 Good evening everyone. Sorry to keep you waiting for a few minutes. Thank you so much for joining us for the Faculty of Public Affairs current lecture. My name is André Ploude. I'm the Dean of the Faculty of Public Affairs. As we begin, I would like to acknowledge that Carleton University sits on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. My job this evening was supposed to be to introduce the president. Since this is throwback, the president is off at another event. He came to join us earlier. So we kind of had whether I should do a pantomime or something. And I will not let you suffer through that. But instead, I'll have the pleasant task of introducing my colleague Barry Wright, who is the director of the Arthur Krueger College of Public Affairs and an associate dean in the faculty. He is the one who organized tonight's event. So Barry, please take a look. Thank you, Dean Ploude. It is my great pleasure to introduce Greg Yip, our distinguished 2017 FPA current speaker, a graduate of economics and journalism here at Carleton. And one of our 75 notable alumni celebrated this evening in honor of Carleton's 75th anniversary. The current lecture is one of the highlights of the year for the Faculty of Public Affairs. It was initiated in 2012 with the completion of Rich Craft Hall, this building we're in now, evocative of the building's situation, beautiful location on the Rideau River, and of the faculty's engagement with the many currents in public affairs. The lecture series focuses on themes at the intersection of current public affairs in the fields of policy, politics, and journalism. And it seeks to provide a forum for distinguished leaders in these fields. These matters, of course, are at the heart of the constituent departments and schools within the Faculty of Public Affairs. They're also at the heart of Greg Yip's impressive contributions to public engagement and debate about global and U.S. economic developments in policy. Greg is a chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal. He returned to the Journal after a six-year stint as a U.S. economics editor for The Economist. He began his journalism career right here at Carleton as editor of The Charlotten in 1987-88. After graduating, he was at the Vancouver Sun, the Financial Post, the Globe and Mail, and then joined the Wall Street Journal in 1996. He appears regularly on radio and television, including PBS, National Public Radio, NBC, the BBC, and I understand that just today he was on CBC Radio and CBC Television's Power and Politics. He is author of The Little Book of Economics, How the Economy Works in the Real World, published by Wiley in 2010, and foolproof, why safety can be dangerous, and I better get this right, and how danger can make us safe, published by Little Brown in 2015. Named one of the best books of that year by the London Financial Times. And I teased Greg that I take the weekend FT rather than the Wall Street Journal as by sort of leisure reading on the weekend. Very high praise indeed. Greg is recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize shared with journal staff for breaking articles in September 2001, and shared awards from the Scripps Howard Foundation in 2008 and the National Press Club in 2016. In 2005, he received the Business Journalist of the Year Award from the World Leadership Forum. It is indeed a great pleasure to bring Greg and other distinguished graduates back to Carleton for this evening's FPA Currents Lecture. Please join me in welcoming Greg Ip to the stage for his lecture. Thank you very for that very nice introduction, and it is truly an honor and a pleasure to be with you tonight. Teaching the first class of Economics 1000. Hope you're all ready. You've done the prepared reading. So I've only been back to Carleton a few times since I graduated. Yesterday I was doing an event at the Economics Alumni event at the Unicenter. And as I left to get my cab back to my place, I got completely lost. I mean, this place did not look at all like the Unicenter I spent so much time in, like, you know, 30 years ago. I mean, the colors were all different, you know, there were structures here and nothing there that, like, you know, the restaurants had changed their names and so on. And then so, and I started, like, worried that I wouldn't actually be able to find my Uber car. And then I saw it, a long, pulsating, sweaty line of kids lined up in loud music and a roar, Oliver's. And I knew exactly where I was. I said, yes, thank you. The world is as it should be. And it brings back memories because 30 years ago I spent a lot of time in this building, sorry, in the Unicenter 30 years ago when I was editor of the Charlton, 1987, 1988. There's a lot of things that I'm very thankful to Carleton for. They gave me a degree in economics and journalism that against all odds I still use on a daily basis and a job that I love. I met friends that I still have that I still have at Carleton there among my dearest, closest friends. I met my future wife at Carleton. I had the most fun of my life running the Charlton in 1987, 88. It was something about being the thick of things of events that year that I just, I've never really been able to reproduce it since. I just had so much love then. And it's one of the things in journalism and public policy that's kind of not reproducible that, to actually have a say in the middle of events. Now these were like small campus size events. We're talking about scandals involving football games and so on, but still, for us, it was kind of a big deal. Now at around the same time the entire country was going through its own massive public policy debate, perhaps the largest of my lifetime. It had to do with a free trade agreement that the Maruni government had negotiated with the United States. And John Turner, trying to basically, you know, resurrect his political career as leader of the liberal opposition, had made it the mission of his life to stop that agreement. And so we at the, I actually, by the time the election had started I had stepped down, but I wrote a big article about the free trade agreement for the Charlton. And I actually tried to bring a little bit of my own economics training to the question on this question. And later an economics professor said, when I picked up the Charlton and I said, oh my God, they're going to opine on free trade. This can't be good. He actually said, well, you actually did an okay job and I was pleased about that. But I will say that it was an interesting debate because there was an existential debate for Canada. It was really an issue of like, will the country that we have defined, tried to define separately from other countries in its own special way disappear, subsumed into the great American melting pot morass as a result of this agreement. And it's almost seems funny now to think about that those were the kinds of questions people were asking because here we are 30 years later and Canada in some ways is more distinct than ever. But I will say, I did not expect 30 years ago that the free trade agreement would still be in the headlines when I came back. After all, it sort of had become part of the furniture, you know, Canadians and Mexicans after they joined had come to take free trade for granted. Maybe most Americans did by this point too. But there was one person who never did take free trade for granted, that was Donald Trump. Now he was a businessman at the time, an entrepreneur, a showman. But he hated NAFTA, he hated free trade in all its forms. He hated trade with Japan, he hated trade with Korea when the United States did an agreement with Korea. And he hated it most of all when the United States made it easier to trade with China. By the