The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Episode 14

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

This is a sample of the Munk Members-Only Podcast. The program provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving 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. This week's Munk Members Podcast explore three big issues in the news: Third Wave of COVID-19 bears down hard on countries with low vaccine rates – Are these government's at fault for mismanaging the latest surge of the virus or was it inevitable that some countries would be caught up new wave of lockdowns in a world short on vaccines? Russia deploys large number of military units to its border with Ukraine – What are the risks of a Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine? Is it in NATO's interest to get involved in this conflict? What can the West do to deter the threat of Russian aggression? Canadian Spring election in the air – Can you hold a free and fair election in the middle of a third wave of COVID-19? What are the risks and opportunities for the governing Liberals? We discuss it all. To access the full length episode consider becoming a Munk Member. Membership is free. Simply log on to www.munkdebates.com/membership to register. Under your membership profile page you will find a link to listen to the full length editions of Munk Members Podcast. If you like what the Munk Debates is all about consider becoming a Supporting Member. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents). To explore you Munk Membership options visit www.munkdebates.com/membership. 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.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. The following is a sample of the Monk members-only podcast. To access the full-length edition of this episode and all of our regular Monk members-only podcasts, go to our website, www.W.Munk Debates.com and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www.munkdebates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Rudyard Griffiths here, the host and moderator of the Monk debates. It's time for our weekly Monk members-only podcast. This is the half-hour program. We produce for you each Friday looking back at the week that was, trying to unpack the big

stories and issues in the news and hopefully leave you with some new analysis and insights on the week that was. Our guide, as always in these conversations, is the irreplaceable Janice Gross-Stein. She is the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally acclaimed author, scholar, and Janice, just someone I always enjoy speaking to you at the end of the week to try to figure out what the heck just happened. Great to be with you, Richard, and with all the monk members. And thank you for all the emails. Keep them coming.

That's right. If you've got a comment, a suggestion, if there's a topic you want Janice to address on this program, please send us an email to podcast at monkdebates.com. That's M-U-N-K, not M-O-N-K Debates.com. Well, Janice, I think to jump in here on our first issue, I'd like to discuss, go a bit bigger picture on this third wave because it's really, I think, hit home this week for all of us. I, like many families here in Canada, have young children. They're now out of school for the next couple weeks, I think possibly much longer to come. Our economy shut down, fully.

eight, nine million people on the basis of hitting, you know, sub 500 patients, COVID patients, as tragic as that is in ICU. And I guess what I'm really grappling with Janice is maybe like a lot of Canadians, I'm starting to lose the faith. I'm starting to feel like that belief I had in Canadian competency is getting sacrificed on the crest of this third wave. You know, growing up as I did, I was kind of, I was okay not being as rich as the Americans, as fernetic as the Israelis, as plucky as the New Zealanders or Aussies, because I kind of believed in Pog.

I believed in that third part of our constitutional slogan, peace order and good government. And I just look at this third wave and its effects and the fact that we're a year into this and we really haven't solved any of the big challenges of COVID. Help me here, Janice. I'm losing faith. I'm really having a bit of an existential crisis about has this country kind of lost competency? You are not alone, Roger, if that's any comfort. This crisis of faith is quite widespread among Canadians.

So how justified is it is really the question? So let me tell you where it's not justified and then where it is. Where it's not justified, we are average performers. We are just average. If you compare us, we are not as good as the Brits, the plucky Brits, the frenetic Israeli. But, Jenice, don't the Brits have a 56% vaccination rate on their population? Yes, they do. Yes, they do. I think that's a little bit better than us at about 18.

That is way better than us. The United States is way better than us. But the Americans, the Brits and the frenetic is really so true, are outliers, believe it or not. They are pulling the average up. But when we compare ourselves now, you know, we are the Downey Angola Merkel, whom everybody admired. They've stopped doing that now. but everybody admired for her stodging competence.

That's what people thought was so great about Angela Merkel. Well, Germany is no better than we are. France is no better than we are. Italy is no better. We are right in the middle of the average pack. So that's the first point that I think is important for Canadians to realize. The second, and I think this is partly why there is an existential cry of despair from so many people. This third wave is worse, much worse, than the first and the second.

