The Munk Debates Podcast - Alberta's separatist movement gets support from Washington and Canada needs a new security agenda

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

The full length edition of this Munk Dialogue with Andrew Coyne is being made available to all paying and non-paying subscribers Members of the Alberta separatist movement have been travelling regularly to meet with members of the Trump administration. Should this be considered treasonous? Does the province of Alberta have legitimate grievances? Equalization is not a good program but it is not a plot against Alberta. How can we pull together and rediscover what we have in common in the face of American hostility? Andrew argues that we must channel this crisis into a positive direction and protect what is good and great in this country. In the back half of the show Andrew proposes a security agenda for Canada to strengthen our democracy and our borders. Where is the urgency and creativity of a policy agenda to match the diagnosis of rupture? And do any of Canada's political parties have the vision and fortitude to rise to this unique challenge?  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And the fact that for all these decades, we've been carrying on with this, I think, Kakamemi idea, which says all somebody has to do is hold a vote somewhere, and the rest of us have to pack it in. And I wonder whether the emergence now of two versions of this folly, under the shadow of a President of the United States who's trying to annex the country or certainly do us harm, may cause us, I hope cause us, to revisit that question. and stop legitimizing separation as just some other option, you know, when it's not. It involves a dismemberment and destruction of the country. Welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Roger Griffiths here, Chair of the Monk Debates, joined in studio with our regular guest and contributor,

Globe and Mail columnist, best-selling author, Andrew Coyne. Andrew, so nice to have you here. Good to be with you. We are warm inside the studio. We are indeed. What did Gore-Vidal call Canada? Our Lady of the Snows. You're a winter pegger, so you know all about that.

But I think here in Toronto, we're still kind of in shock. I think Voltaire decried us as Kelka Arpages de Nage, if I've got that right. A few acres of snow. Yeah, it certainly has felt that way. Let's talk about another deluge of sword. It's the growing, I think, outrage here in Canada about members of the Alberta separatist movement

seeming to travel now regularly to Washington D. to meet with officials of the Trump administration. David E.B., the British Columbia Prime Minister, has called this out as treasonous. Treason usually has some pretty intense penalties attached to it, Andrew. What's your assessment? Overreach or an accurate description of what these malcontents are doing? Well, it's an interesting question. Look, it's not treasonous in this country to propose the breakup of the country.

We should at least focus on, however, that it does involve the breakup of the country, the destruction of a project that's been going on for 150 years, but if people want to advocate for that, they can. If people want to seek the support of a foreign power, that's not necessarily treasonous either. It's certainly unseemly if that foreign power is an ally of ours. Where it gets interesting, it seems to me, is we are at a time when the President of the United States has declared quite vociferously and repeatedly his intent to annex the country. When asked would he use military force, he said, no, but I'll use economic force.

Well, economic force and military force, there's a, you know, if you do a blockade, for example, that's not an invasion or an attack, but it's considered an act of war. So he certainly has hostile intent towards us, shall we say. So that's where it becomes interesting. It's not so much that the United States might be providing aid in comfort to separatists, which is certainly outrageous behavior. It's that the separatists seem willing to do the bidding of the United States in that regard, that they are basically plotting together to divide and destroy the country. That's where it gets interesting. Whether it meets the

technical definition of, you know, or legal definition of treason is another question, but that's what makes this different. It's not the same. I mean, France used to play footsie with the separatists. And Chagall was sent home. But they used to play footsie with the separatists. But it was not out of anything I've ever read. It was not only of any geopolitical desire to annex and destroy Canada. Fair point. It was, you know, we have a common cultural heritage, blah, blah, blah.

