The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 5

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

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 explores two important stories in the news and the key insights of the latest Munk Dialogue on rationality. First, Canada's trucker occupation of parliamentary precinct and downtown Ottawa enters its second week. Is there a way to deescalate the protests? Who is capable of talking for the protesters? And, is there a credible government interlocular to lead negotiations? Second, Xi and Putin meet at the opening of the Olympic Winter Games and pledge mutual economic and security support for each other's nations. How could strengthening Sino-Russian relations effect events in Ukraine? What is the Biden Administration's response to closer China-Russia ties? And finally, what are the key lessons and insights we can draw from Lisa Feldman Barret's recent Munk Dialogue on rationality? 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.Munkdebates.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. Roger Griffiths here, your host and moderator. You're welcome to this, the regular Friday Monk members-only podcast. This is our weekly program where we delve into the big issues and ideas in the news,

hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. As always, on these programs, we're extremely fortunate to have as our guest, an interlocular, Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, an internationally acclaimed author and scholar, and she's all ours for the next 30 minutes. Janice, great to be in conversation with you. Great to be with you, Richard. And what an unprecedented week in Ottawa we have just lived through. I did not see coming what has happened.

Yeah, so let's just to give a preview of what we're going to cover on this show, let's start domestically because the Ottawa trucker convoy and protests not only in our nation's capital, but Alberta, other parts of the country, is kind of making international news. Then I think we've got to jump to Beijing and the Olympics, maybe not so much to talk about the kickoff of the Winter Games, but to talk about this meeting of Xi and Putin with some very strong words of kind of mutual support and mutual antagonism towards the United States coming out of that. And then, Janice, let's just, at the end of the program, find a little time to squeeze in a chat about our monk dialogue last

night with Lisa Feldman Barrett, our continuing series on rationalities, so the perspective of a neurologist on and psychologist on how our brains actually work. But let's start with Ottawa and this trucker's convoy, which is now descended and seemingly encamped in the city causing massive disruption. No sign yet of this protest losing steam. Quite the contrary, it looks like maybe upwards of $8,9 million from a GoFundMe campaign will maybe soon be released to the protest organizers who knows what they can do with those funds in terms of sustaining this protest. I don't, I mean, let's talk about solutions, but maybe also analogs. It kind of reminds me a little bit of, you know, Occupy Wall Street, just in a different, in a completely different political constituency at different time, different issues. But if we go back to that protest, we remember that

well, public squares, parks occupied for months on end and no clear way out for either governments and elected officials, but in some ways no clear way out for the protesters either. You know, I think that's a great analogy that you just drew right there to occupy Wall Street because it has the word occupy in it. And there's a line here, a continuum between a protest and an occupation. The Occupy Wall Street button, public squares, parks, but they did not block streets. They did not cut off whole parts of the city, including some downtown residents. They did not have the noise level, the 24 hours around the clock that is.

driving some people absolutely crazy, literally crazy, because they're sleep deprived. And I think that's the big challenge here. This is more than a protest, but what language we used to describe it is really going to matter. And how long can it last? It can last a long time and it can spread to other cities. There was a lot of talk about a trucker demonstration at Queens Park. in Toronto. You've talked about the Alberta demonstrations. And there was public anger growing as a result of this. And in some sense, unfairly, but in some sense, it's unfairly. The unfair part is to focus on that tiny group that flew a Confederate flag. Now, frankly, what's a Confederate flag doing a Canadian demonstration? I must have missed that explanation.

when somebody gave it to me. It doesn't. But swastika is harassment of people on the streets and actually harassment of some health care workers too. It goes beyond. So in democratic societies, and you know, this connects Lisa Feldman Barrett last night when she talked so, it was so interesting about democracy. Democracy is really hard.

It's hard on people. what she was saying. And boy, do we have a living example of this? Because to let this go on for weeks and weeks, any government in office will lose a tremendous amount of public support if that happens. But calling in the military is using a hammer to crack a nut. And, you know, very encouraging that the Minister of Defense Anita Anand, who's extraordinarily capable, said, a military is not a police force. That's not its job. We have to solve this.

So we have to go into a period now of negotiation and mediation, which is, if you remember, how a similar, much smaller scale protest with the indigenous community a couple of years ago was resolved. There have to be negotiation. So two observations. One, obviously we feel for the people in Ottawa who live there. I think, though, that the rest of the country

there's not a lot of reservoir of goodwill when it comes to Ottawa as a city and as a place. Canadians have no love lost for our nation's capital because it is a one company town. It is the town of the federal government, the town where those pesky tax assessments get rid from every year. And let's just face it, we don't have a capital like Paris or London that's integrated into one of our big, vibrant cities. So I understand the frustration and the anger of, you know, I think, as you say, in a preposter's way, cresting with the Ottawa chief of policing, bring in the army. I mean, what a ridiculous idea. But I don't see that solving this. I don't see the discomfort of Ottawa as creating any kind of national groundswell to end these protests.

