The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Members-Only Pod: Season 2, Episode 6

Episode Date: February 11, 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 focuses on three topics in the news. First, Canada's so-called “trucker” protests go global with copycat movements cropping up in Europe and America. Are we seeing a new form of civil disobedience in the making? How will governments respond? Second, are elites, and Canada's in particular, becoming dangerously removed from the day-to-day lives of “average” Canadians? What could this mean for the future of not just the pandemic but the fight against climate change too? And finally, what are Janice's latest thoughts on the risk of a Russian invasion of Ukraine? How important are the next two weeks? 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.com, and register for membership. Membership is free, and it's available for you right now at www. Monk Debates.com. Hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Monk members. Roger Griffiths here, your host and moderator. Welcome to this. regular monk members only podcast. This is our weekly program where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights.

As our guest each week, we're so privileged to have Janice Gross Stein. She's the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs and International Acclaimed Scholar and author, and she's all ours for the next 30 or so minutes. We're going a little over Janice lately. It's just been so much to talk about. So I hope our listeners are forgiving. for that and thank you for all the emails everybody for the last week i think everyone's really janis just keyed into this moment everything that's happening in canada and internationally

these are gripping stories both of them that were following records yeah well let's start off with the so-called truckers convoy i want to be careful about that nomenclature because let's be clear the canadian truckers association has condemned this convoy it's obvious now weeks later that This is largely an anti-vax movement. We're not going to get into the pros and cons of rehashing the platform of this movement. Instead, Janice, what I want to do is tap into your big brain as a political scientist and talk about movements and talk about what this is. And if it represents, in your view, something genuinely interesting to you as a political scientist,

is some new kind of phenomena of protest? It really is fascinating. And Rudyard, I think of this as innovation in an ongoing innovation cycle. Let me go back for a moment to 9-11 when I certainly stood there in shock watching what was different and frankly knew about what happened on 9-11, somebody figured out how to weaponize a civilian aircraft to take something that we all

used as civilians and turn that into a weapon against the government. Of course people weren't prepared. That was innovative. That was new. What we've seen in the last two weeks coming out of Canada is innovation, not something which this country is known all over the world for. a group of people figured out how to weaponize big rigs and put those rigs in places where they block critical traffic. The authorities have had no response for that. Let's understand why it's new, it's innovative, is a different strategy. And, Bridgett, it's spread all over the world. We are seeing it. in Europe. We are seeing it copied, imitated, which is exactly what happens when you have a breakthrough innovation. And specifically, the yellow jackets, this very potent populist movement

in France is now supposedly convoy mobilized heading from southern France into the direction of Paris. who knows what's going to happen. But you're right, it's almost like a meme. It's, there's a, these, these ideas, what, you know, Matt Ridley, the former monk debate debater in his books has this interesting idea that ideas themselves follow evolutionary biology. Yeah. They evolve. They have sex with each other. They replicate.

And here we have more trucker convoys being birthed around the world. This is incredible. It really is. And so when you look at this, I think there are two really interesting ideas here for us to think about. The Jean-Giard, the French yellow truckers, they were conventional protesters, right? They marched in the streets of Paris, which is what protesters have done in Paris efforts, at least since 1870. now they have an innovative instrument. Now, what happens when you innovate, as you know well,

but your people find a response to that. Now, again, let's think back to the last 20 years and the quantum jump in airport security that we have all lived with as a result of that innovation on 9-11. And let's think forward, what's the response going to be, you're weaponizing a big rig. What's going to happen, for example, to parking regulations, to restrictions on truck movements?

Because you never know where a protester is. That's the point of these, right? What's going to happen to insurance regulations for truckers? What's going to happen to driving and licensing requirements for truckers? In some ways, Roger, and you were so right in your introduction. the biggest loser here may well be the Canadian Truckers Association, which is going to find the rules of business changed because their trucks became a weapon. So what I'm wondering, though, is how serious is the threat?

I mean, a plane flying into a skyscraper, genuinely terrifying. And as we saw, at least in that instance, difficult to stop if you weren't, aware of the conspiracy. In this case, and you know, this podcast is recorded it out of Toronto, we had a gathering last weekend of the so-called convoy movement. I actually went through for a jog that afternoon and jog through the movement. And my experience of it was a whole bunch of people blowing off steam. There was a lot of cannabis in the air. There were a lot of cowboy hats. It was an odd mix of kind of kind of. downtown and rural.

