Transcript
[Applause] Thank you, Matthew. Michael, there are people who would know how the Privy Council is constructed: who sits at the Privy Council, who decides who sits on the Privy Council, and what the primary role of the council would be. So, you’d like me to go through that, please? Okay. Well, some of this will be familiar to you, I imagine, and if you need to, visually think of those TV dramas about the Tudors and medieval kings and so on. The Privy Council just means the private council to the king or queen, the monarch, and it used to be largely a group of nobility and aristocrats in Britain. There’s a French version of that as well. It evolved into modern practice, where the cabinet and the Prime Minister became the principal advisors to the monarch. So basically, everybody who’s ever been a cabinet minister is sworn into the Privy Council and becomes a privy councillor for life and gets “PC” on their business card. Some people get sworn in or added to it as a sort of honorific for other forms of service, but mostly, it’s every living former and current cabinet minister. The only group that ever meets is the current cabinet. I don’t think there’s ever been an attempt to get all of them together. So, that’s basically it.
The Privy Council Office (PCO) is essentially the government civil service department that supports the cabinet and the Prime Minister, with the Prime Minister being the chair of the cabinet. In that little medieval drama, there’s usually some guy sitting off to the side in a chair with a quill, writing down everything that’s discussed and writing them up as edicts and decrees that the king can then sign. That’s the secretary to the king. I guess… well, I’m going to get this wrong, and I’ll get corrected on Facebook tonight, but there was also a character, Stephen, I think, who was always feuding with Cromwell. Cromwell was more like the Prime Minister. Anyway, some of those careers didn’t end well if they fell out of favor; it was harsh.
So, that’s basically it. The PCO is basically the Prime Minister’s department. Every minister has a department: Minister of Agriculture, Minister of Transport, the Ministry of Fisheries. The PCO is about eight hundred people who support the roles that a Prime Minister plays within the cabinet and within government. Matthew mentioned this in passing: you served in the Privy Council—Mulroney, Campbell, Chrétien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau. Now, some of those were relatively brief terms, but I was thinking today, getting ready to talk to you, that if you’re making a transition, and for the purposes of brevity, with all due respect to Ms. Campbell, we’ll just go from Mulroney to Chrétien—centrist candidate, centrist prime ministers both, little depicted shoes in terms of overall political philosophy. Then you go from Chrétien, and I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, we’re going to skip over you for the moment, to Mr. Harper, who has made it very clear, coming out of the Reform roots in the West, and the marriage of convenience between the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservative Party to form the CPC.
Are you watching? I mean, you collectively and you individually—are you watching the evolution of the campaigns? There’s a big change coming, big time here. There’s going to be a demand for institutional change, which might not be familiar to a lot of people with less experience than yours. It’s a good question. I think what people don’t really know much about is that the important transition, or the change, is not about what they’re going to do—whether they’re going to do free trade or not, or this form of childcare program or that form of childcare. That’s relatively straightforward; they’ve told Canadians what they want to do in the campaign, and they come in and get on with implementing it.
Each change of Prime Minister—and we’ve had about seven in the last thirty years—is a change in the “how.” How they are going to develop decisions in one area of policy… Well, it’s not about the policy, I guess, is my point. It’s about the choices. There are prime ministers who like big teams and big cabinets and long discussions, and there are prime ministers who like to have a smaller, tighter group. If you have a bigger group, you are probably going to be inclined, at some point, to have an inner cabinet-type thing, like a Planning and Priorities Committee or some group. How you decide to array your talent in a decision-making kind of system is really important. It sends signals about what’s important to you. If you have a Cabinet Committee on Climate Change, that’s a signal to Canadians. How you group different issues is going to create some synergies and some gaps and so on.
One of my standard lines is that the scarcest resource in Ottawa is time. You can spend money you don’t have; you just have to borrow it. You can create political capital by doing things that voters respond to, but you cannot add to the time limit. There are 168 hours in the week, and you’re probably in Ottawa for 30 weeks a year. If you had a four-hour cabinet meeting, which is a lot—two to three is the norm—let’s say three hours in cabinet for 30 weeks, that’s 90 hours for everything from agriculture to veterans. So, it’s kind of an algorithm for optimizing that time, making sure issues have been consulted on—due diligence has been done on legal aspects, costing aspects, implementation issues, you know, whatever it turns out to be—and making the best use of those hundred hours of cabinet time. You can supplement that cabinet time by having working groups and committees to do the early-stage work, and they’ll beat up proposals until they’re in shape for full cabinet, and so on.
Mr. Chrétien liked to work with a one-tier cabinet. Mr. Harper liked to work with a one-tier cabinet. Mr. Trudeau also works with a one-tier cabinet, but you often end up with working groups, junior ministers, and so on. Setting that, what we call in Ottawa the “machinery of government” in the decision-making process… The other thing the Prime Minister does, of course, is decide who’s going to do what. So, the early days are about figuring out, “I’m going to have somewhere between 25 and 35 ministers. Portfolios get put together or they get pulled apart, and they have a political purpose, a policy purpose, or whatever.” So, you decide you’re going to group these things under this person. The toughest choices, and a lot of the job of the Prime Minister, is team management. “I want you to be my Health Minister, and I think you’ll be better at Defense. If I put this person over here…” What are the dynamics likely to be in a team that may or may not know each other very well? By definition, when you get a big change of government, like the arrival of the Chrétien people, or the Harper people, or the Trudeau people, a lot of them come to Ottawa, and they may have never been an MP before. They may or may not have been a minister before—a lot of them have never been an MP before, and some of them have never been to Ottawa except as a tourist. Then you’re saying, “Come to Rideau Hall, get sworn in, and suddenly you’re supposed to be functional as the Minister of X, Y, Z.”
So, those early days are largely about how to be an effective minister, how the cabinet is going to work, how we are going to take decisions, and how to build a cohesive team out of people who may not have met each other. The candidate in Halifax may never have met the candidate from Edmonton until suddenly they’re in a cabinet committee together, and they’re all human beings. So, the dynamics of a situation like that, when you have a new government with a lot of fresh faces…
Does the Privy Council provide a talent pool for deputy ministers and senior staff? Well, one of the jobs of the Clerk is to make recommendations on who gets to be the deputy minister of X, Y, and Z. Part of it is trying to do the best you can with the career development of that person, with the portfolio of 60 or 70 people. You’re trying to work the portfolio towards gender equity, diversity, or getting younger, or whatever. So, you’re working on the aggregate numbers, individual career development, and then I would say half of my time was spent on personnel issues—about developing and appointing deputy ministers. Part of that was doing your best to create a pair bond, as I called them, between the minister and the deputy. That’s more art and intuition than just a feel, because every minister and every deputy minister certainly has a different work style. They learn differently. There are people that love to talk and argue; there are people that like to cross-examine until they understand. There are people that like to pull things apart and put them back together; there are people that read, and there are people that don’t read. You have to adjust to all of those.
