The Hon. Lisa Raitt is joined by Professor Janice Stein, Founding Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy to talk about recent geopolitical events. From the Middle East to Ukraine and the US election, Professor Stein shares her thoughts on how we got here and what leaders can do to stem deepening polarization in society. Professor Stein also talks about the steps Canada can take to matter more on the world stage.
Lisa Raitt: Thank you for tuning in to The Raitt Stuff. I'm your host Lisa Raitt and in this podcast I'm going to share insights on current hot topics in the areas of public policy, politics and business, with some guests along the way. Welcome back to The Raitt Stuff. With me today is the world leading scholar of international relations and conflict management. She holds the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and was the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She's a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, member of the Order of Ontario, also an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a senior fellow of the Kissinger Center at John Hopkins University. And I have with me, of course, Professor Janice Stein. Great to have you here today, Janice.
Janice Stein: Wonderful to be with you, Lisa.
Lisa Raitt: They say that a week is a long time in politics. And I probably asked you last fall, and then I asked you again in the spring, whether or not we could get together and just talk about some significant developments in the world. And as we started the summer off, I said, let's talk about the US election, what was going on elections around the world. But so much has changed since the beginning of June. It's been quite a busy summer. Has it been a busy summer for you?
Janice Stein: The pace is almost unimaginable, Lisa. I have never seen the pace of global events move at this speed with higher stakes. That's got to tell us something about the scope and the pace of change that we are dealing with.
Lisa Raitt: No question. In May of this year, I want to congratulate you on your honorary doctorate from John Hopkins University. And in your speech, you said, and this was in May, we live in a fractured world, express your opinion forcefully, but do it with attention to how you can inflict the minimum injury on the community that you care about. What motivated you to write those words?
Janice Stein: What motivated me, Lisa, was the deepening polarization that we are seeing in all our societies, of course in the United States, but in Canada too. Although we don't like to talk about it, the anger and the winner takes all. There is right on one side and there is wrong on the other. And there's a diminishing appreciation that issues are complex. So this affects me in my work every day when I talk to students. And that's where we actually worked this year. How are we going to talk about the war in Gaza? In the class where we had students from all sides of it. And I said, let's add a filter. Don't hold back from expressing your opinions based on the best information you can get, but do it remembering that the person sitting next to you is hearing you. And we have to be in the same community together. Don't you think if we did that in the House of Commons in Canada, we would have a more collegial environment where we could work better together across the aisle.
Lisa Raitt: I agree. And there are pockets of that in Parliament for sure. Even to this day, there's pockets of that and it's up to the MPs to do that, the right thing. How is that advice going in the classroom? Because UofT obviously has been a center for a lot of, I wouldn't say conflict, but a lot of charged debate.
Janice Stein: Yes, it is remarkable. It went remarkably well. And I had one more piece, which I think is interesting for people to think about. When we reached an agreement in the class, we were going to do this, I then said, and it applies to what you post on social media. Not good enough to do this face to face, person to person, because when you walk out, if you break this norm on social media, when you come back, people will over-read it. So I need a collective commitment from everybody. While we're together, you need the same filter on everything you post on social media. They all agreed. And at the end, many of them said, we need leadership on this issue. We need people to ask that everybody sign on, both inside the class and outside, and commit to this kind of conversation.
Lisa Raitt: Well, we'd be all better off for that for sure.
Janice Stein: Yep, yeah, and whether it's private sector leaders or political leaders, I think that is a request that we need to hear.
Lisa Raitt: Yeah, super easy to take shots from anonymity. And it really doesn't advance the conversation as you pointed out. We're going to start big global picture. And then we're going to talk about something that you're working on with the public policy forum, of which I'm a director, so full disclosure, but the big picture. So here we are August 14. Canadian Embassy has asked that the children and third parties associated with Canadian staff in their embassy in Israel be removed because they're concerned about a strike from Iran. Are we really on the precipice of something that is going to harm us greatly?
Janice Stein: I am very concerned, Lisa. Nobody can predict this is such a dynamic environment and it is literally changing every hour. We are in front of a really crucial meeting tomorrow somewhere in Doha, in Cairo, where the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Americans will come in a last ditch effort to reach a hostage deal and a ceasefire. Hamas is unclear whether they will come, whether they will be in the background. The Israelis are going. And this negotiation takes place in the shadow of Iran's repeated warnings that they will retaliate much more forcefully for the assassination of Haniyeh and that Hezbollah will start first in an effort to overwhelm Israel's air defenses. From there on, if that happens, we are in unchartered territory because out of this last cycle start, because a Hezbollah missile missed its target and hit a village, a Druze village, and killed 12 children. But it is a mistake for anybody to believe that you can control this and that missiles will not go astray, that there will not be large numbers of civilians injured or killed. And once you cross a certain threshold, there's no going back.
