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foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music]
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[Applause] [Music] hello my name is Bob asked and I'm hosting a series of conversations with well-known albertans in 2023 albertans
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faced two very different visions of the future yesterday Alberta's voted and elected the United conservative party to a second term under leader Danielle Smith
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in this series I hope to engage viewers in a deep dive on three fundamental areas which require thoughtful consideration by the new provincial government
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the first area is fiscal policy in this field we will canvas the structure of Alberta's finances and how Alberta can move away from the roller
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coaster fiscal effects of a boom and bust economy the second area is economic every time there is a bust in the economy the
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inevitable response from government is to trot out the words economic diversification as if speaking these words will make this happen and finally
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the state of Alberta's political system many albertans feel distrustful of their government this is a phenomenon of course not you need to Albert
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increasingly voters are turned off from politics a pox on both parties and this is reflected in the lower turnout in the
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2023 election in spite of a record vote through advanced polls partisanship and polarization are increasingly common
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yesterday's election results show a deeply divided province looking Southward the Trump phenomenon and Eastward autocrats in other
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countries point to a Resurgence of authoritarianism which threatens Democratic institutions so what to do joining me this afternoon one day after
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the results of the provincial general election is Dr Reuben Nelson Reuben was born and raised in Calgary educated at Queen's University
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Queen's theological college and the United theological College in Bangalore India he and his wife ever Heather have been married for 61 years they live with
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their three cats and lacked these out in the Alberta Rockies they have two children I first met Reuben around 1997 when he was instrumental in mobilizing a great
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number of albertans in an Enterprise called capitalizing on change what struck me about Reuben was not just not so much as wisdom but his energy in
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organizing bringing together some of Alberta's organized intelligence and in the form of people of course in government industry and Academia which
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is not at all a small feat this included bringing many prominent thinkers and futurists into Alberta Reuben has long been fascinated by the
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many ways we and our world are changing and what these Evolutions mean for our future is one of a handful of Canadians who in the 60s and 70s
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pioneered serious Futures thinking and its application to the practice of strategic foresight in Canada he has used his insights in every corner
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and sector of Canada to assist those willing to work with him make reliable sense of their adjacent Futures Reuben's research has led him to the view that if
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we are to sustain success in the unique conditions of the 21st Century we must develop new mental maps of where
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we are in history where we are placed in history sadly the now global sustainability industry is mostly stuck with the very
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mindset that is the root cause of the wickednesses we are in over six decades Reuben has taught philosophy comparative religion and advanced social theory
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is worked in the office of prime minister Pierre Trudeau a help formulate cannabis policy of multiculturalism and has been a leader in many associations
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on future studies he's a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and the world business economy and a director of the Canadian Association for a club of
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Rome and presently he is the executive director of foresight Canada welcome Reuben thank you Bob I'm anxious to meet this
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saint that you've just characterized yes same flights status Reuben definitely so you know in framing the fiscal policy which as you know I've got a great
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Passion about uh and and opinions about uh it it it is placing uh Alberta in that in a context and and the way I
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Place Alberta is this to use some of your terms industrial technological Society where we have great industrial
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uh projects such as the oil sands which are extracting uh a basic commodity which is uh heavily in demand uh
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throughout the world uh principally for transportation but but also for electricity and and I and it means that the province
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like it it was in the 1930s is reliant on world commodity prices and trade and and that produces such a great vulnerability
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uh particularly for the provinces both economy and how it flows through into the uh provinces Revenue stream so I I guess with that background do you
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have any um I mean it is my framing of the issue a proper one and and is there anything else that
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um kind of comes to mind based on your work and looking from the past and going into the future well what one of the things both as a person as I look at institutional forms
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that has struck me uh and of course it's not an idea unique to me uh but I think it's more significant than we realize and that is you can there are relatively
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few organizations in the world of any kind and by that I it may be a hospital it may be a country but I'm taking just any organized body it may even be an Empire
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there are relatively few that are not when push comes to shove future takers and being a future taker means that you need to seriously understand the
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situation you're in and with a good deal of humility come to terms with the forces that are shaping your future whether you like it or not
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and it seems to me that Alberta in those terms Alberta is not a humble place we are not people we are extraordinarily male dominated
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you know as well as I do that Alberta did not was not really a place where Europeans showed up uh until late in the 19th century
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that yes in the 18th century uh one or two folks put their foot across the Saskatchewan border and basically said that's enough let's go home and it was another 100 years before anybody came in
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any numbers so that the folks who've come here and I think this is significant a difference for example in in cultural differences between Quebec or Atlantic Canada is the
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people who came here already had been living in MA in a modern techno-industrial culture which has a belief that it can conquer nature and control things
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and therefore that was the formative idea whereas when Cabo was fishing for the British in 1500 off Newfoundland or when the French came in the 17th century
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uh yes there was a growing arrogance but fundamentally we were still uh Pawns of nature and that's not been true in Alberta and so we've been settled
