The Paul Wells Show - Bob Rae and the cascade of crises

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

As Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae is not afraid to speak his mind, even when it’s not clear whether the government stands behind him. In this episode, he talks about the role of the UN in an age of mounting skepticism towards global institutions, his reputation for being outspoken, and dealing with the "cascade of crises" taking place around the world. He also challenges Paul on a column he wrote in 2020, questioning Rae’s appointment to his current job. Please take five minutes to complete this podcast survey for a chance at a $100 gift card.

So this was awkward. You didn't know Fort Pearson. You didn't know the foreign ministry at home. I think that's ridiculous. You didn't know this culture. I think that's absurd. I think it shows you what you don't know, frankly, Paul. That's Bob Ray, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, tearing a strip off of me.

When he got the job, I wrote a column suggesting he shouldn't have. Turns out he read it. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. This week, Bob Ray and the Cascade of Crises. So about that column. When Bob Ray was appointed Canada's ambassador to the UN in 2020, Canada had just run for a seat on the UN Security Council and lost. Like three weeks earlier, for the second time in a decade. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was the President of the United States, Britain was Brexiting, and COVID had shut down

global travel. It might actually have been the worst possible time to be getting into the multilateralism game. Being a sensible sort, I wrote a column saying Ray was the wrong person for the job. All the other UN ambassadors from big G7 countries were diplomatic lifers who'd been representing their countries all their lives. And they were all more than a decade younger than Ray. He'd been doing important things, of course. He was Ontario's only NDP premier, for one thing. And he was brought in as interim leader of the federal liberals after the worst election result in their history. This one time he even saved the Toronto Symphony. But none of that makes a guy a purpose-built tool for expressing Canadian foreign policy. What I was implying was that

it was getting awfully late for Ray to be starting a new career in the world-fixing business. He doesn't agree, and I'll let you hear why. The fact is Bob Ray's been getting noticed in New York, where he's been so outspoken in confronting Russia over the Ukraine invasion and other bullies over just about everything, that it's sometimes not clear he has the government of Canada behind him when he talks. What if he's right? What if he is the right man for the job? Of course, he's done just about everything, including foreign affairs, in a long career. He was a Rhodes Scholar. He ran the Forum of Federations, which was a pet project of Jean Chrétien and Stéphane Dion, and an interesting

one. He carried out specialized diplomatic missions for Justin Trudeau, which was also about Ray and Trudeau figuring out whether they could work together. And he's one of the country's great talkers. He doesn't need a lot of prep time. Just point him at a topic and say, go. He makes news in our interview, I think. Did you know Canada's ambassador to the UN thinks Ukraine should have been given a roadmap to NATO membership 14 years ago? Now you do.

All of this brings me around to thinking that maybe Bob Ray fits Canada's foreign policy, or Justin Trudeau's, the way all those diplomatic lifers fit the systems in Japan and France and Great Britain. Those countries have consistent foreign policies, built on the pursuit of durable interests in the face of stubborn threats. Canada, not so much.

Justin Trudeau's had five foreign ministers. He sent them five public mandate letters. None of those letters even mentioned China. Maybe the best man to represent Canada in the world is a guy who's really good at filling in the blanks. I give you Bob Ray. Bob Ray, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. What are you working on today?

joining us. Thank you so much for having me. What are you working on today? Today started with some meetings about Haiti. Then I've got a group of American military guys coming to see us this afternoon, meeting with a number of colleagues from other missions. And then I've got a dinner tonight talking about the state of the South Pacific islands that are dramatically impacted by climate change. So it's a regular day, I would say. I didn't pay much attention to what goes on at the United Nations until Alan Rock became the ambassador there, golly, close to 20 years ago. And the impression I got as I followed his work there

is that it's just astonishing detail work. There are obviously so many interests represented in such a formal way that everything becomes channels. Is that pretty close to the way it works? Schedule is sort of like a 24-hour high school because your day is in one hour, half hour, two hour segments on a whole range of very, very different issues. So in order to get the most out of it, you sort of have to say, well, of all these issues, what's the most important for this week and for the next week and for how we follow it through? And it is detail work. It's swatting exams. You're working hard.