time he ran for president last year, he had transformed this opposition to free trade into something much bigger, a populist assault on all things global. Not just trade, but immigration, both legal and illegal, on big banks, on the World Trade Organization. Shortly after he won the election, he basically shamed a manufacturer called Carrier, which makes heating and ventilation equipment, into cancelling plans to outsource jobs to Mexico. He went to Indianapolis and had one of his gigantic, iconic rallies and he declared, there is no global anthem, no global currency, no certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag, and that flag is the American flag. From now on, it's going to be America First. Now, it was probably unintentional, but the phrase America First does evoke some dark moments in American history. It was the name of a movement in 1940 that was dedicated keeping the United States out of the Second World War. Well, here we are, it's eight months into the Trump presidency and we're still trying to get a fix on precisely what America First means. Now, if you follow U.S. news nowadays, and like right nowadays who cannot follow U.S. news, it's kind of like addictive in the worst possible way. But you're probably aware that they have their own version of Game of Thrones going on in the White House right now. It's just like a nonstop like battle between the nationalists and the globalists with everything except the blood, and I'm not even sure we're going to get through the next four years without the blood as well. One day the nationalists have the upper hand, the next day it's the globalists. One day the U.S. will tear up the Korea Free Trade Agreement. Oh, wait a minute, the next day those plans run hold. Trump announces that illegal immigrants who arrived as children, the so-called dreamers, will be deportable. A week later he's actually working a deal with the other party, the Democrats, to actually let them stay. So, I do not know how this is going to end. So two things I want to sort of make clear at the beginning. First of all, I don't know how it will end. Whether this flirtation with nationalism by Donald Trump of America First-ism will turn out to be a sideshow in American history, or whether it will be a turning point. But I will argue tonight that Trump is a manifestation of a deeper and broader nationalist revolt around the world and against established elite opinion, which happens to encompass a lot of people in this room and a lot of people that I work with and talk to for my job. It challenges many of the foundational beliefs of the global open system that many of us have taken for granted over the last 70 years. The second thing I want to explain is that it's not my purpose now to have a polemic that's either for or against these movements, but to try and explain them and to put them in some context where it came from, how in some sense the mistakes actually of the existing order of the global existing global order actually fed to the rise of nationalism today. And I'll reflect a little bit on what it means for Canada. Why has Canada so far sidestepped these currents? And why you should not assume that it always will. Now the term globalization is probably one you're all familiar with. It's probably taught in class here, isn't it Barry? And it is very simply put the process by which goods capital and people move ever more freely across borders. It's kind of a sort of a clinical term, doesn't care any particular overtones. But the term globalism is probably one you're a little less familiar with perhaps may not have heard until tonight. And this I would call the mindset, the belief system that globalization is natural and good and that global governance should expand as national sovereignty contracts and borders fall. A lot of globalists as I would call them don't think it's an ideology because they happen to share it with people on the other side of the traditional left right divide. People like David Cameron and Tony Blair or Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. But in fact, globalism and nationalism are in some sense a new political paradigm. Other sides of a new political paradigm much as liberalism and conservatism have been for a very long time. And it's simplest manifestation this divide is about free trade versus protectionism. That's probably how you think about the current argument over NAFTA. But it's also much bigger than that. It's a battle between what I would say sort of like, you know, priorities of patriotism and community values and closed and close knit societies, even illiberal societies on the one hand versus transnational borderless globalized societies and open cosmopolitan values on the other. By which way of saying is that the globalist nationalist mindset doesn't fit easily into our old liberal left right paradigm. But it nonetheless does explain a whole coherent set of values. It may have sort of like burst onto our awareness first when Britain last summer voted to leave the European Union. I mean it was a historic event. It's the first time really in modern history that a country, a major country has chosen voluntarily to leave a major free trade grouping. It was the first movement backwards in institutional globalization. And the reasons went much beyond just trade. For a lot of Britons who voted leave, it was about getting our country back. It was about ending uncontrolled immigration. It was about little England thumbing its nose at the city of London's rootless global elites. As Theresa May, who is now the Prime Minister of Britain, said shortly after the vote, quote, if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. And that kind of captured sort of the assentment of the leave people. The next chapter, of course, was last fall when Donald Trump stunned the conventional wisdom by becoming the president on this resolutely anti-globalist platform. It threw overboard the Republican establishment's longtime support for free trade and its recent embrace of immigration. And he declared free trade, immigrants, and Islamic extremists to be the major threats to American well-being. And that was enough for him to win the Republican nomination and, ultimately, the presidency. But even if that's how we, most of us, first learned about the upsurge in nationalism, it actually began some years earlier but outside the Anglo-Saxon world. In fact, I'd say perhaps the first major event was in 2010 with the election of Victor Orban as Prime Minister of Hungary. Orban's mission was to resurrect the role of the nation state as a defender of its people's interests. Not the traditional institutions of democracy. He called this illiberal democracy an expression that seems frayed with irony and survives today as kind of a neat little catchphrase for one stream of this thought. Poland later basically followed in Hungary's footsteps and elected a government led by the Law and Justice Party. And they followed a similar sort of set of values. In the emerging world, the election of Narendra Modi in India, whose party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is basically a Hindu nationalist party, even though India is ostensibly a second or state. And in 2012, Xi Jinping became president of China and he began to basically intertwine an expansion of the communist party's grip on all aspects of society with renewed Chinese nationalism. The whole Chinese dream basically could be summarized in our language as make China great again. And that has basically been the platform by which China has not just limited political freedom at home, but asserted a more aggressive and antagonistic role abroad. Is this a big deal? Well, you know, every country has patriotic, jingoistic