The Paul Wells Show - Unready and out of step

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Canada often seems "unready and out of step” with the world’s current challenges, according to the editors of a new book on foreign policy. With the rise of authoritarianism around the world and increasing hostility from the U.S., are we taking our place on the world stage seriously enough? Or does our foreign policy need an overhaul?   Philippe Lagassé and Vincent Rigby are two of the editors of the latest edition in the Canada Among Nations series. They join Paul to talk about what’s lacking and what can be done about it.   Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. The report cards in on Canada's foreign policy performance and uh-oh. If you were to ask me right now, identify Canada's foreign policy priorities, tell me what Canada's foreign policy is about. I'd be really hard pressed to produce it. This week, the editors of a major evaluation of Canada's foreign policy performance

sit down to share what they've learned. In a world of trouble, is Canada ready for the challenges it faces? Let's just say there's room for improvement. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. There aren't many things you can count on in this crazy world, but here's one. Every year there will be a new installment in the Canada Among Nations series. It's a book, a new book every year, an annual edited collection of essays on Canadian foreign policy,

produced by the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University here in Ottawa. Every year the folks at NIPSIA, as they call it, designate editors for the series, who in turn get colleagues and distinguished practitioners to say everything there is to say about Canada among nations. This all happens at the speed of universities, which in some ways is kind of reassuring. So the 40th installment of the series, which just came out, deals with stuff that happened in 2023. I've got two of the editors with me today. Philip Lagasse is the chair in international affairs at Carleton.

Vincent Rigby is on the faculty at McGill's Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal, like me. And in 2020 and 2021, he was Justin Trudeau's national security and intelligence advisor. They're not impressed. The world is in disarray, they write off the top.

Authoritarianism often seems to be winning. Canada often seems unready and out of step. The book's centerpiece is an essay by Bob Ray, Canada's ambassador to the United Nations. It's not a very diplomatic piece of writing. Bob Ray writes that, the gap between our investments and capabilities and the deteriorating global security outlook is widening.

He says it's time to close that gap. They sent all of this off to the printers long before Donald Trump started musing about plucking Canada like a ripe peach. But this book sets the stage for that crisis. If we can't depend on the neighbours to look out for us, is it time at long last to make sure we can depend on ourselves? Philip Lagasse, Vincent Rigby.

Thank you for joining me. As you'd be here, Paul. Thanks for having us. I mostly want to talk about what's in the book, but the fact of the book remains remarkable to me. This is a 40 year series of annual looks at Canadian foreign policy that Carleton has put out. So, I mean, I remember reading earlier versions

of this thing when I was an undergrad back in the 20th century. It's quite an undertaking. It's a staple. It's gone through many different publishers. It's gone through many different editors and it's always an adventure to put together. But to your point, it's almost a flagship, not only of Nipsey, but arguably of the scholarship upon Canadian foreign policy.

This is a pretty pessimistic volume. You write in the preface that the international situation is more unsettled than at any time since World War II. The world is in disarray, beset by climate crises, war, extremism, and geopolitical upheaval. Vince, that's them fighting words. That's going to say, as you're saying, my heart was lifted. Very uplifting stuff to put it mildly. No, I think that is really the point of the entire book, that we do live in very dark times and that this is a world that is driven by upheaval.

There's a great deal of unpredictability, of instability, and we've got this convergence of new national security threats, old national security threats that have come together and created a bit of a perfect storm, so to speak. And that's the world. And so the other theme of the book is how is Canada responding? Is Canada stepping up? Is it protecting its national interests? Is it working with allies? Is it protecting Canadians, government institutions, et cetera? How is it doing? And we don't give it a particularly high grade, I would say. Yeah.

