 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the second session of our event. I would like to once again invite Ms. Christine Nakamura to continue the second session of our event. Thank you, Henry. Welcome back, everybody. I hope everybody had a chance to stretch their legs a little bit. And because we have an exciting program ahead of us again. And now I am very pleased to invite Mr. Winston Chen, representative of the Taipei Economic Cultural Office in Ottawa, to introduce the minister. Over to you, Representative Chen. Thank you, Ms. Yipu-Ku Christine. Good evening, Bongswa, friends in Canada. Good morning, Bongswu to those in Taiwan. It is my great pleasure to introduce Taiwan's digital minister, Honorable Audrey Tan, to all the delegates of the first virtual Canadian women-only business mission to Taiwan. I have the honour of receiving Minister Tan twice in Ottawa in the past. I also participate in a close virtual event hosted by Asia Pacific Foundation, which featured Minister Tan as a keynote speaker to share Taiwan's unique and successful experience in combating the COVID-19 pandemic through innovation and inclusion. Minister Tan was a trial prodigy, leading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight. At the age of 19, Minister Tan had worked in Silicon Valley as an entrepreneur and found enough success to retire by 33, and become Taiwan's youngest cabinet minister at the age of 35. The incredible success of Minister Tan has led her to be named among the top 20 most influential people in digital government, and she was this one-hundred-global thinker by the Foreign Policy magazine. Minister Tan has worked hard to create a more open government, which is transparent, accessible, and interacts openly with the civil society. She has helped cultivate Taiwan's digital democracy, including by introducing measures that allow citizens to submit policy ideas for the government's consideration. Minister Tan has led efforts to combat digital disinformation and the following interference while promoting truthful information. One of her most famous strategies during the pandemic was the use of humor over rumor to make light of fake news narratives while simultaneously correcting the record. Minister Tan has made spectacular contributions in fighting the pandemic. Her innovative and digital responses such as developing apps for contact tracing and the mask availability monitoring have been widely praised. While I could go on, I would rather stop here and then pass the phone to Minister Tan. Thank you. Thank you. Merci beaucoup. Thank you. So, yeah, as I mentioned before turning on the mic, this is the first time of the hybrid model for me, where I need to look into the camera most of the time and audience only occasionally. So I'll try to make this work. Good local time to friends joining us physically and virtually regardless of your time zone. Good local time. First, I would like to extend my warmest greetings to the Canadian Women Early Virtual Business Mission to Taiwan and express my gratitude to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada for organizing this event. And your kind of invitation for me. It is my great honor to be able to contribute to the first ever Canadian Women Early Business Mission to Taiwan. This is a very meaningful event providing an opportunity for female leaders from Taiwan and Canada to interact and exchange opinions, how to explore and fully realize women's potential in business. I dialed in on the previous session on my way here to listen to CEO and other topics and I learned a lot from the social entrepreneurship angle. So it's my observation that women's role in global governance is becoming more and more significant, especially when the world economy is heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the building back after the pandemic. In fact, many journalists reported when looking at how different countries deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, countries with women leaders such as New Zealand and Taiwan seem to have performed better against the pandemic. So really happy to share with you all here. Now, so you've been looking at this slide called Digital Social Innovation. And this is the three principles that we have been working on to make sure that when we fight the pandemic, we don't have to resort to top-down heavy measures such as lockdown, which people had a little bit of experience in 2003 here when SARS-1.0 hits and nobody want to go back to that model. So we have to innovate and find something new. And here is the basic idea of what's new about this. What we call the all of society of people-public partnership model, people-public-private partnership when fighting the pandemic with no lockdowns and the infodermic with no takedowns. And it has three pillars. It's fast, it's fair, and it's fun. The fast part pertains to the collective intelligence. As some of you know, Dr. Lee Wen Liang, the whistleblower from Wuhan, although he didn't save the people in Wuhan, he did save people in Taiwan by sounding the alarm about, and I quote, seven new SARS cases in the Huanan seafood market around the turn of the year in late December 2019. And it immediately get uploaded by the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit thanks to the sharing of a very young doctor. No more pipe