And I've found it completely fascinating and very, very worthwhile. I think much of what the public sees is the dysfunction of the Security Council or some debate in the General Assembly that seems to go nowhere. Security Council or some debate in the General Assembly that seems to go nowhere. I keep telling people that's only part of what this is all about. There's a whole lot of other stuff that goes on all the time. So are you trying to tell me that place is still useful? I don't think useful is the word. I think it's necessary. If we didn't have an institution like this, we would need to somehow recreate it. I mean, the reality is it's the one place in the world where people can come together, where you can have conversations with people you completely disagree with, where you're not only talking to like-minded, as we say, or people whose values you completely share and utterly agree with. You're talking with a whole range of people who have very, very different views than we do. And it's a place where there's a culture that's been built up over many, many, many decades where you can have an off-the-record

conversation with somebody that isn't going to happen any other way. You've got to have the physical closeness and the geography of it. And you've also got to have the tradition of it where you just say, this is off the record, I'm having this conversation. You need to know where we're coming from on this and see what else we can do about getting to a solution. It seems to me that we as a society have kind of gotten out of the habit of meeting and talking in those gray zones between stark positions and stark assertions of right and wrong and trying to find those areas of accommodation or at least mutual understanding. That feels kind of old-fashioned somehow. Well, I think it might be old-fashioned, but it's certainly very necessary. You can't live your life without it. Or maybe you can,

maybe some people can. But you're right, there's a lot of tendencies in social media, tendencies in political, domestic, certainly political conversations, where it becomes harder and harder to the proverbial reach across the aisle or find a way to get to a solution. But of course, there's that life here too, right? I mean, there's every nation state is working under the reality and the direction of their own government. There may be a need for a minister or for a leader of a country to say, I want these views clearly expressed on the floor of the United Nations. I don't want there to be any mealy-mouthed declarations.

I want it to be very clear for everybody where we're coming from. But I think in my case, certainly, there's a lot of understanding that some of the most valuable work we can do is working to try and see where this is going and where this is headed and how we can perhaps edit in a different direction. Okay. Now, the prime minister sent you there in the middle of 2020. My hunch is that there had been some conversations for some time before that

about whether you were interested in a posting and what you might do. But in the event, you land in the middle of some of the worst months in New York's history of devastating loss of life because of COVID, strong lockdowns, not a really auspicious start to your work. Well, I completed the work that I did on the Rohingya. I completed it. I mean, I submitted my report and then I did a couple couple of other follow ups. And then the PM said, we'd like you to do some more work on what impact the refugee crisis globally is going to have on events. And that came before COVID. So while COVID was happening, I was doing that. I got a call from the prime minister right after the attack on the plane that was carrying a lot of Iranians out of Iran to Ukraine.

And he called me about advice on that because I'd done some work on Air India. And he said, can you come over, come up to Ottawa? And I came to Ottawa. We had a nice chat about that and a chat about a bunch of other things. And then he said, do you have any interest in going to New York as ambassador? I said, I would have a lot of interest in doing that. And he said, well, you know, Marc-Andre is there, but he's due to change over in summer. So if you're willing to go, it would be great if you could do that. So I accepted, as they say, with alacrity.

And then because of the other things that were happening with the vote and so on on the Security Council, I came to New York a couple of times. And then COVID came. And yeah, I started in COVID. I started in a difficult time as morale was low because we just lost the Security Council vote and a lot of challenges that that brought with it. But it's been fascinating. And I think that to those crises, a number of others have been added, most notably the Ukrainian crisis. So it's kept me very engaged.

And it's been a job where I feel like I'm very much at home because in a way, this is sort of where my young life started. My dad was a diplomat, as you know, and I was very much influenced by him over the years. He had this job. He was in New York in the 70s. So it's been a fascinating experience. I think there's an advantage to coming into a job where people have very low expectations. I think I seem to remember reading a column by you where you had low expectations.

I was the only journalist in Canada who had an unkind word to say about the appointment. You certainly did. And I remember reading it very well. And I cast it aside gently and said, well, we'll see. We'll see how that goes. So since you mention it, my concerns were that you were not a career diplomat and that you're going to be surrounded by all these people

who knew their gang and who knew one another. And you were coming in reasonably late in your career, green on both of those fronts. You didn't know Fort Pearson. You didn't know the foreign ministry at home. I think that's ridiculous. You didn't know this culture. I think that's absurd.