The underlying point somewhere in there is that when you’re in the public service, you adapt to them, not the other way around. You figure out—and this is true of being a deputy minister to a minister, I had four of them—you spend the first month or so trying to figure out what is going to work for them. What are their work habits? Are they going to need to go and have a smoke every 15 minutes? I had a chain-smoking minister once, and you could watch… you know, time to take a break. It’s a trivial example, but the point is you adapt to them. I had ministers who were good in small groups, and ministers who liked to talk and talk and talk, and you try to bring things to a conclusion. I had other people who were pretty curt and just wanted to get things done. So, you adapt to their style, basically. The same thing applies to how cabinet works.
When you have a situation, and several already have been mentioned… but you’ve addressed this. I don’t know where you found the time to think about it, write about the institution, and also policy issues. I was thinking with the coronavirus situation in China now, thinking back to the Zika virus here, the attacks in Paris, and even the attack in Ottawa… Brexit…
Mr. Trump arrives and decides it, and after starts, it’s a good idea after all. All of a sudden, sort of events outside the control of the Prime Minister and his cabinet, the Government of Canada intrudes in a monstrous way on life in this country. How do you position yourself to react? Their institutional—oh, it’s a really good question. There’s always a blend, like between the ambitions of the party that won the election. They will have declared a platform, and the pattern in the last twenty, thirty years is a fairly detailed platform. You know, it varies, and most of what I’m talking about would apply to a provincial government, by the way; there’s pretty much the same software, with some, you know, some variation. And so, you know, they expect to move fairly quickly on implementation of that. It usually doesn’t survive first contact with, you know, the world because stuff happens. And then the next four years are about zigzagging and trying to stay on course and trying to deliver as much of that as possible. So part of it is, well, I’ll borrow the old phrase about known unknowns and unknown unknowns. You try to have people who think about issues like public health emergencies. To use the coronavirus thing, we learned a lot from SARS. We learned, we set up a Public Health Agency of Canada; people worked on the infrastructure of public health and so on. We were infinitely better prepared now than we were for the SARS outbreak and so on. That would be tested. We went through the Ebola thing and whatnot, so there’s an infrastructure to deal with that. There are people who come into work every day worrying about terrorism, and they spend their day, you know, trying to head off and deter and deal with that. And for the most part, very, very successfully. Thank goodness for that. And you don’t have to worry about it because they do it for you; they stand on guard for thee, as the anthem says. You can have economic shocks; you know, oil prices go down. You can have somebody get elected President of the States; it takes them off in a different direction. So it’s all about it, or change a Premier in Ontario or Alberta or what have you. Lots of things upset the dynamic. What you want to do—and this is a big part of the sort of the PCOS role—is, while a lot of attention is naturally going to go to whatever’s hot. So I’m sure the Prime Minister was spending an awful lot of time on Iran over the last few weeks, and something else will, you know, happen later in the year and so on. There are people dealing with the things that are foreseeable. I will have to be at the Commonwealth summit in the fall, and they’re working on, you know, whatever needs to be done for that. Or, you know, I’ve promised to do a gun control bill; people are working on the final finishing touches of that. So you count on the clerk’s job, which is often not the crisis management. Sometimes you get sucked into the room, and you’re discussing about, you know, what do we do with this or that because it tends to be, you know, somebody that the Prime Minister was used to talking to and balancing things off of. But I didn’t try to be the crisis manager. I actually tried to spend a lot of time leaning against that and saying, “What are we gonna need six weeks from now, six months from now, next year?” As I often say, I made a really good living out of planning lists and calendars and making people aware of what would be needed, you know, six months from now or a year from now. So they ensure the rest of the machine is running. Yeah, somebody else is there. There are 70 deputies out there, and there are all these shops. And a smart deputy knows, a smart minister knows their moment will come. I, you know, I was asked to develop, you know, pick a topic: medical assistance and dying legislation. They’re working on it. The Prime Minister doesn’t have to spend any time thinking about that; it’ll be ready, you know. I mean, give or take, you know, one is ready or one is needed. And so, I use a lot of metaphors. A lot of it’s the, you know, the flow and the plumbing, and just making sure things don’t get stuck and they keep moving forward. Some things need a lot of consultation and outreach, and some things are pretty cooked. You know, the decision on once you’ve got the NAFTA agreement, you’re either gonna ratify it or you’re not. And so, I mean, that’s a relatively straightforward parliamentary exercise. Now, the negotiation over two and a half years was much more complicated. Seem to keep an eye on. So each deputy, who is a para-bond with a minister or some cluster there—they now have, this is Canadian federal practice—a pretty good idea of these are the six things I’m supposed to be working on. And then they have a pretty good idea about what are the risks and ten contingencies that might happen in, you know, in my world. And do I have the people and the systems that can respond fairly quickly to them? Stuff happens and you get real shocks and surprises, but I always felt that probably eighty percent of the work we did was for entirely predictable deadlines and events. I used to get really irritated with people where they would be the hero and want to, you know, come in the last 48 hours, and it’s a big crisis to have something ready for a meeting and say, “Well, this meeting has been on the calendar for 11 months. Like, why didn’t you come a lot earlier with, you know, some just kind of interim draft?” You know, so you try to create processes within your department or within your system of gating and checking in and, you know, how is it coming along? Do you have a first draft? What’s your first thoughts on this? And it’s a very, very iterative kind of process. It must require some of those briefs incredible patience. I was thinking this afternoon that if anybody here is under 40, they won’t remember this, and God bless you for it. I never, at work, anybody here under 40, we’re gonna give advice to later. But I could remember when they finally figured out the constitutional and business, and Trudeau and Pearson went over, and I had to leave with the Queen. They signed the documents; I’m gonna be the happiest guy in Canada. I didn’t want to talk about what constitutional. Come what may, part of that discussion applied to mainland Nova Scotia, which is my thing. And then NAFTA, like it seemed like it lasted almost as long, you know, and the ups and downs, or back and forth, that people handling those briefs, which go on a decade each. Baby, lovely. Yeah, close handy. That must be very difficult work. Well, there aren’t that many of those kind of, you know, ongoing perennials. What usually happens is people come in and out; you know, you get a crew that works on some phase of it, and then they