Transcript
Transcript: The Strategic Context, with Janice Stein
[00:00:00 Video opens with an animated globe as seen from space spinning slowly. Text on screen: The Strategic Context With Janice Stein.]
[00:00:10 A globe spins and stops at a view of North America. Text on screen as spoken by the Narrator.]
Narrator: On September 23, 2024, Janice Stein, founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, joined CSPS President, Taki Sarantakis, for the opening session of the Geopolitics and National Security Development Program for federal government executives. The discussion provided an overview of the global strategic context within which Canada's public servants operate, from the state of globalization in the world order, to the implications of living in a world of rapid technological change.
[00:00:55 Taki Sarantakis appears full screen. Text on screen: Taki Sarantakis, President, Canada School of Public Service.]
Taki Sarantakis: The conceptualization of the course was that to be a good public servant going forward, you had to match the requirements of your age with the requirements of the environment. And historically, we've been not too bad at that in the Government of Canada. When the environment was safe, we acted in a certain way. When the environment was growth-oriented, we acted in another way.
It was kind of clear four or five years ago that the environment was about to go through dramatic changes. A lot of the mental models that we have in the Government of Canada, and in the public service, are really mental models from a previous age. And that previous age wasn't that long ago.
It was a couple of years ago. And so, all of a sudden, security started becoming important in ways that we never would have thought that security would have been important in the '80s and the '90s during globalization.
And so, we wanted to shake up the mindset a little bit of key people to just say, You know what? Even though you work in forestry, you have something to understand about geopolitics. Even though you work in science, you have to start thinking a little bit more about security. If you work in an economic department, you can't just stop at economics. In order to serve Canada and Canadians in this new environment, you have to start understanding that the people that you interact with around the globe are different than they were a little while ago.
Maps are pieces of paper that have lines on them. That line, we've been told for virtually all of our lives, from the moment that we were born till we went to grad school, when we came into the Government of Canada, we were told those lines don't really matter. Manufacture anywhere in the world. Trade with anybody in the world. Don't worry about intellectual property. Don't worry about where your pagers and your cell phones come from.
The world is different now, and to be a good public servant to serve your country well, you have to absorb that difference. It's something that all of our predecessors did in the past. To be a good public servant, you have to understand the environment around you and then use that knowledge to inform your files, whether those files are social, economic, regulatory, security, et cetera.
[00:04:05 Split Screen: Janice Stein and Taki Sarantakis. Text on screen: Janice Stein, Founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, let's talk a little bit about the world. We live in a world that's dramatically different, say, from the 1990s. What are some of the differences between 2024 and, say, 1994?
Janice Stein: Okay, that's really a great question. Maybe we can come at it, Taki, through a story.
[00:04:32 Split Screen: Janice Stein, Taki Sarantakis, and slide. Text on slide: A few days before this recording, over 30 people were killed, and thousands injured after pagers and walkie-talkies exploded across Lebanon.]
Janice Stein: Pagers and walkie-talkies, which I think everybody probably paid attention to in the last five or six days. Why is that such an interesting story? I find it absolutely fascinating because I think it brings home to people the breaking down entirely of some boundaries and the firming up of other boundaries in ways we wouldn't really expect.
[00:05:06 Split Screen: Janice Stein and Taki Sarantakis.]
Janice Stein: Where's the boundary breaking down? Which is the first question. This just puts a period on something that's been happening. There is no defined line anymore between civilian and military. Those spaces are now completely integrated.
Why does that matter for all of you in this room? We have a large apparatus that we built up not only for 30 years, Taki, but for 200 years that distinguished between civilian and military. Think about all of international law, all of international humanitarian law, that's a fundamental distinction. The UN. We have a very, very elaborate institutional infrastructure which makes this distinction. It's gone. I think everybody can relate to that. That's why in so many ways, this is a foundational story.
What you all watched happen last week? Your cell phone, everybody in this room has a cell phone, and that becomes weaponized. It's so difficult to draw the boundaries. Weaponized for what purpose? Against civilians? No. Against members of an organization that is committed to use force. And it's distributed by the senior leadership in the organization to its own members. As a way to get around the previous generation, which was too vulnerable because we could listen in on everything that's said. Then these things become powerful explosives in the hands of the people who hold them.
Their family members become bystanders who are injured and killed because you leave this weapon on the table. If we thought about a gun that a parent left on the table and a kid picked it up, we all know what we would say, but we're in that world now because something that is so important in your civilian life becomes a weapon. That border has gone away. We have a huge amount of work to do to figure out where law goes, where institution goes, how we make these fit for purpose in a new world where these are blended.
