The Candice Malcolm Show - March 21, 2022


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


Episode Stats

Length

32 minutes

Words per Minute

166.84798

Word Count

5,368

Sentence Count

341

Misogynist Sentences

1

Hate Speech Sentences

15


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Canada needs to come up with a serious and credible plan to move past COVID, to end all
00:00:05.140 COVID-era mandates and restrictions, to get our economy back on track, but also to begin to
00:00:10.200 address the considerable harm done to the social fabric of our country by the unprecedented
00:00:15.300 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
00:00:34.880 that we need to move past COVID. We need to get back to normal. The reality is that we cannot move
00:00:39.640 back in time. We'll never be able to get back to 2019. We need to move forward, yes, but we also
00:00:45.380 need to meticulously study what exactly happened over the past two years. We need to investigate
00:00:51.280 what happened and why. We need to cancel the overzealous government programs, yes, but we also
00:00:57.380 need to put in place safeguards to make sure that that power can never be abused again, that power
00:01:02.600 thirsty politicians, overbearing governments cannot undermine our rights and freedoms again in the
00:01:08.520 future. So today I'm very pleased to be joined by someone who is working on these very ideas, working
00:01:13.200 on a project to get us to move forward and to get our lives back on track. I'm very pleased today to be
00:01:19.460 joined by Irvin Studen. Irvin is the founder and editor-in-chief of Global Brief Magazine, one of the
00:01:24.740 leading international policy thinkers in Canada. Irvin has been a public policy professor and worked
00:01:29.920 for both the Canadian Prime Minister and an Australian Prime Minister in 2004. He was a member
00:01:34.820 of a small team who wrote Canada's first national security policy. In 2006, he did something similar
00:01:39.500 down in Australia. Irvin holds a bachelor's degree from York University, a master's from both Oxford and
00:01:45.520 London School of Economics, and a PhD from Osgood Law School. Notably, this is really interesting,
00:01:50.740 Irvin has taught foreign policy, both at Ukraine's Higher School of Public Administration in Kiev,
00:01:56.200 as well as at Russia's Academy for National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow. So we're going
00:02:01.820 to talk a little bit about the Russia-Ukraine conflict as well. There are a few people in the
00:02:05.680 world who are more qualified to talk about what's going on than Irvin, and I'm really pleased to have
00:02:10.160 him on the show today. So Irvin, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today.
00:02:13.960 It's a real pleasure, Candice. Thanks for having me. I enjoy your work.
00:02:16.320 Well, I appreciate it. So you recently chaired and you wrote a national exit plan for COVID. So
00:02:23.140 first of all, take us through what led to this and why you decided to take on this project.
00:02:30.060 Well, we were not exiting. We were not exiting as a country. We were studying COVID. We were
00:02:35.720 living COVID. We were sentimentalizing. And in late 2021, I had a long conversation with
00:02:45.860 the person who is now the co-chair of this national, the Canada Science and Policy Committee
00:02:50.820 to exit the pandemic, Kouadjo Keremantan. He said, we said, we should bring together the leading
00:02:56.740 scientists and leading policy thinkers and do our own science table. And so I turned that on its head
00:03:04.220 and we spoke for a while. And I said, Kouadjo, let's actually call it the committee to exit the pandemic
00:03:10.680 because I'm a policy person. You're a science and medical person. We'll bring together these
00:03:16.180 solitudes, the solitudes that really have not been talking to each other. The medical and science
00:03:20.160 community is clinically strong, but they stink at public policy. I mean, really, they stink because
00:03:25.760 public policy is a craft. It's not something that can be just made up through pure intelligence.
00:03:31.120 And the policy community, the political community is illiterate in science, largely. So we bring
00:03:35.800 together these solitudes, properly national, specialists across all the disciplines, which
00:03:41.740 is key, and I'm sure we'll get to that. And we choreograph and exit. So we're not there to study
00:03:45.900 or sentimentalize. It really is a policy lead informed by science. So Kouadjo and I and the
00:03:53.120 committee have released the national exit plan. It is comprehensive. It is regionalized across the
00:04:00.200 second largest country in the world. And it speaks to a policy choreography of exit across eight
00:04:05.500 systems crises, which are important to understand, if you're really going to understand where we are,
