:03.460 that does not want to develop our natural resources, because ideologically, it feels

00:11:08.660 that we have some other greater responsibility to the planet. No other country thinks that way,

00:11:16.900 no other power thinks that way. In some ways, I think Canada is very stuck. But when you look at

00:11:22.980 the North and conceptualizing Canada in the way that you do, I wonder if that could create more

00:11:29.060 opportunities to develop natural resources, more export paths to the North, to Russia, to China.

00:11:36.340 That way, do you see it as a potential 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,

00:11:47.540 our crises. Then I say that we have a dyad of futures, and none of them is that of a middle power.

00:11:55.780 A middle power is a slogan, but I prove in the book, I hope that middle powerdom is impossible for 0.98

00:12:01.780 Canada. It is either major power, I'm not even saying great power, major power amongst these major

00:12:07.780 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,

00:12:21.220 doing all the thinking on their terms. And in the end, because some of these major powers are either

00:12:26.580 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.

00:12:55.940 And the opportunity is through the north. And what I say is that this northern border,

00:13:03.780 the R, part the C, part the A, is the Arctic border. Now, in the south, in Vancouver, in Ottawa,

00:13:11.380 and Toronto, we imagine the Arctic as this frozen wasteland. But I want us to imagine the Arctic as

00:13:17.620 Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, just another border because it's opening up.

00:13:21.220 And that territory is as large as the entire European Union.

00:13:30.020 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,

00:13:41.460 almost 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,

00:13:55.140 facing these giants at our border. Russia, 150 plus million people. China, a billion and a half.

00:14:02.020 The United States, 330 million. The European Union, 500 million. They're all at our borders, 0.99

00:14:07.140 and all of them touching the Arctic. So we need to up our energy, that is human energy first,

00:14:12.580 our demographic footprint, our political footprint, up towards the North, almost a shift away from the

00:14:19.220 South, which we imagine to be the existential game that's relevant. We need to up it. And instead of

00:14:27.620 imagining that we're going to war against Russia, China, or the United States, or the North, we embed

00:14:32.420 them in a framework that is of our own divination. We create the thinking. And that's why the second,

00:14:37.780 the fourth thesis called Canada becomes the center of the world through a city like Whitehorse,

00:14:43.300 Inuvik, or Yellowknife. We imagine they become the Singapore of the North. And so we imagine 10, 0.98

00:14:48.100 15 years from now, business people, businessmen and women taking regular flights from the North

00:14:54.580 to Shenzhen, to Shanghai, to St. Petersburg, to Oslo, to Chicago, just as we do through the South,

00:15:02.260 because it's opening up. And if we don't do the thinking, other powers will do it for us. But if we

00:15:06.740 do the thinking, 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

00:15:19.220 alone. 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.

00:15:31.300 They are the thinking countries, the term setting countries, like the United States, like China,

00:15:37.300 like Russia. These are countries that are hyper energetic, they're ready to build the framework,

00:15:41.380 and they're ready to vassalize us psychologically first. And I say we up our game, we will embed them

00:15:47.220 in our own framework. So we have to move fast, but we need to see our geography and the opportunity

00:15:51.300 first.

00:15:52.820 I remember when I was in high school, I was fortunate enough to go on an exchange program

00:15:56.580 to 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,

00:16:12.340 the pilots look out the window, you can see the Arctic ice caps. And it's like, oh, no, we didn't fly

00:16:16.420 across the continent. We flew over, right? And that's, that's how you get from the West Coast

00:16:20.980 over to Europe. And in a flight, we don't really conceptualize Canada that way. Why aren't there

00:16:26.340 flights that go through the North? Why, why, 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, and how do we

00:16:34.420 get that built?

00:16:35.620 For the same reason that you articulate that the West is the most wicked of our national unity problems.