Lisa Raitt: And at the same time, we have a surprising move from Ukraine, moving into Russia territory and attacking them in the Kursk area. And what's going on there?
Janice Stein: First of all, that is just a gripping story, Lisa, because the Russians were surprised, as you just said. Now, how can that be? They have all eyes on the battlefield and they were caught by surprise. I think that's something we all need to stop and pay attention to. What is that about? I think the Ukrainian general staff realized that they had to break out of this war of attrition. They were losing because the Russians are just three times their size and they were going to be ground down and ground down. They jumped over the line in a sense further north and now control over a thousand square kilometers of Russian territory and have humiliated Putin. There's no question about it. Now, does that mean that Putin is going to be more willing to come to the table? That's not the MO. He lashes back. But from the Ukrainian perspective, two things have happened. One, their morale has improved. Their army is exhausted. They're short of men. This is a huge boost to their morale, and that matters. But beyond that, they now have a bargaining chip to go to the negotiating table. That's what this really is about. Whether they'll be able to hang on to it as the Russians reorganize, that's the big question.
Lisa Raitt: You said that we should stop and think about the fact that Russia was surprised. What does that say to you?
Janice Stein: The reason I put so much emphasis on that, Lisa, is there is unpredictability. And one of the things I worry most about, and you are such an important leader in your field, I worry about leaders who believe that they can control everything, that they can map it out, whether it's in the financial sector, whether it's in markets, whether it's in wartime, that you can map it out, you can plan it, and that there was no randomness, and therefore you pursue strategies with the illusion of control. We need to be so much more modest as we go forward and prepare for what we don't expect and invest in preparing for what we don't expect as well as for what we do expect.
Lisa Raitt: It's funny you should say that we have to be more humble as leaders. Good luck with that. It's not an easy thing. Not an easy thing to find in politics these days.
Janice Stein: It's the second part of the sentence, though, Lisa, too, right? Invest in what you don't expect, right? I mean, the Israelis made that horrible mistake at the beginning of October. They did not expect the attack from Hamas. They took their eyes off the ball. They did not have troops deployed. And it was all based on certainty that they would get adequate warning. The Russians too, surprise, they didn't get the warning they expected to get. We often, all of us don't in different leadership roles.
Lisa Raitt: But Janice, that can't happen in Canada, right?
Janice Stein: Oh yes, it can. (laughs)
Lisa Raitt: And we should invest. I agree.
Janice Stein: Yeah, we have to invest. We have to hedge, right? We have to be smart about where we hedge so we invest against the worst case. Let me give you one example that just struck me this week. In Toronto, we have stopped wastewater collection and analysis.
Lisa Raitt: I saw that, yeah.
Janice Stein: Why would we do that? The cost of doing it, not huge. That's an investment in a hedging strategy. Recognize that the way viruses travel around the world is unpredictable.
Lisa Raitt: Yeah, very good point for all municipalities too. Unpredictability is happening rampantly in Europe and in Asia and in North America. We are not immune to it at all. And if anybody who asked me in July who was going to win between Biden and Trump, I would say it's an even bet right now, but Trump is looking good. Then the assassination attempt. And I said, no one's going to beat Trump. And then Biden's out and Harris is in. And now it's like, maybe Harris is going to win. What are you thinking about all of this? Is this just a period of churn and eventually it will settle out and we'll be able to get a clear indication as to where we're going?
Janice Stein: I think we'll get a clear indication where we're going on this election in the United States once we've got a debate or two between the two of them, because that's not happened, and once we're past Labor Day, and people really start tuning in. But what this really does tell us, Lisa, and this is not a surprise, because we knew from all the polls, this was an election where voters didn't want either leader and were trapped by the fact that they had to choose between two candidates they really did not want. When that logjam broke, you could just feel the wave of enthusiasm and the return of some optimism as people felt freed of being in a situation where they did not want either of you. That's a warning, I think, to everybody. Elections change when people can feel more optimistic and rally around the leader that they hope they're going to like.
Lisa Raitt: Very interesting. I appreciate that. Canada, obviously, we want to be the primary dance partner with the United States. It's very important to us. But as they continue to figure out who it is we're going to dance with, what should we be doing in Canada to be prepared for post-election US?