00:04:11.420 what's happened, and how to properly get out as a country so that we have a good tomorrow.
00:04:16.780 It's excellent. Such a great initiative and so comprehensive. So I want to go through some of
00:04:20.860 the areas that you focused on. One of the things I thought was interesting that you had two different
00:04:24.100 categories, one COVID public health and one non-COVID public health. And I know that it's become
00:04:30.080 a big issue that everyone's talking about, the fact that there's so many people have neglected
00:04:33.600 their health. So much of this early cancer prevention, so much mental health issues have
00:04:39.460 come up. In some cases, they're far worse than COVID itself. So could you walk us through those
00:04:45.120 two different public health areas and why you drew that distinction? Well, there are actually eight
00:04:51.520 systems, and those are two of the eight. So I'll walk through the eight and then explain what those two
00:04:57.120 mean and why we came to that divination. It's COVID public health, non-COVID public health.
00:05:04.920 A couple of years ago, you might have said public health as a generality, one system, but we divided
00:05:09.100 it to be a little sharper. COVID public health, non-COVID public health. Then there's, of course,
00:05:13.800 the economy and business. Education, institutions, national unity, social fabric,
00:05:22.160 and then the international. I might be missing one. I'm a systems thinker, and the only proper way to
00:05:32.700 have dealt with the COVID pandemic at the start, this is how the best countries dealt with it,
00:05:37.600 but certainly on exit is to think of the country and systems. At that point, we would appreciate that
00:05:42.860 while COVID was a shock to the country, it was not the only system going in the second largest country
00:05:48.400 in the world in a big society. We always have many balls in the air. That's the appropriate way to
00:05:53.600 think of a complex country. In the early pandemic, through some of the solitudes we discussed, and
00:06:00.900 also through social media, and the general inexperience in Canada in dealing with crises of this scale,
00:06:06.420 we reduced all of our reality to COVID counts, for better or worse. And I'm not sentimentalizing,
00:06:14.380 I'm just recounting what was. But then we began to think that COVID was our only condition,
00:06:19.580 and that solving COVID, whenever that meant, would bleed favorably into all these other systems,
00:06:27.080 which we neither appreciated nor understood. As a result of that reduction of all our reality
00:06:35.100 to the COVID public health pandemic, we collapsed the other systems. I mean, literally collapsed.
00:06:40.480 Education, which is near and dear to my heart, and which we've been working on separately through
00:06:45.300 the Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids, was a total collapse. I mean, kids started being ousted
00:06:51.560 from all education in total, 200,000 kids plus across the country in the Oliver Twist condition,
00:06:58.900 not in any school at all. Businesses were being collapsed and bankrupted and ousted for no reason other
00:07:05.940 than we imagined that the only thing happening was the pandemic. Whereas other countries had an
00:07:11.120 appreciation, the pandemic is here, put an accent on it. But there are other fish to fry, we have a big
00:07:16.980 country, we can't collapse the economy, kids should still be educated, because tomorrow is going to be
00:07:21.860 difficult. We have to keep the country unified, we have to keep our international standing, we keep diplomatic
00:07:27.260 and intelligence activities. And we didn't. The government closed the society, and the government
00:07:33.320 itself retreated. And betwixt these two solitudes, we, in the de-energization of the society, we had
00:07:42.700 disintegration. And so the systems approach commends a reconstitution of these systems that were
00:07:48.320 collapsed. That's why when we say COVID public health, we're at an endemic stage. For all practical
00:07:54.360 intense purpose, the pandemic is over. For Canada, it is endemic. That means it will be seasonal in
00:07:59.700 character. It will be managed seasonally, as we do other maladies. And for comorbid, or aged or
00:08:07.580 vulnerable populations, we project that much more energy. That's appropriate. That's how an
00:08:14.200 intelligent society thinks. But in non-COVID public health, which we collapsed, we must provide surplus
00:08:20.380 energy. So all the things that were not diagnosed, all the procedures and processes that were
00:08:25.480 neglected, or marginalized, the new mental health conditions that that that that were created over
00:08:31.920 course the pandemic, physical health conditions, the general societal angst, children, all of this