I think a lot of people maybe from service industries, from, yes, from, you know, big rigs on the street, tractors. But one arrest, thousands of people, not massive protests, but one arrest, so not violent, not overly disruptive, and gone the next day. And why was it gone? Because the Toronto Police Services had enrolled, their friends that we love, Jeddis at the Toronto Parking Authority to start handing out tickets.

And that they did. And I mean, these truckers, these protesters, let me call them that properly, they're small business owners. And you get a ticket, you know one way or another, that money is getting collected. You can protest, you can squawk, you can complain. But why do you think Toronto really just had in a sense a drive-by to use an analogy of this of this a drive-by protest versus what's happening in Ottawa and maybe what's happening elsewhere why this discrepancy of response well Ottawa is the originator right it's the innovator and I actually think it's more serious roger than what we the way than the way we normally talk about it for at least two reasons One, let's talk about funding.

One of the most important ways police intelligence and everybody else tracks social movements of any con on the far right, on the far left, doesn't matter, is we follow the money. Well, there have been millions of dollars that have gone to the organizers of this in Ontario. First, through GoFundi, which would shut down quite easily. Then through Go Save Go, which was just shut down yesterday, which is a religion-based organization, but the most important channel of money, we can't follow crypto. And the estimates are a minimum of a million dollars came in in the last two days to the organizers in Ottawa. Now, you and I talked about this before, the dark side of crypto, how crypto and enables flows of funds around legal authorities.

So yes, some of the organizers of this in Ottawa will have to pay fines. But when you're getting a million dollars in cryptocurrency over two days, you're not really worried about parking fines. That's not going to work, frankly. Bigger issue, how do governments track foreign funding? a lot of this money that has come in in this last few days is out comes from outside of Canada. Yeah, no, I see that. I still think, though, that if you're a trucker sitting there, you're kind of wondering,

that money's getting many, many multiples removed from you, right? Like it's with these organizers who have no business, you have no contract with them. Who knows if you're going to see that? money. And it was interesting to me that something happened in Toronto where there was a lot of activity on social media before the protest. In my neighborhood, I saw the giant tractors, you know, rolling through. And I thought to myself, wow, this is serious. We could replicate what's going on in Ottawa. And literally, I went for a jog to Queens Park at, you know, 4.35 o'clock the same day of the protest. And it was empty, Janus. Now, it was a good.

cold day, maybe weather is something to do with it. But, you know, in other words, I think this is interesting. I think it is a fascinating phenomenon. It'll be fascinating to see what the copycats are and the extent to which they have success. I'm not so sure it's an equivalent or commensurate breakthrough with the horrific acts of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden on September 11, no. No, let me make myself absolutely clear about it. Of course it's not. and nobody, thank goodness, has died or anything remotely like that. It's been largely, although exclusively, nonviolent. My point really was we're in a cycle of innovation that states are having a lot of trouble

dealing with. Let's talk about two other things, Roger. One, that the Toronto police negotiated with those protesters before those tractors rolled in. So there was an agreement. They lined university. Avenue, four o'clock in the afternoon, but they left peacefully at midnight, and that was a pre-negotiated deal between these protesters and the Toronto Police. Now, why was that? Because the Toronto Police had the opportunity to learn from Ottawa. Ottawa Police had no opportunity to learn

before these rigs were parked. And here's the interesting issue. Once they're parked, no authority And this is something that a lot of analysts are missing. People are saying, well, why can't you get these rigs towed? First of all, tow trucks of the kind we normally see on our city streets. And I frankly do not like, especially when they tow me. These tow trucks have absolutely no capacity to tow these rings. Absolutely none. So arguing that they do is simply not the case.

What's the big gun? The only weapon that they have is, is to cancel and to speak to your point, Roger, to cancel the insurance of these drivers. That's it. That's the only arsenal that they have to get those 400 trucks off the streets of Ottawa. I can tell you there's an entrepreneur waiting somewhere

who will step forward and create an insurance company and step into the breach. Final thing, final point worth making, what has really stepped up the resolve of governments is the blockades at the bridge, both in Windsor and in Alberta, largely because our trade is so dependent on moving goods across those bridges into the United States. So contrary to everybody who tells us the state is collapsing, that's not what triggered, I think, a more aggressive response, which we're going to see in the next today.

it's moving goods across the bridge. Tells us a lot. Let's come back on this idea of state collapse because it's a scary phrase, but people are starting to banter and banter it around in the context of Canada. And I think it's a fascinating line of argument to explore. So when we come back from this quick break,

listeners, we'll dive into that topic with Janice Gross Stein. Stay tuned. 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.wmunkdebates.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.