It was wrong. But, you know, they weren't a hostile power. So that's what makes this interesting. It does also raise the sort of philosophical question is, is it possible to commit treason against a country that doesn't seem to believe it has a right to exist? And the fact that for all these decades, we've been carrying on with this, I think, cockamamie idea, which says all somebody has to do is hold a vote somewhere, and the rest of us have to pack it in. And I wonder whether the emergence now of two versions of this folly,

under the shadow of a President of the United States who's trying to annex the country or certainly do us harm, may cause us, I hope cause us, to revisit that question. legitimizing separation as just some other option, you know, when it's not. It involves the dismemberment and destruction of the country. So we know Scott Besant has come out and made remarks about how, you know, Burtons are looking to the South and the prosperity of the United States and, you know, things aren't going so well in Canada, again, providing some aid and, yeah, I think encouragement to, to this, this movement, and that's the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and not insignificant cabinet member. What if Trump gets involved with this, Andrew? How concerned are you that he might have the

ability to move the needle on a referendum? I guess you could look at it two ways. One, his participation may simply cause a crisis of legitimacy on the part of the movement itself, but on the other hand, he potentially could have some big carrots to offer, you know, a kind of Puerto Rico-like-esque future Alberta. I think the tax rate in Puerto Rico is 5%, Andrew. That might be rather attractive to a certain number of Albertans who are tired of paying equalization payments for the rest of the country. Yeah, well, first of all, I don't think many Albertans would be particularly keen to join

the United States under Donald Trump. Secondly, there's so many obstacles in between, obstacles to taking the territory of Alberta out of Canada, which you can't actually do. And then obstacles do, even if they were able to do that, joining the United States. You'd have to get the Senate on. It's a fantasy, frankly. And I don't think too many people are going to fall for it. I actually think the involvement of the Americans is kind of toxic.

It doesn't mean they're not going to try. It doesn't mean they're not going to, if there is a referendum, and that's, again, not certain at all. I do think we have to be concerned about the degree to which it could be subject to all kinds of interference. and manipulation and disinformation, not only from the Americans, but from the Russians. So it's a very strange time to be having this kind of vote.

But it's interesting watching, now that it's out in the open, can't be disavowed that they're meeting with the Trump administration officials. The separatists are running away from it saying, oh, no, no, we don't want to become 51st state. Well, they're on the record and on video prior to this, as having said that's exactly what we would like to do. We would like Alberta to join the United States,

to join the Trump regime. There may be a certain share of Albertans who are interested in independence as a vague concept, certainly a larger percentage you wanna make a statement to the rest of Canada. I don't think, I think the percentage of Albertans who would like to join the United States is extremely small. Yeah.

If we pull back a bit though and we think about reactions to the rest of the country, we remember the famous other major referendum vote in Quebec, Canadians kind of, you know, pouring on to the streets of Montreal and elsewhere to profess their love for the Belle Provence. We certainly don't have that dynamic today in Canada. You have Western roots. I'm frankly shocked often at the knee-jerk kind of anger in Ontario, specifically towards Alberta and Albertans. I don't understand particularly where this was earned or why or how. But there is a, there is some toxicity here, Andrew, that isn't just surely on the Alberta side.

It is, it's this reaction, especially in Ontario and Quebec, towards Alberta, towards, understandably, some real frustrations about how the terms of Federation currently work for, for that province. Yeah, there are, there are legitimate issues that Alberta can be concerned about. There's less legitimate issues. equalization is not a plot against Alberta. Equalization does not involve Alberta transferring funds to the rest of the country. I know there's been a cottage industry of making calculations of that, but they're messing up what is actually the correlation,

which is rich people transfer disproportionately funds into the federal treasury, which then pays for federal programs. The only reason you can come up with these numbers about Alberta contributing disproportionately is that they have more rich people there than the other provinces, A, and as a flip side of that, they're never ever going to be eligible for equalization because they're the richest province by far. So the efforts that have been made to convince Albertans,

and it's convinced a lot of Albertans, that equalization is a plot against them, I think, as unfortunate, equalization is a terribly designed program that doesn't equalize anymore. Even if every province had equal revenues, we'd still be transferring money for some reason. So it needs to be redesigned, but in the interests of the whole country,