was her nickname on the PTT. And people upvoted that triage to look at the Lee Wen Liang's message and see it as legit, which is why we started the health inspections for flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan the very next day, which is the first day of 2020. Now, the PTT, while I just said that it's an equivalent of Reddit, it's actually not equivalent because Reddit is private infrastructure for online discussion, it's a private company. And PTT, being a national Taiwan University students pet project that has been running for decades, open source, is firmly in the social sector as a digital public infrastructure. The PTT has no shareholders to report to. It doesn't have any advertisers to please. So all the upvoting and so on that goes on the PTT is based on the merit of those messages, which is why we were able to surface and amplify Dr. Lee Wen Liang's message better than any private sector advertisement funded and so on public infrastructures. I'm not saying that the private sector communication or messenger platform doesn't have its place, but for things of public benefit and like early warning system and so on, I would argue that digital public infrastructure like town halls and public parks in the analog world works better to get people's signals together. So this relies on two things that Taiwan and Canada shares. One is a very active social sector where people would voluntarily put their time into triaging such messages. And the second is the government makes sure that everyone enjoys a complete freedom of information, of speech and assembly of the press and so on so people can talk about SARS 2.0, SARS coming again freely without fearing repercussions of being harmonized as in other jurisdictions. And so this is a fundamental thing that enabled the fast response of public infrastructure. And adding to that, we also have the government's citizen feedback cycle, and I didn't mean the audio feedback. It's a point about 1922. And this toll free number, it's really not cutting edge technology. It's just a call center that you can call from a landline. On the other hand, it's very inclusive and accessible. Very young people, very old people, they're all welcome to call 1922. There's more than 2 million calls last year pertaining to COVID that everyone can get the epidemiology ideas explained to them in a personalized individual education program and by the power of the call center. And the other way works too. People are free to call to suggest new innovations of correcting the government's course when things go wrong. And their ideas gets amplified by the next day's 2 p.m. Central Epidemic Command Center press conference. So one well-known case, but I'll mention it anyway because it relates to gender mainstreaming, pertains to last April when a very young boy called 1922 saying that, hey, you're rationing out mask, but, well, all I get to the young boy said is pink medical grade mask, but other boys in the class have navy blue surgical mask. So the boy doesn't want to go to school because he only have pink mask, what to do? The call center people couldn't handle. It's not in the frequently asked questions. So he gets escalated immediately to the CECC. And the participation office at the team in charge of public engagement immediately suggested that medical officers in the live streamed press conference the very next day all wear pink. So the CECC medical officers, regardless of gender, were pink for quite some time. The mayor is the premier. Everyone wore pink medical mask for the ongoing weeks. And the minister of health and welfare, Minister Chen Shizhong, even said that pink panther was his childhood idol, childhood hero. So the boy become the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that the heroes wear. And the color that heroes wear, right, the pink panther. And so this is, of course, a great anecdote for gender mainstreaming, but the same thing goes on, for example, for master distribution, for innovating like using traditional rice cookers to kill the virus but doesn't kill the mask. To essentially double or quadruple the mask supply and so on, any new idea that goes to the 192 to become public knowledge by the next 2 p.m. So that's the fast part of collective intelligence. The fair part pertaining to mask rationing, as I mentioned, because at the beginning of the pandemic last February, we had a real shortage problem as was many other countries in medical grade mask. At the time, we produce not even 2 million medical masks a day in a country of 23 million people. So we probably have to ration it somehow. But even before the government think of the rationing strategy or anything like that, there's a civic technologist, the name is Howard Wu Zhangwei from China City, that just coded up this map out of nowhere. He asked his friends and families to look at the stores that still carry some inventory of masks and report which one runs out and which ones still have some in stock. This is great because it reduces killing time. But it's not great for Howard Wu's bank account because he used Google API. So overnight he owed Google 20k US dollars just by setting this up. And so he's like, I don't worry about it anymore because it's bankrupting money and somebody else will probably fix it. And so he asked for help. On the GZERO channel, the