I think it shows you what you don't know, frankly, Paul. I mean, I grew up in this culture. For 20 years, I worked creating an NGO called the Forum of Federation. So I worked very closely with people in what you call Fort Pearson, but in the Pearson building in Ottawa. I've known diplomacy my whole life. I think anybody who knew me would know that. So the fact that I was a politician, and you may not have known of my other life interests, is frankly irrelevant. In fact, political skills are quite helpful.

They're not that different from diplomatic skills. They're actually very, very helpful. The one thing I completely accept is that what I call the back to school is you've got to be prepared to accept the discipline of the ins and outs and the ways to and how to communicate and how to do this and that. And the protocol of meetings and all of that, a lot of it came very naturally to me. I didn't find it like putting on a very uncomfortable, ill-fitting suit, quite the opposite. It seemed to fit quite well. As for the age thing, which you mentioned, I think that can all be a matter of opinion. I

mean, there's a lot of ageism. I'm not embarrassed about my age. Sometimes experience helps. Sometimes having had previous experiences helps. I found at the UN that all of the stuff that I've done before has really been prologue to this mission and this job. And I've found it very helpful. It's all been grist to the mill. I think my bluntness has been an advantage because a number of diplomats say we really appreciate how quickly you cut to the chase rather than just repeat the rote messages that we're getting from capital. And I've tried to keep doing that. I think that's very helpful. My energy level is good. My acuity seems to be not diminishing too much. So I'll leave it at that.

We're going to get to the matter of your bluntness, which you yourself have remarked upon from time to time. But first of all, some more context sending, which is what you call the astounding cascade of crises that has beset the world, was besetting the world when you landed in the middle of the pandemic, doesn't seem to be getting better. It is a hell of a mess out there. First of all, how would you describe the contours of

this global cascade of crises? And secondly, how did we get into it and what are the chances of getting out? That's a short question. Well, it is a hell of a mess. I mean, that's not a bad way to describe it. I think it's important to disentangle the mess and try to figure out exactly what is it. I think the mess has many different elements to it. The first one is sort of where we are in time in history, this incredible process of decolonization that has taken place in a post-imperial era after the Second World War. Therefore, an incredible number of members of the UN who were not there, and were not there for much of the 20th century, were not able to participate, have suddenly come on the scene,

in many cases still very poor, significantly disadvantaged, and with a strong sense of resentment, I think would be not too strong a word about what the hell has happened to them and how they are got to be in this position. So that culture of grievance, which is very, very powerful inside the organization, and you've got billions of very poor people in the world. You've got a whole lot of challenges facing so many countries, violence and conflict. But it's all seen through this particular lens. And I think it's hard for people who just look at it from outside and say, what the hell's going on? I said, this is partly what explains the challenge that we face. Then you've got this ongoing challenge of climate change, whose intensity

is growing with every year. And yet the solutions for it are extremely complex, very, very difficult. And the politics of it are equally equally complex and difficult where we're seeing it is the number of displaced people number of people who are impacted by severe weather longer droughts food shortages in in the mountains of the himalayas the glaciers are melting which has a direct impact on river flows. All of the great river systems in South Asia are coming off the Himalayas. You just go down the list. It's huge.

And it's going to be even huger as it goes on. But the reality is it's a global crisis. And it requires global solutions. And global solutions are very difficult because it means everybody has to do them. Then we have the pandemic. The immediate economic impact of COVID and the steps that governments took to deal with it was unprecedented. There's no rival for it. You could compare it to perhaps to wars when governments spent money hand over hand or fist. But in peacetime, there's absolutely no precedent for what countries decided to do collectively.

And unfortunately, not all countries were in a position to do it. So that exacerbated the sense of division, which I've talked about. Then you have the access to the vaccine, which has also been unequal. So that, again, increases the sense of division. And the realization that the old rubric that we're in the same boat is not entirely true because the economic and social geographical circumstances of every country are very, very different. And that has exacerbated, again, the sense of alienation and frustration. Finally, Ukraine. I don't think it was thought that Putin would go as far as he has gone,

would be as destructive as he has been, and so unhinged. And that has created further deep tragedy for Ukraine and for the people of Ukraine, created huge losses for Putin and his army. But looking at the economic and social impacts around the world, significant increase in the number of refugees, but inflation now coming on us as a major factor in our lives. I've gone on quite a long answer to a long question. But I think we have to see it as it's just a cascade of crises, not one. If you said, well, if we had one problem to deal with, it would be bad enough. But we have this whole succession of issues to deal with. What is common to all of them is that they don't lend themselves to simple or nationalistic or one country-based