as much as Elbe. Alberta. But, you know, obviously, you know, the single big issue, example of quote-unquote domineering Federals than anybody's ever been able to produce is the National Energy Program. It was a terrible program. Again, terrible for Alberta, probably even worse for the country. It was bad economic policy that happened to be hugely discriminatory against Alberta, and it should never have been passed. Absolutely. But that's 40-odd years ago. The Alberta oil industry is not suffering now. They're in fact booming. It's, there's not been this, you know, it's not been shut down by the, back, I just saw the chart saying,

we're now, and have for the last couple of years, shipping record proportion of our oil to places other than the United States. And why is that? Because the Trans Mountain Pipeline. So they have some legitimate grounds for agreements. I agree with you that there are some examples you can find of people making disparaging remarks about Alberta. Albertans, that is, terrible. I'm more favorably impressed about how Ontario's attitude to the West in general has changed over the years. When I first moved to Ontario 40 years ago, Ontario looked east. It was all about Quebec. It was all about the partnership with Quebec. I think the political culture, the economics have changed over the years that Ontario really looks west a lot more than it

ever used to. I'd be fascinated to see, for example, data on flights, Toronto-Montorell versus Toronto Calgary. And I bet you the proportion has changed radically over the years. So there's much more contact. I sometimes say Ontario was kind of joined the West. And you saw that with the fight over the carbon tax. That was not an Alberta versus the rest of Canada. A fight. Ontario was in the fight against them as well. I think wrongly, but it was interesting seeing these alliances you would not have seen 40, 50 years ago. So where does this all go, Andrew? If we think that the Trump administration doesn't really have any leverage, and in fact, their involvement could backfire. But nonetheless, let's say there are enough signatures to go ahead with a referendum.

What are the percentage thresholds that you worry about that could cause real damage to the Federation and the future of Alberta's relationship with the rest of the country? Is it a 20% in favor of separation? Is it higher than that? I'm just curious about to use Mark Carney's favorite word, how you calibrate these things. I don't know. That's an interesting question. What's the number where you really start to worry about it? Because it's probably not going to be 50%. I think we can set that aside. Barring someone known unknown, it doesn't seem at this point that there is the possibility. Yeah, now the caveat. But 40% for something would be disastrous. It would be disastrous.

And the caveat is it would almost be worse than a vote to separate. Yeah, and the caveat is you get into the game theory of these things. First of all, you're dealing with emotions, wounded pride, dignity, et cetera. If people don't feel they're being respected, and this comes back to your question, you know, certain proportion of burdens don't feel like the rest of the country respects them, and in some cases with some justice, in some cases less so. But when that feeling is present, it's potentially a volatile thing. And so you could get, you know, all you need is some kind of the equivalent.

of the Brockville flag incident, if you remember that from the Meet Charlottetown days, and how that ginned up emotions in Quebec. And all you need is something like that, and things can go in very strange directions in Alberta as well. Point one. Point two is you have the phenomenon of the strategic voter who doesn't want to separate, but wants to scare. Yeah, wants to send a message. And if too many of those people think the same way, then you wind up voting with a higher percentage.

the vote than anybody intended. They all, you know, so there's a collective action issue here where what's individually rational can be collectively irrational. So you don't want it to get, as you're saying, anywhere close to 50 percent. I don't regard 50 percent as being a magic number, frankly, either. I don't think, I do not accept the idea that just because you can have a vote in a province, that you, that you, they then get to take the territory of that province, which doesn't belong to them.