I mean, in the preface, you and your co-author, Norman Hilmer, the distinguished historian, say that Canada often seems unready and out of step. And then in the opening chapter, it says, decades of good geography and good allies and good fortune have bred complacency and smugness. So I'm supposed to be asking questions. Should I lay the blame for that at the feet of the Trudeau government, which after all has been here for a decade, or at Canadian political culture more broadly? Phil. Let's start with the population. At the end of the day, they have never cared that much about security and defense. They've been willing to free ride on the American ally in particular since the end of the Second

World War. And politicians follow the voters. There's no real desire to invest heavily or take it as seriously as it needs to be taken. And then let's add the bureaucratic layer to that, where Ottawa is a town, if you ask Department of Finance, where it would like to spend its money, certainly not the military. The town itself has not seen this as a priority and has got corners. As we're seeing in recent years, there's a desire, a belief that now is the moment where this is going to change, but still we're dragging our feet. It's not something that we're really committed to even in the worst of times. We almost need something to hit us directly at

home for us to take it seriously. Speaking of which, I have to assume you had already gone to press when president-elect Trump issued his tariff threat. Did that make you wish you could go back and reorder your priorities for this volume, or do you feel like you're well served by events since you put the book to bed? Vids. This is my first experience in putting together a book like this. So Phil has been through many of these iterations and knows the challenges.

But one of the challenges is that you draft these books and then they get published about a year, year and a half later. And so the timeliness is sometimes an issue. I was looking over it again this morning and rereading some of the chapters and I kept on thinking of that overused Harold McMillan quote, events, Dear Boys events. And so much has happened in the last 12 to 18 months. And right at the top of the list, as you quite accurately say, is the election of President Trump,

if we were about to write the book now. I mean, I don't know, Phil, what you would say, but I would suggest that maybe Trump would be a little bit more to the top because virtually everything that the US does has a national security prism. And certainly we're seeing that right now with president Trump, where, you know, it starts talking about 25% tariffs, but what's the cause of spell according to him, it's the border, it's border security, it's fentanyl,

it's undocumented migrants, et cetera, et cetera. So the U S is kind of like the 800 pound gorilla in many of the chapters. Notwithstanding the fact that president Trump had not been elected yet. It just was there already. And I said on numerous occasions that that President Trump had not been elected yet. It just was there already. And I said on numerous occasions that even if Trump had not won the presidency, that we'd be having a lot of these national security type discussions with the democratic government as well. So the US is there.

Trump certainly had to spin to it. But I think the trends were already quite apparent. Paul, can I just add to that? In a way, I'm glad we wrote it before the Trump presidency and before the tariff threat, simply because it would have dominated everything, and it wouldn't have allowed us to actually identify the underlying problems. I think what the book does is to say,

even without this tariff threat, don't make it about that. It's bigger than that. It's a long-standing Canadian problem here. And if you simply focus in on what's happening today, then you'll let go of it once there's new president or the terror threat disappears. And that would probably be the worst mistake. And if I could jump in, Paul, you said at the outset, you mentioned the Trudeau government. And I mean, I certainly have the view, and I think Phil is as well, I hear this comes out in the book, that it's not about just the current government. This is a problem that's been there for many, many decades.

And you talked about the lack of a culture, this notion that we're somehow a far-approved house, to use that quote, that's been used a lot in the past as well, that we've been very, very fortunate with geography, et cetera. There is a complacency there. And has it been exacerbated under the Trudeau government? Well, you can certainly argue that. And I've made that argument at times, even though I was a senior public servant in that government.

So I probably hold some of the blame for that as well. But this is not a new issue. This is something that we've been having to grapple with for many, many decades. And I say in particular since the end of the gold war. I do want to ask you though, Vince, as the prime minister's national security advisor, did you often feel like the Maytag repairman? Did you often feel like you were providing services that were not sought? I knew you'd raise my stint and that's, that's fair enough, but I have to say, again,

I don't think this is a problem just with the current government. I think this is a problem down through the decades where when it comes to national security, defense issues, even on foreign policy, Canadian governments tend to be very, very responsive. And so when the you know what hits the fan, it's all hands on deck. We respond and kind of often responds quite well and gets in the game, you know, going back, looking at our history. Wars in the 20th century, first world war, second world war into the 21st century with Afghanistan. Uh, we do get in the game.