solutions. They can only come about through cooperation and the need to engage and the need to commit ourselves to understanding that this is the world we're in. We're not in another kind of world. This is the world we're in. We'll come back to my conversation with Bob Ray in a minute. I want to take a moment to thank all of our partners, the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and the National Arts Centre. Our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our publishing partners are the Toronto Star

and iPolitics. You're on the other end of a long line from Ottawa. I wonder whether, given the tempo of these crises, whether the tempo of waiting to make sure that you and the government agree sometimes gets in the way. Well, I mean, in every job, that's true. I mean, I have been given a lot of leeway, I would say, to exercise my judgment, but I'm under no illusions that I represent the government and the decisions of the government are the decisions that I

defend and explain. That's my job as a public servant. I was under no illusions. I knew that coming in. But as time went on, I'll tell you the first time that something happened that made me realize that there was a way to do this in a way that might be quite creative was when I was in the middle of one of the first debates that I was sitting in in the fall of 2020. And I read out a statement that had been approved by Ottawa that was, you know, all part of the, and it referred to the two Michaels and referred to other incarcerations and situations that were unfair. And at the end of the session, I discovered that there's something called the right of reply. And so the government of Syria, the government of China all decided to weigh in.

And of course, they weighed in principally against some other countries, but then they made a point of coming after Canada. And so I went out down to the desk of the person who's sort of next to the speaker, sort of the equivalent of like the people next to the speaker in the House of Commons, you know, the desk guys. I said, can I reply to this reply? And they said, sure. Yeah, of course. So I said, well, put me down. And I walked back to my seat and I replied. I didn't have a note. I didn't have a text. I just replied. Then they replied again. And I said, how long can I keep this going? He said, you've got one more shot. So I gave it another shot. And I left the hall and my staff said, that was interesting. I said, well, thank you. But a lot of delegates came up and said, wow, that was great.

Really appreciated your engaging, not backing off, defending your country and explaining the situation. And I got back to the office and people were quite happy and said, that's fine. You stayed within the lines of what our instructions were. You stayed within the lines of what our instructions were. And then a day or two later, unbeknownst to me, someone tweeted out the exchange because the exchange is taped. And so I said, well, if she's tweeting it out, I'll retweet it. So I retweeted the exchange and then it went viral. And then Ottawa said, that was great took ottawa a little

while to say that was great waiting a couple of days just to see get the assessment but i i have to say that um i don't find the relationship to be at all strained or challenging or i mean it's just you just have to be disciplined you have to think all the time as I do when I speak to you my my mind is always and always was in scrums I learned this long ago is try to figure out how to avoid saying something completely stupid and remember what the basic instructions are in the direction you're going in and if you do that then you're okay I mean there is of course the famous story I've told it many times, of Walter Riddell, who was our representative in the League of Nations, who was basically denounced and disowned in the House of Commons by the minister, saying, well, he was speaking for himself,

wasn't speaking for us. So, you know, that's what happens. More recently, in an interview with the CBC radio program, The House, you were asked whether Canada should send Ukraine any arms that they ask for. And you said, this may be a career limiting answer, but I don't see how you answer that question, except yes, absolutely. Send them everything. I mean, you seem to have survived. Totally. That debate about whether to send lethal arms to Ukraine before the Russian invasion and to some extent since is a live debate of longstanding.

Did you always think that it was a good idea to send weapons into a potential war zone? And how does your thinking evolve on that question? And how does your thinking evolve on that question? Well, if you read stuff I've written over the years and understand my sort of position in life, I'm very much a student of the politics of the years between the First World War and the Second World War. Ever since high school, I've been fascinated by that time in history. And I am very much one of those people who believe that the road to the worst wars is paved when you don't deal with the problem early on in the life of the situation. I've felt and felt for a long time and feel now that the people of Ukraine have a country. They've had a country and an identity for a very long time. They were nearly wiped out by Stalin in the 1930s. Their country was the bloodlands of the war between the Germans

and the Russians in the Second World War. They lived under Soviet tyranny for a long time, got worse in the 50s, 60s, 70s. Finally, they became their own country. Again, had that identity re-established. So I felt very strongly about Eastern Europe. My wife and I went to the first democratic election in Lithuania in 1990. And I think that freedom is incredibly important. And I don't believe that you deal with tyranny in any other way than being prepared to defend yourself. I've been a supporter of NATO. I was a supporter of NATO when I was a member of the New Democratic Party, and it wasn't popular, but I was.