get burned out or fed up and move on to do other things. You bring in other people. I came in to the constitutional world for Charlottetown. I didn’t do Meech. There was a group that did Meech, and there’s a psychological element to this. Like, people are gonna say this a lot tonight; they’re human beings. You give your blood and guts and soul on a project, and then it fails. Like Meech, you know, it was defeated or something. You know, it’s gut-wrenching, and it’s very hard to then go in the next week and say, “Well, we’re gonna move on to the next phase of this.” It’s usually you try to, you get those people repurposed and re-energized by giving them something different to do, and you bring in a new crew. So, you know, and I got to the point I worked on the ’95 referendum in Quebec, and, you know, that was probably the most engaging, searing experience I ever had in my career. And then it was, you know, a little bit of the aftermath at ’96, and I just realized I could not go to another meeting about distinct society recognition. Somebody else has to do this, and it’s not that it wasn’t an important subject, but I couldn’t do it. So I left. I went off to Canadian Heritage, and somebody else came in for, you know, the Calgary Declaration and stuff like that. So, speaking of you, but there are only, like, Canada has like permanent questions: How are we gonna live together? Their relationship, we’re gonna—so there is this phrase of permanent guardians of permanent problems. Our relationship with the United States is a 200-year-old problem, and hopefully will be there for another 200 years. Speaking of blood, guts, and soul, I mean, the readings that I was doing the last couple of days ago, male, in the aftermath of your resignation, I described you as a quintessential public servant. So, you know, what kind of softball? Take me through the critical couple of days when you decided, and you had been thinking about resigning or retiring before you became deputy at Perfect? Alone before—never mind when you became the director, or became, became the Chief Secretary, Chief Clerk. Take me through what was the critical decision for you to say, “I’m going to have to resign now; we’d have to walk away from this.” Well, it’s in my letter, so, but I’ll work you backward from that. I went through my own, you know, version of what I was talking about earlier. I put six years of my life into the First Nations Education Act, and when it was, you know, blocked, basically, on Indigenous politics and a number of things happened and it wasn’t gonna happen, I was done. Like, I told the clerk of the day, like, I’m done. I know, I just, I was so dispirited and just, I just didn’t want to go off to Agriculture, Fisheries, or do some other thing. So I told Wayne, you know, because there are dozens of young, energetic ATMs out there, and, you know, give them a chance, and I’ll go off and do something else. So I was leaving in 2014. I was younger at the time, and I figured, do something else. Wayne, basically, I don’t know what he did, but somehow I ended up with Pretty Council as a Deputy Clerk that fall, working and working with Janice, a very good friend of mine and, you know, long-serving colleague. So, when Janice asked me to come in and be Deputy Clerk, I said:
Okay, I’ll give you a year, and you know we’ll get through the 2015 election,” and I was fully intending to leave after the 2015 election. I was going to be helpful too, and I hope I was too, Janice, because I had done the transitions from Ammar Martin to Harper, a question—Martin—Martin to Harper. So, you know, I knew the little, I know a little bit about transitions of government, so I wanted to be there if there was going to be one in 2015. I could be helpful, and like we did it, and we did the 2015 election, and then I started making plans to leave in 2015. And then the Prime Minister asked me to be the Clerk, so like I think the only acceptable answer to that kind of question is “Yes, sir,” and so that led to a three-year detour into that job.
I was planning to leave in 2019 for all kinds of reasons: personal reasons with my family, I was getting to the point where I didn’t want to be that guy who was hanging around too long. I thought there were lots of people coming up who could take on these jobs, and I thought I was the right person for the startup phase of a government for a Prime Minister who’d never chaired Cabinet, for a bunch of Ministers who had never been Ministers. But they had hit their cruising speed, and they needed my value-added less and less than other people who could play that role. So I didn’t sort of do anything about it. I was planning for maybe this summer, maybe the fall, maybe before the election, maybe just after the election. And then the whole thing sort of got sidetracked in January and February.
What made it impossible to stay was we had set up this particular mechanism on foreign interference, which is an issue—it’s a real, current threat: foreign interference in our democracy in election campaigns. We had a long conversation about who can play the role of whistleblower or umpire, and it was clear that they don’t have that in the States and they didn’t have it in the UK. Most countries now are trying to figure out who is going to call out foreign interference in their system: Is it the intelligence agencies? Is it the Cabinet Office? Is it some judges or some independent watchdog? Nobody’s got an answer. They’re totally happy with the answer we landed with in Canada. In our tradition, it was, well, the Cabinet Secretary will do it with a committee of the National Security Advisor and the Justice Deputy and Foreign Affairs Deputy and so on. So, I thought that was going to be a fairly important role—hopefully a fire alarm I never have to pull—being the kind of credible person to Canadians about whether there was interference in the election.
My role just got so, my, you know, my involvement just got so politicized, and I was such an object of attack and abuse from all kinds of channels. I said, “I can’t do this. I cannot be the impartial referee.” So, I just told the Prime Minister I had to get out well before the election. So, I left in April. There are, as I know, and I don’t know because I haven’t talked to anybody since April, we got through the election in good shape in terms of we had a free and fair election with no serious interference from foreign governments.
I want to move on to some short responses in terms of where you see looking forward because we’re supposed to be looking forward back. There’s one issue that I know is important; you’ve already described and so did that earlier on your involvement with what we know as Aboriginal Affairs. That’s even including, yesterday, Dr. Ivor Zinger, the Corrections Investigator of Canada. Thirty percent of the indigenous population of prisons in this country are made up of Indigenous people. You know all the numbers I’m saying—they only represent 5% of the population. Thirty percent of the 22% of all homicides in this country occur where the victims are Aboriginal people, men, women, and men in that order, I guess. According to Mr. Zinger, it’s primarily a function of poverty, racism, and policing. Since 2010, we’ve seen a 40% increase in Aboriginal peoples being arrested and incarcerated. Can you be in the least bit optimistic about our relationship with Indigenous people in this country?
Yeah, I think relentlessly, determinedly, and optimistically that we can do better, absolutely, or I wouldn’t have stayed in that job for eight years. Why haven’t we done better? Well, part of it is perspective. So, everything you said is true, and I don’t want to be misunderstood. There is so much more to do—those are totally unacceptable indicators, and everybody knows their version of them. There’s a huge socio-economic gap; there are all kinds of issues, and more needs to be done, and people need to continue to focus on them.