I also think, interestingly, you know, it's not simply the 3 million plus Canadians who will never get vaccinated, who have declared themselves as verboten when it comes to getting vaccinated any shape and form. There's another, if you look at opinion polls, there's another 3 to 4 to 5 million who are vaccinated. vaccine hesitant. So you're starting to get up into not insignificant numbers of the adult population. Add over that the much bigger group in constituency in this country who are just genuinely tired and frustrated with all the controls and who are looking now at a growing list of countries from Denmark to the United Kingdom to more of the Scandinavian countries to Ireland that have not only stopped, you know, any kind of limits on gatherings and restaurants and bars and

theaters and concerts, they're actually ending the mandates. They're ending the mandates for masks. They're ending the mandates for a whole series of controls around the pandemic. So look, I'm no fan of this protest. I wish people could find more constructive ways through our existing institutions and norms to voice their frustration. But I think we can't underestimate the extent to which, you know, that phrase, I don't know if it's a silent majority, but a significant silent minority who are, don't care at all about Ottawa and who tacitly kind of are enjoying this this wild kind of crazy group who's descended on Ottawa, just for the sheer discomfort and pain that they're causing to...

The political class. To the political class. Yeah. So you're right that there is frustration, fatigue, fed upness, if there is such a word that is growing. People are just tired of this. And there's no clean. into this insight regent.

And that's very, very frustrating to people. There's not a clear path to how this pandemic finally ends and the disease becomes endemic. And that's really, really hard. That having been said, when you block highways in Alberta and you block exports, that does not endure you to the Alberta population. Jason Kennedy made that quite clear.

We have a big demonstration in Toronto that interferes. And once the truckers parked their trucks, hard to get them to move out, frankly. It's not obvious. You know, there's bitter criticism of the Ottawa police, bitter. They should have done something to prevent this. Well, exactly what, right? Blocked off all the streets of Ottawa in anticipation two days before so no trucks could get into the city. You know, you could do that.

But would any of us suggest, for instance, we block off downtown Toronto now before tomorrow? I don't think that's a doable proposition. So as these protests spread, it moves beyond Ottawa. And politicians look at polls all the time. And as you rightly said, Redyard, vaccination has been politicized in this country. It's become a political issue on both sides of the house. It was the ballot question. in the election that we didn't need to have.

It brought, it was a big part of what brought Aaron O'Toole to his knees in the conservative party. So like it or lump, and I frankly don't like it a bit, vaccinations are now a political issue, and no sitting government can allow this to go on for weeks and weeks and weeks. It's not politically sustainable. Well, it is, I agree. but at the same time, it's not, there hasn't been a broad public upsurge of extreme negative opinion about the convoy and what's happening. I think that's, it's not as if this is a popular protest.

It reminds me, to a certain degree, you're right of drawing maybe an analogy to those much smaller Aboriginal protests that happened immediately before COVID closing down. right you know critical rail lines there there was anger amongst a different ideological group in Canada yeah there was also some tacit political support for what those Aboriginal protesters were doing and i think what's different here is that now the tacit political support is to the you know the center right of the spectrum as opposed to you know the center left and it's a shame again that all these things have become, you know, caught up in, you know, issues of science and public health are now kind of situated on ideological spectrums and calibrated. But let's talk about what those potential solutions could be. I mean, as you say, a little bit different than we'll

occupy because these are, you know, 100-ton trucks, so not easy to move at the best of times. you're sending the RCMP into an environment that could quickly escalate and could involve unfortunately violence which to the I don't know it's to the credit of this group but we do need to acknowledge that this group has not been violent in any substantial way I don't believe there really have been any serious arrests at this point thankfully so if there is violence, the perception will be that that violence will be the result of whatever the official responses against this group. And that we know is the dangerous moment because that's maybe not when somebody in that group necessarily goes to violence. It can often radicalize

members of that group who are not there, who are watching it all on social media and television and elsewhere, and they end up doing something somewhere else. And this thing catches fire and you've got more protests and more trucks and more blockades. Boy, Janice, it's hard to see a low-cost, a low-paying exit from this thing. This is frankly really tough for the liberal government. You don't want to be the liberal government right now. They are between a rock and a hard place. They have nowhere to go on vaccine mandates, nowhere to go on that one.

