Transcript
Transcript: Facing Forward: Canada's Adaptability in a Changing World
[00:00:00 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
[00:00:05 The screen fades to Josiane Paul.]
Josiane Paul (Director, Policy and Strategic Relationships, CSPS): Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Josiane Paul and I'm the Director of the Policy and Strategic Relationship Team here at the School, and I am delighted to welcome you today to the event called Facing Forward: Canada's Adaptability in a Changing World. Before we begin, I would like to recognize that I'm speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I want to express my gratitude to the generation of Algonquin people past and present that has been the original caretaker of the land that I am on today. I am grateful to be here. I recognize that many of the participants today are joining us from different parts of the country and that you maybe find yourself on different Indigenous territories. I encourage you to take a moment to think about the territory you occupy. Today's session will consist of a short presentation followed by a moderated discussion. After, there will be questions from the live audience. So, if you have any questions, please feel free to raise your hand, or just to stand up and go to a mic and ask your questions. Please note also that there are simultaneous interpretation headsets that are available at the back of the room.
Please note also that there are simultaneous interpretation headsets that are available at the back of the room.
[00:01:36 Alasdair Roberts is shown sitting next to Josiane Paul.]
So, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Dr. Alasdair Roberts who is a professor of public policy at the University Massachusetts Amherst where he served as the first director of the School of Public Policy and also as a co-editor of the journal Governance for nearly a decade. As a proud Canadian, Dr. Roberts has held many teaching positions at prominent universities, including Queen's University here in Canada but also in many U.S. universities. Among his many honours, he was the first non-American elected as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration and he has received multiple awards such as the ASPA… sorry, I don't want to mess up the acronyms, ASPA Riggs for Lifetime Achievement Award in Comparative Administration. Dr. Roberts is a distinguished scholar, specialized in governance, law, and public policy. He has authored numerous influential books including Strategies for Governing which earned the 2021 Best Book Award for the American Society of Public Administration. His extensive body of work is touching on topics such as democracy, economic crises, government secrecy, and have received a number of notable accolades. We have been also really lucky to have him as the 2022-2023 Jocelyne Bourgon Visiting Scholar at the School, and I can personally testify that it's a joy working with him. We are delighted to have him with us today because he will present us his latest book that you can see right here in the middle. It's called The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century. It had been published in September, so right off the press at the McGill-Queen's University Press. So, with no further ado, welcome to the School, Dr. Roberts.
(Applause)
Alasdair Roberts (PhD, 2022-2023 Visiting Scholar at the Canada School of Public Service): Thank you, Josiane, and thank you. I am very grateful to the School to have had the opportunity to be the Visiting Scholar here in 2022-2023, and the book, which we've got here, if you're looking for gift suggestions, by the way, for the upcoming holiday season, I'm sure everyone in the family would appreciate a copy of this.
[00:04:06 The book "The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century" by Alasdair Roberts is shown.]
And this book was basically a product of the time, my work here while I was a visiting scholar, and I also would like to say a word of thanks to everyone in the room and online for taking some time at a really busy time of year, I know, to come and hear about the book. So, what I'll do is I'll just give you sort of a snapshot of what the book is about and then we can sort of open it up for conversation, and I'll start very abstractly but then I'll get more concrete as I go along. So, this is a book about adaptability in governmental systems or political systems, and I'm going to use the phrase political system a few times. I don't mean just the federal government in the Canadian context. I mean our way of governing more broadly that includes all levels of government, and what I'm interested in is the adaptability of the system, and what does that mean? That means the capacity of the system to adapt to new challenges.
[00:05:05 Text appears on screen:
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Facing Forward: Canada's Adaptability in a Changing World
Building an Adaptable Future: Navigating Canada's Challenges in the 21st Century]
We live in… the premise is we live in a turbulent world. It's going to be a turbulent, potentially dangerous world for decades to come, I think for the balance of this century, for a bundle of different reasons we can get into, and a political system, a country that wants to thrive under those circumstances, needs to be adaptable, needs to be good at adjusting to circumstances. I've given this… a talk about this book in several different places over the last few months, and it occurred to me as I was talking that I could do a word swap without affecting the integrity of the argument and I could talk about sovereignty as well, and basically say this is a book about sovereignty. It's a book about the capacity of Canadians as a community to exercise control over events, to shape their destiny insofar as it's possible to do that given the circumstances. So, it's about preserving sovereignty, maintaining control over events, and this is not, for me, an abstract thing. I think sovereignty is challenged in Canada today in the sense in which I addressed it.