00:08:37.540 thing requires energy. One of the working hypotheses of the exit plan is high energy, high energy at the
00:08:45.340 front. So no sentimentality, high energy, not because I have a fetish for energy, or because I like high
00:08:52.540 energy, it's because we collapse the systems. So we need to reconstitute the systems even to 2019 levels
00:08:59.340 2019. We have to provide that much more energy. So it is all the systems at once, high energy at the
00:09:06.280 front, including that vulnerable population COVID, but especially in non-COVID public health, huge surge,
00:09:13.220 reach out to the population, who's not well, who hasn't been diagnosed in the business area, in the
00:09:19.920 business sector, business system as well, reach out to all the companies, who's in trouble, who hasn't
00:09:26.160 been able to access working capital for whatever reason, who's on the on the verge, who needs to be
00:09:31.720 reconstituted. It's not because government has a central role in business, but because government was
00:09:37.500 responsible for the original ouster. And even if government removes restrictions, tens of thousands of
00:09:42.860 businesses are either on the on the on the edge or disappeared. So it's not enough to just remove
00:09:47.600 restrictions, even though that's a that's a key first point in the in the strategy, all things need
00:09:53.620 to be worked in a simultaneous choreography. But Irvin, we're left with this struggle. So the very
00:09:59.160 people who were in charge who failed to have the foresight to understand all of these complicated
00:10:03.900 systems, who let them all collapse and focus entirely on COVID, I can kind of understand that
00:10:08.800 in March, April 2020, when we just didn't know what this was, we didn't know how bad it was going
00:10:13.500 to be. But at some point, we realized the limited scope of COVID, that there are certain populations
00:10:19.840 that are very vulnerable, and the rest of society, not so much the fact that little kids were
00:10:25.180 punitively punished by COVID policies, even though they're at such small risk. So the very people who
00:10:30.660 let all that terrible things happened and led the charge on that are now the ones that we are going to
00:10:36.580 expect to come up with this plan to sort of move past it. How can we trust these, these institutions
00:10:43.620 and these people who allow this to happen in the first place?
00:10:50.800 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
00:11:02.000 seen it. Some people will have difficulty accepting, once they see what's happened, that this could have
00:11:08.180 happened in our country. Now, obviously, many of those people are, are still in decision making
00:11:13.060 roles, at all levels of government, at all levels of public health across all parties, and the
00:11:18.580 professions. We did this plan for them. We did the thinking for them. And many of them, I should say,
00:11:25.540 I could now say the public fed quietly into parts of the plan, because they said, Irvin, you guys do the
00:11:30.680 thinking, you do the structure, we don't exactly understand what the problem is, what, by the way,
00:11:35.200 many people don't understand what the problem is, they think our problem is COVID and masks and
00:11:40.340 vaccines. That is one widget of a larger systems collapse. You know, it is the key original impulse
00:11:49.140 for collapse. And we need to fix it, but we need to fix it in tandem with all these other systems.
00:11:53.600 So once we have that broad structure, again, the exit matrix is eight by 21, across all the systems,
00:12:04.040 several months out, across all regions of Canada, with an endpoint, with a strategic endpoint. Once
00:12:09.740 people understand that that is the choreography, rather than mask on, mask off, obviously, it's mask
00:12:14.540 off, I should just stress, but that's just a tweet, right? Once they understand that, they can start to
00:12:20.940 implement. We've done the thinking, they fed their parts in, they fed us intelligence across the
00:12:25.680 country, because the country is very big. So the regional, the regional character of the exit is
00:12:30.040 very important. We have to trust that they will execute. And I see in bits now, that they are co-opting
00:12:38.700 or directly using our, our elements, even though many of the systems collapses require really heroic
00:12:45.900 energy in a number of areas, because of the depth of the collapse. So that we're talking really
00:12:50.980 national leadership, provincial leadership, coordination amongst the leaderships. And
00:12:56.580 I hope that that happens. I'm certainly browbeating them quietly behind the scenes. And we've fed this
00:13:02.520 to all the medical office of health and deputy ministers and different political parties. But it is,
00:13:07.740 it remains a paradox of the time that we need better leadership for the times. It's not obvious
