The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: 2023 Predictions

Episode Date: December 30, 2022

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard look at the trends from 2022 to make predictions about the year ahead. From geopolitics to Canadian national affairs to the economy and technology, Janice and Rudyard chart out the big events and issues that could combine to make 2023 one for the history books. To access the full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.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.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates to access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk Debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous

contribution. Hello, Monk members, Richard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this, our regular Friday members-only podcast, Friday Focus. Each and every week, we connect with Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally renowned scholar and author to talk big ideas and big thoughts, digest the week that was and hopefully leave you with some new analysis and insights. Janice, how are you? What are your New Year's plans this year? My New Year's plans? We do the same thing, believe it or not, Roger, that I have done for the last 25, the same. same friends get together year after year after year. We never miss New Year's and we reminisce back over the New Year's food that we have eaten together over the years.

Only the people are getting older, but the food stays great. It's getting better and better. Better and better. Well, I'm here in the Eastern Townships of Quebec recording today and nine degrees tomorrow. So we're not on the ski hills. So we're going to have to make up for that by spending more time in the kitchen. But it is the end of the year, Janice. So I want to do what we promised for our listeners, which is some rank prognosticating about the year to come.

You could say that any prediction is as good as the paper it's printed on. And that might not be much in this case. But there are some big trends out there. We've seen them emerge over the last 18 to 24 months. So what could those trends tell us about the year to come? So let's start geopolitically, Janice. If you want to think back over the year that was or even maybe from the post-COVID period to try to understand a big trend that could continue in 2023 and have some

consequential effects, what would that be? So I'm going to go way on the limb here, Rudyard. And then we'll show at the end of 2023 about all the things we got wrong, right? So don't anybody take this to the bank. I think 2020 is going to be a quieter year internationally from almost every important perspective. Big, big trend, I think China bit the bullet. It is going to go through a massive wave of COVID one way or the other, which they're going to not fully disclose to put it mildly,

but they're going to get over that hump, and we are going to see China reopen. going to see some growth in China, which we haven't really for almost three years. And it's going to, let me just say this, Rudyard, it's going to be, it is going to look better than it is because it's coming off such a low base. Don't be taken in by that. But it is going to be helpful to the global economy and to international politics in general when China finally comes back into the marketplace.

Great. We will note that prediction, Dan, as you say, we'll revisit these at the end of 2023 with our listeners. I think if I saw a trend in 2022, maybe this is more hope than reality, but 2022 was not a good year for autocrats generally. Iran's Khomeini, a horrible year, horrible protests, horrible oppression,

that just continues to sap any remaining legitimacy from the Iranian regime. Vladimir Putin, horrible year, thought he was going to get a quick lightning victory in Ukraine now bogged down with no exit plan. And Xi Jinping, as you say, ripping off the Band-Aid on COVID after a bad year for the Chinese economy, a bad year for Chinese kind of diplomacy and its international reputation abroad. I think that 2023, I hope, and I think is going to see that trend continue, that these autocratic states will continue to be buffeted by what you've talked about, their great weakness, which is all decision making is centralized. And by that very feature, it is, you know, what Nassim Talib would call anti-fragile. It is very subject to being buffeted by the whims of events.

And I think that's going to play out again for better or worse, but ultimately for the worst for those regimes in 2023. You're right, Roger. These regimes are so brittle. That's the best way to think about them because they cut themselves off from the leaders do, from dissenting information. It's so hard to take, and their men, to take these men on, frankly. will either any of those three leaders go in 2020, which is a really hard call. It's a point prediction. They're just guesses.