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and the culture has been determined by males so this is a left brain culture it's as if we don't that when you're at work all
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you need is your left brain be rational empirical and logical uh leave your emotions at home uh don't get personally involved so as a person you don't bring yourself to work and you learn that this
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is a business decision and has nothing to do with you so don't take it personally that means then that you're dealing with people who have trained themselves
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to think that in some sense they're in charge and if it works well enough they can succeed and what we are learning whether it's
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the fires of this may uh or or the things that you mentioned in terms of a roller coaster economy is that in fact in that sense we're not in charge and albertans have yet to have political
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leaders who will help wean us and it is a weaning process help wean us off the idea that we're in charge learn a deeper humility and then
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ask the questions how would we behave accordingly right and and that and that raises one of the historical junctures I think in
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fiscal policy and and we we go back to 1980 and the controversy over the national energy program which was designed to
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create more Canadian Champions and companies uh in an industry that had been heavily dominated by U.S capital but but also European Capital that had
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Finance the development of um of the conventional industry and what what happened in 8182 was not so much the national energy program but
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also the collapse of oil prices which meant that the model that the law he'd had developed the political model and I mean
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Iran for the PCS in in 85 or 86 but the the model was very much of of kind of buying vaults
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um and that was uh paid for by royalty revenues law he'd wisely decided to sterilize some of that money
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in it 76 but then they made this very pivotal decision in 82 just before a provincial election to um reduce the flow of of resource
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Revenue into the Heritage fund uh and and to take all the investment income out as a way of paying for a 30 percent increase
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in spending so and and law heat was very determined in the early mid 70s to capture more of the rent which he did and and this was
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at a time of the old pack and the nationalization of oil companies and then that sort of struggle uh that that went on but but as the time evolved I I
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think there was a an understanding or a grudging acceptance within political circles and within um the the the government itself the
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bureaucracy that uh well this wasn't such a bad thing we will ride the roller coaster but we don't have to to pay much in the way of taxes so so
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unpack that a little bit for me Ruben I don't know if any of this is um generated some some thought but it it just is a kind of a cultural change that
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carried in to the client era where you you had brought in the neo-liberalism Notions in in the uh the Thatcher Reagan idea government couldn't do anything
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right uh and and that we became just more and more reliant on uh both the natural gas and and the conventional oil and it's been transformed as Robert
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Patty appointed out in an interview I did with him in a bitumen now that's the big money maker um so kind of walked me through that that kind of cultural shift and and what
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you think was going on at that time and and whether I'm blowing smoke here about Lockheed uh let me let me back up remember that when
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you do Futures work you're looking Beyond normal frames of reference and the general rule is for for every year you look out to into the future you need to look two years back
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is actually history let me just give you a quick Reuben's quick cut at some aspects of Western history if Europeans didn't arrive here in any
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large numbers until 1880 1890 and um up until the the end of the 20s this is a period when at least on the
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Prairies of Canada including Alberta life is pretty tough men and women you you had to be pretty Hardy to uh whether you were homesteading here or even if you were in
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Calgary or Edmonton what was called a town uh right I mean folks in Toronto who in the 60s thought that we had wooden sidewalks were not far off the mark they were a few decades out of date
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but but back then so we grew up with a culture that was hard physical work for men and women that and then we hit the 30s which
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people were out of work again hard physical work and then we hit the Second World War and we came out of that um as people who in a sense were
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together um but we and we were used to not having a whole lot and you if you remember Alberta in the in the 50s if any of us hadn't been
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smart enough to rent an Old Barn in the country you could have filled it with handmade wooden furniture that today you could sell for enough to retire on
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because we literally scrapped millions of kitchen and cabinets and other tables and other things for Chrome sets if you remember that in the 50s
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because this was going to be modern so that there's been a hunger here as well so you get a certain kind of self-reliance and will make do as well
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as a sense of we're able to do it and we're going to advance as best we can so that's the foundation that lawheed inherits and as long as the price of oil
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is reasonable and the NEP isn't around it when the gusher flows he has to create the Heritage Trust Fund because he can't spend it all fast enough right and so in a sense there's no virtue on
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his part other than enough sense that we better put some of this in the bank and then there's just a double whammy of the OPEC oil crisis and the national energy project
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and quite understandably uh people who uh this is in many ways the first really deep scarring shock to the Alberta psyche
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since the 30s except damn few people who were you know in in charge then had searing memories of the 30s in a positive way that they could learn from it they might have been children and
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simply seen the stress on their parents and so lawhee was tempted to and fell as you point out fell to the Temptation he wants to win the election of 82 and
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spending money is one way the historically he didn't invent this this is a perfectly normal thing of human beings to do probably goes back to the ancient Incas and Egyptians
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so uh and law he did not in my memory did not make it absolutely clear that this was an emergency situation and a one-off he didn't protect himself enough
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that if things then got better you could um change the model and what has happened uh is that we've become a province
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um that that the norm the norm is people say we're fiscally conservative and socially Progressive which doesn't mean card caring members