GZEROV channel, Taiwan's leading social sector civic technologist movement. And people suggest various ways for him to switch to free software, to open source software to save money and so on. But one of the people who contributed was yours truly was me. So I brought his idea to the premier saying that we really need to trust the citizens with open data, meaning that we need to enable more Howard Wu when we're doing the mask rationing so that everyone can absorb the cost. And I also helped negotiating with Google so Google waived his usage fees. And in exchange of me placing Howard Wu's implementation above OpenStreetMap, so that people would still see that it's Google sponsored. So that's a pretty good people public-private partnership. So the idea here is that since we digitized the national health insurance right after it starts 1.0 in 2004, nowadays we have not only broadband as human right, but we have fiber optic connections from all the 6,000 pharmacies with pharmacists trusted by local communities to the national health insurance. So every time that a mask is sold in any pharmacy, everyone can see in real time like this 58 adult masks goes down to 56, 54, 52 while you're queuing in line. You can check your phone so that everybody can see that this is being distributed in a fair fashion and everyone can suggest how to distribute it better. And this is great because when we publish things once every 30 seconds, people can do dashboards such as this one. If we publish every quarter then people cannot co-create. So real time open data or open API publishing upon collection is like the digital data fabric that is the strata on top of which digital social innovations can grow. I still vividly remember when we wrote this out on the map. I was very happy about it because I can overlay the population map on the pharmacy map and I see it's a almost complete correspondence meaning that we're very fair in the distribution of the medical grade mask. But just a few weeks later, an MP, Gao Hong-An of the TPP who did an interpolation to administer Chen Shizhong saying that a quarter of an open street map community, this is actually not fair because if you look at the rural places, the time cost that each person need to go to a nearby pharmacy even though the physical distance on the map is the same, the opportunity cost, the time cost is not the same so that the rural people when they go to the pharmacy, maybe the pharmacy have already closed. But because this is such an evidence-based interpolation, it helps that MP Gao Hong-An was VP of data analytics at Foxconn. So she knows something about data and understatement, she knows a lot about data. So when she did the interpolation, Minister Chen simply said, legislator, teach us. And what a great response from the cabinet minister, right? So you can do better, so let's do it your way. So the very next day, we introduced pre-ordering in 24-hour convenience stores. We introduced a new distribution mechanism suggested by MP Gao and the open street map community. And MP Gao was very happy and posted on social media, said yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's co-creation. So that is how fairness is guaranteed by pretty much everyone, including the four leading convenience stores that expanded the 6,000 pharmacies to the almost 20,000 points of mask pre-ordering and collection. And finally, because this is a stressful time, so people do have a lot of conspiracy theories. There's a lot of uneasiness, for example, when there's a mask shortage. One of the trending disinformation at a time was that of panic buying. There was a rumor that said, and I quote, all the tissue paper manufacturers are being nationalized and all the tissue paper material are being confiscated to make medical grade masks. So we'll run out of tissue paper soon, go out and buy. Well, it ended up, we discovered that it started by tissue paper resellers, go figure. We didn't know that at the time, so we just know that people run out and buy all the tissue papers they can find on the store and so on, so we need to work on some way to counter this panic-induced infodemic. And the way we do that is through the power of humor because humor and fun travels even faster than outrage and polarized ideas. So within just a couple of hours, the premier, Su Zhenchang, you just saw his front side and this is his back side. So like both sides are very mimetic-worthy. Anyway, so as part of a popular internet meme, our premier, Su Zhenchang, you know, said this wordplay. We all turn for Wu Xin Yao Yan and the full mandarin is, 不管你在怎麼退屯, 我們都只有一粒咖 chen. But this is a wordplay because a mandarin to stockpile tuan sounds exactly the same as bottom's tuan and so it's very easy to remember but this is actually serious policy information here that says tissue papers are made out of South American materials and medical grade masks, this is really a plastic product are made of domestic materials. There really is no way confiscating one will make the other work. It just simply makes no sense and because this is really viral. This is one absolutely viral on the social media. So within just a couple of days, the original rumor just died out and replaced by this humor fun message and this is not just a one-off thing. We have a very cute spoke stock, a Shiba Inu, the name is Zong Chai. Actually