00:13:15.980 that Canada will survive 10 years out. It's just not obvious. We really have to up our game. Most
00:13:22.360 countries, given the performance of the last two years, would not have a tomorrow. And we see this
00:13:28.400 around the world, different countries are in difficult straits. And we maybe have been forgiven by
00:13:34.640 history. Maybe we do have a tomorrow. But God forbid, we should repeat this performance in the next
00:13:40.260 calamity, because it will be more, more dire. This was not a world historical pandemic on the mortality
00:13:46.580 count. I'm sorry to say it was not. It was a pandemic. It was global. We survived it as a country won't
00:13:54.940 survive the next one. We won't survive the next war, the next international conflicts, we have to up our game
00:14:00.240 and understand that we have to draw the right conclusions, right? No feeling sorry for ourselves.
00:14:06.560 And so the exit is to prepare for tomorrow. And that is certainly part of our thinking in the
00:14:11.100 choreography. Okay, well, I have two questions that come from that. I'm not sure which to ask for. So
00:14:15.300 I'll ask you them both. And then you can you can decide which one goes first. So number one, you said
00:14:20.020 that Canada almost collapsed, and we might not survive. We're lucky to survive 10 years from now. So
00:14:26.360 so what is the threat? What what might happen? Or what could have happened? You're talking about
00:14:29.780 from a perspective of national unity of separatist movements of vulnerability from
00:14:33.800 foreign attacks. Can you describe what you mean by the risk, the existential threat to Canada?
00:14:40.340 And then the second thing is, you said that we have to make sure that governments can't do this
00:14:45.720 again. So how can we guarantee how can we protect our citizens? How can we ensure that future
00:14:49.840 governments don't give themselves this power to act in a way to just declare an emergency to say
00:14:54.920 something's a bigger threat than it actually is, and be able to go through and destroy our
00:14:59.580 institutions like that in the future? Let me start with the latter question is a great question. The
00:15:03.960 latter question is more difficult to understand and to to to guarantee we can't guarantee that we'll
00:15:10.860 have the right leadership for the right for for the next calamity, although I suspect that becoming
00:15:15.420 calamities will be much more pressure for pressure full for for for Canada externally and domestically
00:15:23.100 than this one. We overreacted or underreacted, right? Leadership in many cases in leading leading
00:15:29.840 provinces pretended that they were just one of us rather than leading. When there were closures,
00:15:35.860 whether the closure were right or not, government took all the energy out of the society and didn't
00:15:39.940 compensate for the energy, right? All of these things are lessons that a society that is serious
00:15:46.140 about non repetition of catastrophe draws. If we move on in 2022 and pretend the last two years don't
00:15:54.100 exist. And by the way, I worry about that greatly, because in the language I hear, I hear that
00:15:59.380 things are back to normal, like nothing ever happened. Whereas a serious society, one that loses a war,
00:16:08.420 or almost loses a war, or that created or committed grave mistakes of public policy administration does
00:16:16.080 huge introspection, not self-flagellation, not sentimentality. What did we do wrong? And what
00:16:22.180 must we never repeat? And that's part of our work. Although we're not there to punish or do
00:16:29.100 accountability, that will come in time, right? I've taken notes, but we need to exit in order to
00:16:37.060 create that intellectual space to draw conclusions. And hopefully the next set of leaders will draw
00:16:41.800 that. We need a higher set of leaders across the professions, because that goes to your first
00:16:46.080 question, the circumstances around the bend will be wicked for our country. First of all, the world
00:16:50.500 is coming out of its most serious catastrophe since the Cold War, maybe since the end of the Second
00:16:58.200 World War. Huge economic drop, social conflict, collapse in a number of public administration
00:17:05.640 systems in major countries, destitching of global structures. And we're the second largest country
00:17:12.520 in the world. So we can collapse, because history suggests, as I've calculated, that countries last
00:17:19.700 about 60 years. Countries last about 60 years after which they collapse either through constitutional
00:17:25.320 domestic collapse or war. We're going on 153, 154 years plus. Means every year on top of that is good
00:17:36.980 luck and work, hard work. And we see many, it's very tragically around the world, many countries that are