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of the PC party but it just means that's that normal dominant set except we're not fiscally conservative what we are is tax averse
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and you see that in the first bill that Danielle Smith is going to bring into the house to find the way California is bound that you have to have a referendum to raise taxes and so uh
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what we've got ourselves into as you say is this roller coaster because you've got had people who were uh big Spirit had enough experience of
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what hardship does that they want to avoid it and that's turned into in a funny kind of way uh turning our backs on uh not
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each other as immediate neighbors but on each other in the broader sense of the culture that we in Alberta uh if you if you live down near Coots frankly you don't think
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a whole lot about the people in Hay River let alone Grand Prairie Brunswick just out of sight out of mind entirely and so yes there's a certain sympathy
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for people in Central and and you know closer to where you are with the fires but frankly unless it's a smoky day down here it's not given a lot of thought so
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we've become a province in which the the doctrine has become look out for yourself look out for your family and um and if you can
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socialize costs and privatize benefits and of course that's what the oil industry is doing it's what the it's what every industry has learned to do uh even during the Washington consensus
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um and The Chicago School folks were smart enough to say if we can get the public to share part of our costs um a good part ideally uh whether for a battery plant or for carbon capture and
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storage as long as we get the profits from the capital costs that are being largely covered by the public sector
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right and so we've got a province that thinks it's conservative in its mindset and you hear that all the time from Chambers of Commerce from business people from uh conservative-minded politicians
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there's not much in the way uh if Alberta went into therapy if we had a therapist who is any good he or she would help us face the fact that
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by and large we have become systematically dishonest about who we are and what we value the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and our actual Behavior no
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longer congruent well one of the chapter one of the chapters I was reading in the Blue Storm book that came out edited by Dwayne Pratt and colleagues
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um had to do about the archetypes that we have the Alberta Mavericks and and so on and it it as you described the earlier pen the the earliest Pioneers
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coming here it was very very grim and as you say it was Manual Labor uh there I'm certain there was elements of neighbors helping neighbors in need but it was
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really a struggle for families uh homesteading uh and and their relationship with the CPR with the land development companies
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and the government but but also with Aboriginal uh communities as well and um it it it doesn't invite that this this
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issue that people raise too about the Americanization of the culture of Alberta and the importance of American capital for the
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energy industry but there was a lot of migration from the United States from Nebraska and Montana um up north yeah a third of the people who settled
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the Prairies between 1880 and 1913 and a third of the three million who came were American my mother born in the U.S yes a lot of
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the established you know people who've been here a while uh on the Canadian prairies we look South and we literally see cousins right and whereas from Ontario and Quebec if you look so if you see
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competitors you also see cousins because there's been lots of truck and trade for hundreds of years that way but but we've there they fought Wars with each other we burned the White House they came and
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burned Fort York um so uh we're here on the western side of North America uh we have a common grievance about the
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government back there whether back there is Washington or Ottawa because back there owns a lot of the land and publications and has called a lot of the shorts and
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and so uh I mean uh certainly Alberta south of the Battleford river is the most Americanized part of Canada when I went to school the only new kids
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in my class were the oil kids that every spring some of them left because their fathers had done their time in Calgary and we're now headed off to Oklahoma City or Dallas or wherever they were headed next uh and the new
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kids were always the oil kids other than math class was the same class that had been there for grade four um and so we just got used to having American Oil kids
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um as as part of the culture so turning now Reuben to the economy and when I chatted with Todd Hirsch I I raised the idea or the notion about how
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um significant on a terms of trade basis the the oil sector is that uh if you look at it from the amount of exports
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that we generate uh to pay for imports because so much of our products whether they're on grocery shelves or in retail stores clothing stores are are all
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imported so the the population the the government and and the uh the economic actors have to find a source of income and that's generally been the oil and
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gas but what what worries me is again the the long-term future of the economy in a carbon constrained world
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and as a futurist uh what what is your perspective on on the the role of oil going into 2050. well I'm a stranger enough I I'm among a
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really small minority of people I I don't cheer what is Now official Doctrine and that is uh we have to decarbonize as quickly as we can because
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of climate change all of that true uh except uh it won't work in other words we're being sold a bill of goods and I say this not as a show for the oil companies but just as
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somebody who is in routine contact with some of the best researchers around the world which is no virtue on my part it's just what good futurists do and uh the
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conversation in the last 15 years has increased in uh in this in the number of people in the conversation the quality of research behind it and it's quite
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clear in my view at least the research I've come to trust says there isn't a ghost of a chance that what we're being sold as a path to a green economy is actually going to work
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that that it's blind to the degree to which our prosperity has been based on uh high carbon energy it's also blind to the amount of
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materials that you need in other words moving at you know to electric vehicles and electric everything else in the hope we can keep all the rest of it uh is an
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illusion because it also destroys uh the environment so we're in a position as a modern techno-industrial culture this is my view that it's false to say what the oil