The problem is, is that when we go to the cupboard and see, okay, what's in the cupboard to help us here, it's often bare. And that's the problem. And so we've not been strategic. We've not been thinking about these things in advance. We wait for the crisis to happen. And then it's, as I say, okay, we better get moving. We better get moving fast.

So I was the NSIA during the pandemic. So the pandemic was 24 seven. It consumed a lot of my time. I spent probably 75, 80% of my time talking about the pandemic, giving intelligence briefings on the pandemic. And there were isolated issues here there, but yeah, there's a tendency, I think in all, all Canadian governments to wait for this stuff and to happen. And then, and then kind of hit the panic button.

Phil, like I say, this is a, a central theme of the chapter that you wrote on the government's defense policy paper, which came out last autumn, a chapter that you wrote with Justin Massey. The title of it is the Unstrategic Defense Policy. The argument is essentially that Canada is a policy taker on these things rather than a policymaker. It's figuring out how to contribute to ends that are determined largely in Washington and Brussels. And what's going to be done with our military is to some extent treated as not really a Canadian concern. We're just happy to help. Is that fair? I'm in Washington right now and I just was at the Wilson Center and I gave a talk on Canadian defense. And a former American

official was there and she said, you know, we always kind of go to you and you say, well, what are your priorities? And Canada never has any answer. It's all over the place, just everything under the sun. So they kind of come to us expecting us to be able to say, okay, this is what we're going to do. But that's not how we approach it. We approach it as we want to be the best joiners we can be. We want to plug into whatever you're doing. Canadian defense policy is being seen to join coalition operations, having the flag there. And we measure our success too often, at least militarily, did the Americans respect our contribution? Were we seen as valuable? And that's fine when you're closely tied into the US administration and you share

your general outlook on the world. But when you start to diverge, then you're facing a bit of a problem, right? And in particular, you might say, well, what are we doing to define the Canadian national interests? What would a Canadian military that is geared towards independent operations be looking like? How might it be structured? And we prefer not to have that conversation. It's far easier to, and cheaper, I might add, to plug and play.

When you talk about wondering what the priority is of not having a ready answer, I was in Finland a year ago. I probably can't dine out on that trip forever. But Finland and Sweden have just joined NATO. And when you ask them what they're going to be up to, they say, well, Norway's got a formidable Navy. Sweden has a serious Air Force and we have a ground army that you don't want to mess with. So we'll take care of the northern extremity of NATO and not do too much expeditionary work elsewhere. We'll just make sure that the North is never NATO's problem. That's the kind of ready answer that I get the impression you'd like to have somebody in Canada come up with and so far they haven't really done that. No, we want to be all things to all people. Even though we know we can't do it all, we would

prefer to have a skeletal multi-purpose force that can be wherever it needs to be, as opposed to saying, okay, we're going to focus in on that, or we're going to focus in on a particular region. I mean, even now we're talking about being in Latvia, being in the Arctic, doing North American defense, potentially doing humanitarian or disaster. And now some people are talking about 10,000 troops on the border. I mean, how do you do all that with a defense budget that's around 1.5% in GDP? You don't do any of it particularly well.

I think that's fundamentally the problem. I used to say even when I was in the bureaucracy that we're middle power if that term is still in use, but with great power aspirations. And we love to talk about how we're a country that's bordered by three oceans and that we've got interests all over the world. So we want to be in North America, but we're also a member of NATO. We've got interests in Africa, the Indo-Pacific region. We've got a history in the Middle East. So we want to be ready to play in all of those areas. But at the end of the day, Phil is 100% right.

If you're not going to resource it, then you've got a problem and you can't be all things to all people. So then you do have to start to focus. I thought a good start may have finally come with the latest defense update where there was a focus on the Arctic. And I think that's good for us. It's good for the United States. It's a move in the Arctic. And I think that's good for us. It's good for the United States. It's a move in the right direction.