What are the things you would worry about? If you felt that when you look at politics, that politics is turning into sort of a prolonged exercise in crisis management, one crisis after another, if you're rolling from crisis to crisis. That's a sign of the erosion of sovereignty. It's a sign of losing control or mastery over events. If you feel that politics is sort of devolving to the point where the country is becoming a dependency of another country, to use a phrase that's been bandied about lately, if you think that we're becoming the 51st state, that's a worrisome sign about loss of sovereignty. If we got to the point where we thought, well, we're getting into a point of political or social or economic stagnation and we can't figure a path out, that's about the erosion of sovereignty. And then, the worst case scenario is if you've got internal pressures, centrifugal pressures that are sort of pulling the country apart, and you can't figure out how to maintain unity. That's a worrisome sign too. So, if you're looking at your dashboard, those are the sort of things you would be worrying about and we don't want to be in that place. We want to be able to survive and thrive in difficult circumstances.
And basically, what I argue in the book is that a political system in the broad sense ought to be good at doing four things if it wants to preserve adaptability or if you want to preserve sovereignty. First, it ought to be good at anticipation, that is it ought to be good at looking down the road and anticipating challenges so that there's time to prepare. We ought to be good as a collectivity in basically identifying the challenges that are coming not just next year but in coming decades. So, anticipation is number one. Number two, we ought to be good at inventing strategies for addressing the various challenges we think that are coming down the road, and that's not just going to be one challenge or another because they're going to come at us in a packet, in a set, and the question is, are we good at inventing sort of what some scholars like to call a grand strategy, a national strategy that basically says this is how we think we might address the array of challenges, the sort of threat matrix that we think we're going to face in coming decades? So, the second is inventing strategies. And then, the third is building political agreement. You can have the best idea in the world about how we're going to address coming strategies but you need to make sure that you've got the political support for doing that, and you can break that into two ways of thinking.
The first is sort of political agreement among the political class, the leadership group in the country, and in Canada, that includes leaders in the federal government but also leaders in provincial and other levels of government too. That's the way our system is built. So, agreement sort of among the political class and then general agreement among the public. Have you got the public with you when you basically say we think this is how we need to kind of reconfigure ourselves to meet coming challenges? So, political support, the leadership group, and the general public. That's the third element, and the fourth element is execution. Have you got bureaucracies that are good at doing the work of translating strategy into action? That means dismantling old institutions, building new institutions, building new programs so that you can do what needs to get done. So, that's the bit about execution. So, four things there, anticipation, inventing strategies, building political support, and execution, translating strategy into action. My argument is that a political system has to be good at all four things in order to be adaptable, to maintain control over events. And then, I look at it in the Canadian context and I basically say, look, we have a sort of distinctive political system and one of the features of the Canadian system is it's highly decentralized.
We give power to provinces and territories. We empower lower levels of government, we empower individuals by recognizing their fundamental rights. We operate in a principle of market economy so we empower private actors. We operate in a political system where we spread authority around, for very good reason, but one of the difficulties is that when you do that, you've got a coordination problem, right? The flip side of that is, how do you get everybody on the same page? How do you get… build agreements so far as you can about what the national objectives should be and how we're going to go about addressing those objectives? So, the flip side of decentralization is this problem of coordination, and we're also a democracy. That's another way of spreading power around because we basically say elites are going to be accountable to voters for what they do and that raises the challenge of getting everyone on board too, and one of the knocks against democracy is that it tends to be sometimes short-sighted. Everyone's focused on the next election, and I would argue that if you looked at the trends over the last 40 years, the polity Canadian system has become bigger, more populist, there's more people here, it's more diverse, and it's also more decentralized, and we take democracy more seriously.
All good things, but then the flip side is how do we deal with these potential difficulties of short-sightedness and coordination? How do we keep, so far as we can, everybody kind of heading in the same direction? In a system like ours, governments also ought to be preoccupied with the question of attending to those problems of potential short-sightedness and lack of coordination. It's sort of the character of the system. You want to be attending to its potential vulnerabilities, and the argument I make in the book is that for one reason or another, perhaps because we just got used to a long period in history that was unusually calm, we haven't been paying attention to those vulnerabilities as much as we used to. And in fact, I would go further and say that not only have we not been paying attention, we've sort of either deconstructed, dismantled, or neglected institutions that are actually important for performing those four functions that I argued were core to adaptability. So, for example, I would argue, and I do argue in the book, that we've disinvested in forward thinking. There used to be a habit in Canada of having, and I'm saying this by way of example, these sort of big, grand, royal commissions that would be sort of explorations of where we thought the country was going to go and how we would address looming challenges.