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companies are saying that we can keep producing oil and gas we'll get the society to pay for carbon capture and storage and and other stuff but it's going to be a technological salvation
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and then we can keep on with our life that's one version the the other version is the environmentalist version which the federal government has bought into and that is we'll go green and then we
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can keep everything it is and what I've come to the view is uh if we continue to grow and remember that
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economic growth was promised by every each of the 14 political parties in the last election there were 14 different parties to uh the the radical right
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they all in one way or another promised us that there would be no great disruption to our modern way of life and in order to do that we do have to
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have growth and in order to do that uh we have to continue to consume the planet in which case we die of biophysical degradation well that's one way or you can say well
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let's not grow except we are now so hooked on growth and it's worked into our culture and our minds in so many ways that it is literally the case that without growth
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both for psychological and monetary reasons the culture collapses so the within a modern framework the only choices we have are which way do you want to face societal collapse
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you can you can face it with growth or without growth but those are the only two options and in either case you get societal collapse and the thing that if you want to get
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out of that trap you have to learn to question the modern frame of reference but at this point not just in Canada but around the world there is no serious investment in even understanding that
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let alone questioning it I mean there's no group of professionals bigger than a philosophy department and as you know philosophy departments are usually about six people at Best in today's universities where economics
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might have 30. uh so even the size of an indecent economics Department uh let alone the 250 professionals the perimeter Institute thinks you need to
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do theoretical physics and they're not looking at the whole of reality they're just doing theoretical physics and they think they need 250 professionals with a support system of 750 for a thousand
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people on their payroll well as I say there there's no place in the world now with six people on their payroll to look at the issue in a serious way of
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is modernity itself a sustainable way to live and the last election that we just finished there was no thought zero given by any
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political party that that we cannot take for granted that modernity is here essentially forever and ever amen and my view is it will not last the rest
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of this century proven so when we talk about developing new mental Maps uh how how do we go about that well I
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others have pointed out but I agree with them that that what Trudeau is doing is still locking us into a modern car economy okay so if you're going if if the fundamental question is we have to learn
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to wean ourselves not just off automobiles and high carbon fuels we have to wean ourselves off the very way we have come to see ourselves and reality as modern men and women
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and most people in a vague sense might know they're modern but if in order to have supper tonight they had to write even a five-page essay on it or give a seven minute talk uh most of them would
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go hungry they're not bad people it's just that it's not not a conversation that's normal right and so my strategy is a strategy of reaching out into the future to do
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something that most people won't understand is actually helping to set us up for long-term success you know as I want to do it in a way that doesn't alarm people now so anybody who's listening to this who's
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already alarmed for God's sake turn it off go have uh you know a walk in the sunshine and and pretend it didn't happen and you'll be better off and so will all of us so let me just give you an example
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we came out of the second world war as a culture that as a culture we knew how to do Hands-On operational work so that operational planning and operational work is what most
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organizations know how to do during the war it became clear in a way that the military has known about it for off and on for thousands of years but
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coming out of the second world war because it was both Global and so documented we really got it that other things being equal if the rough size of the armies and the
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armaments are equal folks with better strategies than others won and so we came out of the war saying we not only have to do operations we have to do strategy and we invented management we forget
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that there's no management before I mean management has talked about in 1900 isn't what we call management today management is simply the arrangement of work it's operational
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planning and so Management in the c-suite today which doesn't do any I mean all they do is think they do nothing with their hands they do
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nothing with their right this is a left brain activity that shows itself in terms of decisions for boards and money gets spent and things get happen but the c-suite doesn't in a
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sense do anything and we learned that that's really important work and Pierre Trudeau came to power in 1968
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Peter lawheed in 71 and they were the first two major politicians in Canada and therefore the first people who had a a wide influence on their jurisdictions
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and they both understood that thinking strategically and policy work needed to happen well when they inherited Trudeau the federal public service and lawheed the provincial
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Public Service there's nobody in any of those public services or has policy in their job there's no assistant Deputy Minister as a policy there's no policy Shops and lawheed and Trudeau are committed to
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introducing policy to their governments because they know if they can't do policy work and they only work operationally that they're going to be overrun Dale it's now so complex what
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they'll do is create incoherence and that policy is designed to avoid operational incoherence because you have the same policy across a broad spectrum
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and Pierre Trudeau looked around and said there isn't one policy think tank in Canada in 1968 not one and he invited Ron Richie who was
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Executive Vice President for Imperial oil to said Ron you're going to do this for me and Imperial is going to pay for it if you have to travel and have some nights in a hotel but I want you to
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travel in the U.S and in Europe because those are the those that's the world that we understood at the time yeah it wasn't yet important as a source of ideas I want you to travel there and
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visit their think tanks and invent Canada's first policy shop and he reported Ron Ritchie reported back to the prime and this was done before the Prime Minister what he was
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elected leader but before the election of 68. so this is one of the first administrative things he actually did and Ron Ritchie came back two years