impulses, even Canada, except they asserted at times of war and the Olympics. Yes, I confess that I got a little bit worked up during the gold medal game at the Vancouver Games. But this is different. Today's nationalism is a revolt against an economic order that has been expanding since 1945. It's against globalization. It's against institutions like the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, the European Union, even NATO, and against, say, elites, against Davos Man, as Samuel Huntington once called him, and against elite opinion, which of course includes the people that I spend my life interviewing and being around, economists and journalists. Now, let me give you a little bit of history about the expression and the nature of nationalism. Now, it tends to evoke dark images of the 1930s, but for most of the last three centuries or four centuries, the idea that nationalism is bad would have struck most statesmen as absurd. In fact, the modern nation state can be traced to the 1648 and the Peace of Westphalia. When France, essentially at that point, a Catholic country decided that it would, for the first time, put its national interest ahead of its religious interest and decided with Germany's Protestant princes in the Thirty Years' War to contain the power of the Catholic Holy Roman Empire. And I like to boast to my editor that when I wrote that in the column, it was the first time in ten years that we had gotten the Peace of Westphalia into the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Sometime in the next year, I'm going to make sure I get the Holy Roman Empire in as well. But in any case, the next three centuries, the nation state was essentially the dominant way in which societies interacted with each other. Now, interestingly enough, the discipline and philosophy of economics was in some sense an intellectual revolt or an intellectual answer to nationalism, an alternative world. To be precise, the very first economists, at the time they were called political economists, because economics was a branch of moral philosophy. But people like David Hume and Adam Smith were searching for an organizing principle for society which did not require deference to a higher external political or religious authority. And they came up with the ideas of self-interest and the famous invisible hand of the market. As Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations, Commerce and manufacturers gradually have introduced order and good government and with them the liberty and security of individuals who had before lived in an almost continual state of war with their neighbors and servile dependency upon their superiors. Free trade to the early economists was not just an efficient way to allocate resources. It was a pacifying and stabilizing influence on human beings. David Ricardo, who here has studied economics? Who here has heard of David Ricardo? You probably heard things like recording equivalents. Maybe your professor of plurid forced you to study comparative advantage and actually work out the advantage and so on. But I would recommend to you that if you might want to actually go back, this is the 200th anniversary of that book by the way. It's one of the most important books in all of the history of economics because the ideas in it are difficult for non-economists but they're wonderfully intuitive and elegant to economists. But what economists may forget about Ricardo is that like these other political economists of the day he saw economics as a way to make Hume all of humanity better. And he thought free trade was something that would bring the world together. He wrote, free trade binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world. Pretty heady stuff. Well this vision of globalization is essentially what the root that the world decided to take after the Second World War and it was entrenched in organizations such as the General Agreement on Terrorism Trade which later became the WTO and the International Monetary Fund. But it was most perfectly consummated in Europe with the creation expansion of what became the European Union and its four freedoms, goods, services, capital, people. And as its founding charter set out the ultimate goal was political union. As conceived then it was a political not just an economic project and e-expansion often followed geopolitical and not economic priorities. The expansion southward in the 80s to Portugal, Spain, and Greece was essentially a way to like persuade those countries to leave military dictatorship behind and not lurch into communism. The expansion in the 1990s and 2000s into Eastern Europe was a way to prevent those countries from slipping back into Russia's orbit. And similar tensions and priorities took place in the United States. When Bill Clinton decided to go ahead and finish the work of George H.W. Bush and signed off into law it wasn't an economic decision. It was about stabilizing the Mexican government and turning this neighbor of theirs which had always been this troublesome hotbed of anti-American rabble rousing into a stable pro-American ally. In 2000 when Clinton signed the agreement that allowed China to join the WTO once again he had visions that this that exposed to free markets China would see the value of freedom of expression as well that China would become more like us. It didn't really work out that way. You know Mexico has been stable but it's you know the flow of illegal immigrants continues to come into the United States. China did become wealthy but it did not become friendlier. It became more did not become more democratic and it pursued a nakedly mercantilist brand of export promotion that led to massive trade surpluses in the United States and the loss of millions of factory jobs in parts of the country. We now think of as Trump country. So what gave rise to the transition from globalism to nationalism? Well as I've been trying to explain to a certain extent it was a backlash against the overreach of globalism. Economists when they approach this question they tend to see it as purely a response to economic hardship. You know the U.S. mortgage crisis, European debt crisis, decades of inequality, stagnant median incomes. Something to this I just saw a recent paper from the Brookings Institution which does find a correlation between higher unemployment and the rise of populist parties of the left and right. But the tie between pocketbook concerns and the rise of the nationalists right is not consistent and probably weaker than you realize. For example as I've noted the countries where the nationalists have been strong in Europe, Poland and Hungary did not actually not experience the euro crisis because they're not members of the euro. Their economies have done quite well in terms of employment. The only Western European country where an anti-immigrant right wing party is actually part of the governing coalition is Norway which is actually not a part of the euro and whose economy has done quite well. Germany's economy has done extremely well and yet the anti-euro alternative for Deutschland party grew up in revolt of that. And then when there was this large refugee inflow it saw its popularity shoot up. Britain too, Britain's economy has actually done really reasonably well. It's yet the only country to vote to leave the European Union. And when you actually look at studies of why Brits voted the way they did. You know they divide the country into 380 voting districts and they run correlations. They find the correlation between unemployment and or wage growth and how they voted is actually quite weak. It's almost not existent but there is a pretty strong correlation between the rise and the immigrant share of that