00:16:43.860 I concur. It's the first national unity problem I identified. The capital is in Ottawa. The capital

00:16:49.060 is in Ottawa originally because the strategic threat of Canada to go back to our genesis and

00:16:54.660 this idea of our borders was the United States. In 1867, Canada is created as the antithesis to the

00:17:02.660 American project. That is just a constitutional reality. It's particularly in the first paragraphs

00:17:07.140 of the Constitution. That is why all of the major cities and all the major economic activity

00:17:15.140 limb the southern border, not because it is warm. Anybody who's been to, to Winnipeg or Ottawa

00:17:21.700 at any particular time outside of summer knows that it's not, we're not there for meteorological

00:17:27.620 reasons. We're there because all the forts lined the southern border because the Americans were the 0.99

00:17:32.820 threat all the way to the west. The railroad went east-west and the cities followed and the

00:17:38.820 economic activity followed thereafter. And then the mythology of climate as the reason that we're

00:17:45.460 there because it's warm in the south and not in the north. And then the idea that the current

00:17:49.540 mythology that the Americans are enduring friends. Well, the Americans are our friend today, but in my

00:17:55.780 read of things, they are just another country and they are thinking in their own interests. And one

00:18:00.660 day that could turn against us, right? Even in annexation terms. And that should be understood,

00:18:06.020 including through the north. So now we understand the north is opening up in a way that was not true

00:18:10.900 over the last 150 years, just as China is relevant in a way that was equally untrue over the last 150

00:18:17.860 years. When Canada's created, China is just recovering from the opium war. So it's destabilized for

00:18:23.620 the entire modern existence of Canada. Now Russia and China are right at our borders, as I just

00:18:28.660 depicted. And so that border alignment, that border thinking needs to be shifted up from the American

00:18:34.900 axis up to that AC axis. And Ottawa is not there psychologically. Ottawa, as we discussed, I think,

00:18:44.180 in the last interview and even offline, has been self-isolating for two years. I mean, literally,

00:18:49.620 they've been zooming the entire country and imagining that they're governing through their

00:18:53.620 intellect, purely the second largest country in the world, not even understanding our geography,

00:18:59.540 neither intellectually nor in a felt way. And I want, I commend to all colleagues, all patriots of

00:19:05.620 Canada to feel our geography. It is huge. Canada, we must appreciate, that's why I reject the idea of us

00:19:12.580 us ever being a small country. If you, if you total the country, the geography of Canada, we are as

00:19:19.700 large as the Roman, Persian and Ottoman empires combined. That is the territory of Canada. That's

00:19:24.900 how big we are. We are, we are empire sized. We don't have an imperial mentality. Fair enough. I'm not

00:19:29.860 for that. But we need to think commensurately with our geography, because it is now opening up. And we

00:19:36.180 will be dominated on that geography, if we don't play at the right level. As it's opening up, Ottawa

00:19:41.460 needs to think, push its thinking up, up north. And in so doing, I also argue that they can address

00:19:47.940 in a very meaningful way, the Western problem, because much of the West is collected to the North

00:19:53.860 in psychological terms, particularly Yukon and parts of Northwest territories, Nunavut a little less.

00:19:58.420 And there is a huge energy proposition there. There's a huge scientific proposition. There's a

00:20:03.940 huge transport proposition. There's an environmental proposition. We have a new university that's just

00:20:10.580 come online through Yukon University. In 10 or 15 years, I'd like to see five major universities across

00:20:16.580 the North, literally in the Arctic, one of them offshore. I'd like to see 10 million people living

00:20:22.900 across the Arctic as it opens up by the end of the century. That's perfectly normal for a geography

00:20:27.940 that opens up. And we'll have some major cities. Just as a century ago, Vancouver was a village,

00:20:34.340 and Montreal was superior to Toronto. These things change. So we don't imagine that tomorrow everyone

00:20:40.100 will move to Toronto. I find it less attractive than other parts of Canada today anyways. But for

00:20:45.620 strategic reasons, we're going to have to shift our energy and get out there, get out there en masse and