Where's the boundary firming up? – Taki, I'm coming back to you, you alluded to it – supply chains. Supply chains. You don't have this story without a global supply chain. It starts in Taiwan, goes to Germany. This is just-in-time manufacturing, which is what we lived with from the 1990s on. It was really efficient, and it led to growth. We all point to its failures, but wow, it lifted a billion people out of poverty in India and China. It reduced the cost of much of what we buy and consume. It led to growth even in the developed world, but it made us vulnerable. That's what you saw play out.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. Don't think about it just in terms of very highly sophisticated people doing something with a cell phone. It is not that at all. If that's what you're thinking, that's the wrong a message to take away. Your garage door opener, a light bulb, your pacemaker, a car, those are all potential weapons. If you are connected, you have a vulnerability.
And the Internet, which is one of the keystones of globalization, has connected us. But when it connected us, security wasn't even an afterthought. It was about connectivity. It was about getting online. It was about, Oh, isn't this great? My front door now is connected. The light bulb above my bed is connected to about 4 billion people because about 4 billion people are on the Internet. So, the world has changed underneath our feet very, very rapidly.
Janice Stein: The question becomes, in your cost-benefit language, how much are you willing to pay for greater security? If you're nervous now that your cell phone can become a weapon that somebody uses against you, and it can be a weapon in multiple ways. They can listen to what you're saying. I can tell you, every single one of you, and you know what, if you're from some of our agencies, nothing you do on your cell phone is private. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So, just take a moment of panic there to say how you would feel if all your texts and your emails and your conversations were made public. Were there things that you wish you hadn't said or done?
But if you think somebody's going to weaponize that, how much more would you pay to have that cell phone manufactured entirely in Japan or Korea? Probably not in the United States or Europe, frankly, because we don't have disciplined enough labour forces. I can tell you the cost would probably be, what, twice, three times as much? That's the discussion we're having now, which is so different from what we had then. But it still leaves out some of the important things that we have to consider.
Taki Sarantakis: I don't think we could do it at all because it's very, very difficult to make a pencil in one place without a supply chain, let alone an iPhone or an Android phone.
So, we took efficiency, and we raised it on the gold platform at the Olympics. We dropped some other things. We dropped – you mentioned a few of them – justice, fairness. We also dropped some other things that are, in a way, closer to economics. We dropped redundancy. We dropped security of supply. We dropped having something made by somebody that loves us rather than somebody that doesn't love us.
Talk a little bit about how efficiency did damage to us. Maybe we'll bring a little bit, we'll ease into COVID a little bit because I think COVID is a wonderful, wonderful manifestation of that philosophy that not only can we all see, but we've all lived through.
Janice Stein: I think COVID is a great example. As you were asking a question, Taki, that's where my mind went to first, because I think every one of us knows that in March of 2020, when we finally understood the beginnings of what we were facing, we did not have the most basic supplies. And let's talk about masks. Masks were not manufactured in Canada at that point, surgical masks, because it was cheaper to have a supply chain. And when the world shut down the way it did, we, for the first two or three months of COVID, were scrambling to import masks. Now, it is not complicated to manufacture masks. So, we had no redundancy. We didn't have a backup system which could take over if the main system broke down.
That's what redundancy is. I would bet that there's not a single one of you that hasn't backed up your computer. I don't know what you do in the office, but let's talk about the one you have at home, your personal computer. It's backed up somewhere. If you don't worry about security, it's backed up on the cloud. Which is eminently hackable, let me just tell you that. So again, it's up to you what you care about. If you don't trust the cloud like me, you back it up on an external hard drive. But that's not very good if there's a fire in my house.
But we understand that we need backup, we need redundancy. We have no redundancy. We have no redundancy in our healthcare system, we didn't have it in supplies, we didn't have it in emergency room capacity. Some of the most basic things, we absolutely had no redundancy. It became so clear, Taki, that we have to trade off. We have to give up some efficiency for some redundancy.
How much? That's a political debate. It's a security debate, but it's a larger political debate. By the way, how much better are we at mask manufacturing in 2024, Taki?
Taki Sarantakis: But the issue so much – and I don't want people to take the wrong lesson away from here – it's not, become inefficient. It's become cognizant of your vulnerabilities. That really is the key lesson. If you think in terms of vulnerabilities, you do your job better.