But if you read the strategy closely, it's still an expeditionary force. They still want to potentially play with the big boys. And I was there for some of those crises like Iraq and what have you. And when the US wants to go somewhere, we often want to be there. Not always the government,

but at least the military would like to be there. Would like to be there right beside the big boys in the big action. And I'm sorry, we can't do that with the resource space that we have now. A lot of these reflections inform an early chapter in the book by Bob Ray, who is after all, still Canada's ambassador to the United Nations.

I noticed that the chapter is called A Personal Reflection. And it kind of sure is, he says essentially we don't, we need to have an army that's worth joining and we don't really have one yet. chapter is called a personal reflection. And it kind of sure is, he says essentially we don't, we need to have an army that's worth joining and we don't really have one yet. Did you have to twist his arm to get him to be that Frank or did you finally have to let him

in because he was banging on the windows? Well, maybe I could ask, answer that one. Cause I'm the one who reached out to him. Uh, not that we're close personal friends, but I think I knew him well enough that he wouldn't shut down in the email when he saw the name. But no, I reached out and explained what the book was about. And he actually didn't take that much convincing.

He made a couple of jokes about how he's not going to say anything that's going to get him fired. But at the same time, I think he gives a pretty honest assessment of the state of the world and Canada's position in that world. And the personal reflection piece, I think, is really interesting because he talks a little bit about his time looking at Air India and him being sort of the target of Favart's CMP scrutiny earlier in his career. I think he's actually a university student. So it's got a nice feel to it. But then when he actually gets to sort of a tour de raison of the world, it's, it's,

it's, it's really well done. And it's, it's like, the world is really, it goes back to the quote from the introduction, Paul, it's a world in turmoil. It really is. And Canada does have to do more. And so I think he pushes the limit a little bit with what, what a bureaucrat normally say, but he does it and he does it very eloquently. And he sent me a little email the other day.

I hope he doesn't mind if I, if I mentioned this, but he said, I'm glad you reached out to me. I'm glad to have written it. The argument he makes is that, you know, recruitment is a part of a generalized crisis in the Canadian forces. And that to help to address that, you need to have a Canadian forces that is worth joining. And he says, this is not a patch up job. This is not something that we can turn around with a quick fix and a strategy. It's the work of generations, but it's time for that work to happen. That's maybe a more somber message than we're used to hearing from people in public service in this country. It is. And at the end of the day, you can buy all the new equipment and all the highest end capabilities

to reach your 2% of GDP. But if you can't actually convince people to use that equipment in uniform, then it doesn't really matter. We tend to think of capability as being technology or platforms, but people are a key part of that. And let's be frank here, our infrastructure is crumbling, military infrastructure, we've let it really slip for decades. So we're spending a lot of money and a lot of time getting new equipment, but that infrastructure piece is going to be critical to keeping people in the force, making sure that they aren't working in conditions that aren't great or dangerous. And already, right?

Uh, the bases and the locations aren't always easy to access, not really attractive necessarily to people who grew up in urban centers. So we have a lot of work to do there to say the least, but, you know, as I always kind of joke with my students, if you want to do air training, are you ready to move to Moose Jaw? Right. It's no sly against Moose Jaw, are you ready to move to Moose Jaw? Right? It's no sly against Moose Jaw, but we have to be realistic that we've got a big country with a lot of infrastructure spread all across it.

And this is, if it's difficult to see family, if it's difficult to get from one place to another and if it's difficult for your partner to follow you along, it makes it a really tough proposition. I've always said that all the money in the world is not going to solve the problems of D&D if they don't fix what I call the P&P problem, personnel and procurement, and they're intimately linked. And so we all have a story about D&D trying to get money out the door every year and lapsing funds back to the center to finance our treasury board.