The classic example might be the Macdonald Royal Commission on Canada's Economic Prospects of the 1980s, but that's one of many, many royal commissions of that type that were established in the 20th century. We don't do that anymore. We don't have these kind of big think exercises about where the country is going. We used to have standalone commissions like the Economic Council of Canada that were charged, they were sort of standing royal commissions, as it were, charged with thinking about their country's long-term prospects. And in the 1990s, we dismantled most of those major independent bodies. And so, we sort of disinvested. I also argue in the book that we've come to a place where we rely very heavily on political parties to do this kind of big thinking about where the country is going to go, and that political parties, the Canadian political parties, are simply not built to do that well, they just don't have the capacity to do it. So, we've disinvested in forward thinking. I would also argue that, in important ways, we've disinvested in the capacity to build political agreement among the nation's leaders. So, for example, we used to have an institution, the First Ministers Conference, it used to be sort of regarded as sort of a fundamental part of the Canadian way of governing. We've essentially deinstitutionalized FMCs.
Now, they're sort of held impromptu, very informally, when some emergency or another seems to require them, but we've abandoned the practice of domestic summitry as a mechanism for trying to get leaders on the same page. Another critical question is the condition of what I call the public sphere, our capacity as Canadians to talk to one another, that space in which we communicate either through media or other mechanisms about what we're trying to do, and I basically argue that we've neglected the health of the public sphere. In the 20th century, every time a new technology came along, whether it was radio or television or cable television, we had sort of a sit down and a serious think about, how do we preserve a distinctive Canadian sphere, a space in which Canadians set the agenda and can talk to each other in a civil way about national priorities? We've gone through another technological shock because of the digital revolution that has completely upended the Canadian sphere, and I would argue that we have not addressed, as seriously as we should, the question of how you repair that space for common conversation, and that's critically important if you want to build political support for a path forward.
And then, finally, I basically argue that we have not attended to the health of the Canadian Public Service as an institution as we ought to, and my diagnosis in the book, very briefly, is that the public service does great work when the moment demands it but is also suffering from an accretion of controls that have built up over decades, administrative controls and political controls very often imposed with good reason but without attention to the cumulative cost of all of these controls, and we used to have a practice of doing kind of a periodic spring cleaning in which we would ask, what does the control mechanism system look like and could it be tuned up a bit? Have we done the benefit-cost analysis on control versus performance? And we are, I think, in desperate need of another kind of housecleaning exercise like that as well. So, that's the sort of overview of what I argue in the book. And as I say, I don't regard this as an abstract exercise. I think the question of adaptability, or if you like sovereignty in the Canadian context, is very much on the table and I think all of the questions that I've raised are pressing. They're something that needs to be attended to very soon. Thank you.
Josiane Paul: Thank you, Dr. Roberts. So, if you have any questions, please prepare them and go to the mic to ask them, but I will start with one of my own. So, in your book, you're saying that adaptability matters because it's the cornerstone on which we can build a grand vision. The other thing that is really present in the mind of public servants and elected officials is the pressing needs that we have to face now. So, how can we effectively find a balance between that long-term strategy and those pressing needs?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, I think that is the challenge, and I'm not going to have a neat answer to this, but the problem, and this is probably true at any level of organization, whether it's in a unit in a department or a ministry as a whole or the government as a whole, the challenge is finding a space for conversation about long-term priorities, right? The danger is getting swept up in the needs of the moment. At the governmental level, the danger is getting so preoccupied with one crisis after another that you're unable to take the time to sort of think about what the long-term strategy should be, and one of the things I worry about, I mean, it's sort of well-documented, the pace and intensity of governance has increased substantially over coming decades. The problem of information overload at the top of government, I think, is intensified just because of the way the world has changed, and one of the things I worry about is that we have not created or sort of reserved that capacity for bigger thinking about national strategy. So, that's one of the reasons I say there's something to be said for reviving old practices so that we are, on the one hand, getting the day-to-day ton, but also on the other hand, making sure we're preserving space for talking about the big picture.
Josiane Paul: And let's say that we arrive to consensus for that grand strategy and what it should look like.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: It doesn't mean that we will all agree on how to get at it.
Alasdair Roberts: No, no.