And the reason it's much worse is we are dealing with a wave caused by variance that are more contagious and are more deadly. Now, this is what viruses do. They're smart. They evolve. They mutate. And they outsmart the treatments. And frankly, governments have not been as smart as the virus.

And that's true in that whole average pack. So the question for Canadians is, are we okay being average? And you started this morning and you said, yeah. I mean, I'm fundamentally okay being average as long as we get peace order and good government. Yeah, as long as we're competent. Yeah, well, and that's, I think, the big discussion. And quite frankly, there are huge pockets of incompetence in the management of this. of this, especially third wave, which is so foreseeable.

And people in every sector recognizes, and that's what's amazing, in quiet conversation, in the private sector, there are businesses that should have been aggressively testing people in factories, where they know people are cheap to jail, should have moved aggressively on saying to their workers, if you're sick, you stay home and we will pay for that because, in fact, the cost is much less than what we're going through right now. So let's not let the private sector off the hook here. In the public sector, again, behind the veil, there are public servants who are looking at what is a scattered performance across this country. And they are asking themselves, are we a country? How do we have the variation in competence?

across this country at the provincial level that we do. So Nova Scotia, to take one example, far from home, is an absolute beacon of light. They had a phenomenally capable doctor, Lisa Barrett, who got out in front of this and partnered up with a just fantastic public servant. And, you know, in Nova Scotia, there's no vaccine urgency. They have one case in the hospital right now. One case.

And so the Atlantic provinces got this, and Nova Scotia's the leader there, got this brilliantly right. Ontario and Quebec are not in that league. And so we're seeing this unevenness. And more to the point, what is lacking, and I find this so frustrating. What is lacking is a national sense of urgency where we suspend. That's the real issue here. where we suspend the politics as usual, the business as usual. And we say, hey, folks, we align around what we think is the best, a state of the art.

We learn and we do it fast. And we say to the public what we told you two or three weeks ago, you know what? It was right when we told you. It's not right now because we're dealing with a smart virus that's evolving. And that's the score. And I frankly believe, Roger Dout, when either private sector leaders or public sector leaders talk to the public that way, the public is on side. We're not hearing that kind of talk, frankly. Yeah.

We have to do better. We have to do better. Let me just go at the average argument. Let me take one pass at that because, you know, I think that is the meme that's out there. You know, don't worry, Pete Canadians, we're having an average response. The reality is actually, as of this week, we're behind France, Germany, Italy in terms of percentage vaccination. Not a lot, but three, four percentage points. It's still something to note.

The second thing, I guess I would say about average, is that I was willing to make the trade on for, let's say, less dynamism, let's say than the American, Israeli, or let's say even the Australian kind of experience of what it means to be a citizen. Unless inequality, Richard. Yeah, right. But I was willing to go for the, you know, for the Canadian model on the basis that, kind of like a stock portfolio, I would be, I'd be risk adjusted in a variety of other ways. So that so that I could enjoy my life and I could have a sense of security about the future. And I guess what's shaking me, Janice, is that sense of security, that tradeoff no longer seems like,

such a good bet. Frankly, it seems like I made a bad bet. I made a bet on a country and a system that was so risk adverse, that was so sclerotic, that was so incapable of rising not to one or two challenges. Every government's going to fail one or two challenges of COVID, whether that's contact tracing or vaccine procurement. But in this case, we failed every single one. We didn't fail to protect long-term care homes once we failed to protect them twice we didn't fail simply on vaccine procurement or failing on vaccine distribution we didn't simply uh botch contact tracing as you know better than most people we completely botched rapid testing we still don't have rapid testing 13 months into this so janis why why am i wrong to say you know what maybe it's time to

to think about greener pastures elsewhere, where you do get that dynamism. Yeah, maybe you get a little more risk, but choosing to mitigate risk by staying in Canada to cling on to good government as a risk mitigation strategy sure didn't pay off for me in this circumstance. Well, again, I don't want to paint the picture in an overly bleak. And that's really the challenge for Canadians. Why not be bleak, Janice? This is bleak.