is a companion animal of the participation officer of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. So every time they finish a 2 p.m. press conference, the officer just walks back. They leave just a block or two away from the building of the MOSHW and take new photos of the dog and that's at physical distance. When you're out there, keep two dogs away from another aware mask. If you're indoor, keep three Shiba Inus away. Remember to cover your mouth and nose when sneezing. Do what the dog does here. And this is a masterpiece. This is a wear a mask to protect you from shi-shou-shou, which is very hard to translate, to protect your own face from your own unwashed hand. And this message appeals to rational self-interest rather than saying, you know, protecting the elderly, protecting your parents, protecting the frontline medical workers and so on. This says wear a mask to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands, and protect your own children. And this is a masterpiece. The links must use enhanced sanitation together, which is really the only way that the PPE, the mask policy, would work. So with that, we get three-quarter of people get access to masks, wearing them regularly, cleaning their hands by April. And around that time, the R-value, the basic transmission rate drops to below one. And then we move to, like a slightly post-COVID timeline. So this is my initial sharing. I look forward to the fireside chat. You can check out more at TaiwanCanHelp.us. I think we're natural partners in working on digital social innovation because we do share with Canada the values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. So I look forward with the following fireside chat with Ms. Janice Fukakusa. Thank you. Minister Yang, I think that Christine Nakamura was going to speak. I don't know if it's working. I don't know. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you just fine. Here she is. Sorry about that. Thank you so much, Minister. I mean, you always, always amaze us when you speak. And it's just a delight to have you with us again. So thank you very much for that presentation. Now, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Janice Fukakusa. She is the Chancellor of Ryerson University in Toronto and the former COO of the largest bank in Canada, RBC. And she's going to moderate the discussion with you. So over to you, Janice. Thank you very much, Christine. And thank you, Minister Tang, for all of the insights that you've given us, not just in this talk today, but you were a guest of Asia Pacific Foundation a few months back and we all were very impressed, especially with the results you have in Taiwan. And I have a question about capital and the civic tech movement in Taiwan. There's lots of innovation there and ideas, and you speak about social innovation to develop new business models. So how does Taiwan direct resources, financial or other types of resource to empower innovation, especially the type that doesn't target to generate traditional profit and return on investment. For example, what are the social metrics of success? And maybe you could talk a bit about stakeholder capitalism and how this transition that you've made in terms of the good of citizens and the open and transparent economy. Thank you. It's a very good question. Should I mute my video? Okay, it magically works. Technology, yes. So I think it's very important to understand the importance of social enterprise. First, Taiwan already has a very strong charity, social enterprise co-op based social sector. So many of the largest charities, they own social enterprises that once working on regional revitalization, working on equity in development and making it a business. I'm talking about the double or triple recycling pipeline from say the the foundation as well as the Chinese glassworks and so on. So there's already a self-sustaining participatory co-op ecosystem that forms the nucleus of the social innovation or impact capitalism. And on the perimeter of that, we're now looking at a configuration where many people are not even running publicly listed companies whereas of course now there's a duty to do GRI reporting to do impact investment and things like that. But for the majority of Taiwanese enterprises, the small and medium businesses, they're all very willing to integrate into the supply chain by working with vendors and supply chain partners listed on the public social innovation and the index doesn't restrict whether it needs to be a co-op or a foundation or a charity. It could also be for profits with purpose companies as long as they do the scorecards using SROI SRS, the B-Lab scorecard or things like that. All we're asking is accountability and people who participate in this supply chain integration who make like millions like $5 million per year in purchase and so on get an award from yours truly. And we do also procurement and investment incentives and loan incentives for all the small and medium businesses that declare their stakeholder benefits balance scorecards using the SDG the Sustainable Development Goals index and so on. And adding to that all the cross sectoral partnerships for the public and also have the yearly presidential hackathon and if you check the presidential hackathon out you can see that there is no prize money I like the more commercial