One of the entities that actually had masks and had medical gowns... Can anybody take a guess? Complete non-medical entity. Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, they all had stockpiles of masks, and masks that actually worked. Masks where the rubber hadn't snapped. The reason why is they looked around at their business and said, Where are we vulnerable? We're vulnerable if there's an internet outage. We're vulnerable if there's a cloud outage. We're vulnerable if our employees can't come to work. We're vulnerable if our employees are subject to an epidemic of bird flu, or a serious case of the flu, or what have you. So, it's about vulnerabilities. It's about thinking consciously about, where am I vulnerable? Now, one of the things... Go ahead, Janice.
Janice Stein: It is exactly right, Taki. It's how much greater cost am I willing to pay less efficient? It's not about being inefficient. It's how much greater cost am I willing to pay to reduce the likelihood that I will be vulnerable in this way? Because once you're vulnerable, it's too late.
Taki Sarantakis: We've been vulnerable on some interesting things over the last couple of years, not because we're dramatic proponents of taking risks. We've been vulnerable on very baseline things that somebody has just said, "This is now a security issue." Steel is a security issue coming in. Baby food is a security issue going out. Talk to us a little bit about-
Janice Stein: EVs.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes, batteries. Talk to us a little bit about how people are now, I don't want to say gaming the system, gaming trade, but I'm not sure I can find a better word than that.
Janice Stein: This is probably the biggest debate right now in the United States and Canada. I think it's one of the big debates that's going to be with us. It affects every department of government, frankly. Because, and again, how do we balance? We could securitize everything in our economy. Because if you want to go way out along the frontier, everything is potentially a security risk.
Let me take one which is very, very controversial. I'll tell you how hard it is to deal with, and it's going to come to our government, I can tell you, if it's not there already. Tiktok. Okay, what's TikTok? Tiktok, looking around at the faces on the screen, you are not primary TikTok users, but if you have any young people in your life, you know how much it is the network of choice, the platform of choice for them.
What are they watching? Videos that people are creating. And you say to yourself, "That's not a security threat. How can that be a security threat?" There is a very strong group of people in this country, in Canada, who are saying to the government TikTok is a security threat to Canada. Why is that? Because they're collecting data about Canadians who use that platform.
So, when your kids, or your teenagers use TikTok, that data goes back to China. There's no question about that, even though there have been commitments. So, I say, okay, do I care if the data about how often somebody watches a cat video goes back to China, is that high enough on my list of security threats that I'm really going to worry about it?
Well, let's up the argument. TikTok also transmits videos that people can access. And what is becoming clearer is that there are actors, like Iran, who use TikTok to make videos that are entertaining but also have a political message embedded in them, and they're downloaded. And they're downloaded by the, largely young, group of people who use TikTok. Do we care about that? Does that elevate the whole discussion to a different level?
There's one other piece of information we'll put on the table, because we could argue about this for the rest of the hour we have together, Taki. If you look at the data, TikTok is eating Instagram's lunch in terms of user numbers. More people are using TikTok, fewer people are using Instagram. Are we surprised that in the United States, the home of Meta, which owns Instagram, there is enormous pressure on the United States to ban TikTok. Meta is at the forefront of the campaign, arguing that TikTok is a security issue.
Now, depending where you are in this debate, either you see – and that's where the debate is going to come to you, I can tell you it's coming to you – either you see this as lobbying by a self-interested, powerful economic firm that is using security arguments to get what it could never get if it just used economic arguments, or you say, how naive is that? If messages are coming in that are political propaganda on TikTok, that's a security issue, and that's enough for me. I'm going to ban it.
Taki Sarantakis: In 2018, when I took over the School, a precursor to this was I revamped the ADM Development Program, and I brought you to come and speak at the ADM Development Program very early. You started off with a sentence that shocked the participants back then, but now people would yawn. And your sentence was the following. You said, "The liberal economic order, world order, is over. Period. Pointe finale. Get over it." What did you mean by that?
Janice Stein: And that, I think, Taki, is underestimating the controversy of that statement when I made it. You can imagine how well received that was by some of the ministers in the contemporary government. I certainly heard from them.
What did I mean by that? In a sense, I could see... Sometimes you get things wrong, Taki, and I get them wrong as often as everybody else gets them wrong. But I could see the growing securitization of the global economy. And this is not the first time that we've seen it in history. What happens then is that the borders we'd erased – and erasing those borders, fundamental to the liberal economic order. We don't want to really talk about that. But that's why all the jokes about a global elite that is at home everywhere and lives nowhere has a grain of truth.