That's a signature issue for this government. And it has a lot of support across the country, frankly. There's one thing Canadian support. It's vaccines and vaccine mandates. That is not by and large, you know, something where we've got an evenly split country. But on the other hand, you're absolutely right to say, this has not been violent. And that is, to the credit of everybody involved,

that has not been violent. And there is, I don't think, any appetite on the part of Canadians to see the federal government use force, use, and how do you forcibly remove 100-ton trucks, right? That is different from clearing apart. Now, I've heard, and you probably have heard this week, lots of references to a protest by BIPAC people that was cleared in a day and a half.

And so there was already beginning to bubble up, especially in social media. How come there's two standards here? How come we let a trucker's protest go for 10 days? But we don't allow a BIPC protest to go, a protest by black and indigenous people to go for more than a day and a half. Well, frankly, the answer to that is partly in lieu of that. logistics. And let's just call it like it is. It is really tough to move those trucks out of Ottawa. I don't even think the Army can do it. So in any obvious way. So we are going to have to go into an arduous process of conversation. And here's the critical moment, Reddard.

When do the people who are leading this protest, and they're not in Ottawa, the leaders, most of them, when do these people make a calculation that if they keep this going much longer, they're going to injure their political cause? So do they negotiate for one more week, one more weekend, two more weeks, and then do they unblock so that civilian traffic can go through? And that's the neighborhood of this resolution. My point in that, though, would be just, you know, how chaotic and disorganized is this movement? I mean, to what extent can those leaders even speak for?

the participants that are putting their trucks on those roads that are protesting, this is this is kind of inculcate anger. Yeah. It is now, you know, I guess what I wonder is, you know, with this this go fund me money in some ways to me is critical. You know, if there's $8 to $10 million there, that could really stretch this protest out because if the organizers can get organized and start distributing money specifically to the truckers whose trucks are parked on those streets to allow them to continue to sleep in those trucks. But it is winter.

The trucks are going to run out of fuel at a certain point. You can't heat those cabs forever. I don't know. Are these guys going to bring diesel on their backs in from the suburbs of Ottawa to refuel their trucks? I wonder here partly, again, it may be painful, but is this a waiting? game. Is this simply something that, you know, might take four, four plus, maybe we're still here a month from now, but this is something that burns itself out because it is, in some ways,

it is so disorganized. And, you know, we can't expect to negotiate a surrender. Well, you know, the prime minister was signaling that this week, and that's a good thing, actually, when he ruled out, out of hand, he ruled out. So he gave up right at the beginning of the He gave up probably the only credible option, mildly credible option. I don't even believe it's credible. He said, we are not going to use the military. There are no plans to use the military. But let's talk about the gas and the kerosene juries that are being brought in to heat

those cap. Those are fire hazard. It's going to take one spark of somebody who spills some and somebody else likes a cigarette. So they are physical risks, Roger, that everybody's running at this point. in a prolonged protest that has to worry public safety. Ottawa police are frantic. You just have to listen to the chief to hear how concerned they are. I actually think there's going to be,

I think there are already conversations going on. We saw it work in Alberta. And you know, you raised a really great point here, how organized are these protests? There's never a central command of these protests. Never. They're always much more disorganized. It's always hard to find the right person to talk to.

But one way of hope here is GoFundMe has not released that money. And I think they are going to drag it out and drag it out and drag their heels and say they're doing due diligence. And GoFundMe has been called to testify before Part. So if they run out of money, that is a driver. It's been great. We've made our point. We'll be back. But we're taking the rigs home. I mean, that's where we have to get to. We have to, everybody has to be patient. I think, you know, on this subject before we leave it, two big points to make you ready. I've never seen a level of anger and frustration among people that

half the conversations I have with people are start with I'm fed up, I'm tired, I'm exhausted. Everybody has a short fuse here. And we're seeing a lot of behavior that we wouldn't see normally.

So you're right to finger the level of anger and exhaustion. It's exactly under these circumstances we need extra patience. Wake this out. But I'm not living with the horns blowing, but that may change by tomorrow night. Yeah, I could. Yeah, look, we need patience. I just think it's in it's in short, it's in short, short, short supply. And I think public health officials, politicians, others need to understand that, that the public's been asked to do a lot. And some people have reached their limit. And in some ways, this is an expression.

Yep. of that cohort that is beyond their limit. And there's a danger that that cohort is only going to grow if we don't move quicker to, and again, in a responsible way, start lifting these controls and start talking. Maybe you start talking about a larger plan to actually think of a future without wearing masks, a future without a vaccination mandate. All those things are possible. Maybe it's time to start talking about them.

When we come back from this quick break, we're going to dive into the big story, obviously, that's been shaping geopolitics the last month or more. Russia, Ukraine, it took on a Chinese dimension over the last week with the kickoff the Chinese Winter Games in Beijing and a high-level meeting on Friday between Chairman Xi and Vladimir Putin. Back after the short break. 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. 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 monk members' podcasts. Thanks for listening.