Thank you, fantastic witnesses. I am glad to see that you both have a connection with Hamilton. You're affirming MP Bob Bratina's assertion that the world actually revolves around Hamilton.
One would hope that the world would come together after the COVID crisis. After all, it doesn't matter where we are in the world—other than maybe some places in the South Pacific—because we're all experiencing the same things. We're all forced to socially distance and wear masks in public. People are staying at home worried about the health of their elderly relatives, worried about when their income is going to start to come in. This should bring humanity together, but in fact, there are suggestions that this is undermining globalism, undermining our common sense of humanity.
Borders are closing. We're trying to make sure that supply chains are domestic rather than dependent on foreign countries. We're seeing diseases as coming from other places and affecting us.
Certainly, globalism has done a lot to make the world a better place. There are so many people who lived in abject poverty before globalization. There are countries like Mexico, China and India where there was a lot of abject poverty and now it's quite rare as a result of globalization.
Similarly, the world has been a fairly harmonious place with not a lot of international conflict since the formation of the United Nations in 1945. I'm a little worried post-COVID-19 that we're becoming a little more fractionated, a little less together in terms of humanity. This is pulling us apart, rather than together.
My first question to the panellists is this: Do you think this is the case? Are we going to come out of this more united globally or less united?
Second, what can we, as Canada, do to ensure the former, that we come out of this more united and strong, that our international institutions are stronger, not weaker, and that we're not going back to the kind of world we were prior to 1945?