Josiane Paul: So, my next question is a little bit in the same vein. So, how would you go about legitimizing that grand strategy in relation to aspects that are, and here bear with me because I'm French and it's a difficult word, unanimously agreed upon (laughs). So, when we're not all in agreement about how to go at it.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: What should we do?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, so the general predicament here is we've got, as I said, a highly decentralized system, and we're a democracy, we're committed to democratic ideals. So, everyone gets a say, and the… but we have to do the best we can to try and get on the same page. It's an ideal, right? We will never be on the same page but if we're committed to Canada as a project, we have to do the best we can to try and get on the same page. And so, I think one of the arguments I would make is that we're not attending to that challenge as much as we might. We're actually on the same page more than we might imagine. On fundamentals of the system, most Canadians are sort of generally agreed on where we want to be. We want a federal system, we want to respect individual rights, we want a market-oriented economy, and so on and so forth. The broad design is sort of the consensus there. And very often, we're actually negotiating on the margins about what these ideas mean. One of the criticisms that's been made is, I've argued basically we need to get back in the business of having regular and robust first ministers conferences, that is first ministers conferences that are actual events. Think of a G7 summit, that sort of style of event but done in the domestic context and done precisely for the reasons that you have G7 summits, to sort of build rapport, establish a common agenda and so on.
And the argument I've got back is, well, Al, you've got kind of a very rosy idea of what's going to happen in a first ministers conference, that there'll be… there's going to be robust disagreement, you're not going to come out at the end of the day with sort of a common consensus on the path forward, and I totally understand that but you have to endeavour so far as you can to undertake the exercise, to try at least to figure out where the areas of disagreement are and sort it out because the alternative is a system that just tends naturally to sort of go its own way, and the other argument I would make too is that if we're telling Canadians that… about the importance of civil discourse, of the importance of talking to one another in a civil way about important, difficult issues, well, it's the obligation of national leaders to model that behaviour, to demonstrate even though there are robust disagreements, you can get in a room and talk about your differences. So, I think, for example, a robust practice of domestic summitry that includes all the First Ministers and Indigenous… leaders of the Indigenous community would be great in terms of anchoring a conversation about the national agenda and also modeling what civil discourse looks like.
Josiane Paul: So, bottom line, we need to speak to each other.
Alasdair Roberts: Yes.
Josiane Paul: And listen to each other on top of that (laughs).
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: And when I read your book, one thing that you were talking about, it's about federalism, about the federation that we're living in and how it could be a tool for adaptability. Can you speak a little bit more about that in the context that you just talked about, like having our leadership talking more to each other, having clear conversation about the future of the country? How can we use federalism in that perspective?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, I actually argue in the book… I do a little bit of compare and contrast between Canada and the United States in the book, and I actually argue one of the Canadian advantages is that I think we've got more robust and effective provincial governments than Americans have state governments, for a bundle of different reasons, including the fact we operate in a parliamentary system but other factors too, we've got energetic, robust provincial governments and I actually think in the world we're going to be heading into, the fact that we've got robust capacity at the subnational level is a good thing. It's a great thing. You want decentralized, robust capacity. I think it just makes the system… has the potential to make the system more nimble, but the other point I make, and I've said this already, is that the Achilles heel, the trade-off, is the coordination problem. And so, if you're going to have robust decentralization, you also want to have some sort of countervailing measures, and that's where I think we're not… we're falling short.
Josiane Paul: But it's also a good forum to learn from each other.
Alasdair Roberts: Yes. Exactly, yeah.
Josiane Paul: Because we have different competencies, so we can see what the other have done and try it after.
Alasdair Roberts: Right. Exactly, yeah.
Josiane Paul: You talked a little bit about polarization as well and it's one of the big issues of the day, I think, this mistrust and misinformation that is circulating, and one of the adaptability principles is to talk to each other. So, how do we make sure that the right information is conveyed after the leader talks, for example, together? How do we make sure that the right information is conveyed to the public? How do we make sure that the federal government is encouraging a conversation that counters the trends of misinformation and disinformation?
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah, I think a couple of points. The first is, I talked a bit about the condition of the public sphere, and one of the things we have to attend to is the way in which the quality of conversation is degraded because of the impact of new information technologies, right? Social media. The other thing we sort of have to pay attention to is the way in which new technologies like social media and new forms of news media have sort of rewired social networks in Canada, broken up old networks that linked Canadians to Canadians and constructed new networks that now link Canadians to people in other countries, particularly in the United States, and I think we need to sort of think about, okay, what are the… what's the impact of that on Canadian politics? I think one of the effects is that the Canadian political agenda increasingly is connected, for good or for ill, to the American political agenda. The tenor of American politics is reflected in Canadian politics. This is not entirely a new issue. Every time, as I said, a new technology came along in the 20th century, we sort of had a kind of a check to think about, what are we going to do to correct that? And we haven't, I think, done that exercise as thoroughly as we might this time. So, we need to have a conversation about how we sort of reconstruct the Canadian public sphere and ensure a civil conversation.