00:20:51.460 see the country and build. One of the things that I took interest in, and this is really well

00:20:57.300 documented in the US, was migration during COVID. A lot of people in the US left sort of poorly

00:21:03.380 governed blue states, 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 red

00:21:19.940 states, places that had lower taxes, that had more job opportunities, and that were incentivizing people 0.58

00:21:26.260 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 didn't

00:21:37.940 see much of that in Canada, though. There wasn't really a lot of migration. There wasn't really a lot

00:21:42.340 of option when it came to, where can I go to escape restrictive COVID policies? Where can I go to raise a

00:21:48.580 family in a way that I can afford? I know a lot of people leave Toronto because they just cannot afford

00:21:53.780 a house. When I was reading your book and talking to you last time, thinking about the North, thinking

00:21:59.940 about all of this land that we have, and yet not a lot of people, I wonder if there could be some kind

00:22:05.780 of incentive for people, like in terms of a place where you can go and raise a family, you can afford a

00:22:12.260 single-family home, you can have a kind of more traditional, simplistic lifestyle if you were willing

00:22:18.340 to move up North. I wonder, have you seen any politician talking about this kind of stuff? Any

00:22:25.140 sort of grand idea of how to move people to places in this country where they can have a better lifestyle,

00:22:33.380 aside from everyone sort of congregating in and around places like Toronto and Vancouver?

00:22:38.740 Well, we had a collapse in thinking over the last two years. The collapse in thinking over the last

00:22:46.340 two years that you articulate is built on the general absence of real thinking in the years prior

00:22:54.980 because we weren't forced by circumstance, as I mentioned my father rightly said, until the pandemic

00:22:59.780 had Canada had to invent its problems. In a comparative sense, we had small public tragedies,

00:23:06.340 but we didn't have any war on our territory for the entire 20th century in any meaningful way.

00:23:13.060 And we didn't have the Quebec collapse in the mid-1990s or the early 80s that could have also

00:23:20.420 torn the country asunder. And all of the other continents of the world had it. So now it's our

00:23:24.740 turn. We are following the laws of history. So to think, a country that thinks also says,

00:23:31.780 how do we make sure that we have the right quantum of population, the right quality, and that people in

00:23:38.180 our country are happy and dynamic and also are mobile across the territory? By the way, when I talk

00:23:45.460 about people moving to the North, I don't just talk about foreigners necessarily. It could be Canadians

00:23:50.500 that see opportunity. And one of the things quietly, maybe even cunningly, that I have in the book is that

00:23:55.860 the North makes the demographic about which I'm most worried in Canada dream again. That's the young 1.00

00:24:01.380 people. When you talk about the North and the future of the country, as I see it, that excites

00:24:06.580 young people who have really suffered most over the last two years in Canada, in my view, unforgivably.

00:24:12.500 It's exciting. You see the entire world, it is close to us, and we have the wrong imagination,

00:24:18.020 the wrong imaginary from the South of the North. We imagine to be a frozen iceberg that's unlivable,

00:24:23.300 and it's exactly the opposite. It's to be built, it's to be tamed, it's to be connected to the rest

00:24:29.220 of the world. As I mentioned, the North connects us to a market of seven billion people, seven,

00:24:34.740 oh sorry, two billion people through the North, which is seven times larger than continental North

00:24:40.180 America, and four continents. So then I imagine a young person living in the North can live just as

00:24:46.820 as well as perhaps you did or I did growing up in the big cities of the South, with as much culture,

00:24:53.780 with as much mobility, but proximity. It would take an overnight trip to St. Petersburg or Shanghai or

00:24:59.220 Chicago or Oslo, as I mentioned. You want to go to London, or you go to another part of the North,

00:25:04.100 because I imagine the three territories connected. So easily you go from Whitehorse to

00:25:07.780 to Inuvik overnight, and you have a nice stay, you eat in a nice restaurant, you have some reindeer

00:25:15.940 for dinner, you take a course at the university in Northwest territories, and you go back home to a

00:25:25.060 nice lifestyle. Now the cost of living is high in the North, it's actually higher than in the South.