But there's the procurement issue and this personnel and you've got to fix both of those. I saw both of those dimensions when I worked in D&D. I spent half my career in that department. We've been short of military personnel for a long time. We've had a really bad procurement process for a really long time and we just don't seem to be getting out of the curve on this. So again, you could increase this to 2% tomorrow. But I don't think it would do the trick. There's an argument that I've heard more frequently recently

than ever before, which is that the way these things are accounted within NATO plays against Canada, that we have AI and cyber and intelligence capabilities that are not counted towards the 2% target. I have to say it doesn't sound like a terribly satisfying claim, but I guess I'll start with you, Phil. Do you put any stock in that? I think it's a bit of an exaggeration. The prime minister at the NATO summit last summer said, well, we could just give the Coast Guard some weapons and that would boost us. Maybe. I don't think it would get you to your 2% though. You can only do so much fudging and accounting. At the end of the day, people know what you're actually dealing with. If it's just a numbers game or shell game,

that's going to be noticed and it has to be sustained over time. That's the other big thing here. You can make it seem like you're spending more, but you're not going to fool the United States about your actual contribution, for example. If anything, you're going to annoy them even more. I want to say a word about the people who are supporting this podcast. McGill annoy them even more. with all its imperfections and limitations. With their one-year intensive master of public policy program, they teach a principle-based design of policy solutions to important problems. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxpellschool. This is an edited volume.

You are not your contributors' keepers, but Vince, let's start trying to put together an action plan for a more activist international Canada. What would that look like? Where do we go first as we start to patch holes? Well, this in and of itself is a conversation that probably lasts about three days if you want to do it properly. But I always say you got to start at the strategic level. So it would be really, really helpful if we had a national security strategy to identify some of those priorities

that Phil was talking about earlier. And so in the defense update, there is a couple of small paragraphs that say that the government will put together a national security strategy and at the same time, a defense policy every four years. So I'm led to believe that deep in the bowels of PCO, people are beavering away on producing a national security strategy and at the same time, a defense policy every four years. So I'm led to believe that deep in the bowels of PCO, people are beavering away on producing a national security

strategy and getting that out the door. I'm not so sure it's going to get out the door in this political context now, given where we're at, but that it is being worked on apparently. So that, that I think is reassuring. We need one. We've not had a national security policy since 2004. And to speak to the culture, the lack of a culture on national security, it's the only national security policy we've ever had. So if you think about that, 21 years ago, we last had a national security strategy. And then at the same time, we don't have a foreign policy. If you were to ask me right now, identify Canada's foreign policy priorities, tell me what Canada's foreign policy is about.

I'd be really hard pressed to produce it. I think it's a very transactional foreign policy to Phil's point before about defense policy. I think our foreign policy flits about very responsive, very crisis-laden. We've got some regional strategy, the Indo-Pacific strategy. We've got an Arctic strategy now on the foreign policy side, but those are regional strategies and they don't link up to anything at the strategic level. Last time I checked, you had some fairly significant investments in Europe.

You know, we're in the Western Hemisphere. What are we going to do in Latin America and Caribbean? We've got interest in Africa. I mean, how does this all tie together? So we need some strategic direction. We need a government to come out and say, so this is what we're going to focus on. And hey, guess what? We do have limited resources. So we are going to make some trade-offs. And so we're not going to do anything in Africa anymore or not as much as we used to, or we're going to do less of the Middle East. We're

going to focus on the Indo-Pacific, because that's where the action is, and Europe, where there's lots of action as well, and maybe the Arctic, something like that. But I think starting there would be the way to go. I'd only add that you have to, in a sense, be clear on how much you're going to spend and what's realistic over the long term. I think that's the first challenge I would lay out. So if you're only realistically going

to hit 2% for a short period of time and then dip back down, that's not sufficient to be globally deployable across all these regions. If you're going to focus on Europe, then you should probably focus on Europe. But realistically, I don't know if you can do Europe properly and Indo-Pacific and the Arctic altogether, at least not well, right? If the United States has been telling us for some time now, maybe you should do a little bit more on the Arctic side of things. Do we want to do that? Is that what we see ourselves doing? Or in light of what's happening in the US, do we say, now we need to build our European partnerships a little bit more. And I'll just end on this. A