district's population and whether it voted leave. There are countless studies of why people voted for Trump and they don't usually single answer probably because there are multiple reasons why people voted for Trump. But I think it's clear that Trump voters were not solely and possibly not even mostly motivated by economic concerns. Trump became the nominee of the Republican Party by striking just a little bit of history. After 2012 the Republican leadership decided that it was a mistake to be so like hostile towards in the rhetoric and policy posture towards immigrants. And they said to remake the Republican Party and invite immigrants into it we've got to change that. So most of the candidates for the Republican Party in nomination 2016 bought into that. But Trump did not and it was Trump who using his harsh rhetoric about Mexican rapist and his Muslim ban which that won the primary. Just to throw a few statistics at you from our Wall Street Journal's NBC poll. If you look at people who voted for Trump 59 percent believe that immigration makes the country weaker. Among people who didn't vote for Trump 59 percent believe immigration makes the United States stronger. 50 percent of Trump voters said immigration was a factor in their vote. Only 24 percent of non Trump voters said the same thing in the primaries in every state that had a caucus or primary exit poll. Among voters who always said immigration was the most important issue to them. Trump won all those voters. And there's other things going on than just immigration. I mean I've been studied this carefully but it's been a very tumultuous time in the United States and society. I mean demographic changes is really become quite relentless. The foreign born population in the United States has reached an all time high. Gay marriage has gone from a fringe cause to the law of the land. Social media has upended how we communicate and relate to each other. There's the opioid epidemic. It's fact last period I could think of that's comparable as the 1960s when we had the spread of television, the assassination of Kennedy, campus protests, civil rights riots, the whole bit. What's interesting is that the 60s was a period of rapid income growth. And yet in spite of that all these social fishers made it a very politically unsettling time. Now there is a tendency among people that times of insecurity and upheaval to retreat or at least long for the familiar. And so nationalists typically will cater to this longing. They'll invoke nostalgia for a simpler time when cultural values and mores were more stable and predictable. And when deployed in the pursuit of power it is a short step to xenophobia, the fomenting of fear and the mistrust of outsiders of others in the pursuit of political support. It's been the case certainly in Hungary and Poland for example to a certain extent in China. We see elements of it in the United States. I don't want to miss anybody here making a mistake of saying that just because you voted for a particular candidate that therefore makes you a xenophobe or not a xenophobe. So this story will get a little bit more nuanced as we go along but bear with me. Trump certainly of course would deny that he was campaigning against outsiders. But it's hard to escape the conclusion that the themes he revisited in the images that he tended to arouse did unfortunately or not draw the support of people who are xenophobic. And early action by his administration continued to play to these themes, just banning visitors from Muslim countries. And on trade of course withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership immediately. He has invoked common populist themes as other populist leaders have in the past. Portraying for example the people in my profession, the media as enemies of the people, things like statistics as phony or just plain wrong. So you see certain elements in Trump that are sort of at least common with what you see in nationalist populist movements around the world and through time. Staying with the survey research has also found a strong non-economic foundation for nationalism. For example two scholars have studied the political manifestos of political parties in 13 Western European countries since the 1950s and found that around the 1980s you notice this big shift from economic concerns such as wages and income security to non-economic concerns such as culture, national security, crime, abortion, immigration. Resistance to immigration is often blamed on economic concerns. You know they're a burden on welfare, they'll compete with the native born for jobs. And for this reason many advocates of more immigration try to respond with evidence that shows that immigrants, even low skilled immigrants, are not a burden on the welfare state and they do not reduce the wages of the native born. And the solution they say is more training and income transfers for those displaced by the forces of free trade and globalization. Well I agree with that as far as it stands that those are correct and true policy directions to take to address identifiable problems. But there's a deep body of survey evidence that suggests that while economic concerns do drive some of the resistance to immigration they are not the only or even the main driver. Rather it's concerns about the impact of immigrants on the rest of the country, on the local community, on changes to the predominant language, customs, or culture. This may relate to ethnicity and skin color but not necessarily and not even mostly. For example there was one study in the United States that was trying to find the origins and the way people respond to immigrants. And interestingly it found that when Americans were exposed to immigrants of different characteristics they became much more receptive and friendly to immigrants. When they speak English even when they speak it with an accent. And at that point skin color ceased to be a relevant determinant of how they responded. This was seen by the authors of the study as evidence that when immigrants appear to have assimilated or trying to assimilate it breaks down some of the barriers in the host population. I'm not sure if it's broadly applicable to everything but I think it was an interesting finding. Now Canada shares of course a lot of sort of characteristics with the United States. We were for a long time historically a white country, a European country, experienced very high levels of non-white and non-European immigration. And so that the demographic pictures changed significantly in the last 40 or 50 years. And in the last few decades there has been in Canada like the United States slowing in the growth of living standards. So why hasn't Canada seen the eruption of nationalist sentiment in the backlash that you've seen in the United States? You know last as the United States elects this nationalist right of center president Canada elects a globalist left of center prime minister. Well of course there are factors that are specific to both countries having nothing to do with these broader themes. You know just like that sort of throw the bums out time for a change factor must surely have played a role in electoral outcomes. But I do think it's true that Canada has done some things differently that really do matter. Economically Canada has experienced some of the same loss of factory jobs and stagnation of middle class wages that the United States has. But it hasn't suffered as sharp an increase in inequality. The safety net here is more secure you know health care for example. I mean you lose your job in the United States the first thing you worry about is that you'll lose your health care as well. That doesn't happen here. There has been more attention by both parties