Alberta did not pre-exist as a sovereign entity in Canada. It was created by an act of Canada. Even if it had pre-existed, once you make a decision to pool your sovereignty, to dissolve your sovereignty, you can't reconstitute it. It's gone. So it's a fiction that you can then suddenly say, I want to take these back seats, right? It's a doctrine of natural rights, I think, that they want to assert. And even if you get over that objection, in the case of,

Quebec, most of the, you know, you can make a sort of an argument that Quebec pre-exist, although the province of Quebec was the creation of Confederation, not the, not the, you know, prior to Confederation, it was a single colony of Canada. But also 80% of the territory of Quebec or more was added by acts of Parliament after Confederation. So the notion that you could just unilaterally break a contract, reconstitute sovereignty that you dissolved, that you in fact never had, take territory that wasn't yours ever to begin with and just depart from the country is preposterous. And we never should have entertained this idea. It was all we could do with regard to Quebec to get us over the idea that they could just do it unilaterally. Yeah.

I remember people just quivering in their boots at the suggestion that this thing might actually have to follow the rule of law in the Constitution of Canada and the implications of the Constitution of Canada. A lot of people were very frightened by the secession reference to the Supreme Court, thought that was going to inflame public opinion in Quebec, it didn't. Thought that the Clarity Act that followed it was going to inflame public opinion in Quebec. It didn't. That's what precipitated Lucien Bouchard's departure from politics was. Where's the outrage?

Quebecers looked at it, it went, well, A, is the Supreme Court, and we respect the Supreme Court. B, it's a perfectly reasonable proposition. You know, at a bare minimum, if you're going to even propose separation, you need to have a clear majority and a clear question. And then, in my opinion, the rest of Canada can say, well, you know, we'll look at that, and we'll think about some other proposals we can make as a counterpul proposal. Yeah. Just finally, Andrew, because you've written a lot about Canadian nationalism over the years. In all of this, is there a critique, a need for us to look in the mirror a little bit about our own sense of who we are?

100%. And the extent to which, especially in the last decade or so, we've torn down our national symbols, we've literally torn down many of our statues, we've kind of. a vilified Canada's past. We've turned into a kind of litany of sins of omission and commission. And, you know, we are a mass immigration society that high levels of immigration of people coming from all their parts of the world who are only just beginning to learn a Canadian story, who understandably might have very little understanding or interest in Alberta or Quebec or different, you know, pleas for regional identity. It's just, it's not what they're focused on.

It's not what their background is, and I don't blame them for that. All that, though, creates an environment, does it not, Andrew, of a weak center in this country right now? I don't mean institutionally. I mean culturally and in terms of how we think about who we are. I agree. I think it predates all that, though. But it is the fundamental question is, and we're now having to confront it, things that were implicit before are now explicit. What's the argument for Canada continuing, A, as a sovereign country independent from the United States,

and B, as a whole entity, not divided into pieces, which comes down to is Canada a nation? It's interesting. We've had debates about declaring Quebec to be a nation in the Parliament of Canada. Try to imagine somebody proposing a resolution to recognize Canada as a nation. I think people would quiver in their boots. How can we do such a thing? Andrew, Canada is a reet. It's not a nation. It's a reet. It's a selection of condos and real estate I do think we first of all have to really invest in the idea that this is a nation, that nations are not necessarily ethnoculturally homogeneous, that new world nations made up of people from many lands,

or by their nature cannot be such a thing. By their nature have to be mission-oriented, purpose-oriented, have to be about growth, dynamism, people coming together from different backgrounds, but united in a common project. part of that, as you say, is honoring our history without whitewashing it. Maybe we got the balance wrong in one direction in the past. We've kind of got the balance wrong in the other direction now. So you don't want to wash away all the sins in our past,

but you don't want to say, well, that's the whole, that's the only thing that's relevant about the Canadian story. It's a magnificent story. It's a country that is very likely the most successful achievement of human statecraft in the history of the world. that's a remarkable claim to be able. We've done extraordinary things for our own citizens and for the rest of the world, and we should honor that.

But that's only part of the thing, it seems to me. It also has to be an idea that we are invested in certain common projects and common values and ideals. That's going to have to be a short list. The longer the list, the more you're going to have somebody saying, well, I don't agree with that. But it's usually centered around things like the Constitution. And one of the examples of par excellence is to our south.