There is some good news, though, which is the national conversation around this has completely and utterly transformed over the last 15 years. I say that from personal experience, and I give a lot of credit to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for doing that, but there are other people who played a role. There are a lot more hands on the task than there ever were. So, I’ll give you a few examples of that, and this is not to say everything is perfect. I always get misquoted on this; I’m not saying everything’s fine, but we have more partners and more hands. When I started, it was then Indian Affairs and Northern Development. The attitude of most provincial governments was, “They’re Indians, they’re federal; why are you talking to us?” They were uncooperative on land issues, even though provinces control all the Crown land, forestry, mining, land-use planning, and so on. So, it was very difficult to make progress on any of the land settlements or additions to reserves or any lesser things.
I called out the Western Premiers on this just last month. And the people that have policy programming expertise in how to do healthcare, childcare, primary and secondary education, water infrastructure—I could go on and on—for the most part, work in provincial governments and municipalities. If you raised an issue of could you help us with the First Nations reserve, it was like, “Oh, you’re trying to offload a responsibility; you’re trying to dump something on us.” There were no real partnerships there. So, we had this sort of weird little mini-department in Ottawa trying to deliver a school system, a child welfare system, and build houses with very little of the infrastructure and expertise to do that, and do it with funding agreements, which is like one instrument in a government toolkit.
Over time, and I give my Ministers a lot of credit for that and I give provincial Premiers a lot of credit for that, that piece was broken. Now, we have all kinds of partnership deals, made a lot of progress, and a lot of the land issues. Small municipalities in Manitoba are sharing water systems with reserves that are nearby; people are working together on economic development projects and so on. None of this gets in the media because the media likes conflict stories—they like the blockades and the obstacles and the negative stories, all of which happen. But you don’t see the coverage of the breakthroughs, agreements, and steps forward. The social indicators—we’ll see some of this after the 2016 census data comes out and the well-being index—they are trending upwards in most of the country: for unreserved people in Yukon, BC, most of the prairies, Atlantic Canada, and Quebec. They are slowly trending up and converging. They are not getting any better in Northern Ontario and in Northern Manitoba, the old Rupert’s Land.
So, that’s a broad generalization; there are exceptions to that. We could spend the whole evening on winning conditions and so on. And you talked, I’m glad you mentioned obstacles, because if anybody really wants to pursue this issue, go look at Sheila Fraser’s May 2011 Auditor General report. She was finishing a 10-year term as Auditor General. They had done over 20 audits on the fund for programs for First Nations communities, and she wrote a kind of essay on these are the four things we need. I won’t go through it—spoiler alert, read it. Those are the four obstacles, and one of them is having a solid legislative basis that people know what the expectations and standards are and implement them, which is one of the reasons we were pursuing an education act. Every kid in Canada is governed by an Education Act, except kids that live on reserves. Every kid in Canada is protected by Child Welfare legislation, except kids that live on reserves. So, a lot of those gaps needed to be filled. And anyway, there are better and more innovative ways of getting infrastructure and housing built.
So, I could go on and on about this, but my view on this is that these are issues that will yield to good public policy, good public administration, sound governance, and real political courage, both on the part of non-Indigenous governments and Indigenous politics, which was incredibly complicated. So, you know, I think we will make progress. The conversation about reconciliation has brought in people making statements of reconciliation and plans: private sector organizations, universities like COZY, professional colleges. By the time I was wrapping up around 2013 or 2014, unsolicited people were dropping by saying, “I want to get involved. How can my institution or organization help out?” So, there are a lot more partners, and of course, it has to be led by strong Indigenous leadership, which thankfully we do have a lot of.
The point that is often overlooked, because the media doesn’t pay any attention to it, is that 4% of Canadians are Indigenous or at least self-identify as such. Half of them don’t live on reserves; they live in cities like Halifax, Toronto, and Edmonton. It’s a growing, young population; it’s about a third of the Regina school system and so on and so on. So, what happens in our cities and small towns is also a big part of the solution. I think this city is beginning to understand that.
There’s so many other [things] I’m inclined to want to look for because, considering you spend that much of your life in Indigenous Affairs, that was a very terse answer. But I want to move on to sort of some—how do you see things going forward? There’s one issue, which is now—it’s an old idea back again briefly. What’s your take on the nature of exit, but a horrible particular use of work, the current state of affairs, and feelings in the province of Quebec? It has a kind of an Arthur-like quality to it. What’s your sense of how that discussion will likely evolve in the life of this current government? Oh, that’s a good question and a tricky one. I’m not asking you—I know you’re both to give the Prime Minister advice—but your experience would give you some sense of it.
Yeah, and I think there are a number of things we could pursue there. Canada is an act of will to live together of different languages, religions, and cultural backgrounds and so on, which really stands out in the world when you look at other places and how they’ve dealt with similar issues. It has within it tensions and so on. The regional one is always going to be there because we’re not smoothly divided across the country. Atlantic Canada’s four provinces are, what, six percent of the population, six percent of GDP. Ontario is big—there are six billion people living in Toronto. I mean, the weighting is always going to be different, and people will get different governments over time. The point being most parts of the country—and I think you can find the data on this—feel that they are not listened to or not getting their fair share. Even Ontario made that argument under Dalton McGuinty. It’s not a new argument coming from the West or the Atlantic or Quebec or whatever. In fact, we all agree that we’re not getting our fair share, we’re not listened to—probably in some ways a kind of unifying thing. I don’t mean to make light of that because it means that the national government constantly has to be listening and vigilant and reaching out and never taking things for granted. But I’ve come to the view, as I’ve spent a lot of time on this, that we are a far more resilient country than the journalists and the pundits and the industry that works in this would think. You know, we’ve had a separatist government in Quebec for the best part of 20 years. We had a long batch in the 70s and 80s, and we had another batch in the 90s. We had two referendums—hampering up the country. So, I mean, a little bit of fussing about whether to have the RCMP or an Alberta provincial police force is a pretty small kind of issue compared to an overtly separatist government driving towards independence, which seems to have cooled down. You would never take that for granted; you’d never take it for granted if you’re the Prime Minister of the national government. I think it just means—and this would be a trend that would happen in any country—governments have to be listening and attentive and trying to be responsive. But at the end of the day, we’re not ten provinces and three territories; we are a nation that sometimes has to make national decisions. You’re in NAFTA or you’re not. You’re having, you know, some policy as a national gun or a national endeavor, or not. We have probably, I think I could say with some surety, as a federation, tried to figure out how different levels of government—we have the most creative, innovative set of arrangements for figuring out how people can compromise and live together: opting out, opting in, devolution, this, that, the other. It’s not neat, it’s not tidy. It drives people who like consistency crazy: Why don’t we treat everybody the same? We have these two versions of equity that will never get solved. One version of equity is you treat everybody exactly the same, and the other version of equity is you have to understand why I’m different and make a combination of that. Governments always have to try to wrestle with that, and part of that is, you know, in federal-provincial relations as well. That’s another—I will be trolled as complacent and not understanding the West—but I think it’s a resilient country, and when you look at what other countries go through where they have real problems, nothing we’re dealing with is of that magnitude.