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later in the late spring of 1970 and gave a report to the prime minister and the Prime Minister gave it to Michael pickfield who later who was a
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dear friend and a high Confidant and and um so he gave it to them to the most trusted person that he knew in the federal public service and his prime minister's office and Michael gave it to
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me and James was the third person in the government of Canada to see this report and Michael Butch which is how he knew me uh read this thing and write me a briefing note well I didn't know how to write a
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briefly note I'd only been in town a couple of months but long enough that that Michael and I had fallen into good conversations and he thought I might have something interesting and I basically said
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this work is extraordinarily important because it's at a whole it's at a whole new level of generality and that's what needs to be understood about it except what Ron has done is give you a
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better model that was invented in the 1930s and it's not good enough for Canada and if you implement this model you'll create something that will officially
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succeed because people are beginning to be open to the need for this so the press and the globe and others will like it funders will like it it will officially succeed and be deemed to be
00:39:45
wonderful it will make almost no practical contribution to Canada and that was the institute for research on public policy right broadly unfortunately I've been right
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irpp there's nothing you can point to in Canada that's decisive about Canada's development but Trudeau had an instinct that his public servants if they were going to do policy needed a safe place
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outside the public service where they could learn to do policy and bring that back because within the public service it was an environment that this would not be valued
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so now we're in the same position we need to lift up a whole new level of generality to do strategic foresight strategic foresight is not just better strategic planning in the same way
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strategic planning isn't just better operational planning operational planning strategic planning and strategic foresight are at three fundamentally different levels of generality and most people don't
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understand that and so what we don't have in Canada is literally any developed competence to do strategic foresight
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so what might the government do what might Danielle do if she wants to do something that doesn't alarm take back Alberta she could quietly turn the bamf Center into the world's foremost
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Research Center for research and practice in strategic foresight which most people in Alberta would think is a waste of time and money but it means also they'd ignore it because they'd get over it because they got
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other things to do than worry about the Banff Center they don't worry about that most of what it does now is is irrelevant so if it's still going to be irrelevant who cares
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um but we need in Alberta and in Canada a place to develop the capacity to do a new form of thinking about past present and future in new frames of reference
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just to begin to then do this work in a way that we can hone it down in the same way your background is such that that I'm sure you've been in sessions where people say what would your policy advice
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be and you've offered it and somebody in the room would say but how do we Implement that tomorrow yes you go nuts because they think that if you can't Implement a policy
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immediately it's bad policy when what it shows is the person asking the question is ignorant of what the nature of policy is and they're simply danger they shouldn't have been invited to the meeting
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because it takes a while to digest policy into your system and figure out what you're going to do with it and if you don't understand it it's like having uh somebody close to you die
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and somebody says to what are you going to do without them the honest answer is who the hell knows I don't know it's just happened I'm going to have to learn with this for a while and what it means
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operationally in my life I haven't got a suite it will mean something but it may take months and even years to work through the implications and we're in a situation historically that
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what we're into is going to take months and even years to work through the implications because we should not be funding an automobile-based culture which means
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electric vehicles should go it means that we need to think far wider and deeper about the challenges we're in and nobody in Canada is doing it in a way that's at all serious
00:43:36
and in a way that's coherent enough that if if there was a group of people who were serious about it that you could actually advise them Daniel Smith is I mean her tendency to
00:43:50
be a bit of a disrupter and the the whole question about policy stability which is very important for for the business community uh but but at the same time I just
00:44:04
wonder whether and and Trump is is the same sort of individual in the sense of wanting to disrupt systems and and challenging the
00:44:16
status quo which I think we both agree is probably a good thing we're we're in a mess and and so you don't keep doing the same thing using the same systems
00:44:28
and policies and procedures but uh and and what I'm worried about with Miss Smith is the question of
00:44:40
ultimately separating from the rest of Canada uh we talked earlier in the conversation about the Americanization of Alberta clearly the most
00:44:53
Americanized culture in in the country Smith was mistaken about the powers of Premier likening them to a governor and so on and this business of amnesty
00:45:05
so so somewhere we we we have a great uncertainty and there's been a lot of writing about it Alan Greenspan
00:45:19
about the age of uncertainty and so on and and many thinkers being perplexed about where all this ends and we're we're in a I think a very
00:45:32
unique uh point in global history where the communications is global and we we can find out what's going on in Somalia you know with our smartphone very easily
00:45:46
uh so I I just and and this the notion of planning I think has been uh
00:45:58
challenged or discredited that Master plans just don't work because systems are so complex now uh and plus the fact that people have their own agendas
00:46:12
so let's just uh think about uh well I mean the challenge in in to me at least is that we live in a capitalist
00:46:26
system where uh making money is a virtue um where everything can be treated as as a tradable commodity and there's a
00:46:40
wonderful book by um Michael's sandal you've probably read it about what money doesn't buy yeah and Mark Carney's values is is like that too people uh
00:46:54
they they know the value of uh I'm trying to remember the phrase but it it's this idea that they don't know the value of
00:47:06
anything they know the price of of a good so so wither capitalism uh globally Reuben uh is is this
00:47:19
as you know it's a it's become a minor industry because there's all kinds of different bodies uh marxists are feeling their oats because they're saying we always
00:47:34
knew it and and and and uh so uh neo-marxism is doing well um and there must be a dozen bodies around the world who are trying to rethink it to some extent economics and
00:47:49
capitalism my issue with all of that is it's still within the frame that our last election was in 14 parties basically saying our future
00:48:03
is fundamentally modern now some of them might say and we want a new kind of capitalism but they're still in a modern frame and so I want to go back to your comment about Donald Trump
00:48:16
and others that there are people who kind of intuitively get it that that we do need to shake up the systems in a really serious way that we've got
00:48:29
