Wednesday’s annual Fletcher C. Snider Lecture at UTM featured Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson speaking about Canada’s global agenda at home and abroad
As well as his national affairs column, Simpson has written six books and won numerous awards for his work, including the Governor-General’s Award for non-fiction, the National Newspaper Award for column writing, and the National Magazine Award for political writing.
Simpson said he does not dispute the popular slogan “The world needs more Canada,” but he believes it would be more accurate to say that “Canada needs more of the world.”
Canada cannot solve environmental or trade problems alone, Simpson said, and these are only two of many global issues. He urged Canadians to enhance their skills and productivity to compete in the global marketplace, while turning Canada into a nation that will attract and retain talent.
Simpson that the national agenda “is not survival of the fittest”: politicians, he said, spend much of their time discussing minor issues and striving simply for one-upmanship, while the greater public instead needs to ask, “What good did that exchange do?”
Simpson said that in lecturing at universities across Canada, he has discovered that students are internationally focused. They are primarily taking courses like political science, law, and international relations, he said, and make up a constituency which desperately waits for a strong, internationally minded political leader to emerge.
Simpson devoted another short portion of his lecture to the topic of U.S. relations.
Whether we love or hate the US, Simpson said he finds anti-American attitudes entirely useless in a country striving for progress. At a time when U.S. powers are increasingly parochial, “there has never been a better time for Canada to become international-thinking,” he said. Simpson warned Canadians not to fall into “the trap of moral superiority,” to avoid alienating the other nations of the world.
The point that Simpson stressed most heavily is that the Canadian global agenda depends most heavily on the funding of universities.
“We talk about the shortage of doctors, but never the shortage of professors,” Simpson said. Politicians, he said, say that Canada can have it all, and never explain to the public that some benefits must be sacrificed for others. This is especially pertinent in the case of what Simpson called Canada’s “iconic” health care system, which the government is continually pouring funds into.
“There’s a right wing way of looking at this, and a left wing way of looking at it,” Simpson said. “And then there’s arithmetic.”