And I've never had a different thought. I don't think you rattle sabers for no reason. I don't think aggression is ever a good idea, but you have to be able to defend yourself against aggression. And I think that's what the Ukrainians have been doing from the outset. Let's test that a little further. Ukraine was looking for a roadmap to NATO accession in 2008. Vladimir Putin was already warning against it in his 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference. Stephen Harper has, and I'm not waving his name around as a partisan flag, but he was the prime minister. And he has said that Ukraine should

have gotten that roadmap to accession in 2008, that Putin was going to stomp his feet, but it was right then and it might have helped. Do you buy that? Yes. What do you think would have happened? How would that have played out? Well, I think I do not believe that Mr. Putin's so-called red lines should be taken as just as saying, well, that's his red line. We can't do anything more about it. I think the real issue between Putin and Ukraine and why he thinks it's different is he is insistent that Ukraine is not a separate country. Ukraine is not a separate place. It does not have its own identity. He says, yeah, the Baltic countries, yeah, sort of, yes, okay.

Poland, yeah, whatever. Hungary, yeah, okay, but not Ukraine. Ukraine is different. And I think we understand now in what sense it's different. He thinks it's his. And he thinks he can do whatever he wants. He thinks he can kill, brutalize, terrorize, threaten people with any kind, torture people. When the full record is taken of what this man has done in Ukraine, I think he'll be among one of the greatest war criminals in history. I think what he's done is beyond disgusting. And I think the answer to that is not to say, well, while he's got his red lines, we'd better respect them. He doesn't respect anybody else's red lines. He doesn't respect international law's red lines. He doesn't respect, well, you can do this, but you can't do that. No. And you can't let tyrants like this decide what the

future is going to look like. It's a ridiculous position to put ourselves in. Frankly, I think my position is very much embraced by many leaders in NATO. And I think it's widely felt in public opinion. I think public opinion in Europe and in North America has been helping to encourage governments to do what should be done. I wonder whether you ever met Putin. I did once. I mean, it wasn't a one-on-one meeting in an alley or anything. It was at a gathering in Moscow. I was part of a delegation that was led by Governor General Clarkson when I was chairman of the Forum of Federations. We were there to look at Arctic issues,

spent some time in the Arctic. And so I was present at a meeting that was attended by many, many people talking about Russia and Canada. Those were early days. That was around 2003 or 2004, I think, was the time of that visit. He had an iciness about him that struck me at the time, and I said to somebody in that delegation, I said, you can take the boy out of the KGB, but you can't take the KGB out of the time. And I said to somebody in that delegation, I said,

you can take the boy out of the KGB, but you can't take the KGB out of the boy. I think that's true. Some people think the thing to do is to get Russia out of the permanent circle of members of the Security Council and take its veto away because the United Nations is often hobbled by the presence of Russia and Chinese vetoes. Well, the vetoes are a product of the UN's history out of the deal that Roosevelt and Stalin and Churchill, much less China and France, but those three made in Yalta and elsewhere. My own instinct is to say, if we had to start it all over again, we wouldn't make the same, we wouldn't have the same arrangements. But to change the charter of the UN requires the unanimity of the permanent members. So you're saying it would be great if Russia were to voluntarily give up its veto.

And the second thing is that there is no real provision for expelling people out of the UN because the principle of the UN is no matter how bad you are, you're still a member of the UN. You're a leader of a nation state that we will deal with. We can kick them off the Human Rights Council. We can kick them off the Human Rights Council. We can kick them off various agencies. But membership in the UN is there. If you don't pay your dues, you can't vote eventually. But otherwise, you maintain your membership.

So the Security Council thing is, I mean, you'll appreciate, Paul, that for me as a former Canadian constitutional politician for many, I mean, you'll appreciate, Paul, that for me as a Canadian, former Canadian constitutional politician for many, many years, when somebody says we'd like to continue to debate on the Constitution of the United Nations, I sort of say, I think I've seen this movie. I've been there. I've experienced it. I'm not sure I want to experience it over and over again. I'm not sure I want to experience it over and over again. Since we're talking about the Security Council,

could Canada have won the last two times that it tried to get on the Security Council? Are there structural things that are just beyond our grasp? And are we missing out because we're not on the Security Council now? Well, let me answer the last question. The answer to the last question is no. I don't want to personalize it with respect to Mr. Harper under him, but I think there was a sense among a number of countries that under his leadership, Canada was less interested in the United Nations than it had been.