00:17:43.020 on the verge of collapse, disintegration, or fighting for their lives. Some in war, some through COVID
00:17:50.140 collapse 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
00:18:03.940 other countries. We're not exceptional. We've had exceptional good luck. We come out of the pandemic
00:18:09.120 with four major domestic pressures, any of which on its own could tear the country apart. The Quebec
00:18:15.620 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
00:18:25.680 sharp. It is much sharper than before the pandemic and is not understood by the rest of Canada.
00:18:31.900 The Indigenous question is massive, and it has centrifugal pressures across the country that could
00:18:38.480 make it impossible for the country to be properly governed, even as we imagine ourselves as being a
00:18:43.760 national reconciliation, to which I'm sympathetic. And then finally, we've created borders from
00:18:50.320 jurisdiction to jurisdiction, province to province, province to territory, territory to territory,
00:18:56.300 territory to territory, city to city, that have disunified a structure that took over a century
00:19:02.680 and a half to make cohesive. So there are real, both physical borders, and also regulatory borders
00:19:09.340 that have been created through COVID restrictions, COVID borders, COVID thinking, COVID mental
00:19:15.680 structures that need to be unwound with great pace. And that's in the national exit plan as well.
00:19:22.840 Within the next couple of months, we need to bury all of those borders. It needs to be reunification of
00:19:27.980 the national economic, social, and political space. That takes work though, however. If not, these borders
00:19:34.060 become sticky. And at any point in time, New Brunswick can say, you guys aren't New Brunswickers,
00:19:39.340 not welcome here. Or same with Alberta, same with Northwest Territories. And that's completely
00:19:45.820 contrary to the original ethic of federalism, of confederation. We create a unity across the
00:19:51.560 second largest country in the world. Now internationally, it's even more wicked because
00:19:56.020 as I described the post-pandemic world, Canada now has four major borders, all of them populated by
00:20:06.060 great powers. And we're not one of them. We imagine everything is America, the A-axis.
00:20:11.580 But we're close to China. You're from Vancouver. Colleagues from Vancouver, Victoria, and Whitehorse
00:20:18.920 up north will appreciate that they're closer to Beijing than our Brisbane, Australia, Canberra,
00:20:24.180 and Sydney, geographically. China is the major country of the post-pandemic world. Whatever
00:20:29.940 people think about China, it's just an objective fact. And we're close to them. So China is our western
00:20:34.480 border. Russia is our Arctic border. Russia is at war with Ukraine. But that means we're immediate
00:20:42.340 neighbors with a country that is at full-on war, with final E-axis to our east. So ACRE,
00:20:49.820 that's our rectangle, ACRE. America, China, Russia, Europe. At any point in time, these borders could
00:20:56.220 crush us or pull us apart. And if one does the math, it's 15 combinations of push and pull that could
00:21:02.840 disintegrate us as fast as any of the countries that are in trouble today are being pressured. And
00:21:08.960 that could happen on any given Wednesday. That's such an incredible way of thinking about Canada
00:21:15.260 and looking at the situation. Irvin, I don't think that many people keep it at the front of mind that
00:21:20.660 we're so close to Russia, that we're so close to China in the way you describe. And I know you have a
00:21:26.020 whole book on this topic, and I'm going to get you to come back and we can really dive into the
00:21:31.320 strategic importance that Canada plays in the world and how we can really grow to our full
00:21:35.760 potential. So we're going to save that topic for the next interview. But I do want to ask you while
00:21:39.700 we're on this topic of disintegration, and you mentioned how we are on the border with two
00:21:45.840 countries at war. I have to ask you while you're here, you've lectured and taught in both cities,
00:21:51.380 you're very familiar with the sort of underlying issues of the conflict. So can you sort of give us
00:21:57.680 an idea of what do you think Canada can do in this conflict to be a force for good in resolving or
00:22:06.160 helping to mitigate or helping to end this conflict between Russia and Ukraine?
00:22:11.120 Actually, at the outset, it's a painful conflict to behold and watch. It would have been unthinkable
00:22:21.060 10 years ago. But professionally speaking, I've been writing about these tectonic plates of conflict
00:22:30.020 for the last several years. So it's not completely unanticipated. All of the scale is horrendous and