The global economy integrates, it weakens borders, and it does trade where we have very elaborate supply chains where one product may be made in 40 different countries, frankly, even pencils, as you just said, Taki. We do it through foreign direct investment, where capital moves, frankly, across borders, and it does so not subject to the tax regimes that we would normally think of. Of course, the third thing that moves is labour, where we had a big increase in mobility of people moving across borders for jobs. That was the height of the liberal economic order.
By 2018, you could already sense that this was beginning to change. It starts with China and Trump's tariffs on China. This was the beginning of a view of the world in which getting the best product at the lowest cost was no longer the most important value. There were other issues. And it was driven, in fact – and I think it's important to put this on the table – it was driven, in fact, that those years when China joined the WTO, which was 2001, and this is long gone by now. That, in effect, is long gone. A million jobs left North America, principally from the United States.
Where were those jobs? They weren't in New York City or San Francisco. They were in Pennsylvania. These states sound familiar to you right now? Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia. Every one of the swing states that are at play in the US election experienced a rapid decline in manufacturing jobs that left the country at the height of globalization. These are the hollowed-out communities. The Trump agenda was a political agenda responding to the grievances of these communities. But domestic politics and international politics were joined at the hip, and that was already there by 2018. It's much deeper now.
Taki Sarantakis: Absolutely. You said a couple of other things that I think are really important for us. One, you said there is no more distinction between the domestic and the international. Everything international is domestic, and everything domestic is international.
The second thing you said was that the fact that the rules associated with the liberal economic order that is passing, or has passed, are gone doesn't mean that there are no rules. It's just that the rules are now different, or the rules are emergent, or the norms haven't codified yet into rules. Why take either of those in any way?
Janice Stein: Absolutely. Let me take the last one first because I think it's so important because I know that the civil service hears often about the rules-based international order. It's invoked a lot at the political level. I wanted to distinguish between the liberal rules-based international order and a rules-based international order. They're not the same thing. That gets elided at the political level, frankly, when ministers talk. But they're not the same thing.
The liberal rules-based international order is what Taki just talked about. Remove barriers, lower tariffs, grow trade. It's all about opening up so that everything, at every level, moves more easily. That's what the liberal international order is. And there are rules to do that. The WTO was the epicentre of that, the World Trade Organization. As long as it was functional, it's not anymore. It's paralyzed by the United States, by the way, not by China, by the United States.
What's a rules-based international order? We've had that forever. Let me give an example. Don't kill a diplomat. When did that start? That's a rule. When you violate that rule, boy, does it matter. That's a rule. Big powers make rules, which smaller powers observe.
To argue that we are for a rules-based international order doesn't say very much because we need to understand the content of those rules that we are either supporting or opposing. Rules-based international order is what I call content-free discussion. It has no content.
Taki Sarantakis: Absolutely. Now, I'm under 10 minutes. I got the signal, so I've got about 17 hours of stuff I want to ask you, but I'm going to ask you two last questions. The first is, talk to us a little bit about capacity and state capacity. It seems to me that throughout most of the time that humanity has organized itself in states, that states have had more capacity than civil society. And even if that wasn't true, that states could control the capacity that was in civil society. Has something changed?
Janice Stein: Yes. States are relatively recent in human history. They're a new invention in the history of how humans have organized themselves. And they got the Treaty of Westphalia, 16[48]. That's fairly recent, given how old humanoids are. We really codified the fact that states were the key unit by which we were going to organize the world.
If you think about this, How did states get made? Armies. Kings or Queens needed armies, and they had to build a powerful bureaucracy to raise armies, because you have to tax people in order to pay for the army. That's your first big bureaucracy that stands up, and it's organized, and it extracts money from the people who live on that territory, and it becomes very powerful. So, the action was really at the state level. If you look at the more recent period, Taki, really up to the 1980s, a lot of the innovation took place when it was commissioned by the state.
So, all of the modern – the Internet, to take one example, that's probably the best example, was a project started located in DARPA, which is the Defense, Advanced Research and Products Agency, inside the Pentagon, which was an accelerator located, and an innovator located, inside the Pentagon. The state was still the most powerful innovator, most powerful purchaser, and had an enormous concentration of power. That's changed. That changed, in fact, because technology diffused.
One of the big things is that the Internet escaped the Pentagon and came to you and me in this room. And all of a sudden, we could access anything we wanted, and we weren't dependent any longer. A cell phone spin out, right? Because we have this broad platform now, Wi-Fi platform that we can all connect to, and it puts all that incredible power in each one of our hands. But something's happening that we're not paying we've enough attention to.