Come on. Go with me to bleak. Join me in bleak. I am not joining you in Bleak here. And that's actually the trap for Canadians right now. Because if you look at the vaccine roll up, for instance, in the province of Ontario, shots came, you know, supply came in on a Sunday. They were rolling up by a Tuesday.

Yes, some 25% of a point. appointments didn't get filled, but they're moving, they're adjusting. They actually look at the performance on vaccine rollout. Janice, the entire city of Toronto can only vaccinate 8,000 people a day if all of its centers are open and working. Last time I looked at there's 2.9 people in the greater Toronto region. 2.9 million. That's going to take some time. That's going to take some time at 8,000 people a day.

It's going up. I'm telling you it's going up. And I see the numbers. It's going up. So here's the challenge with going to bleakness that because we lack, and I think this is generically true, because we've lacked a sense of urgency here and an unwillingness to take risk, that is really the issue here.

Our performance has been, for anybody who's looking at it, frustratingly slow, and we've missed the opportunity to get out in front of a very smart, virus as other countries have. But again, we have to ask what do we want of our governments? That's really the issue because this is a one and a hundred year pandemic and hopefully we don't have to go through something like this quite again, you know, at least for another decade or so what do we want in our government? What do you want, Rudyard? Do you want your government to ensure you against the worst possible outcome? That's what we've asked of our governments in

this country and we told them over and over and over it's on us don't make a mistake don't make a mistake and boy if you make one you are on the front page of the globe and we are going to go after you the slightest violation of process you're skewered and you're skewered frankly in quite a vicious way in public 100% you tell you tell people that at the political level and more importantly to me at the civil service level we're doing this to you and nobody speaks up for these people. I agree. I agree.

I'm not going to get an argument for me on that. But here's what, just my final point, but this is where I think the good place, the bleakness eventually leads you to, which is bleakness leads you to anger. And anger leads the public to a place where our politicians and our political leaders feel the urgency of the moment. What you've been talking about with such prescience over the last number of weeks. what I find depressing about Canada right now is our complacency with this, the extent to which our political leaders know that they've buried us in money in cash subsidies that were kind of sedated

at this moment. They're not feeling the ire, the anger that would cause them to do just what you want to do, which is to take risks, to break things, to have that sense of national crisis. that's what in some ways makes me the most depressed is that we're not angrier. We're not saying to these politicians, you fix this now, you get this right. Boy, and if you don't, you're out of there.

And instead, all their polling numbers show from the national governments to the regional governments to the local governments, all these politicians are cruising in there with polling numbers that suggest re-election. Absolutely. This just makes me. so confounded by my fellow citizens.

Like, what am I doing here? Do I belong to this country anymore? Roger, I agree with you. I'm all in on anger right now and all out on bleakness. And, you know, and it's not anger. And actually, you know that I've been seriously involved for the last eight months in dealing with our provinces and our federal government on rapid antigen screening

in these essential workplaces, which are now the heart of the outbreak, and that's part of the reason you're locked down because we didn't get it in on time. So my anger just explodes now, frankly. And it is, so here's, I think, what's really important. It is really important for Canadians to feel, yeah, we're average, but you know what?

We're not happy with being average. Average is not good enough for us. And coming out of this, when we get out of lockdown, and we do get 60 or 70% of our population vaccinated, and we have routine screening in our schools and our essential workplaces, which is where we need to get it going. And we're going to do that this summer, or I will lose it completely, frankly. It's not good enough. But there's a more general message, I think, that comes out of this one.

average is not good enough. It is not good enough. And there's no excuse for being average because you know what? We can do better than that. We have the talent. We have the innovators. We have the smarts. We're just not asking enough of ourselves.

And I agree with you. Say to our governments, as soon as public starts saying to our government's average is not good enough, this changes. But you look at the public opinion, polls federally and provincially, that's not there yet. That's an election

slogan. I'd march under. Average is not good enough. You've been listening to a sample of the Monk Members Only podcast. To access the rest of the episode, consider becoming a member. Membership is free and available at www.w monkdebates.com.

Once you've joined as a member, go to your membership profile to access the rest of this episode and all of our members. Monk Members Podcasts. Thanks for listening.