I mean, they're going through a lot of troubles right now, but the history of America is that their nationhood is very much connected to their ideals and their sense of the constitution of what America stands for. That's a wonderful basis. You get some people, I think, who haven't done a lot of reading, who will sneer, oh, come on, nations can't be based on ideas. They're based upon ethnicity or blood and soil. Blood and soil.

Among the things they don't understand about that is, that's an idea. Yeah. There's no objective significance to that. You've just decided that that's going to be your... What you can also do on another basis, like liberty and fraternity and democracy and these kinds of principles and ideals that people can sign on to and say, and what's important is it doesn't have to be a different, you know, self-consciously different set of principles from another country.

We're going to share a lot of things in common with all the democracies, but what we can highly resolve to be is the best, example of those. We can aspire to be the country that leaves the way on all these things. It leads the democracies in its commitment to these universal ideals. So the reason I say it predates all the things you're describing is we've had a problem ever since the decline of the imperial connection, that that used to be our basis. Well, we're part of the British Empire and what it stands. Ready I ready. Ready I ready. Exactly. Unfortunate episode. And when that declined, we didn't really know what to replace it with.

And the first installment was Capital C, Capital N Canadian nationalism, which was, you know, it's all about public enterprise. And it's all about we're kind of socialists by nature and all these things that weren't really true, but were in the interest of the coterie of literary nationalists who were promoting it. And it kind of, I think, ran aground, frankly, in the middle of the free trade debate in the 1980s.

That was a real watershed moment where Canadians said, no, that doesn't really work. We want to look out where we want to take on the rest of the world. We don't want to be turning in. We're gazing at our navels. But we still have a lot of work to do to build on that and to say, you know, who are we, is what do we want to do together? What do we want our country to stand for? What do we want it to achieve? What has it achieved and stood for in the past?

And what can we do to build upon that? And, Andrew, we've lost, in a sense, with Trump and at the second administration, an argument that I think maybe it wasn't a unifying idea, but it did give a sense of energy and direction of the country, which was our fortunate geography, our adjacency of the United States, the world's largest and most dynamic market and economy, and the extent to which integration in its various shapes and forms from the Autopac through to free trade agreements Kuzma today was this kind of frame in our minds as to how Canada would evolve from here. And I guess what I'm getting at it is that's now highly contested.

For many people, that's gone away. Our prime minister, to some extent, wants to move on from that to a different narrative, a narrative of a third way of Canada returning to some kind of multilateralism on security, the economy, other factors that it creates itself. out of whole cloth. Andrew, that seems like a worrying place to be with these two referendum kicking off. We've lost the sense of a kind of manifest destiny of our own through the United States out into the world, and now we're trying to grapple with these intangibles of figuring out

what comes next. At the same time, you know, it's created a common external enemy. It's given a kind of validity to anti-Americans. Now, I don't want us to be anti-American for the sake of it. But in this particular historic moment, when the United States has gone to hell, A, B, is threatening us quite overtly, there is something to be said for, okay, we've got to pull together to resist this threat, and we've got to rediscover what we have in common. And it's been very interesting watching reaction, for example, in Quebec, where the polls are pretty clear.

A lot of Quebec nationalists, I may have said this before, but they may not be too keen on the rest of Canada, but they think even less of living under the boot heel of Donald Trump. So there's an opportunity there providing we can motivate that and channel that in positive directions. So anti-Americanism isn't the thing that's going to say of us, but trying to hold on to and protect and defend

what's good and great in this country and having a better realization and awareness of what a remarkable accomplishment this. country already is and how much better it could become if we keep the damn thing together. I think that's a, I think that's a, there's, there's positives in this very perilous situation. And certainly as I said earlier, if it causes us to rethink our blithe acceptance of separatism as just being, oh well, you know, I guess the country, I guess the country dies now, you know, if it causes us to have a bit more sinew and a bit more sense of self-worth as a