hackathons but the award is really a trophy and the trophy is the shape of Taiwan with a micro projector underneath and if you turn on the micro projector it projects our president Dr. Tsai Ing-wen handing you and promising whatever you did will become national wide policy as if it's a presidential promise within the next 12 months so the executive power is the presidential award and on the selection of presidential hackathon we use novel voting mechanisms such as quadratic voting and so on to make sure that it reflects a balanced synergy across the environmental, the social and the economic ideas so some of the winning ideas include for example an augmented reality tool for people to plant trees together for example a pokemon go like game that encourage people who are outdoors to refill their bottles at pokemon stations really drinking fountain and earning points and completing missions and they will form a new habit instead of buying plastic bottles or for example people using that app will get notifications when there is a heat damage risk and things like that all of this have provable impact in the SROI framework but probably not so much in the ROI framework so it makes sense for the government to sponsor to essentially subsidize those data fabrics without going to the way to the procurement because we use open data and real-time open API everyone can build new ecosystems based on those shared digital fabric so that is excellent with respect to innovation so rather than using a carrot and stick approach it's all really about the carrots and also about I think that a lot of the way that you handled the COVID in terms of the fast fair and fun was is part of that equation because of the transparency and the speed at which things done that really aided the digital innovation so I think it's admirable to advance those goals so quickly in Taiwan and as you know they've been decades in the making and it's all being about the punishment of shame right of not reporting equals this is about the reward of making it better for everyone the citizens and the world so I think that's fantastic and I hope that you're a shining example of it now one of the things you do is collect a lot of data and you know in certain countries and I think in Canada to some extent people get a little bit paranoid about all of the data collected by the government and then how it's being used in that so how does Taiwan continue to support principles of open government and how open should governments be and what are the potential benefits and costs for all governments operating under these principles we'd be interested in your views on that. Thank you again very good question it's probably a question worth at least three day seminar but I'll try to answer that in three minutes I think one of the core idea of a people public private partnership or a data coalition as we call it here is based on norm setting just as we don't talk about you know text collection text production what's the norm for sharing text it doesn't even make sense there's a journalistic norm there's an academic norm there's a norm around so called intellectual property but it's actually copyright and patents and all that it makes sense to talk about different norms in different communities and so because of that when we talk about the data coalition we don't mean so much as people just downloading data or contributing data we mean that people make useful narratives out of the data that we collectively make together one case in point is the national healthcare like Canada we have a single payer universal healthcare and in the Taiwanese population there's more than one quarter people five million and counting who downloaded the NHI Express the national health insurance app and with the app one we can of course pre-order masks but in addition to that we can also download X-ray scans I think CT scans also all the visit records and the prescriptions by the pharmacists the doctors and dentists and so on so it become a single entry portal to all the medical data that you have in the care of the clinics so you can correct them you can contribute to say that you can use the CT scan to get to know study using an SDK on that app you can even if you have sufficient mask in your home you can refrain from collecting your mask ration which is 10 per two weeks nowadays and then just with a click of a button dedicate your uncollected quota to international humanitarian aid in exchange of a what we call non-fungible token a token of appreciation of your so this is a data collision where people who care about international humanitarian aid can send a very strong and clear signal to the foreign service to give out this to the countries and indigenous first nations in need and similar data collisions exist for example in primary schools people set up air boxes to measure the PM 2.5 real-time air quality together and when they grow to almost tens of thousands I think around now it creates a tremendous pressure on the environmental minister but we can't beat them so we must join them so we negotiated with the social sector and then agree to install their design of micro-climate sensors into say industrial parks because the municipal government own the lamp in the industrial parks again the social sectors that's the norm the public sector amplifies it and the