00:22:37.540 inappropriate. There are two questions that are implicit in your one question. Canada is forced for
00:22:44.900 good. Let's park that for a second, because my own thinking, and it's in the book, and it's also part
00:22:51.140 of my own professional work is first, Canada must think for itself, and about itself. Nobody owes
00:22:56.740 Canada anything. There's nobody around the world. And there are too few people in Canada saying,
00:23:01.460 what does Canada need? How does Canada survive? And no country has a suicide pact, meaning that no
00:23:07.820 country must do anything for any other country at its own expense, that we will help the world,
00:23:13.520 but we will crumble while we're at it. My thinking is the reverse, is that if Canada thinks for itself
00:23:19.760 at the right level, we can, by extension, be a great force for good for humanity, which is,
00:23:26.480 of course, in historical terms, the better condition. We're all human. But our vehicle for the goodness is
00:23:33.680 a Canada that thinks for itself, a strong, big Canada that survives. So let's take them on in sequence.
00:23:43.520 Canada thinking for itself, vis-a-vis Russia, first and foremost, must understand our basic geography.
00:23:50.720 And I commend to all your distinguished listeners, as I do to my son, every second day, look at the map,
00:23:58.000 look at our geography. The Arctic is opening up. Everybody should go visit the Arctic, especially our
00:24:06.320 young. And then you will see that there are two Arctic giants this century. One is Russia, which
00:24:14.240 controls over 50% of the Arctic space. And one is Canada. The second is Canada, which controls
00:24:20.240 over 25% of the Arctic space. So the two giants, the United States, the European countries are far
00:24:26.640 behind. So what are we going to do? Our posture could be directly confrontational with Russia.
00:24:33.440 Russia. And I understand that at the moment, it is such, right? And we owe ourselves the imperative
00:24:41.760 of defense. But for the remainder of the century, the more intelligent posture is that of embedding
00:24:50.640 these major countries at our borders, Russia, China to the West, but also increasingly, to some extent,
00:24:58.080 with the Northern interest. And of course, the United States, which, by the way, I look at as
00:25:03.360 just another country in strategic terms. Not our friend, not someone who will protect us. I think
00:25:10.400 quite the reverse. In strategic terms, I look at them as just another major country that acts like
00:25:14.640 a major country. So what does a smaller country like us do with that wicked, now wicked geography?
00:25:22.720 We embed them. We embed them in a framework of peace and prosperity with defensive assets at the
00:25:28.720 plate, but not imagining, as we do by Twitter, that we're going to war with them because they
00:25:33.200 will all crush us fast, all of them. And in any combination will crush us even faster. And God
00:25:40.400 forbid they should fight war across our territory, right? Or play diplomatic or information space or
00:25:48.160 intelligence games across our territory. We need to up our game. And I guess this will be in a future
00:25:54.240 interview or in the book that I have, I've written about Canada creating the Singapore of the North that
00:25:59.360 embeds all these major countries, including Russia, including China, including the United States,
00:26:04.720 Northern European countries, in a framework whereby we're the center of an international market,
00:26:10.240 a framework connecting four continents of two billion people. That's a seven to one ratio,
00:26:17.920 I think, of the continental North American market alone. And we're at the center of that because we
00:26:22.640 constructed it. So that's a way of saying, yes, Arctic sovereignty, but Arctic sovereignty,
00:26:27.680 vis-a-vis the Russians is not building up basis, we can build a basis. But on top of that, we create
00:26:32.080 markets, we create people to people relationships, and travel and all that's coming out of this
00:26:39.200 terrible war. In respect of the war itself, I do not see it as an ancient conflict between Ukrainians
00:26:46.480 and Russians. We can talk about the history, I see it as a post Soviet conflict about territory and
00:26:54.400 borders, and critically, the legitimacy of two very young post Soviet states. I mean,
00:27:01.840 both Russia and Ukraine are old cultures and civilizations. But both of them, we forget,
00:27:08.560 are very young countries. They're just over 30 years old. And each of them across huge geography
00:27:15.120 is trying to secure legitimacy. In the Russian case, they're trying to secure legitimacy across the
00:27:20.720 biggest territory in the world with 14 land borders, three maritime borders. It is the most complex
00:27:26.400 country in the world. And it is extremely difficult to govern. I'm convinced that the Russian governors