country that, you know, we have earned the right to exist. We're not some petty tin pot dictatorship that probably should be dismembered like the Soviet Union. We're a democratic, liberal, decent society that has paid its dues and doesn't have to apologize for existing either as a separate country from America or as a one country in the northern half of the North American continent. Just go a little bit deeper with you because this is fascinating. The last time we had this, you know, a real kind of surge of deep anti-Americanism. I'm not going to skip the Vietnam War in that period. It was there. I'm going to go back to the, you know, the 19th century, the War of 1812. We were part of an empire. We were more British than we were Canadian.

This time, as this kind of surge of anti-Americanism kind of courses through the body public, we're alone. In a sense, the prime minister has said that the international world order has ruptured. We are comparatively, you often talk about this, a small country, small by measured by population, measured by economic half, certainly measured by military and other other capabilities. So what does that mean, Andrew? The sense of Canada alone and maybe Canada confused, understandably because we've lost this sense, again, of a kind of shared destiny in North America with America as not co-equals, but as collaborative partners. And now, what next? Where do we, you've written a book on Canadian democracy. I once wrote a book on Canadian citizenship.

I often feel that, you know, these are the types of things that we should be returning to, which are these internal kind of processes and symbols and institutions that truly are ours. But it seems like so much of the debate, Andrew, is, well, here's the next trade agreement with Qatar, or a new strategic relationship with China, or we're off to help the Europeans on security and we're going to buy their fighter plane and not the F-45. I feel all of that is somehow so surface to what the actual need is. I wouldn't say surface, but it's only one part of it. So one part of what we're having to deal with is to strengthen ourselves by external needs, by showing that we've got options in trade, for example, so that we're not too locked into the American market, by having stronger alliances with other countries that we can call upon if we need to.

Those things are all important. I don't think we want to discount them, but the point I think you're getting at, which I agree with, is it has to start with our internal strength. And the starting point of that that we've just been discussing is having a belief on our own self-worth, having a belief that the project is worth pursuing, that there's something here to defend. So that's a whole set of things there.

But then there are things we can do internally to try to budget. So one of those is certainly is democratic reform. I mean, we're having to do a lot of things at the same time, but maybe that's the nature of crises is you get a lot of things done. you know part of having part of the worth of having a parliament

that represents the people is it implies there's a people for it to represent when you don't when the parliament is essentially irrelevant to people that it's not this rallying point this cockpit of democracy that can summon our collective will in a crisis

as you know the British parliament did for example during World War II then you're that's a fatal weakness maybe not fatal but that's a weakness that that has to to be addressed. The way in which our electoral system divides us against each other that we've discussed before is just criminal, that we've allowed this, you know, you want to talk

about the national energy program. Would we have had a national energy program if the Liberal Party had more than two seats west of Ontario in that election and if they didn't have 74 the 75 seats in Quebec, if it had been a more broadly based party, if we had more broadly based parties that had to run national campaigns that could win seeds in every part of the country and had to win seats in every part of the country, rather than being. regional rumps as they both are today. Because the voting system would be different. The voting system would be different. The incentives would be different. So that is a national security policy now, it seems to me. Democracy is a

national security policy. But then there's a bunch of things beyond that. Unifying the economy. Inter-provincial trade barriers are a national security issue because they're weakening our sense of self. The reason we have these hundreds of trade barriers internally isn't because we don't understand the benefits of free trade. We understand it better than most countries. It's because we don't see ourselves as us. You don't put up trade barriers against yourself to start with. And so if we're doing so, it's because we don't see each other as us. So that's a project. Seems to me that has to be part of this. I think we have to be building up our internal resilience against various forms of attack,

wherever they may come from. The obvious one, of course, is the military. But much more importantly, I think because I think military attack is the least likely, but sort of hybrid types of things where you mess with our financial system or you mess with our infrastructure or you do things that can cause chaos in this country and therefore panic and therefore people urging, well, give them what they want to stop them doing this. We need to be thinking about the ways in which we can preserve order in the midst of that chaos, which means being able to scale up infrastructure management in a crisis in a hurry, which means having manpower available to do that. And so there's some interesting questions we've got to think about in that end of things.