That's all. My hunch is no that we will be sitting here a year from now. Vladimir Putin will still be in power. Jishiping will still be in power. And even in Iran, unless he dies, Khomeini will still be in power. Khomeini will still be in power. It is so hard to penetrate the security apparatus around these three, you know, Iran, the most brittle. Russia increasingly brittle, as you say, Roger, but we're not yet seeing the defections

from the security class, from either in Russia or in Iran. that we have to see for these regimes to crumble. Then when we see them, they crumble what it feels like in a day. It happens almost overnight. My hunch is not in 2023. Great, Janice. Let's switch to Canada. The year that was, are there again any trends, directions that you see coming out of the

political institutional environment in Canada in 2022 that we should be thinking about in terms of trying to understand the year to come? Well, we are in for a year of heat, I think, in Canadian politics, rugged for two reasons. One, believe it or not, we are probably in some kind of pre-election scenario. There will be politicking within the Liberal Party and anticipation of an election. That always turns up the temperature. But there is a second reason.

we have deepening discontent in Alberta and Saskatchewan and a Quebec Prime Minister, who no surprise, is asserting Quebec prerogatives and more. So believe it or not, and for Canadians, this is almost a nightmare. We could be back to talking about the Canadian Constitution. I don't think there is a Canadian who would look forward to that one. Oh, no. That's exactly right. My prediction is, you know, if we look at 2022, I think one of the singular things about the year was a growing concern, if not outright, anxiety about a lot of Canadian institutions in 2022.

If we go from the Emergencies Act and the response to the trucker's convoy, if we're a lot of, we're going. if we go to the state of Canadian health care and seeming shortages in ER rooms across many metropolitan centers, to even more prosaic, but nonetheless frustrating things like the failure of the passport office to provide timely travel documents. I think unfortunately, 2022 was a year when many Canadians began to worry about state capacity and the extent to what which our state is able to deliver, especially when it comes to health care, necessary required services on a timely basis. And I worry that 2023, these trends, in fact, could intensify, that the challenges that we're seeing in terms of, you know, the labor force,

in terms of governments at all levels, especially the federal government, having real challenges and getting employees back to work. This is affecting, I think, productivity. I think it just makes everything more. difficult, more time consuming. And I think if you are thinking about 2023, I think self-reliance, a little bit of self-preservation, anticipating maybe more about how you're going to deal with challenges that come to face you personally, your family, as opposed to necessarily assuming that the Canadian state and its institutions will be there for you in the way that they

have in the past. I agree with you, Roger. We've seen a failure to deliver. To the law, liver of failure to execute. It's particularly bad right now in health care. We have so many burnt out and exhausted people that have been working overtime really for three years. And there is a big retirement. We saw the data on family physicians this week. The looming retirements of the over 65s is going to make it tougher for Canadians to get access to a family doctor. So this is a a big, big problem in Canada. But Canadians take comfort. Just look what Southwest Airlines

went through in the United States. And I was thinking to myself, boy, if that had happened in Canada, Rudyard, we would be all over it. You and I? We would be screaming. This was the worst performance of 2022. That airline was out for a week

and millions of suitcases. are somewhere in the ether is all I can say. Adding to institutional anxiety, I think anyone coming through Pearson Airport had some challenges with their luggage this holiday season. So we are not immune to the effects of, again, a hot economy, a lot of inflation, a lot of demand out there that's increasingly hard to meet.

And I think we can suffer through that if it's higher prices at the grocery store. We did that obviously with a chagreement. but when it comes to pretty key national institutions like healthcare, which are a big part of the Canadian identity, it's a big part of how we have chosen to express some sense of kind of solidarity and care with each other. And when children, let's say most recently, you know,

with this wave of pulmonary infections and diseases, we're unable to access, you know, critical care facilities at, you know, children's ICU's. I mean, wow, you have to wonder. what are we doing? Einstein's definition of doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, I just hope that 2023 we can start to have some bigger,

honest, difficult conversations about state capacity and how we solve for these challenges. Yeah, I agree with you. We cannot, and I hear I agree with the prime minister, believe it or not, we cannot keep throwing money out of a system that has choke points so built into it without addressing the fundamental problems. But Redyer, this is a pre-election year.

This would be tough under any circumstances to try to tackle this in the run-up to a federal election. That is just too high hill to climb. Great, Janice. Let's take a pause and come back on the other side of this break with our Monk donors. If you're not a donor already and you'd like to get access to the full-length editions of Friday Focus, you can do that right now on our website, Triple W. Bates.com, look for Friday Focus in the top right navigation for as little as $25 a year, 50 cents an episode. You'll get each and every edition at full length, plus all kinds of other

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