I want to look forward to here a bit because I’m kind of loathe to do it because it’s such a huge can of worms. Some of the material that I was looking at—and this is stuff that you have talked about in terms of, I know, in working for the CBC—looks at the change from analog to digital in one small multiple-speaking company, where, in fact, you have to continue to do what you’re doing with the people and the equipment you have. Well, theoretically, you’re having to rethink how you’re going to deal with new people and different technologies, except it’s all happening simultaneously. But you have given this a tremendous amount of thought as it applies to this civil service. Now, I can’t imagine you coming up with it, but I’m looking to set up some of the questions, maybe, for some of the younger people here about how you see the transition from where we are now—sort of somewhere on the arc between analog and digital—and where we have to be in terms of the human component only. We could recruit them, yeah. That’s a huge topic. So I refer people—if you’re interested—the last of the four reports that Prime Minister I did should be on the PCL website somewhere. It has a couple of pages on this and how government has evolved over the last twenty or thirty years. So again, not to downplay some of the really interesting and disruptive things that are going on now, we have been on a path of technological evolution for a long time. People had to figure out what to do with the telephone, what would television do, the arrival of the Internet in the mid-90s changed a lot of things. People wanted services online instead of going into government offices. If you’re as old as I am, you remember having to line up to get your license plate stickers, you know, on a certain day. Lots of things happened in the service area, and we’ve gone from sort of, you know, being able to download the application form and mail it in to actually being able to fill it out and file it online. The service thing has kept pace; public services have generally kept pace. And a lot of them are in provincial hands, of course, with what banks and tell you—no other sort of service providers do. I set up a small company, so, you know, if anybody ever wants to hire me as a consultant, and I was registered, I did a name search and a registry and got a GST number in seven minutes online. Done, right? I mean, people just take that for granted now. I dealt with citizenship processes and birth certificates and so on. The service side in the government has just gotten better and better and better, and the expectation that citizens have keeps rising. Now they want it on this, they want it at 7:24, and mobile. So for the last seven or eight years, people have been going beyond websites to apps. And again, my clerks report—you can find all kinds of interesting things. I hope you’ve all got the border app from CBSA or you’ve got the Parks Canada app or you’ve got the Canada weather app or, you know, like a lot of services have moved to that kind of environment, and they’re available in both languages, in formats accessible to persons with disabilities, 7:24, 365, with almost no interruptions, and as it should be. But it’s not really particularly newsworthy that we feel that we’ve done that.
What’s happening now, as I understand it—which is sketchy—is the arrival of predictive algorithms and machine learning will allow another wave of changes in the way things are done. They will affect all kinds of processes, in particular healthcare, education, and so on, and they’ll affect the way we, you know, the way we organize and do things in government. One of my sort of common refrains is it’s easy to get buy-in and support to improve the external services of government. MPs are happy if people are happy with Parks Canada, you know, and that you can reserve your campground this summer online and do all those kinds of things. We have the highest rate of online tax filing in the world. We have the highest rate of census participation online in the world. We are number one or two in open government. We are number three or four in open data. Like, we’re good at this; we’re good at digital government. So I’ll come back to your question, folks, in your question as well, as it means different skill sets. It means that people have to rethink how their definitive service, how they’re going to do policy development. What we’re slower at is internal processes: the financial systems, the HR systems, the pay and pension systems.
Those are slow to change because it’s hard to get support to modernize and invest in them. Nothing comes for free, you know, and if you do an IT project for an airline and a bank and it doesn’t work, you write it off. And, you know, if you do it in government, you’ve got a scandal. So, the risk set point in the public sector is way, way, way lower than the risk point in the private sector. There are many, many aspects of that, but we need to do it. Part of it is like you need data analysts, and there you go, find people with a very specific skill set. But you also need middle and senior managers to understand what the right questions to ask are. So, this is the uptake. Good in the civil service, when you look at the last five years, the last decade, our bright young women and bright young men are saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
So, I’ll just finish with one thought: we’ve set up, with the Can of School of Public Service, go to their website. They’ve set up a digital academy so that there’s their training very specifically the skills for digital government for middle, you know, for all kinds of people, including the middle managers, senior managers, and professional communities. What does it mean for people in communications? What does it mean for services it’s on?
The Digital Academy is a good, you know, a good initiative. Most departments now have a Chief Digital Officer; most provincial governments have a Chief Digital Officer; most municipalities have a Chief Digital Officer. It allows all kinds of cool partnerships between provincial, municipal, and federal governments. The attitude changed about 10 years ago, and I think the Obama administration gets a lot of credit for this. There’s a way of thinking about it beforehand where people within government, with a few consultants, would figure out, “Here’s an online service,” or, “Here’s something we’re gonna do,” and they would work on it and launch it. It would work, or it wouldn’t work. Now, increasingly, what happens is, you say, “What government has a lot of is data—authentic, reliable data in thousands and thousands of data sets of all sorts of stuff.” Throw the data out there and let people create their own apps and ways to use it. That is something that the Cameron government did in the UK or something that the Macron government’s doing in France.
We’ve been able to, just through more, instead of coming up with a really preconceived idea, develop applications for, I don’t know, reporting potholes in the street so that they can be fixed more quickly. That’s a trivial example, but there are many, many, many versions of that. Government is about, if you’re in public administration, managing money, people, and information. We’re very good at managing money; people management has a lot to be desired, and we can talk about that. The skills that we really need to develop are how we manage information, because, you know, government and public institutions are among the largest holders of data that we have.