The only thing I would add is civil order. And I think things, you know, the statistics don't bear it out. Crime is declining. But there are various types of petty crimes that I think have increased in recent years, which created a sense of insecurity of people inside their communities. And I think incorrectly and unfairly, mass immigration is kind of layered over that, and the two are correlated with each other in many people's minds. This is causing a whole new set of divisions that we haven't had to deal with before

because we had a very wide consensus on immigration. And aspects of that, I think, are fraying. Fraying, yes. It's not broken. I wouldn't overstate that. If you compare attitudes to immigration in this country to any other democracy, I think you'd find it's much higher, even though basically, and I'll say this, the liberal government lost control of immigration policy. So I favor high levels of immigration, but high but controlled. But I think that's part of a national security policy as well, both in just in a sense of national self-confidence.

It's not coincidental, in my opinion, that the periods when we were most confident of ourselves, most assured that we were heading places. Sure, at the highest levels. Had high levels of immigration. In the early part of the 20th century, in the 1960s. Because, again, a new world country is about ambition and mission and purpose and growth. Sifton, settling of the West. Exactly.

I think, you know, what's interesting to me as a national security matter is we're going to be living, We're in a different world now probably for the rest of the century, if not longer. We had a nice run for 150 years where nobody could threaten us physically. We had the three oceans, the Arctic tundra, we had the great republic to ourselves, which we could always depend upon to be stable, united, Democratic, and always come to our aid if we needed it because it was in their self-interest. And all of those things are no longer necessarily applicable. And if we are indeed in an age of predatory great powers,

where we can't be sure of our position in that. We're talking about ways to make alliances with other middle powers, but ultimately your security rests internally. I think the long-run assurance of that is to become a great power ourselves. If you look at the projections of population out to the end of the century, almost all of our rivals or near counterparts are either stagnating in population or shrinking. The birth rates have gone down the cliff. most these countries aren't particularly strong on immigration receiving.

They're all going to shrink. Take an example. China is going to go from $1.3 billion today to $600 million by the end of the century. Russia is shrinking, Japan, Germany. If we simply maintained population growth at about 1% per year, which is way less than recently. It's in fact less than our historical average. 1% per year compounded over 75 years, not tomorrow, but over 75 years,

you get into the 90 million, 100 million range. At that point, we're the second largest democracy. Depending on who's a democracy in that period, 75 years from now, but if taking the present democracy, we would be larger than Germany, larger than Japan, larger than France, Germany, Italy, Britain, second only in the United States. That would transform our sense of ourselves. I think being 40 million, being an eighth of the U.S. population,

rather than a 12th as we were 70 or 80 years ago, has already changed us. We're much less fearful versus the United States than we were in the past. But population to some extent is destiny. If we're a larger power with the GDP to go with that, there's strength of numbers. If we're going to defend the entire northern half of the continent,

we certainly couldn't do it with $4 million when we first made the claim. Can't really do it even with $40 million unless we're going to have a much larger armed forces. At $100 million, you've got a bit more of a serious claim. So just to end this fascinating conversation, Andrew, you've outlined, you know, an agenda here, a security agenda that goes beyond, you know, the traditional kind of ways that we think about security into democracy, institutions, into immigration. Do you have a sense that our elites are thinking this broadly and creatively? Or is it, and do, is there the political role?