couple of years ago, the Japanese were really pushing us to try and be a more serious Indo-Pacific country. And they were making overtures to us saying, look, I mean, we're trying to friendship, we're trying to get some people involved here. They eventually kind of let it go because we just weren't biting. I mean, we don't seem to have the ability to

think things through long-term. Are there any other countries where the national security discourse is as completely dominated by the question of whether they're going to spend 2% of their GDP on defense? Is there like in, I don't know, Ireland or somewhere, are they high five in themselves because they're at 2.01? Or do they have a policy to do something and then they look at the math later? In the UK right now, they're talking about whether it's 2.5 or three. Germany is trying to figure out how they sustain too. I mean, there's a number of other countries

that are having this conversation, but if I'm going to be a little bit more sympathetic, it's a bit easier when you're in Europe, right? Your population is now keenly aware of what's up. There's a war right on their doorstep. They have no illusions about what's happening. We still, unfortunately, even in spite of foreign interference, even in spite of incursions into the Arctic, whatever it is. The Canadian population takes a long time to wake up to what's happening. Vincent mentioned the world wars. I mean, we were dragging our feet on armament right until the late 30s. And even then we had to really be kind of brought into it.

We finally did when push came to shove. But it's a great Canadian tradition that we hum and ha about this stuff up until you really can't anymore. I think every country struggles with defense dollars. I mean, God knows even in the US, you have certain parties and you got to spend more on defense, you got to spend more on defense. I think what is different, I think in the Canadian dimension or context is that we truly are at the bottom

of the barrel within NATO now. We're one of only the handful of countries that have not reached 2%. We don't even talk about the percentage of our defense budget that goes to procurement. It's supposed to be 20%. So it's bad. And so to answer your question, Paul, yeah, other countries talk about the dollars, but we are, I think, having an existential debate with ourselves right now. And plus we've also got the United States right beside us.

Trump's wagging his finger at everybody. The US has been wagging their finger at everybody for a while, but they tend to look at us and go, hey, you're right next to us. Can you do it a little bit better? And the last point, I think that just to build on what Phil said, yeah, it is easier for countries in Europe and even in the Indo-Pacific region. Australia's got China they can point to. These countries can say the threat is really imminent, but it goes back to the point that

Phil made at the beginning about our population's not particularly interested in this stuff. They're still in a world of 100 years ago where, again, we're far from the crisis and the politicians listen to them. But my problem is that the politicians have got to show leadership and politicians can drive public opinion. They don't actually have to respond to it all the time. So drive public opinion and start talking about the world as it is. The last line, I think in the introduction all to the book is Canadians need to lift up their eyes and see the world for what it truly is right now.

And it's a great line. I think we can give the credit to Norman. He end that line. It's a beautiful line. Wake up, wake up. And the government's got beautiful line. Uh, wake up, wake up. And the government's got to have that discussion, start talking about the threats. Not scaremongering. It's, it's dealing with reality.

What's the golden age that could serve as a reference? What is the period when Canadian foreign policy was well planned, well executed and well budgeted? I'd say 47 to 57. We insisted on being a founding member of NATO. We responded to the Korean war and didn't just immediately disarm in the aftermath of that war, but actually kept forces going and kept the significant force going up until Dieffenbaker came in. And that's when you had the slow decline that occurs.

But that's, that's the era when that occurs. But that's the era when those budgets and those forces did the peacekeeping operations. They were the ones stationed Western Europe. They were the forces that basically sustained us until the 70s and 80s when the next recapitalization happened. But it's easy to point back to that time and say we should just go back to that. The reality is also that much of Europe was pretty decimated by the war and the Asian powers had not been redeveloped. So you didn't have economic powerhouses like South Korea and Japan was also rebuilding. So it was also a unique moment.