And I don't know whether that's a fair comment or not, but I think that's certainly something that one hears. I think the initiative that the Trudeau government took was made within five years after that defeat. And ordinarily, there's usually a 10 or 12 year gap between asks or candidacies. And one of the problems we faced in that experience was that a number of countries had already committed themselves to supporting others. In particular, although we're a member of the group that's called Western Europe and Others, which is the constituency from which we become two seats, two countries elected from it, it's hard for non-European countries to win at the best of times. And it's very hard to win when you've added yourself as a third candidate in that group,

because within that group, people have made their, pardon the expression, they've made their deals. So there's a lot of countries that we would have assumed would be friendly to us and would say, oh, of course, Canada will support you, who didn't support us. And that, I think, is a much more significant part of the defeat than anything else. And my advice to the government is based very much on my third point, and that is, in the current context and in foreseeable future context, I don't know why you'd want to spend a lot of your time and effort and money and engagement and everything else on the possibility of sitting for two years on the Security Council. It's not easy for me to see the logic of that. So maybe don't try next time. Oh, so maybe don't try next time. Well, figure out when the coast is clear next time, when there's an open, when there's a vacancy, do as much diplomacy as required to figure out how do we get ourselves in a stronger position before you go. And understand that given the number of countries in the world, 193 as opposed to 53, which it was in the old days, or 60 or 70 or 80, now you've got 193. You've got to pick your

spots well in advance if you want to clear run. And that'll be a decision for the government and maybe future governments to make as to what the timing is. But my point is this, is there's a lot that we do, a lot of engagement that we have, a lot of work that needs to be done that doesn't involve being a member of the Security Council. There are 178 countries that are not members of the Security Council right now, including a lot of big countries. And so you say, does that mean they're less important than the UN? I mean, last year we were in the top seven donor countries to the UN system. Top seven. That's a significant place for us to be.

And so we have a lot to say about what happens in the UNDP, but what happens in UNICEF. We get asked questions about a number of issues where our views are taken extremely seriously. We have a lot of ways of influencing the life and work of the UN in every field of its endeavor. There are hundreds of Canadians of great talent and ability who are working in the field for the UN or working at the head. We have two undersecretary generals of the United Nations now are Canadian. So we have a lot to be proud of as a country of our current and ongoing commitment and dedication to the UN and making it work more effectively.

The fact that we're not on the Security Council for two years is, I mean, the countries that won the Security Council vote that we were in, they're coming off the Security Council this year. So that ends that for us. There's no point in worrying about last year's snow. Even as the problems that you've been addressing and that you've described for us increasingly spill across borders and around the world,

there is also a rising skepticism for multilateral solutions and multilateral institutions. Obviously, a populist distrust of the World Health Organization and the UN and the World Health Organization and the UN and the World Trade Organization and on and on and on, but also some academic journalistic skepticism that this stuff isn't working even if it was a good idea and that nations need to retrench either to networks of friends, the so-called friend-shoring argument, or simply try and do what you can in the world and hope for the best? I have to assume that's not your

own read of things. Well, the fact of the matter is that Canada joined with a number of other countries to create NATO four years after we created the United Nations. And in the Charter of the United Nations, the formation of regional and other alliances is provided for. So I don't think there's anything incompatible between sometimes nation states have to do stuff, sometimes regional groups have to do stuff. Sometimes it has to be a broader basis of understanding. I don't think it's quite as stark a division as you might describe it.