to ensuring that the tax system does not aggravate inequality. But on the non-economic front the difference in immigration systems is absolutely crucial. In the U.S. surveys find that across political spectrum on the left and the right when people are asked about immigration. There's very broad support for immigration for legal versus illegal immigration for those who have skills in education who meet specific economic needs of the countries. And who either speak English or try to speak English or commit to speaking English. And I think this fact alone can explain the differences between the United States and Canada on immigration. Because Canada of course has an immigration system that does all those things. You know for years for decades now Canada has had a system that prioritizes all those things. As my friend Tony Keller at the global the editorial page I heard the global mail likes to put it. The U.S. has low levels of legal and high levels of illegal immigration and Canada is exactly the reverse. Canada gets to choose its immigrants while in the United States it's the opposite. And this is I think the key reason why immigration is less divisive in Canada. It is simply immigrants are more easily assimilated and it seems like more of part of the social contract in Canada. Now part of this elect geography it's Canada is a hard country for an illegal immigrant to come to. You know I mean if Canada had a long border with a underdeveloped country I suspect we would have more of an illegal immigration problem than it does. There's another important difference and that has to do with the choices and the priorities of the political leadership. In the United States immigration wasn't always so politicized. Ronald Reagan did sign into law the last major legalization or amnesty as some call it of illegals back in the 1980s. And Democrats weren't always crazy about immigrants coming in. After all they were seen as a threat to the unionized workers who were for a long time the base of the Democratic votes. Democratic vote. But in recent decades immigration has become highly partisan issue. Republicans have become ever more dependent on white working class voters who feel the greatest economic and cultural anxiety about immigration. Democrats have become much more reliant on minority voters which makes it much harder for Democratic politicians to propose tough responses to the issue of illegal immigration. Their opposition for example to Trump's wall is kind of ironic. I mean as a practical difference there really isn't much you know difference in efficacy between a wall and a fence with a lot of you know drones and sensors and so forth. And back in 2006 many prominent Democrats voted in favor of exactly that a high tech fence 700 miles of fencing. One of the Democrats who voted for that young senator named Barack Obama. In Canada the immigrant vote was traditionally the liberal vote and then the conservative party made a concerted effort to break the liberal stranglehold on the immigrant vote especially in Ontario. In the U.S. as I was mentioning Republicans tried to go in the same direction but their grassroots support has rebelled and as a result they nominated Trump. Well what lies ahead will Canada continue to resist the nationalist tug that the United States and other countries like Britain have felt. The conservative party seems to have gone a little bit in that direction you know there was the effort to prohibit the wearing of the Nikob during the citizenship ceremonies. The discussion of hotline to report barbaric foreign practices and although I'm not an expert on the political situation in Canada I am told by those who are that this may have been a factor that hurt the conservatives politically in the 2015 election. And then there are those and so there are the people say well this doesn't this prove that this Canadians are immune to appeals to of this sort of divisive nature maybe things too soon to tell personally. But I am a little bit careful about jumping to that conclusion. First of all I would not have predicted 10 years ago that the United States would have gone in this direction. If you look at other countries that we that Canada sort of like feels a kind of like bond of similarity to that have a similar centrist liberal policies and historic openness to foreigners like Sweden or Germany. They saw surges in right wing nationalist parties in the wake of large influxes of refugees. Canada right now is experiencing a little bit of a test of its own with the surge in Central American and Haitian refugees from the United States in recent months. And in Quebec you do see elements of the political class you know seeing whether this is something that can be exploited from a political point of view. That said it's hard not to escape the perception that things are not working out the way the nationalists thought 10 months ago. You know earlier this year the nationalist wave looked unstoppable you know you know there was going to be a row of dominoes in Western Europe fell. But instead first Austria and then Netherlands and most important France defeated the nationalist parties and France a neophyte globalist Emmanuel Macron defeated a seasoned nationalist Marine Le Pen. What's interesting to me is that Le Pen was actually right when she called the Euro the source of a lot of France's economic problems. But what was interesting to me that the French voters didn't want to lose the Euro and so that turned out to be a loser issue for her. Meanwhile the nationalists in Britain and the US are looking like the dog who caught the car. They have achieved what they want at the at the polls electorally but they're struggling to actually figure out how to govern how to put those beliefs into a coherent way of doing business now that they control the mechanisms and machinery of government. Britain will get its sovereignty back but there's growing worry about the economic impact on that country. A very you know strong sense that they want their cake and they want to eat it too. They want all the economic advantages of what they used to have with Europe but they don't want the unpleasantness of the freedom of movement. The Trump administration struggles to govern in great part because Trump himself has no appears to have no consistent vision of what he wants to achieve or who his allies are. And he has found that the sinews of globalism are a lot harder to sever than he kind of thought. It's a lot harder in you know running the apparatus of the federal government than saying you're fired on television. Who to thunk it. And take NAFTA. Now in the run up to the election I wrote pieces and others did as well worrying that or warning that the trade is one area of American governance where the president is endowed with extraordinary power. So he can basically like slap tariffs on countries withdraw from free to trade agreements you know impose quotas do all sorts of things without any permission whatsoever from Congress. And I was you know thought it was a realistic possibility that within months the United States would be out of NAFTA that there would be like tariffs shooting up. And I suspect that Trump and many of his people thought the same thing. What we discovered is that when he attempted to do that is that the United States one of the saving graces of the United States. And I've said this like the last time I came to Carlton is that the United States loves competition. And so it's not just in things like you know like business and sports but they like competing power centers in the United States. What we have seen is that there's competition not just between the executive branch of the White House but between the chambers of Congress