That covers about a third of the questions that I have. Don’t worry, I’m sure that you know, and we are going to, as we promised, turn it over to the adjudicated questions from the audience, as opposed to—thank God—I don’t get to decide to point at people. So, have we explained how this is gonna work? Matthew, Mark—Mark one, why don’t you do that, and I’ll get to put it up while you’re doing that? Explain that we can’t see any of you because you all decided to sit at the back. Is anybody here? Okay, so if you’d like to ask a question, it’s very easy: get your mobile phone or whatever device you have on you. You can log in on your browser to Slido.com. You can see the URL up on the screen behind the two gentlemen to my right, your left, and enter the event code I-P-A-C. You can just type in your question with your thumbs. You’ll be able to see questions coming in, and you can upvote questions that you find interesting. Don will eventually seal this after Matthew fixes that—you’ll see the questions, and he’ll get to choose.
All right, there’s a couple coming in now, so why don’t we—you can ask one more while the others come in. My question, just to give people a chance to sort of get their phones up: I was reading a piece for some variants in pieces in the Global Government Forum where they were talking to and about you, and you and I talked about this briefly before we actually sat down. I quote, “In most countries, some parts of the population have felt somewhat disenfranchised or alienated. They felt that the political system or the economy is not responsive to them and not helping them move ahead. The potential risk worldwide on the impact of democracy is significant.” You say that responsiveness is the key. What’s responsiveness in this context?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I meant sort of—it’s a blend of from the political system, so I’m staying in two sort of elected governments and the choices they make. But I think there’s a piece of it, and I’ll start there, which is also about the public service and public administration entities. The models of, you know, getting together with experts in a boardroom and cooking up a policy and then releasing it with a communications plan, like that, doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in any field. You now have to have skills in engagement and deliberation and trying to, you know, turn things into actionable choices that a Cabinet can make, or that—and you try to build some consensus and buy-in. At least if people may not like the policy, they will feel the process that got there was at least reasonably fair and inclusive. Because the trend in parallel was if people didn’t like a policy—like, “I don’t like cannabis legalization,” or “I don’t like,” you know, pick any topic—they’d attack the process and say, “Well, you didn’t listen to me; I wasn’t included; this was a rigged process; it was elitist; it was Laurentian,” you know, whatever. So it’s important to design processes that people will see as ultimately legitimate, even, you know, and that the outcome will be accepted by most people, even if it’s not exactly their preference.
Some governments, I think it’s a tough one for parliamentarians to figure out how they do then, you know. I mean, we can devise consultation processes, engagement processes—there’s a whole industry, and I mean that in a good way—of how to engage people, you know, respectfully and to draw out people. At the end of the day, though, it’s not a “let’s all vote on Slido” kind of thing; it’s a parliamentary democracy. Parliament has to make choices for the country, and Cabinets have to make choices to put before Parliament. So I think that the role the public service will play increasingly is a kind of aggregator to turn things into actionable choices when you’ve only got a hundred hours of Cabinet time a year. There’s just so much information, so many issues, so many choices, so many possibilities, and turning those into actionable decisions really is the kind of policy role that government will, well, you know, will continue to rely on. Because nobody else is going to do it for you. You know, academics have their role in this; interest groups and advocacy groups have their role; NGOs have their role; unions have their role. You know, everybody is after something—how to mediate and aggregate and turn those into choices. That’s a particular kind of role the politicians have to tap into and understand what’s going on. You know, and the populist sort of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore” thing was clearly going on. It’s part of the Brexit fuel; it was part of what was going on with right-wing, anti-immigrant politics in France, Germany, and Italy. You know, it’s a volatile mix, and people can turn on the system. The most obvious manifestation is in the United States, where the most serious thing going on is probably not that particular president, but an entire breakdown of confidence that people have in the way that government works.
First question: you said some ministers joined Cabinet inexperienced and human. How did you and the PCO develop them as leaders? How long did you personally—how did you personally learn to develop leaders?
I didn’t deal with every minister sort of in an equal kind of measure. The primary relationship that any one minister would have would be with his or her Deputy Minister, and part of the role that Deputy Minister plays is to try to support that particular minister. Sometimes there’s an element of, like, really high-end executive coaching involved in that. Sometimes, I mean, they’re human. Some of them are insecure and need reassurance; some of them are way too confident and need to be talked down a little bit; some of them like to fight with their colleagues; some of them are conflict avoiders and roll over too easily. So there’s a lot of coaching involved in developing those relationships. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. There’s a chemistry between a minister and a deputy that’s quite variable, and sometimes they don’t get along. Part of one of the things I had to do as a clerk, three or four times a year, sometimes would be to say, “Okay, I got that one wrong; those two people are not going to be able to work effectively. I’ll move this person over there,” you know, and try to keep up with that. And much as the Prime Minister would go, you know, once or twice a year, “Well, actually, you know, that person’s not really working out as much as I hoped in that portfolio; maybe they’ll do better somewhere else,” or, in rare occasions, out of Cabinet altogether.
So, magic wand time here—what would happen as Clerk is sometimes ministers would come to me and they’d say, “I have a problem with my deputy,” or, “I have a problem with my colleague,” or, “I have a problem with PMO,” or whatever. And they would turn to me for kind of like, “What’s your, you know, you seem to know about this governance business; what’s your advice?” So I did have conversations with some ministers, especially in the early days, about how to be a more effective minister or how to get out of a particular problem—not about the policy, although I had a few of those—but more about sort of relationships, how to do it, and the skill set, and how to be better at the job.
So, we’re going to give you the magic wand here, and you get absolute power for whatever period of time is necessary. What’s one change to the public service you wish you could have made?
How big is that wand? You always leave with unfinished business. I remember talking to my predecessors about that.
You start on day one, and you slog away and you run around doing as many things as you can, you know, between crises and driving the agenda. I spent a lot of time on public service issues, and I’m satisfied I got a lot of things done that I wanted to do. I would have liked to have pushed further on mental health issues, but I feel very confident that’s in good hands with the current leadership of senior management. We were just starting to really get into the harassment and bullying issues, and I would have liked to have been there to see some of that a bit more. But, again, I’m confident that my successors will deal with that.
The change—and I said this at a parliamentary committee, and I got in trouble, so I might as well do it again—and this may be a federal comment; I honestly don’t know, you know, what the law is in Nova Scotia or Quebec or Alberta, but the underlying employment law makes it almost impossible to fire somebody for misconduct or mismanagement. It has to be so egregious, and it takes two years if somebody uses all of their recourse, which should exist.