But at the very least, it points back to our potential. There was a time when if you did invest in this and you were thinking of the San Lebron government in particular, where you're hard nosed, you know what needs to be done, and there's a willingness to spend it. But I'll also note the spending on defense and security starts to decline when the spending on social programs starts to ramp up. And that's not coincidental. Well, two things. First of all, the golden age that you identify, I don't have my copy of Lester Pearson's memoirs to hand, but I'm pretty sure there's a paragraph in there where

he says, we knew this couldn't last. A lot of our allies had had their Navy sunk. A lot of the great armies in the world had just surrendered in humiliation for war crimes. And there was a window and we knew that it wasn't going to stay open forever. And I guess the next question that comes to mind is, say if we take as read that we don't do enough in the world and that we should, how do you get there from here? Is there a message that you find politicians are more interested in hearing about on this front? Or is this something that we sort of cluck about every, every year when a new edition of your book comes out? Oh, I've been thinking about this a lot in the last week or so, given our Trumpian moment and my view, and I think a view of a lot of people

out there is that this is all very unfortunate and Trump's being a little bit of this and a little bit of that, all kinds of different adjectives and words we can use to describe his behavior and his personality. But at the end of the day, maybe he's doing us a favor. Maybe he's telling Canada to wake up. And I don't just mean in terms of their foreign policy, but as a country, I think that in the last 20, 30 years, you can make an argument that we kind of lost our way. I mean, I'm not a domestic expert in terms of the economy and so on, but you're hearing all this talk about internal trade barriers.

We're hearing a lot to talk about productivity. We don't have a 21st century economy. Get with it. Build more oil refineries and the ability to ship oil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then internationally, I think to some extent you can make the argument, yeah, Trump will, he'll hinder anybody and he'll pick on anybody. But I think he'll pick on countries

that he perceives as weak. And I think Canada internationally and on the world stage right now, is perceived by a lot of people to have lost their way and not particularly relevant. So how do you go to Canadians? How do you have this conversation? Well, you don't just have to talk about the threat

in terms of conflict, Russia, China and the Middle East, but you can also say, hey, maybe the US isn't our closest friend anymore. We're going to have to start thinking about acting our age and building ourselves up domestically, but also on the world stage. And this just makes a lot of sense. And I think that's a message that might resonate with Canadians right now, including having a stronger defense policy and more resources for defense and a more up-to-date national security strategy and better resources along the border, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm wondering if that would gain some traction with the Canadian population right now, a

sort of Canada that's kind of reborn, given the kind of pressure we've been under in the last, and this is, we're two weeks into his presidency and it's not going to get any better. It's not going to get any better. So we're going to be getting this message a lot in the coming two weeks into his presidency, and it's not going to get any better. It's not going to get any better. So we're going to be getting this message a lot in the coming months and years. When we speak about attracting other investment or building other partnerships, the reality is you have to kind of be present to do so. Think back to the Trudeau senior. He withdrew significant number of forces from Europe, and then he goes to Europe and tries to negotiate trade deals. And the Germans tell him, what the hell are you talking

about? And that's where you get the reinvestment in defense that occurs under him and the Leopard tanks and things like that. The two go together, right? If you're going to be a trading nation like us, and you want to build other types of prosperity, investment interests in the country, you have to make sure that you're present in the world and that you have allies in more than one sense. I mean, there's been a lot of talk around how a submarine deal, for instance, is going to be a national partnership with others, not just a piece of military kit. That's the right approach.

You have to think of it in those terms. You have to think of research and development with other countries. Who are you working with to do some of this? It's been very easy, incredibly easy for us to just say, you know what, the simplest, cheapest solution is just to tie into the US system, and that would be good enough.

But as we're seeing it, it really exposes us to some significant vulnerabilities. And it's not just on the security side, it's on the trade side and our own domestic economy. We've just become incredibly complacent when it comes to living off the US. So it's part of a package deal in a way. What is a new Canada look like and where does it want to be in the world? How do you rethink your country at this stage? Absolutely. There's no suggestion I think of of saying to the US, bye bye, we're gone. I mean, again, geography is a reality. Economics are a reality.