00:27:31.120 do not even have an appreciation of what's happening in their territory. It's just too big. And they're all
00:27:35.840 in Moscow. Ukraine is also huge. It is bigger than Germany. But it has a very, very young self-government
00:27:45.440 culture. And if I may be direct, very, very weak governors. To this day, no great president has
00:27:53.040 arrived. Now, including with the greatest respect, the current president, who was a very, very good
00:27:58.560 comedian in Russian language. I would listen to him once in a while. But until the war, he was a terrible
00:28:04.480 president. And the one prior to him, even worse. And oh, he's heroic today. And appropriately so, he loves
00:28:11.920 this country. But the question is now, for a proper exit, one that serves Canada and the world and these
00:28:18.560 countries, the only exit can be one that re-legitimizes or re-legitimates both the Ukrainian
00:28:25.600 state and the Russian state side by side, both strong, both living in peace. There is no other solution.
00:28:33.840 Whatever we say on Twitter, whatever our sentimentality, every other solution will
00:28:37.920 conduce to disintegration of Ukraine first. And if Russia goes second, then it takes Ukraine with it.
00:28:45.520 Repeat. If Russia disintegrates, it takes Ukraine with it. If Russia and Ukraine disintegrate, they
00:28:51.520 take Europe with it. If Europe disintegrates, the world is in trouble. We're back in the 20th century,
00:28:57.040 and that's bad for us because they're at our border. What is the exit? There must be immediate
00:29:03.920 mediation. The mediation must come from outside of NATO and it must come outside of the Soviet space.
00:29:11.920 I've recommended Asian countries, some West Asian, some East Asian, because they're neutral
00:29:17.200 and they're respected by both Kyiv and Moscow. So Israel has stepped up. I don't know whether they
00:29:21.520 have the assets to do it. I am talking about India, China, maybe Singapore. But in a consortium,
00:29:29.840 they can help to negotiate two countries that are largely fraternal, that are fighting for different
00:29:35.520 teams, that really are warrior nations. I mean, both the Ukrainians and the Russians know how to fight.
00:29:42.080 And they will fight for a long time. And it is tragic. So Canada must push for that diplomatic
00:29:49.920 settlement. There need to be peacekeepers, in my view, in the end. I think I've recommended Indian
00:29:55.040 peacekeepers, again, third force under the UN umbrella to provide a separation of the belligerents.
00:30:03.040 In terms of the Canadian play, I think the solution, one thing that has been mooted even today about
00:30:11.520 flights for refugees to Canada, we should have done that two weeks ago if we're a serious
00:30:16.320 country. We did it with other countries. Israel is looking at that. Poland has been heroic on refugees.
00:30:22.720 We must save maximum lives. In any conflict, we save lives. And Canada has all the capacity to do
00:30:28.960 that. We're just slow. Much like in the pandemic, we were slow to mobilize. Internationally, we're even
00:30:33.760 slower. There's a couple of things on the future look of Ukraine. Obviously, it must be a sovereign
00:30:40.720 state, but it will be a neutral state if it survives. And it has to have a character that is,
00:30:47.840 and I talk about this in the book, interstitial. It must be a segue between the European Union and
00:30:53.200 the former Soviet space. It cannot be part of a hard block because otherwise these major blocks will
00:30:58.880 be fighting across this geography. Much like we wish to avoid the North American blocks and Chinese
00:31:04.960 blocks and Soviet blocks, post-Soviet blocks fighting across a weakly governed Canadian territory,
00:31:11.120 which will, again, tear us apart.
00:31:14.080 Oh, wow. I mean, there's so much there. And I really appreciate you breaking it down for us. I
00:31:18.640 completely agree. Ukraine has always sort of been a buffer zone. And even the population itself is a
00:31:22.880 mix of Ukrainians and Russians. And for a long, long time, they lived together in one country or one
00:31:29.680 empire. And so it's such a shame to see them break out. But I really appreciate your time,
00:31:35.920 Irvin. You're clear thinking on this. I hope that world leaders will take the advice both on COVID
00:31:41.760 and the geopolitics in Europe and the importance of coming to a resolution sooner rather than later.
00:31:48.960 So thank you for all your wisdom. And we'll certainly have you on again to talk
00:31:52.800 about building up Canada and the potential that we have here in our country.
00:31:57.520 My great pleasure.
00:31:58.640 All right. That's Irvin Studen. I'm Candice Malcolm. This is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:32:05.920 Thanks.
00:32:09.680 Yeah.