between the governors between businesses group and all of these brought to say hey wait a minute. We don't want NAFTA to go away. And so all these competing center powers of center basically united to try and demonstrate to Trump that this was not a wise move. The same is true you know of the career free trade agreement. I mean like literally like I think two weeks ago it was leaked to the media that they were going to like pull out of the career free trade agreement like that week. And then whoa you know Kim Jong-un just launched a missile and detonated an H bomb and suddenly that was put on the back burner. So in so I think basically what we're discovering is that what Trump is discovering as any icon on of us would have told him that terrorists and you know protection that economics is a world of tradeoffs and you put down terrorists or you pull out of free trade agreements and bad stuff is going to happen. The hard reality is that attacking globalism and globalization has been a potent vote getter and like apparently a very nice kind of theme to build a movement around but it's not a constructive platform for running a country. Once you tear up our trade treaties what you replace them with when international commerce is more integrated with our lives not just imports but digital content that people we interact with. You know putting up borders of any kind creates enormous unintended consequences. If your population is aging and your fertility rate is low as is true for virtually every country in the western world then how do you grow your economy unless you let in more immigrants. At some point the nationalists are going to figure out what it's taken to you know economists have been saying for 200 years a more global open economy does make all of us richer. Now before we succumb to hubris again and me personally as well let's take a step back. Does this mean the nationalist movement is really over. No not by launch not my opinion never you know I as Mark Twain I think said never forecast especially about the future and I've discovered that my political forecasting is the only thing worse than my economic forecasting my economic forecasting is pretty darn bad. Well but let me point out a few things. First of all yes the nationalists lost in France but Marine Le Pen won a third of the vote that's more than twice what her father won 15 years earlier and the first round she won more than any other party including the mainline socialist party and Republican Party. I would still say a national front government is a matter of when not if in France. In the U.S. it's dangerous to assume anything about Trump based on one week's headlines. His you know negative attitudes towards immigration retains a very strong base in the Republican Party and Trump remains more popular with Republican voters than congressional Republican leaders. There's been a lot of turnover in his administration that game of thrones thing I was saying but the people who have stayed include all the people on the trade team. You know Wilbur Ross the Commerce Secretary Robert Lighthizer trade ambassador Peter Navarro his trade economist they're all they're all still there. They're all very negative on free trade and most important Trump is still there and he's very negative on trade. And meanwhile the people that we have come to think of as the globalists like Gary Cohn the head of the National Economic Council their light seems to have dimmed. And more important even if you sort of like just sort of like step aside and from all the specifics to Trump and his administration and go to the economic and non economic demographic forces that I've talking about that essentially fuel this nationalist wave. They're all still there because Trump clearly draws unusual degrees of support from xenophobes and white supremacists. There is in some corners a knee jerk tendency to therefore say Trump supporters are all xenophobes and white supremacists. That's factually incorrect and it's counterproductive. Many of the people who voted for Trump are in fact pro immigration they just want those immigrants to line up take their turn bring skills and speak English. They want secure borders so that like Canada they get to choose who immigrates to their country. Now one of the reasons why they voted for Trump isn't because they especially like Trump or the way they talked or in their hearts actually agreed with a lot of things they said but they didn't feel that what they wanted they were going to get from the Democratic Party. And I read a very interesting interview with Jeffrey Sachs. Jeffrey Sachs is what they call a rock star in economics and he's also one of the he's at Columbia University. He's also a liberal and a Democratic of impeccable credentials. But he had some pretty tough words to say for his party and other liberals in this interview about immigration. He said well let's talk about this wall that the Democrats have decided they're never going to cooperate with. It sounds so vulgar. It's like building the Berlin Wall. But to have the country he says it made sense. Don't countries have borders. Don't you police borders. And then he said but the left doesn't have a language that acknowledges the need for borders and the need to police them. Jeffrey Sachs knows that if Western countries open their borders he thinks and this is actually based on some estimates I've seen. If Western countries dropped their borders and allowed immigration tomorrow one billion people would migrate would immigrate. He says no society would tolerate even a fraction of that flow. He says any politician who says let's be generous without saying we're not going to throw the doors wide open is going to lose politically. So he says so again I'm quoting Jeffrey Sachs that's where the left is tongue tied because it sounds chauvinistic to say we need a limit on migration. But you know what this is actually starting to sink in. I mean there was a very interesting interview with Barack Obama shortly after the election and he was asked what was the takeaway for Democrats about this vote. And the point is one of the things he said was we Democrats have to realize that for a lot of folks borders do matter. So where do we where does this leave us. The nationalists you know say things seem so heady for them like eight months ago they're now confronting the contradictions and flaws of their own platform. And the globalists people like Justin Trudeau here in Canada Emmanuel Macron and France say you have the wind at their backs. But I think all globalists including them have to be wary of the message that voters have sent in the last year. I think it's interesting and I've watched this from afar with more than a little casual interest how Trudeau has balanced these pressures. And it was good that when he allowed he brought in the Syrian refugees he did in a very highly disciplined organized way. I think that is very very key to this because once again a sense of control over these arrivals is so important to maintaining public support for them. And with respect to the problem now developing along the Quebec border he and his government made it clear that no sorry this is happening outside the standard channels you guys will have to go back. Canada did not just say open doors to everybody. Macron I mean I followed him pretty closely as well. He he's actually adopted some of the language and views of the Nationalists. You know he basically wanted to stop a foreign takeover of a French company by an Italian company no less. They're close neighbor in the European Union. What you know I thought you were our friends. He wants Eastern Europeans who come and work in France to pay French payroll taxes OK so that they're not