Janice Stein: Well, as you said, Lisa, the Monk schools worked with the public policy forum and I disclose a conflict here. I am now the director of the Monk school again. But we started with a premise, the world has changed. We are seeing regionalization of the world. Europe is trading with Europe, Asia is trading internally in Asia. And what part of the world are we in? We are in North America. There's no country in the world that is as dependent on a trading partner as we are on the United States. And we've tried to diversify. We've tried for 40 years. We've tried. We have not moved the needle. We are more dependent. And that's to me the ground zero on which this country stands. So we have to matter more to the United States. So we started a project, how can we matter more to the United States? Where are those areas? So far the story we're telling is, first of all, on defense spending in the Arctic. We have to get serious is all I will say. You know, tolerance for a lower level of defense spending and in NATO members gone. But they will count what we do in the Arctic toward our 2%. So what should we do? And it's not submarines, let me just tell you in my view. It is not submarines.
Lisa Raitt: I was going to ask you that. (laughs)
Janice Stein: You know, we have so many advantages. We're really strong in space. We are really good in some of our sensing technologies. We have an opportunity to leapfrog and put in place defense spending that simultaneously will allow Canadian companies to find a buyer and to sustain some advanced technologies in this country. We cannot get this wrong, Lisa. We cannot get it wrong. So that's one big one. Another one worth putting on the table is clean energy and we pay a lot of attention to nuclear energy, right? The Europeans have made, led by the Germans, made a terrible, terrible mistake. Ontario is pushing forward with small modular reactors, reasonably hopeful that we will make in Ontario a significant investment in nuclear energy. We have to get over, you know, Chernobyl and Fukushima and say, you know, a world where clean energy is key to everything, we have assets and we need to partner with our closest allies and figure this out, regardless of who wins the election in November.
Lisa Raitt: I agree with you on that one. Interesting that you talk about space as being a place in which we do really well. Another area and coming out of the University of Toronto actually, is the importance of AI, artificial intelligence. We were there, Canada was there at the very beginning. But are we pressing on the advantage we had on the beginning or are we seeing it disappear?
Janice Stein: No, no. So frustrating to see this, Lisa. And you know, and this is not the only time in our modern history where we were there early and we could not consolidate our advantage. So world leaders in research, a whole community around these researchers in Montreal, Toronto, and Edmonton that are world leaders. What do we need to do? We need to do two things. Let me draw the thread back. The future of AI is dependent on compute, which means the power, the computing power, dependent on clean energy. Let's connect those threads, right? We are a cold country with clean water, which is important for cooling. So we have an opportunity here if we're focused. And if we can be innovative the way we think about compute and how we share with allies to really push this forward. Secondly, the private sector needs to up its game and invest in commercialization of AI. And again, not to put you in a conflict, I know that CIBC is doing really interesting things at the board level and at the senior management table in investing in some of the smaller companies in this country that need access to capital. We don't stay in the game because the most innovative companies need to grow and they don't get access to capital at scale in Canada. This is an own goal that you can hear my voice drives me crazy.
Lisa Raitt: But how do we keep them Canadian?
Janice Stein: We need to make available capital for these companies to invest as they grow. So who's got to be part of this story? Our banks. And that's why I talked about CIBC here, but it's impaired, frankly. And we have large pension funds that are global investors, but we need to do much better at connecting up the really great talent that we have in the smaller companies in the sector who are pushing the envelope and encourage our pension funds to invest in these as well as all the other places in the world where they go.
Lisa Raitt: Okay, well noted. Appreciate that. I read the papers, much like a lot of the listeners do as well. And we form opinions and some stuff will keep us up at night. But you have a much greater in depth and breadth of information and understanding of global politics and global tensions. What keeps you up at night right now?
Janice Stein: What keeps me up at night right now is the really scary possibilities in the Middle East because we could be in front of a region-wide war that nobody wants but nobody's able to control. And if that happens, Lisa, it affects everybody. It affects the global economy. It affects global shipping. Everything we've done to control inflation is out the door frankly. So that's the thing that this August has been keeping me up at night. The bigger picture, how do we deal with the really ugly polarization that we're seeing in our democratic societies in the United States, but not only there in Europe? And we have to be so careful in Canada. And that's why I was so glad you started with that story at the beginning. And I'm glad you told it because if we can get CEOs and senior political leaders to say what you need to say, but understand that communities are fragile. And if you rip them apart, you can't put them back together.
Lisa Raitt: Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you joining me here today. I'm sure our listeners have learned an awful lot and maybe they have more questions, but maybe the questions can be answered when Munk School and the Public Policy Forum come out with their work called Mattering More with respect to Canada and the United States relations. And hopefully, Janice, we can talk about that when it comes out.
Janice Stein: It would be a pleasure and just let me say what it is, always a pleasure to talk to you, Lisa.
Lisa Raitt: Thank you. You as well. Thanks so much for tuning in. Now, if you have any questions or comments or even requests on topics to discuss, drop me a line at lisa.raitt@cibc.com. Your interactions actually will make this better. I'm your host, Lisa Raitt, and this has been The Raitt Stuff.
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