And I often hear from my economist friends, we tried trade diversification. It's never worked. We're no further ahead. And it's very, very difficult to diversify when it comes to the military. Again, we're so close to the US military, but I think the time has come where you've got to look at this a little bit more forcefully, a little bit more creatively,

and start reaching out to friends and allies and just looking at what the opportunities, the options are, because this model ain't gonna work in the long-term, this is the way the US is going, and everyone's assuming that it's four years and then someone's gonna replace Trump and it's back to normal. I wouldn't count on that.

I don't think we'll ever going to have another Trump, but the policies, it's not like these have popped up out of nowhere in trade protectionism in the U S this has been an issue for a while. Tariffs, tariffs are not new to Mr. Trump. I mean, Biden wasn't exactly a laggard when it came to tariffs either. So this is something we're going to have to

really cope with. Well, this is a theme of my own writing lately is that you're not always going to have a Trump, but JD Vance's young man and Stephen Miller, who advises them on border things is seemingly never ending. And the Heritage Foundation is not about to shut down. So, um, it might be time to admit to ourselves that we can't keep borrowing the neighbor's lawnmower. It's a good way of putting it. Phil, cheer me up. What, what, what are the green, what are the green shoots that you've

identified in this exhaustive study? Well, look, I think there is, you know, some reason for optimism. I think the reality is we do have a very professional public service that is able to do things when it's given the permission to do so. I think that's one of the themes that I really came across in a lot of this. It's not like that we're bad at things. It's that there's a real risk aversion, generally speaking, that inhibits things. And if you have clear political direction, you might be able to do more. In terms of overall kind of positives coming out of it, there is this conversation that's happening. There is a recognition that we can't just keep going.

I don't know if it's going to feature prominently in the debate during the election, but it strikes me that we do actually have an opportunity now, looking at everything that's before us, looking at the threats, looking at our economy, to see ways in which these things are interconnected and to try and say to the public, okay, now's time to make some difficult decisions about what we want to do and what direction we want to go in. So I'd say that the silver lining to me is the one that Vince identified, which is we've had inflection moments in Canadian history where we go through a pretty significant transformation. So after the Second World War, we stopped being closely tied to the British Empire and we decided to put our lot in

with the United States. Is this a new inflection point where we say, okay, we tried that model for a while, it was great for us, but now there's a different model that we can look at. My hope is that the seriousness of the moment is such that it does finally get the population and most of the political leadership to recognize that there's an opportunity here. I've got to say, just riffing off that, that if now's not the moment, I don't know when it will be. Because I think Phil's 100% right. A, you've got the threat and the state of the world. And we do say in the paper, I don't think it's been like this since the end of the Second World War. So that's just a reality. And then second, you are actually having a debate in Canada about defense and national

security interests. I can't remember last time one of my neighbors came up and started talking to me about 2%. If you'd mentioned 2% a year ago, two years ago, they'd go, what are you talking about? Somebody even questioned what's NATO. But I mean, it's not always been the most informed debate over the last couple of years, and it's been frustrating at times and a lot of misleading issues that been sort of surfaced that have frustrated me, but, um, you know, foreign interference, the convoy, now this with Trump, 2% defense spending

more and more people talking about the Arctic, the discussions taking place finally, and as Phil says, lo and behold, we've got an election coming up. What a great time. I mean, I hope we don't have a Kim Campbell moment where we go, now's not the time to have serious conversation. No, this is the time to have a serious conversation. I think the first litmus test will be whether we actually have a dedicated debate to foreign policy, defense,

policy, security. Well, gentlemen, you've been a barrel of laughs today. Thanks so much. We're never coming back on this show again, are we? Let's come on over and we can kick it anytime, I'll tell you. Um, uh, Phil Ligasse from, uh, Carleton University, Vincent Rigby, now at McGill, a colleague of mine at the Max Bell School. Thanks for your work on this volume and thanks for sharing your work with us, uh, this week.

Thanks, Paul. Thank you, Paul. Much appreciated. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Regehr is Antica's head of audio.

If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. you