LIVE SOON: Why Canada needs more wartime urgency
From housing to actual wars, it's time for Canada to get moving
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In this episode of On The Line, Matt Gurney has a pair of guests. First up is Mike Moffatt, senior director at the Smart Prosperity Institute, a professor at the Ivey Business School and host of the Missing Middle podcast. Mike joins Matt to chat housing, and how our action isn’t matching our rhetoric. Then, Glenn Cowan comes on. Glenn is a founder and managing director at One9 Investments, which focuses on national security companies. He’s also a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, where he was an officer for 20 years, much of that spent in special operations units. Glenn tells Matt why he thinks Canada needs to move faster, and how Canada must use its economic power as another facet of its national defence.
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The last time we thought we needed wartime action was the covid years, and look how that turned out.
Our current leadership and institutions are far too incompetent (when not simply malicious) for any kind of wartime urgency to turn out well.
Instead, we need to accept the necessity of doing a gut-job renovation on all of them, and take our time to do that right.
Unrealistic, you say? Entrenched interests are too powerful? You're probably right. The second best option is doing nothing.
Gonna go back and catch up on the Mike Moffatt segment, but just wanted to say Glenn Cowan was great. His "bullish on Canada" comment is worth taking to heart. After decades of complacency (which also infected the CF), Canadians are coming to grips with new realities faster than one might expect. That's worth encouraging.
Even a year ago, flying a Canadian flag was basically an invitation to some decolonizing or convoy ideologue to start shouting about what a terrible country Canada is. Given this recent history, the new and rising level of public support for increased defence spending (and, heck, even identifying as capital-C Canadians) is actually heartening. And if (if) poll respondents are wrong about the US being our largest threat, at least Canadians now actually get that there "are* threats.
Me, I'd like to see more + better messaging around (national) identity formation and capacity-building for ordinary citizens. All the defence, tech, procurement, ally relations stuff: yes, yes -- but also, let's encourage and *enable* ordinary Canadians to think and act in ways that support, serve and defend our country. There's a new willingness that should be tapped into.