00:25:31.460 That has a lot to do with geographic distance, the fact that all the economic activity is imagined

00:25:38.340 to be in the South, but also through a lack of density of populations. We're going to need more

00:25:41.940 people in the North, more people actually will reduce the unit costs of housing and food in the North,

00:25:50.180 not the South, and also the unit costs of transportation, and make my life more interesting.

00:25:55.380 It also serves our interests for sovereignty purposes and for the opportunity, I suggest,

00:26:00.660 to have more people eventually move to the North. But as I say, it's not a painful proposition. I find

00:26:06.900 it very exciting once someone understands that it is opening up much like Canada did in the late 19th

00:26:14.100 and early 20th century for people who want to build life for themselves.

00:26:17.300 One of the things you hear about is that back then, the government was offering land plots,

00:26:23.220 like people were given plot of land or some kind of a bundle incentive to go live in the West to

00:26:30.500 develop Saskatchewan or given some farmland in Alberta. Could you see a program like that where

00:26:35.940 Canadians, maybe even First Nations Canadians are incentivized by being given land that they could

00:26:41.620 go develop? Or what other kinds of things can we do to get this plan in motion?

00:26:46.580 A hundred percent. And you began to hint at that when you said that over the last few years, we've

00:26:53.780 actually lost a lot of people, a lot of good people in Canada, and no one's keeping track.

00:26:57.540 And we're loath to get them back because they were psychologically, they've moved on. It's a big loss

00:27:01.780 for us. We've not had to work hard. And this is an area in which we're going to need to work hard

00:27:06.420 to get the right quantum and the right talent. And there needs to be a very deliberate choreography.

00:27:10.500 Choreography can't just be, just fill the place up. I'm not for that, even for the South. I'm for

00:27:14.820 very bespoke choreography. And that means business leaders, civil society leaders, and government

00:27:22.500 leaders getting on the phone, getting out into markets, into other countries, into other parts

00:27:28.900 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.

00:27:40.580 We say, well, we'll come to the North when there's a job. And I say, no, we want the job makers,

00:27:46.420 in many cases. I remember being at a conference in the Middle East, and they were more curious about

00:27:52.580 the Arctic than we are in Southern Canada. And they said, well, if I look at that geography,

00:27:57.620 I think I could employ a thousand people within a year. And that's the type of person we want in

00:28:02.740 the North. We want the term setters. They come and we're, as perhaps I and someone else don't see

00:28:09.380 a job, a discrete job to be filled. They say, I'm going to employ a thousand people in the community

00:28:14.500 from across Canada and from across the North within a year and multiply that. These are term

00:28:20.020 setters that will help us make a term setting future. And you talk about the Indigenous population,

00:28:25.460 they are in many cases, the term setters that we'll need, or they're the ones that will want them.

00:28:30.100 There's some very, very energetic, ambitious, self-governing First Nations in the North that

00:28:35.780 are very practical, that are interested in talent. We just, in a very Canadian way, don't know how to

00:28:41.780 make offers. We don't know how to sell. And now we're going to have to learn to sell. Selling involves

00:28:47.220 the thinking that I command in the work and thinking goes hand in hand with the work that is needed to

00:28:52.180 build up that huge territory. Well, one of the things that I read in your book, and I've seen this argument

00:28:58.740 many times, and I instinctively reject it and disagree with it, is this idea that Canada should

00:29:03.780 deliberately grow its population to 100 million people. Whenever I hear that argument, I think of

00:29:09.700 people who just sort of want to wholesale bring other people, other cultures, and displace Canadians, or

00:29:14.900 sort of ignore the Canadian population, or is sometimes so condescending. It's like the idea is that