The other point I would make too is that I think… I'm going to make an argument that we ought to do one of two things. We ought to have some kind of digital era version of the Macdonald commission on Canada's prospects. It's not going to be like the commission of the 1980s because the world has changed dramatically in terms of technologies but we ought to have some independent big think exercise about where the country is going, and I think if you give it autonomy and independence and weight, it could shape the national conversation, but you have to give it autonomy and weight. You have to make it seem credible. If you're not prepared to go that way, then I think the other alternative that's worth considering is giving… is creating party political foundations which was actually a recommendation of the Lortie royal commission 30 years ago, publicly funded basically think tanks allied to each of the major political parties so they can kind of craft a vision, and maybe if a party is doing it, it will have credibility among its own political supporters, but these are the different ways in which you can sort of inform conversation, anchor a conversation on Canadian realities, and I think do it in a way that strikes the public as having credibility.
Josiane Paul: And now that we have talked about the grand scheme of things, I would like to bring it back to the public service because often what… I'm creating a lot of learning here at the School and what I'm hearing is we want practical advice. So, I will bring it back to us as a public service. So, how can we excel in anticipatory governance and contribute to the development of looking forward policies when we are prone to be distracted, as we talked, by a problem of immediate nature? So, what we can do as a public service to have that looking forward.
Alasdair Roberts: I said earlier on, and there are folks in the room who have more expertise on this than I do, but I think the general proposition would be at every level of organization, you want to make sure that you've created a space for a conversation about the bigger picture insofar as it relates to that level of organization, right? It's sort of a stacked thing. So, every unit wants to make sure that it's creating a space to have a conversation about, where do we think this entity is going in the next few years? What do we think are the sort of big factors that are going to shape our work? How are we going to respond? What are the alternative scenarios that we imagine we're going to be looking at? How are we going to respond to those scenarios? So, I think that's the way you would sort of embed it at different levels of organization.
Josiane Paul: So, you kind of have to look at things, not only what is coming your way but trying to expect what will come in 10, 15 years just to make sure that the policy that you're developing is robust.
Alasdair Roberts: That's right, yeah.
Josiane Paul: So, and in your book, you're saying that the conditions right now are ripe for a polycrisis in Canada. I'm sorry, I'm quoting you here.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: So, the conditions are ripe for a polycrisis in Canada in the coming decades, a country with people who are not thinking intensively about the future may not survive the coming storm. So, it's a clear encouragement for us to think forward. And based on that, I will have two questions for you. The first one is, we often… when we're looking at what we're doing, we're doing faithful implementation, fearless advice, so we often have the impression that we don't have the control on the external vulnerabilities coming our way. So, how can we be adaptable in answers to those external pressures that are coming our way?
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah, so I think one of the things we just have to accept is that it's going to be a complicated, turbulent century and we will never be at ease. That's just life. If there was a phase in recent history where we thought we were at ease, it was either a transitory moment or we were misinformed. Governance life is challenging. It always has been, and certainly, in this century, it's going to be, and I can get into enumerating why I think that's going to be the case, and a certain degree of unease is actually healthy because it makes us attentive. It makes us think about forward planning. So, pardon me, I've forgotten the rest of the question.
Josiane Paul: So, basically, when we have… when you feel that you don't have the control on what is coming your way, so how can you remain adaptable? Because basically, it's a little bit like resiliency, right?
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: Resiliency is to get up when you receive punches, being adaptable is being able to avoid those punches.
Alasdair Roberts: Well, the way you kind of… I think you're never going to have complete mastery over events, right? That's just… that's life, and that's true for governments as well as for people. There's… I said at the start that sovereignty is about having as much control over events as you can, given the circumstances. And so, the way you try to put yourself at ease is basically by looking down the road and scenario planning. What do I think is likely to happen? What do we think is likely to happen? What could we do now to anticipate the various contingencies? And we're doing that in part so that we can prepare but also in part so that if we visualize what might happen, we're not blindsided or shocked when one scenario or another does happen, and I'm just going to sort of… if I can sort of digress for a moment, people aren't just public servants, they're also citizens, right? You're sort of exercising agency as citizens of Canada as well, and in that respect, you can sort of look at the character of politics in your capacity as citizens and voters and say, is this good enough? And a thought experiment that I've sort of thought of is put yourself in the position of an average citizen.