but you see it actually took that idea seriously I mean it's just for the moment you and I agree and and anybody who's listening to this agree what we've done in effect
00:48:41
is by agreeing to be oblivious to the systems that we're actually in we have left to people who want to shake
00:48:55
up systems for their own good and in service of their own ego you end up with the Daniel Smiths on Donald Trump's and Eragon in turkey and the Prime Minister the
00:49:08
prime minister of Hungary um and Johnson who was prime minister in England uh I mean you end up with people who are thoroughly destructive yes they're perfectly willing to shake
00:49:21
things up but in a sense to no good end they don't have the capacity they don't have the Integrity they don't even have the the common good in mind and but we
00:49:33
we who bemoan that and quite rightly be moment haven't been bright enough to say and in a clear enough voice we need institutions that care for us at
00:49:48
a deeper human level to think these things true on behalf of all of us so that we can have a more radical middle so that we can have uh um a Centrist
00:50:00
movement of people who are upset at what's happening to them to their towns to their grandchildren you go through the list I mean in that sense the elites there's something to the
00:50:15
people who talk about the Elites in Canada and how much they've been good at Feathering their own nests while for those for whom they have formal responsibilities I think that I've
00:50:28
I think there's a lot of Truth in that and I say that as one who has lived his life much of it with those folks I I'm not part of it not well healed enough
00:50:39
but but I have been accepted by them and had access to them but the interesting thing is we thought that better policy work would would shatter the Frameworks except as you and
00:50:53
I both know policy work doesn't ever ask the questions what are the frames of reference that we're taking for granted and if policy people do that they might
00:51:04
move One Step Beyond where they are now but having moved out one step they said we've done it whether it's like people who say think outside the box notice that that's from that singular
00:51:19
when people say think outside the boxes and then I have to ask well how many are there they're like Russian nested dolls how many movies we have to make to get out
00:51:31
and what I talk about is reaching what I call uh escape velocity from modernity just like reaching escape velocity from the gravity of Earth if if you're trying to get to the moon and you
00:51:45
don't reach escape velocity gravity will bring you back through the atmosphere and kill you in the process yes and we don't have anybody in Canada
00:51:56
who's serious about how would you help a whole society that doesn't even understand the depth to which it is modern come to terms of the fact it has no future as a modern culture
00:52:10
and how would you help them understand that in a way that doesn't terrify them and see that as an adventure so we could replace the Alberta Advantage which is about low taxes and money in your pocket
00:52:22
to the Alberta Adventure week Alberta could be earn a reputation at least it could I mean we do have enough Mavericks and things we have the possibility of
00:52:34
earning a global reputation of becoming the most extraordinary place in the world that is taking this work seriously and that people would fly here from all over the world and we would say if
00:52:47
you're from Nigeria and can't afford it of course we'll help you if you're from China and can't afford it of course we're going to charge you and top dollar the irony is uh there this will turn
00:53:02
into a multi-billion dollar Global Consulting work in the same way policy work is is hundreds of millions of dollars uh how many hundreds of billions
00:53:15
of dollars uh globally um and Alberta had the opportunity to own this work in 1966 Preston Manning talked his daddy
00:53:27
who is Premier into creating the first Futures think tank in Canadian history run by um Lauren Downey as the human resources research Council
00:53:42
and Lauren had 10 guys working for him who were among Canada's most extraordinary futurists they did the first formal Futures project in Canadian history and among other things it was
00:53:56
published in in 68 and it predicted the demise of the socrad dynasty because they could see that Alberta was quivering on the edge of a culture
00:54:08
change and didn't get it and Peter lawhey came to power as was predicted and said to himself my girlfriend's guys are good um
00:54:21
we all they're extraordinary but he also said as any Premier quite responsibly would say but are they my guys I didn't appoint them they were appointed by the previous government and one of the first administrative
00:54:33
things Peter did came as you know came to power in August um in the fall he foreign phoned Lauren Downey and said uh this is just a heads up I am not going to go to the bother of
00:54:47
passing legislation to uh obliteration but your budget next year will be a dollar and uh if you can raise enough money to keep it going good on you uh I'll
00:55:01
support you if you can't do that plan to wind down now but Peter had no idea that he had a leg up on what would become a global multi-billion dollar
00:55:14
franchise very very interesting Reuben I wanted to turn the discussion to to systems and one of the pivotal
00:55:29
principles underlying our political system of course is the rule of law and the rule of law was was very instrumental in fostering capitalism and globalism and World Trade system
00:55:43
now now China is is a country which is moving more towards an authoritarian type of State uh and and yet one wonders whether their
00:55:58
capacity to mobilize resources and get buildings built and so on is um perhaps a a better model of going
00:56:12
into the future now that of course was controversial and Justin Trudeau kind of into the thought it was slow back but we we are creatures of of course of
00:56:26
our heritage and on our heritage as liberal democracies and and what that stands for uh there there's an interesting book by Seth Klein Naomi Klein's brother the
00:56:39
just for about creating a mobilizing federal government provincial um almost a state of emergency to address
00:56:53
climate change uh and and that would if you had extraordinary powers then you could basically say well electric vehicles and
00:57:04
more cars is not the solution and we're gonna go in a different area we're going to secure for example the water supply we're going to secure the air supply
00:57:16
we're going to reduce emissions in a very structured way uh but but again there's we we're in an open economy as economists remind us so again what what
00:57:32
to do what what is there to do uh I I move from being kind of an optimist to to a great pessimist along the lines of
00:57:44
collapse of civilizations and and so on uh just speak a little bit about the The Perils in uh both kind of a
00:57:56
50 000 foot State planning versus Community communities getting their act together and creating local products and creating
00:58:08
local markets well it I mean let's play with that I think the issue you're raising is absolutely critical and one of the things that gets us into trouble is that
00:58:19
we think that intuitively just given our whatever our education and backgrounds are but as modern men and women we tend to think in binary terms yes no uh whereas the Chinese and the
00:58:35
ancient Hebrews I mean if if those of us who call ourselves Christians were actually had spent more time not reading the Old Testament in English but understanding the thought patterns in
00:58:48
Hebrew behind English which is a whole different story we would find that that Hebrew patterns of thought and Chinese patterns of thought are remarkably similar which suggests that it's not about
00:59:01
eastern western it's it's it's about a time shift that if you go back four or five thousand years you find lots of people who are thinking in relational terms
00:59:14
and in small group terms now China ends up relationally and bit by bit as it becomes an Empire thinks large groups so it's an interesting example of relational
00:59:26
thinking and an Empire indigenous people are relational thinking and small groups and and then they have as you know with the Blackfoot Confederacy and others
00:59:39
agreements among them in a way to keep the peace uh and they're also smart enough although that Mendel and his genetics are in the future but they've they've
00:59:51
also paid attention enough that that for reasons they may not quite understand in our sense scientifically uh but it's not good to uh marry too many first cousins so
01:00:04
you get your rides from a neighboring group and all good so I mean in that sense we're remarkably smart and I take seriously uh the challenge that you've
01:00:17