It’s two years, and most middle managers just don’t have the stomach for it. So if they have a toxic employee or a performance problem, they manage around it. They hope the person goes somewhere else, and then they kind of work around it. And so I just think the system would be better off behaviorally and performance-wise if we acknowledge that out of 269 thousand people, not all of them are up to the job. It should be a little easier than establishing cause. Now, the lawyers can correct me on that. And the last thing you want is for the threat of firing to become a new instrument of bullying. You know, that a toxic boss then threatens to fire somebody, so it has to be balanced with recourse and transparency and that sort of thing. But I think we’re clever enough in this country to find a model where a small percentage of behavioral and toxic conduct problems, you know, the B2 is a good example. You know, bullying bosses are weeded out, and underperformers—like everybody who’s worked in the public service has worked in an environment where they know there’s somebody in the team who’s not pulling their weight—therefore everybody else has to work that much harder and probably feels most worthless. I think we should be able to say, “Thanks for showing up. Here’s a generous severance. You’ll be better at something else.”
Use a question I know you won’t answer, but I’ll ask. Odia, ’cause it’s right here in front of me: What Prime Minister did you enjoy working with the most and why? I knew you wouldn’t. What advice would you give to the user? I’ll give you an answer—not the answer, but an answer—which is that nobody gets to that job if they aren’t a really interesting, gifted politician. You know, and I just feel so blessed that I had close working relationships with four or five of them, frankly. And I got to know some of them. I spent a lot of time with Joe Clark as a minister. I spent a lot of time with the three that you mentioned before, and they’re completely different in their personalities and their work habits. But they’re just, like, really interesting, skilled, driven people who want to make a difference. And like, I enjoyed working with all of them. Some of them are more gregarious storytellers, and some of them are more kind of businesslike, and you can imagine which is which. But it’s such a privilege to be in a small room with four people having those conversations that, you know, sometimes surprise you.
What often happens—and this is true of ministers as well—is that they have a public persona for the House or for politics and the way they conduct themselves in a more private meeting is completely different. I can think of some Atlantic Canada politicians whose accents would wax and wane depending on the situation. I think there’s also two of Mr. Kircheis’ were one of those as well.
What do you see as the biggest, or rather, what do you see as the biggest threat to maintaining an effective public service in the next five to ten years, and how do you mitigate those challenges? I mean, overall, I have a lot of confidence that we have the people and the skill set, and more importantly, the values of sort of being humble and trying to always do better and learn from our mistakes. And we have a lot of feedback loops that tell us we could have done things better. And as frustrating as that can be to live with sometimes, I’m glad we have them. So, you know, if you have a dozen officers of Parliament checking your work every year, you’ve got parliamentary committees to answer to, you’ve got judicial review in the courts, you’ve got the media, you’ve got social media, you’ve got stakeholders, you’ve got think tanks and academics—lots of people will tell us how to do better. And it’s really picking up those signals and learning and implementing them. We now have a much better system in place for the health of the workplace. We used to survey people every three years; now we do it every year, which allows us to track workplaces and say, “This place is, you know, twelve points below the median score on that under the question number 17. We better do something about it so we can get to a lot of the workplace issues a lot better.”
I didn’t answer one of your earlier questions because I went off on some tangents. Young people are applying in droves to the public sector. I think—I hear this from provincial colleagues as well—and I don’t think it’s for the defined benefit pensions. I think it’s maybe for some people, but meaning matters to people, the younger generations. And I can only talk about my own kids and people I’ve met. Serving your country, serving your community, making the world a little bit better, making your country a little bit better—it’s still our best sales pitch because you can do it. And then, if you’re in a professional career, if you’re an engineer, a lawyer, a financial manager, a computer science person, or whatever, the most interesting work done in the country is in the federal government. So the professional streams are also, you know, worth pursuing as well. We have a problem in trying to figure out smarter selection processes. If I’ve got 75 applicants for three positions, how am I going to pick that gem for potential and values and growth with more success? Because sometimes you’re going to get it wrong, and you know you’re going to have a dud. But it’s a two million dollar investment by Canadians. If you hire some kid out of Dalhousie public administration into an indeterminate position, you’ve committed two to three million dollars of public money. If that person, you know, so you want to get those selection processes to be as good as possible. We tended to lean on credentials, like “I’ve got the pieces of paper and the diplomas,” or the experience, and I think increasingly what we’re going to have to spot is potential. And that’s harder to measure, obviously. So the work in the sort of personnel field on how to find people, how to grow people—kind of drifting back to your other question—what will have to be is faster and more adaptive, moving the people and money and information from one thing to another because the pace that Canadians expect will be faster. And, you know, we’re built for stability and continuity. We’re not built to be easy. And you don’t want your public sector to completely overreact to “there was a headline yesterday, so I’m going to build a whole new government department,” or panic or overreact. I remember going—I mean, my anecdote on this one is there was a Globe and Mail story about small business regulation, or they ran a series on it a few years ago, and it led to a whole paper burden reduction exercise. “We’ve got to get rid of as much regulation as we can.” Then the Globe and Mail ran a story about lead in toys coming from China, and it’s like, “We’ve got to have more inspectors and more regulation in the toy sector as fast as possible.” So if you can oversteer, you can overreact, you can be too responsive and too jittery. We’re built for some continuity and stability, and that proved itself in the global financial crisis in 2008. But you’ve also got to be responsive and spot the signals of this is a new thing, and we have to understand it and deal with it.
Here’s a central question in the country. Lace, we’re going to ask them to ask some questions. We should, I should. State homes clear. How do you see a country so reliant on natural resources taking a real leadership role internationally when it comes to climate change? That’s it. That’s another good one. I mean, there’s lots of natural resources: there’s forestry, there’s fisheries, there’s agriculture. There are countries that have essentially no natural resources that maintain a very high economic life and standard of living—from the Netherlands to Singapore, to you know, I can go around and around. We have a particular kind of blessing here, which is we have a very strong educated labor force. Most Canadians work in the service sector, over two-thirds of them, and we’re really, really good—increasingly good at things that will matter. So Canada is one of the world leaders in digital technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and things like that, aerospace-based telescopes. You know, like we are in a lot of those industries or sectors that are growing. But we can also create jobs and generate a lot of income by extracting natural resources and bringing them to market. We’re going to have to do it in a sustainable way, and we’re going to have to do it in a way that’s aligned with our climate change targets and goals. And that’s going to be a tough transition from a hydrocarbon kind of sector to renewables. Another way, you must be optimistic because the political will in the population, you know, and it’s identified—you could see, you know, the number of people identify with the green elements of the more traditional parties, never mind the Green Party itself. There, most people—yeah, it’s also—it’s just smart economics. This isn’t running against the economy in that sense. And a lot of people in the hydrocarbon industry understand this—the ones that work for the big global companies and so on. There are more people working in clean tech in Canada than work in the oil and gas sector already now. And there are opportunities to make and sell stuff, you know, that is consistent with a very aggressive climate target. We’re well on our way towards a 30 by 30 reduction. But I think the view now will be that it’s not enough. We’ve got to be faster, we’ve got to be quicker. And that just means breaking down problems and figuring out what are we going to do in the transportation sector? What are we going to do in the housing and building sector? What are we going to do, you know? It’s not all about the electric cars and stuff like that. But the world has pretty much made that decision to move on.