And hypothetically, imagine a federal election was coming down the pike, and suppose you said, I want to be a good citizen, I want to vote in an informed way and I actually do want to think about the what the country is going to look like or what challenges it's going to face over the next 20 or 30 years. And so, imagine an average citizen says, okay, I need some kind of credible story about what the challenges are going to be over the next 30 years, I want it to be fact-based and credible and I want some explanation of what we might need to do as a country over that period. Where would an average Canadian go to get that story that's legitimate and accessible? I mean, where would they go? You got bounded time, you're not going to read an 800-page book, I'm not even sure there is an 800-page book, but I mean, you need… part of our difficulty is that we're not producing the kind of content that citizens would need to make informed choices. One of the things I worry about is the superficiality, the sort of emptiness of a large part of what's passing for political conversation these days.
What do we imagine a panel on politics is about? It's sort of about the politics of the moment. It's about transactions, who's up, who's down, who's in, who's out. How did the latest byelection go? And that's an element of politics but that's not the whole of politics, and what I'm getting at when I talk about things like creating party political foundations or reviving royal commissions is trying to figure out how we produce the content, the material that allows people to make intelligent choices about where their country is going to go in the span of the next generation, and one of the knocks I've got is, well, Al, it's absurd to think people are going to make decisions about where the country is going over the next 30 years, but I would observe that citizens make decisions, 30-year decisions, all the time. What kind of degree am I going to get? Where am I going to live? Where should I move? Where should I get a job? Should I buy a house? Should I start a business? These are all 30-year decisions. Let's give citizens the capacity to make informed 30-year decisions about the fate of their country too.
Josiane Paul: So, we could use adaptability… from what I hear from that, we can use adaptability to plan the future but we also can use adaptability principle to make sure that we are making things better in the short term to get there. How can we use adaptability, for example, to include marginalized voices into our processes and make sure that we have a better future than what we have, we're making things better, right? So, how can we make sure that we can use adaptability to have all those voices at the table?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, we certainly want to include marginalized communities, right? Because we are committed to the proposition that a just society is one that's built on the principles of democracy and human rights and inclusion. That's one of the things we're about. We want to create a society that promotes that value. And so, it's like gymnastics. We sort of raise the level of difficulty, right? We're committed to the principle of inclusion and then the next question is, how do you have a conversation that includes everybody that is also capable of sort of reaching some adequate degree of consensus so that the country can move forward? That's the project.
Josiane Paul: It's true (laughs). We're always trying to make things better. I have that conversation often with my kids when they're telling me, I'm better than you at that, are you angry at me? And I'm like, no, I'm raising you, I want you to be better.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: So, I guess it's the same thing that we want for our country. We're starting from something and we've got to… we want to be adaptable to be able to go and be better at what we do and have a better community. At the same time, as you said, we are facing those crises that are coming, one after the other. So, how can we better prepare? Because those overlapping crises will just grow over times, right? We see the climate change, it's horizontal. It's a horizontal crisis. We see people aging. We see all those crises coming up. So, how can we prepare to that polycrisis that you're kind of warning us about over the next years?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, so I touched on what I think are the main points. The first is that we need to be investing more heavily in the production of… well, in thinking about the future and producing materials that allow the public broadly to understand the challenges that are coming down the road and participate in that conversation in an informed way, because if we don't do it and if we don't attend to the health of the public sphere, it's going to be… Canadian politics will sort of be excessively influenced by extraneous factors. So, we need to be investing in big ideas, we need to establish the routine of having a conversation among national leaders and use that as an anchor for national conversation, and we also need to be attending to the health of the public service as well, and we maintain a robust federation that allows… with robust subnational governments that can carry the ball a lot so that the weight doesn't fall entirely on Ottawa. So, that I think would be sort of the game plan.
Josiane Paul: Perfect, and I see that we have a little bit of time left so I would like to encourage everyone in the room, if you have any questions, please come and go to the mic. We would like to encourage your participation as well. So, talking of leadership, we need to have those people come and speak. So, in your views, what are the leadership qualities we need to put forward to be adaptable?
Alasdair Roberts: The capacity to be frank, I suppose, about… it depends what level we're talking about, right? But I mean, the capacity to be frank about long-term challenges. I'm not a politician but there are going to be politicians who are sort of skilled in basically saying we need to be honest about the challenges that we are confronting, we need to look down the road, we need to attend to the problems of the moment, but we also need to maintain… have a conversation about what we think is going down the road. So, that's an element of leadership, and sort of figuring out how to foster a conversation about the longer-term challenges, and I think probably the other tricky bit is knowing how to let go. There's a maxim that if you try to grasp things too tightly in an effort to get control… I'm bungling the maxim but the notion is if you grasp things too tightly, you actually don't get control, that you loosen your grip in order to maintain control, and I would say as a matter of practical politics, whenever you say to a politician, well, we ought to have an independent body looking at x or y, they might immediately say, well, I am not entirely keen on the notion of having an independent body looking at national challenges. Who knows what they might say, and a lot of politics over many years has been sort of driven by that sense that I need to maintain a tight grip over what's happening, and I think actually the counterintuitive response to that would be to basically say your effort to maintain a tight grip over is counterproductive, and that in this moment, what we actually need is a substantial independent voice that is sort of engaging in this long-term inquirance and setting the background for political conversation.