room and permission to move on some of these things because what you're saying to me makes a lot of sense. But my feeling is that our approach right now is very technocratic, that we are turning dials and flipping switches, and we're not thinking of these things in the broader ways that, as you say, if we really do want to accept the prime minister's contention that there has been a rupture in the international order, the liberal international order for 85 years, has gone away. And as you say, if that's gone away, then we're in something else and it's not just for the weekend, probably. It's maybe for the next century, the next 85 years. Where is the, where is the kind of urgency and creativity and breadth to match maybe the correct diagnosis of rupture

in terms of a policy agenda? I don't know, again, I have to harp on this, but I don't know if trade deals with guitar is going to rise to the level of the response that's required. Yeah. I mean, I don't, in public, you don't see it from either of the parties. And to some extent, that's understandable because you're still getting people accustomed to the idea that their world has changed. I think people are uneasily aware of that. I think you can see that in some of the polling numbers. So there's a broad sense that something is really scary out there. But I don't think, I'm not sure I have, fully conceived of the nature of the threats we're facing today and how much our world has changed. Some of that

is still to be determined by events south of the border, for example. But if I'm right that the United States is on a trajectory towards a very dark place, halfway there already, then that just fundamentally changes everything. And if as part of that, the United States is basically in league with Russia and China, then we're just in an absolute nightmare scenario. Imagine if the Americans in World War II have been on the sides of the Germans. That's sort of where we're at. You know, we've always been able to count emotionally as well as otherwise that if something

really, really bad happens in the world, well, the Americans will go and fix it. It doesn't say they didn't create some problems as well, but you know what I mean. Well, we can't count on that anymore. So to the degree that the public absorbs just what a fix we're in, then I think that starts to create room. Look, you're already seeing that. You would not have had public support for increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP to 3.5% of GDP in the past. Politicians were reacting to public incentives. Yeah, we just spent $13 billion on a HST.

adjustment for it. Exactly. A hundred percent. And we're spending a bunch of money on stuff that we couldn't afford in the best of times, certainly can't afford now if we're going to be making these very rapid and major increases. So when do we get serious? I guess that's my question. I don't know. But crises have a way of focusing the mind. And maybe the crisis still has to come. And some of these things are interlocking. And this is the thing I talked about in the last chapter of the book. Thank you for mentioning it. Is we've got all these huge decisions to make as a country about defense spending, about trade policy, about infrastructure policy, energy policy, immigration, all these major things which inevitably become somebody has to pay the cost

and somebody gets the benefits and the costs and benefits are regional distributed. And we have a history in this country of avoiding making those big decisions because we didn't want to have a big regional dust up. Or national energy program, we proceed with a big policy and we nearly fracture the country. I'm very worried that the kinds of challenges that we're facing are going to bring us to some kind of crisis, either of stasis and paralysis or of rupture. And so democratic reform is a big part of that, I hope, but even that aside is at some point crises can get so bad that things become possible that weren't possible. Exhibit A, if you want a little hopeful note, was Confederation. The parliament of the then single province of Canada

had reached total impasse. They couldn't get anything done. They were at each other's throats. And they had the good sense to finally look around them and go, okay, we've got to do some lateral thinking here, bring in the Atlantic provinces, think about a Senate, all these things that were, you know, they had to kind of invent on the fly.

And that's what we're doing now. As I said earlier to somebody, we're not just, as the phrase has it, building the plane while we're flying it. We're having to build a whole other plane, plane while we're flying this one. And then at some point we're going to have to jump from the old plane onto the new plane and hope that we all survive it. Yeah. Andrew, thank you so much. I love these conversations and the directions that we go in. I know the monk community does also. So

great to have you here in the studio today. Good fun. Thank you. That was Andrew Coyne here on the monk dialogues, a regular guest on this program. Please, if you're watching on our YouTube channel, you can get a podcast version of this show on your favorite app. And if you're on on your favorite app, come join Andrew and me over on YouTube. Over 100,000 people subscribing to the Monk Debates YouTube channel. I'm Rudyard Griffiths, chair of the Monk Debates. Talk to you again soon. Bye-bye.

The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star. rating. Thank you again for listening.