00:29:21.140 we need to bring other people in to civilize us and enlighten us on other cultures and other values. And it

00:29:26.340 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 the

00:29:46.180 world to get there. A lot of the 100 million arguments over the last decade and a half start with my own

00:29:52.020 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

00:30:04.740 poor. And that is our current trajectory. So we can tweet as much as we want. We love Canada, we're

00:30:10.900 patriotic, we're democratic. But on the ground, we will become non vital in economic terms, politically

00:30:19.300 less connected. And you mentioned the connection between Ottawa and the West, which is also also

00:30:23.780 has to do in part with demography and non sovereign on our own territory and vassalized by other countries

00:30:30.580 that are larger and more energetic. So it is also an energy proposition, human sense, more people,

00:30:36.260 more energy, bigger companies, bigger markets, more transportation. I have, I think, a powerful table

00:30:42.900 in there, which I talk about the basic thing of, of high speed rail, we have, the Japanese created their 1.00

00:30:48.740 first high speed rail lines in the 1960s. Now, how many have we got in Canada in the year 2022? Still zero,

00:30:58.100 and zero for any foreseeable future, where even where, where high speed rail is already passe. And

00:31:03.620 there's nothing possible on that on current demography. But with larger demography, we can not just have

00:31:11.380 that we can have, we get larger capital markets, larger intellectual markets, better, a better

00:31:17.860 cultural space. But let's talk about the North. I mentioned that there are 115,000 people in the North

00:31:24.980 for a territory that we control for now, the size of the European Union. That is a strategic nonsense.

00:31:32.020 It is strategic nonsense, given that the surrounding market is, is 2 billion people, that the immediate

00:31:37.860 strategic neighbor for now a threat, I see before long, an opportunity, the Russians have 115 million 1.00

00:31:44.020 people. If you juxtapose, as I do in the, in the, in the book, the distribution of their population,

00:31:51.460 of their 150 million people, they have 2 million plus in on the, on the Arctic front, facing our 115,000.

00:32:00.100 And although they're larger, they're not that much larger to command such a disproportionate

00:32:05.460 superiority in ratio. So we're going to need many more people simply to govern ourselves in the North.

00:32:11.220 How many more? I'm actually indifferent between 80 million and 100 million and 120. Those are just

00:32:17.300 quanta to make people think it could be 70 million, but we're going to need about 10 million in the North

00:32:23.300 to govern ourselves, to manage this huge geography that's opening up. And 10 million in the North

00:32:28.500 means that we're going to need proportionately larger bases in the middle of the country. Now

00:32:33.060 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 whence we imagine everybody, whether we imagine everybody immigrating. We'll imagine that everyone's

00:32:48.900 going to come to the GTA. I don't want everyone to come to the GTA. I don't want more neighbors.

00:32:52.500 I want people to be properly distributed across the country through choreography. And I do want

00:32:58.340 to maintain the majority-minority equilibrium that you talk about. There needs to be a very bespoke 0.91

00:33:03.060 choreography. But we're not doing that. Even on the current immigration structure, it's very lazy. 0.64

00:33:09.220 It's quite laissez-faire. And it has no appreciation of our geography and our sovereignty needs and the

00:33:14.980 opportunities that I talk about.

00:33:16.900 Well, and it has no appreciation of the difficult work involved in integration, right? You talk about

00:33:24.020 a threat to Canada being that we could become a vassal state for all of these other more powerful

00:33:27.860 countries. It's like, if we just start importing people from those more powerful countries and don't

00:33:32.260 give them any guidance, don't give them any integration into our country and just say,

00:33:37.300 yeah, welcome to Canada. We don't really like ourselves. We don't have a lot of confidence.

00:33:40.260 We have this horrible history and we're humiliated by it. Come do whatever you want, basically.