Josiane Paul: We have a question here in the room, please.
[00:43:29 An audience member is shown standing in front of a microphone.]
Question: Hello? Can you hear me?
Alasdair Roberts: Yes.
Question: Hi, Dr. Roberts. Thank you for joining us. I really enjoyed reading the book, so just thanks again for being here. The nature of my question today, and I'm happy you addressed it in your opening remarks, is about complacency and the effect it has on our institutions, and you talked a bit about polycrisis today, the things we're facing here as a country. I kind of thought as a public servant, you get to the financial crisis, we might get it, or you get to the Syrian refugee crisis, we might get it, you get to COVID, we might get it, and without asking you to, you know, the crystal ball, but what can we do about complacency? What's the solution to complacency? What will finally sort of get us out of that sense of we're good enough without really wanting to push further? Because I get a sense that I often hear from folks, comparatively we're okay but when you start really digging into things, it's kind of scary how far we're going down a hole and that we're not kind of realizing that yet. So, any thoughts on complacency and what we can do about it? Thank you.
Alasdair Roberts: Well, I'm against it, obviously. I think it's a matter at first instance of political leadership, and basically… well, actually, I'm going to say it's a matter of political leadership, basically national leaders at different levels of government who basically say we need to have a conversation about the long term, that certainly there are issues of the moment that need to be addressed but we need to maintain a space to have a conversation about the long term, and I guess just to follow along on what I was saying a moment ago is that maybe we need to have some independent body that's sort of going to help us with that conversation because the pressures of government are such that it's hard to have a date to run the day-to-day affairs and try to have a conversation about the long term. I would also say, as citizens, we should demand more of the political class, that tell us… we want a credible story about what you imagine are the long-run challenges and how you're going to address them. Show us what the program looks like. And so, I think as citizens, we can sort of demand more as well, and we've mentioned the phrase polycrisis a couple times. And so, what am I getting at there? It's basically just the notion that politics devolves into a situation where it's one damn thing after another and you get hit so frequently by crises that you sort of lose the capacity to exercise some control over events. That's what we mean by polycrisis.
[00:46:20 Josiane Paul motions to the next audience member with a question.]
[00:46:22 An audience member is shown standing in front of a microphone.]
Question: Hi, my name is Jason and I love data but I'm glad I stepped away from the computer monitors. I'm also new the public service, so I guess personally I'm interested in open data and how can we share data with Canadians to help them make those informed decisions, and that public discourse realm that you mentioned is so important. So, my question has two parts. How could sharing better data on Canadian public and private wealth and income help us make better decisions as Canadians or the public service? And secondly, with globalization that you mentioned in the book, is it important to make it easy also for Canadians, especially marginalized groups and others, to put that Canadian data on wealth and income into the global context as long, as it doesn't make us complacent because, yeah, I didn't know your question earlier. Thanks.
Alasdair Roberts: Well, thank you. So, I'm a big fan of open data. Back several books ago, I used to do a lot of work on open government, and I probably shouldn't say it in this crowd but also a lot of work on the Access to Information Act, so a big advocate of transparency. The one caveat, and I did say… I said this in my earlier work, is that merely releasing data into the wild as it were is not enough. I mean, and this is true with the sort of higher-end release of digitized information and the lower-end issue of how the Access to Information Act works. You need what I said and called in earlier work, trusted intermediaries, you need organizations and individuals in civil society who know what to do with the data that's being released, and one of the difficulties I found sometimes with various transparency schemes is that information was being released but there was sort of no… there was no thought of, well, who's actually going to use this?
And one of the difficulties sometimes is that if the data is being released in certain forms and civil society organizations or journalists or whomever don't have the technical capacity, the skillset necessary to use the data, then the exercise is sort of futile, and I would also say too, and I want to sort of emphasize this, that we need to have a serious conversation about creating a distinctive Canadian public sphere, and that's a space for conversation in which we can say there is an agenda that's reasonably stable, that is set by Canadians, that reflects Canadian priorities, not the priorities of individuals in some other country, that allows a civil conversation about national priorities. If you haven't got a healthy public sphere, releasing data isn't going to do the trick by itself, right? Because you're releasing data with the hope of having an informed conversation on national policy, and if we haven't sort of done the maintenance to make sure that the sphere is operating properly, releasing data is not going to help.