This really starts... It's an old story, and it's always stunning to me, Taki, that Canadians don't know the story because it built our country. Starting with the Biden Administration, the United States moved back massively into what we call industrial policy. It moved back into industrial policy. Why did it do that? Because it looked at the things that the United States could not manufacture. It looked at the vulnerabilities. It said, We need to address these issues before they bite us.
And so, the Biden administration has put approximately $2 trillion into addressing vulnerabilities through legislation. The best known one? Chips. Which are so important. Everything runs on chips. United States is bringing back the capacity to manufacture the most advanced chips, which was previously really only in two countries in a very complicated... The Netherlands and Taiwan. There are now the plants in Arizona that can do that. They brought the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company to Arizona with incentives. It's across the board.
Where's Canada on industrial policy? We're old hands at it because if you think about how this country was built, the government built the railway that went from east to west. That's industrial policy. Without that railway? No country, no Canada. No way would we have resisted the gravitational pull of the United States. But we forgot about it, Taki, in the years from '85 to probably 2020.
But every developed democracy now has industrial policy where governments are steering the future of the economy. They are actively engaged. True in Japan, it was always true. True in Korea, it was always true. True in the European Union. If you don't believe me, I think compulsory reading for everyone should be Mario Draghi's report, which Mario Draghi, former governor of the Central Bank of the European Union, former Prime Minister of Italy, just issued a report last week.
Europe is falling behind. Sound familiar to anybody in this room? Europe has a productivity problem. Europe has no companies in the top 20. Emergency. What do we need to do about it? And he lays out a blueprint for industrial policy. If you took the word Europe out of Mario Draghi's report and put Canada in that report, it would fit perfectly. We are living – and it's not going to matter, and this is hard for politicians to understand – regardless of who's in the White House, regardless of who's on Sussex Drive. Europe, South Korea, and Japan are all in on industrial policy, and we will not be the exception.
So, what skills do we need, Taki, in the public service to advise the government on which big bets this country is going to make for the rest of this decade? What skills do we need in the public service to advise the government on how we regulate what we invest in and grow? What skills do we need to understand what's safe and what is not safe? Those are going to be the big issues that every one of you is going to have to grapple with.
Taki Sarantakis: Janice has put out a big challenge to you as public servants, and I think that's a challenge that we all have to internalize. What skills are we going to need going forward to serve Canada and Canadians?
Now, we're going to turn this off in a moment, but I want to close with something that's really, really important. I want the group to hear your thoughts, your distinctions between values and interests, because as Canadians, we have a lot of values. I can start talking about them right now, and I can probably go well into the evening, but talk to us a little bit about the difference and why it's important to understand the difference between your values and your interests?
Janice Stein: Yes. Look, this is a great question, Taki, because it takes me back to your first question on the cult of efficiency. These are connected. I think everybody understands that we all have values that are very important to us, every one of us. We have values, both individually, and we have values as a country that shape our culture and give us an identity and who we are in the world, and they matter.
We also have interests. Those interests are things like, what will advance economic opportunities for Canadians? That's an interest. No government could stay in power for long if it says, I don't give a damn about whether this economy grows or not. I don't really care about whether people have jobs or not. My value is justice. How long will that person last? Not very long. I don't think they'd get elected in the first place, frankly.
How do we make this country secure from foreign interference? That's an interest because every Canadian cares about security. They may think they don't, but as soon as something becomes insecure, we hear loud screaming from Canadians. So, those are interests. The question becomes, and this is the fundamental political question for any government, where's the right balance? How much and when do we compromise on our values in order to secure our interests? And how much of our interests do we compromise in order to promote our values?
The ideal world is when values and interests align. But that's like saying the ideal world would be if I could be paid to think, and never had to step away from my computer, and never had to teach a student, and never had to grade an exam, and never had to go to a meeting. It happens, but not that often. Most often, there's tension between values and interests. And so, a values-based discussion alone is not real. An interest-based discussion alone is real, but it's not satisfying.
So, it's about that balance. How much of this will we give up for how much of that? And why? Why? Recognizing that we're not in this perfect world where they align. We're in another world where they actually conflict most of the time on most issues. So, somebody tells me, Well, I'm doing this because we're values-based. I'll shoot right back, Yes, but what about our interests? What about our interests?
[00:41:19 A globe spins and stops at a view of North America. Text on screen as spoken by the Narrator.]
Narrator: The Canada School of Public Service hosts exciting and insightful events, workshops, and courses on geopolitics and national security. To learn more, contact the following email address.
[00:41:30 Text on screen: nationalsecurityprogram-programmedesecuritenationale@csps-efpc.gc.ca.]
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