00:33:44.740 And that's kind of the message delivered to newcomers. And I agree that it needs to be more

00:33:51.460 coordinated. It needs to be more deliberate if we're going to want to sustain the unity that we

00:33:57.380 have or at least build unity, continue towards being one country. So Irvin, just final question for you

00:34:06.980 here. You know, you spent a lot of time thinking about Canada. You kind of boiled it down here to 10

00:34:13.140 very succinct theses for the country. What is your grand vision for Canada? Where do you see Canada

00:34:19.460 in 2050? Where do you see Canada in 2100? And what do you hope for Canada?

00:34:26.180 In the last thesis, the 10th, my favorite, I paint 10 steps for Canada post-pandemic. By the way,

00:34:35.940 one of which would interest you personally, I talk about creating a special economic environmental

00:34:44.020 zone for the entire west and north of the country to really give us energy and to open our wings. I talk

00:34:50.740 about movement of assets in the country, both political and economic, more to the west and

00:34:56.100 to the north because of the China-Russia axis, which is underserviced. 2050, I hope I'm around and

00:35:04.740 vital. In 2100, I plan to be around and vital. I hope that Canada is around. It's not obvious.

00:35:10.740 Canada is my team, so I'm always fighting for it and I'm thinking about it. I'm grateful, but now I

00:35:17.220 realize that it's much more of the gratitude that is required for us to keep fighting. I imagine us

00:35:22.900 to be the second major country in the west in the year 2050, second only to the United States,

00:35:32.580 larger essentially in both demography and power and influence and self-belief than any Western

00:35:40.100 European country, any European country other than Russia, which by that point will have different

00:35:45.860 borders anyways. I also, however, imagine us to be connected very non-ideologically to all the

00:35:52.820 major countries in the world. This is an essential point. I'm very non-ideological in my strategizing

00:35:59.140 for Canada and must be so because if we're too dogmatic, we will get crushed. We can be dogmatic

00:36:04.340 on Twitter, but we need to be, I call it strategically promiscuous in our strategy. We need to have good

00:36:11.060 relationships with all these border countries because otherwise they will crush us. And that's 0.99

00:36:15.860 how a cunning, clever, calculating country that's at scale operates. So we'll have good relations,

00:36:22.660 not just with the United States, but with China, with Russia, with all the European countries. And then

00:36:28.740 after that, with India, with Africa, all to our advantage, first and foremost, and survival. And then I 0.72

00:36:35.300 hope, and this is my larger interest, in the service of humanity, which is the more interesting

00:36:40.340 condition. But first and foremost, we have to do it through Canada, which is, as I mentioned,

00:36:45.860 as I commend in the book, worth fighting for. Well, that's absolutely, I really encourage people to

00:36:53.300 go and check out your book. Where can they find your book right now, Irvin? Well, for the coming months,

00:36:58.420 it's going to be an e-book, so they can check it on the Global Brief site. They can purchase it there

00:37:03.460 on the Institute for 21st Century Questions, i21cq.com site. And I hope they love it. And

00:37:11.940 before long, we'll be in print as well. And I'll continue to talk about it. It's highly topical.

00:37:19.540 And as Irvin also mentioned, he's going to be giving a keynote address at our Civitas conference

00:37:24.580 this year. So if you're interested in coming out to Calgary and seeing that conference, checking it out,

00:37:29.300 go over to civitascanada.ca. You can find out more information about the organization,

00:37:34.500 about the conference, and you'll be able to come and see Irvin deliver that keynote address. So,

00:37:40.020 Irvin, thank you so much for your time. It's always so interesting to talk to you. Thanks for sending

00:37:43.620 me over a copy of your book. I really am enjoying it. I'm not quite done yet, but I'm enjoying working

00:37:48.180 my way through, and I look forward to seeing you in Calgary. Me too. See you soon. Thanks for your work.

00:37:52.660 All right. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:37:59.300 I'm Candice Malcolm.

The Candice Malcolm Show - April 14, 2022

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

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