put out so here's here's a response an idea that I have floated among Deputy ministers and some cabinet ministers in Alberta I mean there's a list as long as your arm
01:00:29
of ideas that have been rejected by Prime Ministers premiers you know and other senior people um uh which in a funny way I wear is a
01:00:42
badge of Pride but one of them is let's assume that the price of oil uh is at least at the uh 75 range which keeps us out of trouble Keith is at least floating in Alberta maybe even 80 bucks
01:00:56
a barrel maybe even 85 so that we've got some extra money so uh we're going to appoint you and you get to look around for a female and uh
01:01:10
the two of you have to then look around for uh people who are uh indigenous male and female and the four of you are going to be a group and we're going to give you
01:01:22
um uh uh a hundred billion dollars to spend over 10 years which means that you've got uh 10 billion 100 million no we're going to do more
01:01:37
we're going to give you a billion dollars so you've got a hundred million a year and you're going to be able to give it away in 10 million dollar tranches now 10 million you know isn't a lot today given inflation and whatnot
01:01:49
but it'll still buy you something rather than nothing and we're gonna you're gonna set up um not a competition in that competitive sense but you're going to open uh uh
01:02:01
competitive bidding for towns in Alberta that are fifteen thousand dollar fifteen thousand people are smaller because we're gonna we're gonna learn to practice this stuff at a scale where you
01:02:15
can almost wrap your arms around people I'm trying to do allegory at one point or Edmonton at a million is just nutsville um but but to do uh Claire's home to do
01:02:28
Slave Lake to do uh bonnieville um lots of interesting towns and we're going to say in order to submit an application for this because the deal is
01:02:40
you'll get 10 million a year for uh 10 years and it has to be spent on a program that helps you start the transition from
01:02:52
being an unconscious modern community that only aspires to being a better unconscious modern community so you're both better Modern but also you're no
01:03:05
more conscious than you were and notice that in the last election there was no thought offered by anybody that actually becoming conscious of the world we're in might actually be a good idea
01:03:16
neither left nor right is willing to float that idea in public um where we figured out that if you're going to change a system you're in you have to become conscious of it and the way that system is in you
01:03:30
and and so would work out but literally we'd say that we're going to have 10 places in Alberta Each of which is
01:03:42
going to try to do this and they can be done in very different ways that they can be done on different assumptions each will abide by the rule of law but but you're you know enough about history that there's nothing in
01:03:55
the rule of law per se that advantages capitalism you could also have a culture with the rule of law that isn't capitalistic the law is simply because the laws in that sense are simply the Deep
01:04:08
agreements that people have arrived at and what is good true and beautiful and and how that goes so the fact that that we in the modern world have used
01:04:20
the rule of law to advance capitalism is simply in that sense a historic accident there's nothing inherent in the I mean you can't do capitalism without the rule of law because then it just looks like
01:04:33
you know you've got Scoundrels which you have but with the rule of law they don't look like Scoundrels and so you let them get away with it so without the rule of law capitalism needs the rule of law the
01:04:46
rule of law does not need capitalism it doesn't mean the only alternative is what we think of historically is socialism and so we're going to invite albertans to put their thinking caps on and to
01:04:58
work through some of this to go at it and one of these places may decide to try Master planning you and I might agree a mistake but let's let's try it out to see how far they can get what we
01:05:10
can learn some other place might decide to break up people into groups of 150 in their community of fifteen thousand and uh
01:05:21
and have them work as communities and do that taking the Dunbar number seriously there's a sense in which it's not that I don't care as long as thought goes into it but literally we don't know enough
01:05:35
about changing whole complex systems to know how to go about it and so one of the things we should say is what we face in the 21st century is having to change whole complex systems
01:05:48
in wholesale ways and to understand they're not complicated they're complex and that the rules for complicated systems in the rule for complex systems are utterly different rules and since
01:06:02
nobody on the planet knows enough about how you do that at scale and all this would be in terms of a of a firm back to your bank herself whereas a firm is doing proof of concept it's going to
01:06:15
grow enough to show that it can be scaled um this is simply using small groups to literally see how far we can get to do enough learning because ultimately uh as
01:06:28
you know Tokyo already has what 30 million people in it I don't know how that we even think about that uh let alone Calgary or Toronto
01:06:40
um but but what I'm saying is if we were serious about it that what the objective is is to take seriously that we are in the process of learning to outgrow our
01:06:52
own formation as modern men and women and therefore modern husbands modern bosses modern workers modern exes whatever those X's are doesn't mean we're inherently bad people
01:07:06
it just means that any baby born literally any baby born that does not die either in birth or shortly thereafter from neglect is born into a going a culture that's a going concern
01:07:20
with people who care for them that speak a given language in a given culture that's already established and nobody says to the baby I'm sorry kid you're born into this particular form of
01:07:33
culture at this particular time of history and we're going to pretend with you that this is the right way to be human right so so I I mean if if if you've got
01:07:46
a provincial government that initiates these pilot projects call them and I know they're that's probably not a good name for it but but I mean what are what
01:07:57
are what are we looking for how how do we measure the outcomes of this experiment are we looking at pure water um healthier communities less domestic
01:08:12
violence I I is is this an economy of well-being in other words we're beginning to explore it would this is about whole systems thinking that are
01:08:26
complex and therefore dynamic uh the thinking is integral which means that nothing gets left out so anybody who wants to talk about externalities you give them a bar of soap and say every time you say that word wash your mouth
01:08:39
out with soap there are no externalities in a complex living system and and so um I mean yes you're quite right there's
01:08:51
lots of stuff we already know about the world we need to move into gravity will still be there put it this way if gravity weakens to the point that it doesn't hold us on
01:09:03
this planet every other issue is moved yes and so uh people say there are no facts about the future which may be true as a narrow and empirical statement but
01:09:17
it's really a narrow modern statement to try to Anchor us into hard data where in fact if in fact we don't already know a good deal about the future uh then we're not taking human life seriously we know
01:09:31
there'll be gravity we know there'll be babies we know that those babies will have plastic brains and that their nutrition maternal nutrition before the woman gets pregnant matters to the child
01:09:42
you know there's we know a ton of stuff already and and um and we also know that our desire to measure everything is a mistake so we're
01:09:54
going to limit the kinds of things we measure and we're also going to widen the sensor of measurement um but it isn't how we know based on on
01:10:09
objective measures no object object it's one of the things that we're going to learn to wash our mouth out with soap that object the tension between the the division of the world into some things
01:10:22
are objective and everything else is subjective is a modern fantasy that no pre-modern culture understands or plays with this is
01:10:34
literally a modern invention and you can see it emerge the the CBC did a 15-part series on the emergence of the concepts
01:10:46
of public and private um and we could invite him to do another series and they basically say you don't you don't get private space until you also get public
01:10:58
space that before before the private individual is invented there's no such thing as the public whereas we tend to think historically that Romans had public space but no
01:11:12