private sector work with an ecosystem economy defined by those norms very similar things exist for public campaign donation and expenditure records and Facebook around the end of 2019 I think Taiwan is one of if not the first jurisdiction where they publish the entire advertisement library in real-time open data and open api because they understand the social sector threatened civil disobedience when we in the national auditing office didn't publish it as open api and when we finally do it's the next to face social section if they don't publish this kind of open api for the transparency election campaign financing and so on so election campaign finance data environment data personal healthcare data really there is almost nothing in common but what is consistent is that the social sector must set a norm and the public sector must work with not just for the people in those norms that involves a lot of very quick pivoting because the cycles are really short how do you do that and maintain regulation and also support innovative technologies because to me it seems that they're both at odds but you've managed to solve for all of that with speed too a huge amount of speed definitely indeed this pertains to the bandwidth of democracy if all we have is traditional voting that's maybe 3 bits per person every 4 years so it's really low bit rate communication and the cabinet and the legislature gets into those 4 year cycles in terms of technological adaptation but as you pointed out very acutely that this emerging technologies operate on an hour to hour basis so our bandwidth from the people to the public sector need to also work on a very similar basis so for example in 2015 when Uber X first came to Taiwan then minister Jack Linsai who is in the audience pioneered the use of AI in policymaking and we run together I was a consultant back then to the project so the idea is that we run a AI powered conversation so that people who really had anything to say about the Uber X phenomena instead of debating endlessly whether it's sharing economy or gig economy or platform economy or whatever we just look at what's actually happening and then this is my real friends and families and the clusters that they feel about the Uber X situation and the point here is that each person can contribute their feeling like I feel passenger and people may disagree or agree with me and as they do they move further close to me or farther away from me but this picture which is very much worth sharing is that every time we run such a conversation after I think three weeks in the Uber X case we see that people agree to disagree on a few ideological statements but by far people agree with each other's feelings most of the feelings most of the time with most of their neighbors all we had to do is to flip around the traditional antisocial corner of social media and build a pro-social social media that is based on the agree and disagree but there's no reply button so there's no room for true to grow and the visualization visualizes the plurality the diversity of the voices and not the number of people so if you get 5000 people in voting exactly the same way well the number may change but the area doesn't change and we hold into a very important and I think it's a very important point to account this crowd source agenda setting and only deliberate on the rough consensus insurance not undercutting existing meters on the fair registration and things like that which are then made into the law on multipurpose taxis so Uber is now a local Taiwan company obeying the same taxis rules which also enable existing co-ops to make sure that the people are 100% happy but people can live with it everyone can live with it and this process is very very fast it operates on a weekly basis and it's just three weeks four weeks before we can get a rough consensus from the people so how do you drive people into that dialogue because usually those sorts of dialogues start with a few dissenters but how do you drive them in down the facts that seem to be the most important and most likely to be a sort of consensus building because that's a long process or is it because you're using AI but you still need a little thinking guidance too right? Definitely and the trick here is that it's fun and because it's fun it's made into the civics classes in our curriculum starting 2019 we've got record number of people who are not even 18 years old like very young people petitioning for such crowdsourced agenda setting to happen in our national participation platform join the GOV that TW more than one quarter of citizens initiatives are from people younger than 18 years old it's their civics class assignment the teachers just told senior high school people to start social movements as their capstone project and many of them actually worked very well we've had a 16 year old person who initiated the gradual banning of plastic straws in the national identity drink the bubble tea it was quite controversial at a time but eventually she got 5000 people support and accelerated the pace the EPA has in finding sustainable and sustainable alternatives to the plastic straws and so on there's an abundance of such cases and it's not because we mobilize people to do it but people do it because it's fun, it's meaningful it makes a really good like learning record in their capstone