I mean, we have a special economic relationship with the United States and now with Mexico. The debate around that took place in the 1980s and 1990s, and then back again under President Trump. But I think there's an overall recognition among a broad group of people that having that relationship is important to us and is to our advantage, at the same time as we remain committed to multilateral engagements of one kind or another. I think it's important not to be simplistic in drawing out these distinctions, except to say that those who would look to the more extreme forms of nationalism or the more extreme forms of xenophobia as being the way forward,

I think are completely wrongheaded. The challenges that the UK is now facing economically and politically in many other ways, I think can be traced to the decision on Brexit. That I think was the result of this populist desire to say, you know, let's get out of Europe. Let's be ourselves again. Let's pretend we're Sir Francis Drake all over again. And there's other ways in which the realities of the world just weigh in on that and say, yeah, go ahead, see what happens. See how that works out for you. And I think there are many, many other object lessons like that, which say that the more extreme forms of insistence on state sovereignty as an absolute in this world that we're in, come up against the realities of the market, the impacts of

the global events that I've described. I mean, go ahead and tell COVID that you're a nation state and you're independent. See what COVID says. Go ahead, tell climate change that you want to be on your own and don't want to do what anybody else does. See how that works out for you. I think we have to be smart enough to recognize that there are many features of our world that where borders don't really play as big a part in deciding what's going to happen as we might think. I feel a lot about it the way Churchill used to talk about democracy, where he said it's the worst form of government except for all the others.

And I think you can say the UN has many, many faults, and it's the worst form of global governance, except for all the others, because the reality is it's a way that allows for the flexibility of nation states and regional groupings to work side by side. And I do think we've got to be careful in thinking that, particularly when we're talking about the economy, in thinking that purely national solutions or directing capital exactly where to go and how to behave are always going to be effective or are going to work or are going to be frankly in our best interest.

And that's something that I've actually learned. So I share that with you. You've already given future prime ministers some thoughts on whether and how to apply for a security council seat. Maybe we can broaden it a bit. Obviously, the current prime minister is eternal. perceptions of Canada, opportunities for Canada, and hazards that Canada faces in the world over the next several years? As you know, from having jousted with me in scrums over the years, I don't like to answer hypothetical questions. But quite apart from the construct of your question, I would

say this. What we say is extremely important. The vision that we have and the words that we use are important. And how we express them is important. The clarity with which we express them, the vision that we share, the way in which we can try to draw the lines. The discussions today, for example, about information and misinformation, about democracy and authoritarianism, about the rights of women in the world today. These are all critically important for Canada to speak up about and to engage in and to not be afraid to be part of a global conversation and lead a global conversation on these issues. But there's always the test of what you do as well as what you say. And I think this is the test that we should always apply to ourselves

as people, as individuals, and as countries. So we can't just preach a message to the world and then not practice it. And the better we get at practicing it, the closer we get to really pushing ourselves, setting our own standards, trying to set a standard for the world, the better off we are, the stronger we are. The second thing I would say is as important as the domestic constituency is, we have to fully appreciate the global nature of the challenges that we face. And that really means understanding that how we're doing on the sustainable development goals, for example, which are just sort of a common sense description of what good government is aiming for, equality between women and men, ending serious poverty,

improving health care, all the things that we look at domestically, the line between those things and global issues is not as big a line as we might think it is. So we're going to have to continue to talk to Canadians, and who are after all a very multicultural and multilingual group of people about how quickly the world is shrinking. I think future governments will be facing this even more than we are. And that's something that we have to have to bear in mind. And I think that some of the things that I've learned in life is something I would also say to people, and that is never be afraid to admit when you're wrong. Never be afraid to apologize when it's the right thing to do. And learn how to walk humbly with the realities of life and the limitations of life.

And I think the more Canada can do that, and we as Canadians can do that, the stronger we'll be. So if we talk about the rule of law, practice it in what we do. When we talk about ending discrimination, practice it in what we do. Everything that we say to other people is a test that we have to be prepared to apply to ourselves.

And quite frankly, in case these words are ever turned against me, I actually think that the current government does that quite a lot in terms of how we've managed to change the national conversation on indigenous issues. I think it has been remarkable. And I hope it's sustained by future governments. All right, let's end on that relatively optimistic note. You've been very generous with your time. I appreciate it.

Paul, it's always good to talk to you. And I appreciate it as you get older and realize how smart you still are. I'm sure there'll still be opportunities for us to engage. Thank you very much. Thanks for not keeping me in the doghouse forever. No, you're not in the doghouse. That's fine. It's all good.

Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the National Arts Centre and the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It's published by the Toronto Star and iPolitics. Thanks to our founding sponsor, TELUS, and our title sponsor, Compass Rose. Our senior producer is Kevin Sexton. Our associate producer is Hayley Choi. Our executive producer is Lisa Gabriel. Stuart Cox is the president of Antica. You can read more of my stuff on my newsletter,

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