individuals and and this series did you know by the time you're finished listening to all of them you realize that that's a mistake that public and private go together if you want one you get the other and objective and subjective go together
01:11:26
if you want one you get the other and you don't have to have either if in fact you just set that aside and ask the question as a genuinely open question how many other ways are there
01:11:37
of thinking of some of the same kinds of phenomenon that we point to other than in those terms and in that case you'll find some people typically in other languages
01:11:50
often in indigenous languages but not only that putting their hand up and say well I can tell you how the ancient Hebrews did it we who are Jewish today do not
01:12:02
experience the world in the same way as the Asian Hebrews did in spite of the ultra Orthodox people saying we are true to the ancient Hebrews
01:12:14
they're true to what having built been filtered through 2000 years of Western history and um unfortunately we are what we know about ourselves is we are
01:12:27
so plastic that we are far more products of History than we understand and understanding that fact then allows us to think well if we're products of
01:12:39
History we have actually more room for freedom to in a sense change the production line if what a culture is is a culture is a production line for certain kinds of
01:12:52
persons certain understandings of Economics of families of making love of giving birth falling in love being educated of being obedient uh being disrespectful being a Maverick
01:13:05
that all of that is up for grabs if we think widely enough for an historically enough and and I mean that's what I'm
01:13:18
trying to get to by saying modernity itself is up for grabs We Now understand that if you go back a thousand years nobody on the planet is modern and
01:13:30
there's almost nothing on the planet that's even about the roots of modernity and but there's things in the 10th Century in what we think of as now as broadly Western and Central Europe
01:13:46
that are beginning to show up particularly in art and architecture and poetry and music not an accident the musician we know that artists are often people who sense
01:13:59
things and are ahead of a culture they give the first articulation to a set of ideas and so if you today if next time you're in Ottawa I invite you to go to the
01:14:10
National Gallery because the National Gallery in Ottawa has one of the world's best collections of European northern European art and it starts about 1300
01:14:22
there's some before that but their collections of that's old enough to get you into it and it works through historically as you work through the rooms and at least it used to last time I brought it was there it brought you
01:14:36
out into a post-modern into postmodern art as if what's beyond what we think of as Modern Art uh into post-modern art
01:14:48
and and the the the Group of Seven would be and their abstraction would be um a borderline they're they're not they're not as uh
01:15:01
far out as post-modern art but nor are they still classically modern people and you see that in some 19th century art but mostly in some 20th century art
01:15:14
um and if you walk through it and pay attention you can literally see a modern imagination forming and you could take classes of uh kids in
01:15:27
grade eight kids in grade 12 first year University students graduate students would be interesting to take different sets of people through and then get them together in the cafeteria and say we'll buy you whatever
01:15:40
you want at no cost but the price is you got to be here and talk for the next hour to each other in small groups as well as a whole group to talk about what you've just seen and what is it that's
01:15:53
emerging as the heart of modernity having watched a modern imagination appear in that art and and so reason of course was part of
01:16:08
that development in in in the uh coming out of the so-called Dark Ages and and letting go of I guess the subject of the the more
01:16:23
uh mystical properties of of imaginations and so on and it and I'm getting a sense from you
01:16:34
uh Reuben that that you are ultimately an optimist am I am I right in that in in the sense that it it is the use of the imagination
01:16:46
that is so powerful and and that I think reason and John Ralston Saul talks about the unconscious civilization yeah uh and and and you know his book about uh
01:17:00
voltaire's bastard and said that the damage that reason has wrought uh is is that is that a takeaway can I well take that to the bank I I want to
01:17:14
avoid the language of optimism and pessimism because I don't find the language of optimism to be robust enough to withstand the kind of pain that we're in for
01:17:25
okay I think I may be wrong in my judgment but I'm among those who think that uh even by the time uh we have the next election in Alberta given that that
01:17:38
should be let's assume that the UCP hangs together as a political party long enough that we may have a new premier by then or even several uh at the present rate um
01:17:49
but uh if the next election is 2027 my judgment today would be and I couldn't spell it out exactly as to the details of what I mean but in the same
01:18:02
way that 2023 is a more emotionally stressed world than 2019 or 2015 or 2000 2012 before that if you
01:18:18
look at Alberta elections um so with every passing election the world of Alberta has become increasingly stressed in just for normal living
01:18:31
people by 20 2027 that will have increased noticeably and um so I find that most people's optimism
01:18:44
it's like water uh on the deck after a bit of a summer rain but when the sun comes out if it's hot enough uh give it 20 minutes you can't even see any water
01:18:57
on the deck it's just evacuated and hospitalism tends to evaporate in the face of really serious hardship and so I'll find the language of Hope and hopefulness hope hopelessness
01:19:11
speak to me more in the sense of are there reasons to still get up clean up suit up and show up and I want to say yes even in the face
01:19:25
of extraordinary difficulty and you see that in extreme cases uh in the work of Charles Frankel and others who wrote about uh the German concentration camps
01:19:36
that the people who survived it tended to be people that even as enslaved workers after hours of working in some Munitions plant could nudge each other
01:19:49
walking back to Dachau or forever it was nudged each other to say look at the sunset to say there is Beauty in the world and
01:20:02
to not let what's happening to them as physical beings and what's happening to them because of the Nazi Doctrine corrupt their souls to say there's part of me you cannot own
01:20:16
that I am strong enough you'll never own All of Me and I I remember in 1984 the most for me the most penetrating thing that Orwell
01:20:28
saw is that nobody got to die in 1984 until they acknowledged that they love big brother you could not die as a martyr
01:20:41
they kept you alive until they broke you yes extraordinary insight yes and I for me then what I want
01:20:53
encourage people to do is find some way to experience life here and now as full of enough Grace and forgiveness and beauty
01:21:06
in whatever tradition make sense to them which may or may not be what we think of as a religious tradition or a spiritual tradition whatever but that is strong enough that they have
01:21:20
grounds for what I call Post despair hope because despair in the sense of my God we're trapped and there's no way out of this and we've been wasting time and
01:21:32
money and we're now in worse shape pursuing these fantasies that we've had we've actually wasted time and money and we're in worse shape than than we needed to be that that realization is I've been
01:21:45
through that that's decades ago for me I I don't mean that is virtue I just mean that the earlier you did it the easier it is for you because the longer you wait in a sense
01:21:59
the more that you see of your life is locked into it on the other hand I've lived with the burden of knowing that I live in a culture that doesn't see what I see and doesn't want to see that doesn't have so
01:22:12
that there are not many people as clients who really want to say we're hiring you Reuben to teach you the best that we know as opposed to just give influence over lately on the top
01:22:25
um well I I think that's uh Reuben I think that's a wonderful way to to wind up this uh conversation and and the sense
01:22:35
of also the the grace and and the beauty that that we we experience and and the requirement to to find that Beauty on on
01:22:48
it on a daily basis um we we've covered an enormous uh canvas of of human history Alberta history and I always find our discussions uh
01:23:03
very interesting and fruitful and I hope our listeners will enjoy the conversation as well
End of transcript