project 16 year old now is 19 years old and she's already our national commissioner on open government national action plan so which looks really good on her career in CB well that's fantastic because you know how there's always attention between regulation and supporting innovation and the need to protect citizens but still encourage value creation through the technology how to me that the role of government has totally shifted to be a partner and not protecting one adversary versus the other how long did it take in the development of Taiwan's social and stakeholder capitalism to do that because Taiwan is a very entrepreneurial country and I think that entrepreneurial and it's a it is a capitalist society and has you guys have managed to overlay all of the social good on top of it and integrate it with that whole the profitability and being in free enterprise sort of construct of the economy it's very interesting the role of government in that because it seems to be heavy handed but not in the least because citizens seem to really be supportive thank you indeed the thing that drove me into doing full time job as opposed to just a part time contractor in the central cabinet is actually one sentence in Dr. in inauguration speech for her first term as president where she said before we think of democracy as a showdown between two opposing values but from now on democracy must become a conversation of many diverse values and this wording democracy must become speaks to me saying that democracy is also a type of technology just as social science is also science social technology is also technology and increasing the bit rate of democracy allows us to form more coherent positions so that even for people with very different positions we can still get a glimpse of common values out of those high bit rate real time conversation that respond to the hearing now so I would say that many positional differences are actually good thing if we have good social technology that's to say democracy that can get those shared values in real time and so people can innovate on delivering those values without leaving anyone behind so that's absolutely fantastic ministering because it's like the nirvana of what's happening and one of the things as I was going through and listening to your Ted talks and I thought that how insightful to look at the climate change because I really think that people are waking up only because now they think that depending on how old you are so I think that it's actually going to impact my grandchildren so that's someone I can see today but and with the pandemic it was one month not one generation or two generations so to speed up this whole evolution the question I have for you is how can we get other countries to look at this model and pursue it because the amount of cooperation on the pandemic is phenomenal but that's because everyone has agreed they're facing the same pandemic not everyone has agreed about climate change although they're talking about it but you don't have that consensus but how can you do this and technology is the enabler but how do you make that more universal as the enabler yeah I think in many democratic countries one of the associated risk with the pandemic is the infodemic arguably the infodemic caused more fear, uncertainty and doubt in many jurisdictions compared to the pandemic paradoxically the more liberal democratic the jurisdiction is the more likely that some variation of infodemic or the other will take hold in the population if there's no counter infodemic public infrastructure I mean the digital public infrastructure in place I think Taiwan and Canada are pretty good when it comes to local journalism when it comes to digital competence when it comes to citizens willingness to voluntary their work on the voluntary sector or the social sector it was called here to get accurate reporting of whether it's musk availability or what really is happening in their neighborhood but in many countries there are divisive points that were previously seen as irreconcilable like ideologies and so on and I think it's one of the things that Canada and Taiwan can work on together through say presidential hackathon and I think it's one of the key co-creation and innovative means to show other democracies that you don't have to make the false dilemma the false trade off between the civic freedoms on one side and stability and economic growth on the other which is what many jurisdictions are seen as an inevitable choice during the height of the pandemic but after the pandemic just as we did in 2004 I think it's time for everyone to take a systemic look at the pandemic and then the infodemic using this sort of cross-sectoral partnership without the government assuming everything in a top-down way this all sticks and just accidentally destroys the agency of the social sector but instead work as you said carrot-only basis preferably with carrots that shape like Lego blocks so everyone can remix it Exactly and that's fantastic because I think that one of the lessons that I take from the Taiwanese experiences that with SARS and the lockdown is all within your line of sight and your memory and you don't want to do that so you'll do anything you can not to do that but the whole world experiencing varying degrees of this you see the lessons learned can be turned around