The auto industry has made its decision: they’re out of hydrocarbons by 2030 globally, and they are making massive investments in that and a lot of other areas. You know, there was something like 20 times more investment in the clean tech and renewable sector than in oil and gas in the world last year. People are already making those adjustments. Financial markets, institutional investors—firms like BlackRock are getting out of hydrocarbons. So, like that ship has sailed, to use a nautical metaphor here in Halifax. What we have to do is not worry about those companies so much as the communities, the workers, and the social infrastructure of communities where people have come in and worked hard and built something for their families. It’s a very important issue and something I know that you also thought about, written about, spoke about, and done things about over the course of your career.
You’ve seen increasing efforts to foster a diverse public service. How have you seen this change and how the work is actually done? Okay, when you think back to when you first arrived in, how are we, when you first had your first civil service job in Ottawa? What year? I was born in 1957. 1981, I showed up in Ottawa as a 23-year-old. Sir, different faces in the public service? Oh, yeah, absolutely. How has that impacted the way it works? It’s gone through different phases and some people will, in terms of emphasis. But the trend line has been to an arc of history towards greater inclusion. There was at one time much more emphasis on linguistic communities. We talked about New Brunswick earlier, and people counting noses in terms of people from linguistic backgrounds and competencies and so on. That’s still important; we still have a commitment to linguistic duality. Then gender was a big issue in the 1990s, and we’ve made enormous progress. The federal public service is 56 percent female now, and we’re about parity now in senior executives. There’s still work to be done. I spent a lot of time working on particular things like the security and intelligence community, the financial community, and so on, so there were particular pockets that still needed work on gender inclusion and all kinds of other aspects of reflecting Canada. Some of that will take care of itself because you just have to see a class in Dalhousie, or you know my daughter’s at the University of Toronto; it’s a diverse student population. We hire them, the public service will become more diverse and inclusive.
I was very proud to have delivered the apology for how we treated LGBT employees in the past, where you could be blackmailed and lose your security clearance for being gay in the late 1980s. That has completely and utterly changed. Now, there’s an aspect of Indigenous issues that is a whole other topic. We try to make sure that people who decide their best way to serve is to join the Crown—which is not an easy thing to do for some people—get development and support, and we certainly spent some time on that. The interesting thing that comes up is generational diversity. A typical large workforce will have four generations in it: baby boomers like me, Generation X, Millennials, and so on. Not to caricature, but they think differently, work differently, expectations are different, career paths are different, and so on. You have to be a pretty skilled middle manager to be able to deal with the grumpy baby boomer in the corner and the anxious millennial in that corner, and sort of how they all fit together culturally.
I’d just add one more comment to a long answer, which is that everybody who works in industrial organizational psychology, social sciences, governance, business, or whatever has come to the view that more diverse teams and more points of view actually improve performance. It’s not a cost; it actually improves the performance of the team. So, there is an argument to be made even for people who are kind of counter-financial types that if you have a larger set of talents and perspectives, and you learn how to harness them and listen to them—which means we have to get better at being sort of command-and-control hierarchy and flatter, and more listening to our own people, which is not an easy thing to do—then you actually get better services, better policies, and better outcomes.
There are a dozen other great questions here, so what I’m going to ask Matt to do is he’s going to fold these questions to you, and you can answer them individually from your shop at home when you go back to Ottawa. There is one question here, but I have to find it out. It seemed like a good question on which to end. It is from the ghost of Sir John A., by the way. Alright, so we have divine intervention or ghost intervention. What is the thing that most scares you, John? Where do you go? What is the thing that most scares you, and what gives you the most hope with respect to the future of this country?
Oh, that’s a good one. Hmm, I have a lot of confidence in the country. I think it is a remarkable place. The probably the greatest threat to our continuing to be one of the most successful countries in the world—safe, prosperous, secure, and good at all kinds of things—would be actually a little bit of taking it for granted, a little bit of complacency. I think, you know, every generation has to work at it and has to commit to serving and to finding the right mix of policy, government administration, and competence, and finding ways to address these perennial problems about how our French and English are going to live together, how we’re going to deal with a diversity of regions, urban, you know—we have to continue that. You can never take it for granted, but it is a resilient country.
I think the things that I would worry about would probably be things that come from the outside in, in that sense. I’m a generation that is a proponent of a rules-based international system with respectful relationships among countries. I’m a fan of democracy, the rule of law, a free press, and any number of things, and it’s kind of dismaying to see the grand old democracies like the United States and other countries kind of retreating into autocracy. What’s happening in China, what’s happening in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Poland, Brazil—sliding back to much more autocratic and less inclusive ways of governing themselves—and that worries me. I don’t know if, you know, you tell me whether Canada is vulnerable to that kind of, you know, I’m mad as hell populism and let’s blame the immigrants. I don’t think we’re that. Well, I’m not worried about that as much as maybe I should be. Nobody has ever got a lot of traction in mainstream politics on immigrant bashing, which they have in Germany, France, Italy, Poland, and other places. So, it’ll be—and then, you know, to end on a fairly obvious note, we’ve got to get a grip on climate or, you know, the world that my daughter and the next generation grow up in is going to be very, very different from the one that we did.
Well, that is about all the time we have. Well, thank you very, very much on behalf of iPAQ Nova Scotia. We hope that you enjoyed the evening. We very much appreciated your participation, your attention. Also, thanks to Dalhousie University for sponsoring the event. Thanks to Neptune for hosting us. Our event coordinators were Loren Welding and Vanina Dent. Addenda Moody, and of course, thank you Michael very much for stopping by to visit us here in Halifax. Before we see you again sometime, we’ll get all the real questions from the more knowledgeable audience, sure. And before you turn yourself on us, I do want to thank people for coming out on a winter night in January to an event like this. I’m really honored by your presence here. So, thank you very much. Thank you. We thank you very much. [Applause]