First, thank you. I'm delighted that someone has read our report. That's terrific. More specifically, I think the notion of Canadians' engagement is part of understanding what a technocrat might call the “disintermediation of the world”. When the United Nations was launched, it was $50 for a three-minute phone call between London and New York. Now anyone in the world can get on Skype for free and talk with anyone. This is not just about how governments connect, this is about how societies connect. Our businesses, our universities, and all the aspects of multilateralism that are global co-operation are very far beyond government.
I would even say in the Canadian context that when we think about the role of business in the world, which is crucial—that is the global economy—it's regulated at the provincial level. Our stock exchanges and our markets are regulated at the provincial level. That means on that issue alone, our provincial governments are major global players for, as an example, our extractives industry. We're not used to thinking of provincial governments as global players, but there's no question that they are. Our provincial governments are also the primary funders of our universities. All the students and all the faculty, all the incentives of what people learn, what they teach, and what they research, are fundamentally driven by these very local budgeting and policy questions. Then, of course, we have the national research funding bodies, like SSHRC and NSERC and the IDRC, which are part of this too.
The bottom line is that I have been in many meetings in the world. One with a Swedish coalition was most profoundly moving to me. It was at a World Economic Forum session, and it was the most sophisticated commentary I could remember hearing on global sustainable development challenges. I looked around the room and saw that it was the CEO of Ericsson, the CEO of Volvo, the CEO of the Swedish pension plan, and the head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the scientists. I realized that this was a conversation that had grown over 10 years because the government was working with the business leadership and the scientific leadership at every step to say, “How do we build our society's engagement for the world? Because this is in everyone's interest.”
This is why I stress so strongly that in Canada, I believe, we need to be thinking about a 10-year horizon for most of these questions. One doesn't change overnight the funding incentives for our universities. One doesn't build overnight our corporate sector's global engagement where it doesn't exist adequately. This is about conversations, this is about joint problem-solving, and in some cases it's about regulation. Most of the time, however, it's about the role of actors engaging, in a crucial global engagement manner, in a way that's additive to everything we're used to talking about. It's not a substitute, it's an addition. That's how I think we can actually make sure we're leading on all these questions where so much of the world, I can guarantee you, wants Canada to be leading.