very quickly and I just want to give you one observation I've been heavily in financial services and during the financial crisis it took the government a lot of time to react and the economy went into recession because of the whole concept about shoring up certain of the sectors like the financial services sector so when we got to round two with the pandemic it took the governments about two weeks to react and to know that automatically they had to put the stimulus at the recovery first or the insurance on the citizens and then follow up with stimulus of course the chapter still being written now just when you look at the speed of that I think there's huge hope with the pandemic impacting everyone and all of the focus on really social good and stakeholderism that it's not just about making money it's about our customers our citizens, our children having a as rich a life as we've had that there is a chance that this can be done and I think that you are such a shining example here in Taiwan of the art of the doable now I was going to actually mention because I didn't mention that if anyone else has any questions so Christine I'm just going to ask you because we forgot to mention it and I think that there's a way of putting in questions or are we basically at the end of our time I think we're nearing the end of our time but we might be able to take one question if the audience, anybody from the audience both virtual and in person if you have any please put them into the Q&A box and we'd be happy to answer any questions I think that perhaps it was such a wonderful discussion and so thorough and comprehensive that people are just trying to absorb and absorb the information provided today So can I ask the final question then? Absolutely You have such a powerful message I would like to know how you can do this continue with your great progress and get this message out because it's so practical and the way you articulate it is so simple that you can't ignore it so maybe that's a rhetorical question Yeah, I think it's a great question I sometimes call myself a poetician which is most of my work is inventing ways of saying things like fast, fair, fun, humor over a rumor things like that so it's easier to spread so I guess I'll just summarize the points that I made during this excellent exchange and it's my job description that's been on my twitter and it goes like this when we see the internet of things let's make it an internet of beings when we see virtual reality let's make it a shared reality when we see machine learning let's make it a collaborative learning when we see user experience let's make it about human experience when we hear that a singularity is near let us always remember the plurality is here so thank you for this exchange live long and prosper everyone Thank you, that's fantastic Incredible Minister Tang, Janice thank you for an incredibly profound discussion a lot of us a lot of messaging to digest in weeks ahead and especially for the post-pandemic era I think we have a lot to think about so what a thought provoking discussion today, thank you very very much the Asia Pacific foundation of Canada has been privileged to have had the opportunity to work with Minister Tang on a number of occasions and with each session we continue to become further inspired and amazed with her wonderful messaging Thank you again Minister Tang for taking time out of your busy schedule and in particular to attend in person today to share your thought provoking insights and Janice, thank you for engaging the Minister in discussion I understand the challenge of moderating a discussion with Minister Tang but I think everybody will agree that you did a fantastic job so many many thanks and on behalf of the mission chair Vice Chair all of us at the Asia Pacific foundation of Canada I'd like to once again thank our supporting organizations the Women's Entrepreneurship Strategy Ecosystem Fund the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario Air Canada Global Affairs Canada CEO Venture Labs and especially our friends and colleagues at the Canadian Trade Office in Taipei and the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research Without their generous support this virtual mission would not have been possible and please permit me to also give a shout out to my foundation project team who have worked tirelessly over the past few months to make this virtual mission to Taiwan a success and we're going to show you a photo of our team that took organized this virtual mission but stay tuned as our work isn't finished we will evaluate the success after the business to business meetings that are going to be scheduled into the latter part of March and hopefully we will have news to share with you on the business partnerships, investments or distribution agreements achieved through this mission well this brings to a close the first Canadian women only virtual business mission to Taiwan it has been a long two days but we hope that you found the mission inspiring and informative many thanks to our audience as well for your attention and we hope that this mission will be a catalyst for further deepening economic and people to people ties between Canada and Taiwan and will result in economically beneficial outcomes for both economies good night safe journey home to our guests TICC thank you