Josiane Paul: We have another question.
Question: Good?
Josiane Paul: Yes.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Question: Okay, thank you Professor Roberts and thank you also Josiane. My name is (inaudible).
[00:49:58 An audience member is shown standing in front of a microphone.]
I am a policy analyst within Josiane's team. So, it was with great delight that I read your book, very inspiring, gripping. My question has to do deal with the skills. So, adaptability, at the end of the day, I think requires skills. So, what skills does adaptability imply for us, the public servants?
Alasdair Roberts: Thank you, yes, and very tempted to take the word gripping and put it on the back of the words, but thank you for that. What skills? The capacity… I mean, the challenge of carving out space to think creatively about long-term trends, the capacity to think about what factors are going to matter in terms of the future of a particular organization, scenario planning, sort of being able to contemplate alternate futures. I would say too, I mean, there's a bit of a challenge here. You can try to predict what the future is going to look like, and I mean, I think the one thing that we can say with certainty is we'll always get it wrong, but what you want to do is improve flexibility in imagining alternate futures without also committing to the notion that one of them is what will happen, if you know what I mean, a sort of suspending decision but recognizing that there are going to be alternate futures, and doing all that while balancing the pressures of the moment. I think that's… I think those would be the essential elements.
Josiane Paul: Thank you, Dr. Roberts. I think we have another question.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
[00:52:00 An audience member is shown standing in front of a microphone.]
Question: Thanks. I'm wondering if you could speak a little about of the role of cities in all of this. When you talk about the problems that Canada faces, climate change, affordability, economic prosperity, cities will be hit the hardest in a lot of cases. And then, on the other side, you see less federal or provincial-federal relations, less regular meetings, you see the federal government and municipalities signing agreements bilaterally and working and skipping the province over. And so, where do you see the cities fall into this adaptable future?
Alasdair Roberts: I think they're critically important. And actually, I say in the front of the book… because this was a very short work written over the course of my year here, right? And I say there's omissions in this book. I said in the very start, here's the various… here's my laundry list of ways in which this book is sort of deficient, which is probably a bad way to start, undermines the sales pitch of the book, but one of the things I said is I haven't paid sufficient attention to the role of cities. So, I do think they're critically important.
Josiane Paul: So, I see that we have five minutes left, and before we go, there is really one question that I want to ask you.
Alasdair Roberts: Yeah.
Josiane Paul: Because I think that the last chapter of your book is brilliantly crafted. So, for learners and for people that read your book, what are the key takeaways you want them to leave with?
Alasdair Roberts: Well, and this goes back to my… what I said basically at the start of the book. There's sort of two parts of my argument here. The first part is about the importance of adaptability and the importance of thinking about whether we're paying enough attention to adaptability. And then, the second part of the book is basically a more kind of concrete explanation of what I think the vulnerabilities might be, and what I do say in the front of the book is I might be completely off base in the second part of the book. You might think, well, prescription A or prescription or B just doesn't make sense, and I sort of totally accept that but I do think if you think I'm wrong on the particulars, don't dismiss the first part of the book because I think the big question, with a high degree of certainty, as they say in the intelligence community, I can say this with a high degree of certainty, I think… pretty sure that's right, our capacity to survive and thrive in the coming century is going to hinge on adaptability or flexibility. I said at the start, it's also about sovereignty, our capacity to maintain control of events, and to do that, the system has to be good at looking down the road, thinking creatively about what might be happening, building political support both among leaders and citizens, and translating big strategies into action, and the system has to be good at doing that. So, I would encourage you, even if you think I'm wrong on the particulars, to sort of sit back and say, okay, how well is our system overall doing in terms of adaptability? Where do you think the sort of vulnerabilities or weak points are? And what could we do to improve our flexibility and nimbleness in terms of responding to the challenges of this century?
Josiane Paul: So, thank you, Dr. Roberts, for those fine words. I think it's key takeaways that we can definitely build on as public servants. So, thank you for being with us today. Thank you for your time as a visiting scholar. As I said, it has been a delight working with you in the past year. So, please join me to give a round of applause to Dr. Roberts.
(Applause)
Alasdair Roberts: Thank you.
Josiane Paul: And for those of you who are online and are interested in the work of Dr. Roberts, I would like to flag to you that there's a few videos up there from his work while he was at the School that are still there, that you can go and look at and get a little bit more knowledge about adaptability if it's something that is of interest for you. So, thank you for joining us and have a nice day.
[00:56:40 The CSPS logo appears onscreen.]
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