getting a false advantage over French workers. This this is a betrayal. Is this a co-option. Maybe it is. I think I think these positions by people like Trudeau and Macron is recognizing that when globalism overreaches they lose the support of the people. And that is what opens the door to people who offer more simplistic you know and more inflammatory solutions. Canada can learn I think from some of the things the United States has been through. But I know that the U.S. sure as heck could learn a lot from what Canada has got right. And that's it for me. Thank you Greg for a timely thoughtful accessible and thought provoking talk. We have about 20 minutes for questions and discussion as a courtesy to our guests and to the other audience members. I would ask you if at all possible to make your way to one of the microphones. If you can't if you could state your question very very clearly. I'd also like to ask you to identify yourselves and keep your question or comment to a minute if at all possible. And one per person please. Thank you Laura. Yes I'm Laura Peck. I am a fellow in the Masters of Political Management Program. But I have been a practitioner of teaching politicians how to get elected and stay elected since 1984. Trump breaks every rule. So I wonder if I could get you to comment on his communication style. Everything that he does I would never I would never counsel a politician to do that. I wonder if I could get you to to share with us some of your insights. Okay so as I said in my remarks there are a million theories about how Trump got elected. And they're all right to a certain extent. So I have a few thoughts on this but I do want to steer people away from the notion that if you know it was this or that is the other. But I'll say a few things because a lot of people are the same thing. This guy is you know like the way he speaks the things he says his lack of his grasp of the facts and so on would have been toxic to anybody else. So it's a couple of things. First of all his use of social media is really quite brilliant. And the way he talks it sounds like a guy that you know he sounds kind of the way that you're sort of like annoying uncle might talk at the barbecue. But to a lot of American people that is comes across as genuine. And one thing we know about voters in every country is that insincerity really is a killer. And Trump no matter what you think of his views or his intellect comes across as really believing the things he says. Even if what he says today is the opposite of what he said yesterday. So there and in Hillary Clinton you know you had the exact diametric opposite to the extent that there was a portion of the people that were voting based on style. You know Trump brought a difference in style that was really quite powerful. Also the the Hillary Clinton campaign was seriously disrupted by their excessive faith in statistics and data. Now yesterday I was talking to the economics alumni about how great economics is because we all believe in data and so forth. But there's a real risk in believing in it too much. And Hillary Clinton campaign I think will be you know exhibit a from now on about believing in too much in data. They had stopped polling in Wisconsin something like eight weeks before the election. It did not know that this movement was going on. Then there was a whole issue of the hidden Trump vote right. People didn't want to tell pollsters what they thought you know because they had been told over and over by the media that this was not correct. So I think those are a few of the few of the things. But even while I think that these things are valuable let's keep a few bigger points in mind. First of all Trump lost a popular vote by two percentage points which was not that far off from the polls. All of the structural factors were going in the Republicans favor. There was the eight year itch you know the presidential cycle that thing the fact that economic growth had been slow. These were sort of like structural background factors that should have supported the Republican candidate. So and remember he only I can't remember the number but he got only about a third of the Republican vote during the primary. So as a rough approximation at least half the people who voted for him would have probably preferred somebody else be the Republican candidate. But he was a Republican candidate they got. So I guess my bottom line is there are many reasons and I don't want to overstate them. But on the point of communication the things I said were what I sort of drew away from that. My name is Edward Atrage. I'm an aerospace engineer. I tend to look at things from a higher altitude if you like. I think on policy Trump is right on the mark. But I'll just take one matter that you raised about xenophobia. Trump is not against all immigrants. He's only against immigrants from radical Muslim countries. Let's be clear about that. Now the American psyche is rooted in the soil of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Islam on the other hand is a monotheistic religion characterized by submission which is a very big word. Submission to Allah an unknown quantity and to Muhammad who is his chief and last prophet. Can you find anything more diametrically opposite to the American way of life? There's no such thing. Muslims can never become citizens of a country. Their allegiance is to Allah and to Muhammad. Let's be clear about that. And the only reason why Britain left Europe is because of the Muslim immigration into Britain. I have a big problem here. I'm going to stop you there. So could you please let me know why you think that Trump is such a xenophobe? First of all I think I said in my remarks that I was not expressing a view about whether he was a xenophobe. But I think that it is a factual matter that many people who are xenophobic are very attracted to him. But with respect I disagree with almost everything you said with respect to Muslims. There are polls for example of Muslim attitudes in the United States and they show that on questions of American values. They are almost indistinguishable from all other Americans. But there are interesting differences between how Muslims in the United States have integrated versus how they've integrated in Britain and in France. And that may have to do with specific institutional obstacles in those countries that do get in the way of the integration of Muslims into the broader society. And I'd say one of the foundational issues of the United States which makes me long term optimistic is precisely as you were saying it's a country. It was the first country founded on not on soil or blood but on values of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and a lot of other things. And the United States has been through these periods in the past. There was a massive period of new immigration in the 1890s through the 1920s. Many of the things that are said about Latino or Middle Eastern immigrants today were said about Southern European or Eastern immigrants back then. It created a lot of pressure. It created a backlash and immigration was basically shut down. And here we are and those people are as integrated and as indistinguishable from all other Americans as far as I can tell. As you get my point. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that we are dealing with a lot of the pressures that we are seeing in the United States now in some sense. You should not surprise if you look at how the foreign born population has expanded so rapidly in the last 10 or 15 years. But I am also optimistic from history not just in the United States but in this country that those things do get better with time. The second generation you know integrates super fast relative to the first generation integrates extremely quickly. The second generation faster so most of the problems I think that we are dealing with will be solved by time. Hello my name is Aiden and I'm a first year political science student here at Carleton. And I was wondering you attributed a lot of the resurgent nationalism to economic reasons. You did state that there were a non economic undercurrent and that's what my question kind of is trying to address. Is there not a case to be made that a lot of the very divisive rhetoric and the polarization that's happening right now in the United States and elsewhere is because we've lost a sense of national homogene which kind of led to a sense of solidarity within the nation and strengthen the center for free and open debate so that candidates wouldn't have to be pushed to such extremes in order to push policy. I mean that's a great question and I'd be kidding you if I thought I had a single answer that can explain all these things. I don't know whether it's the loss of unified national purpose that caused the polarization or the polarization that caused the lack of a sense of national purpose. I guess I would throw a few things into the pot to sort of like help explain the polarization there. And to anybody who studied American politics a lot of these will not be surprising. First of all there is the gerrymandering. I mean having spent like 15 or 20 years watching the American system close up. It really is phenomenal the extent to which the machinery of government can be twisted to partisan purposes. And the gerrymandering of course means that you have more and more congressmen running in safe seats where they really don't worry about losing to the Republican or the Democrat in the general election. They worry about losing to the more extreme partisan in the primary. And that was a phenomenon that was first seen in the Republican Party and frankly we are now seeing it increasingly in the Democratic Party where it's getting very difficult for Democrats to take sort of centrist positions in the face. So that's number one. Number two is I don't think I can let my industry off the hook media you know what I mean. And this originates in technology starting with cable television 500 channels and so forth like in the old days when all you had in the United States was CBS NBC and ABC. It was the economic interest of those networks to basically aim at the middle because they wanted to get all the people that they could. But with cable television it became possible to target people and we know from a variety of research that people really do gravitate to news that they tend to already agree with. It's sad but true. And now in the days of social media you know where Facebook can write algorithms that are customized to each individual user to reinforce the things that they all want to believe. I think it gets worse and worse. And so in some sense this is a time when we need the work of economists and journalists more than ever. But it's a time when people are less receptive to what we do than ever. Yeah. Hi there. My name is Sanjay. I'm an economist at the Bank of Canada. What I wanted to ask you was it's no secret that U.S. society is a polarized one. And I mean that would be an understatement. But it does not seem like the election of Trump has you know you have that enemy and everyone can focus and reconcile their differences to tackle that one enemy. The Republican Party is in its in shatters. Trump is a Republican only in the name. And it doesn't seem like the Democrats have reconciled their differences. I mean just recently Bernie Sanders introduced a bill trying to introduce a single pair system which has practically no chance of making it through in the Congress. And yet there's a wing within the Democrat Party that is still centrist. So it seems like there's a fair bit of tussle going on there as well. Do you foresee a split where we have we conventionally move on from a two party system in the U.S. electoral system. So I read a terrific essay that I think everybody's interested in American politics should Google it was by James Fallows in the Atlantic. And he had just come back from China and he had been there for like 10 or 15 years. And he said everybody around here thinks America is going to hell. You know I mean they're just so miserable. And he just thought America was so wonderful after 10 years in China. And he said like all his life he said he said you know all my life America has been going to hell. There's always been a time when everybody was convinced this country was just finished. And he said if you go back in history it's true. You know every American president thought this country. Everybody thought that the other when somebody became president the country is going to hell. He said John Adams thought the country was sort of Thomas Jefferson thought the country was going to hell when John Adams was president. And John Adams definitely thought the country is going to hell when Thomas Jefferson was president. So there's a degree of like you know sort of like gloominess and sort of like hair on fire to the American political system which actually is a self-correcting thing because they tried to make it better. You know the Republican Party was born out of the most divisive split in its history. You know it's when the Whig Party basically you know fell apart over the issue of slavery. The Republican Party emerged from the ashes and became the party of abolition. I don't think that will happen right now. You see there are structures in place that make it very difficult for any party to win election outside the two major parties. No third party candidacy has come even close. So I think there are powerful reasons that will drive both parties that will keep them both cohesive. But I do want to share one thought with you which is about you said the United States is more divided than ever. I just explained why that sort of comes and goes. One of the things that gives me sort of some comfort is that in the United States, not just in the United States but most countries, one of the striking things about populism is that it's actually not very popular. It's actually really rare for a populist candidate to win a majority of the vote. I mean as I was saying Marine Olympians at 31% can't seem to get any higher. The one party that really tried to build its identity in Great Britain around throwing the immigrants out, the United Kingdom Independence Party essentially disintegrated after they got what they wanted. And even as I said in Germany, the German Nationalist Party had gotten as high as 15% in the polls and now it's down to like 7 or 8. What happened? Well the events that led to the alarm that created the AFD, the influx of all these refugees, they ended. So similarly one of the, you know, sui generis factors that probably helped Trump was that there were two very serious Islamic ISIS inspired terrorist attacks in the United States, the one in San Bernardino and the one in Orlando, Florida. And so those things do have a tendency to drive particular political movements for a time. But unless you expect those to be a permanent feature of the landscape, they eventually lose their potency and we go back to caring about the things that we used to care. So that gives me some optimism that the political machinery will eventually absorb, co-op, move past some of these specific issues. And that the polarization that you see today will not be as extreme, it will go back to essential, I mean we are in a period of extreme dysfunction and polarization right now. My hope is that before long we will go back to just a normal level of polarization and dysfunction. I love those historical references, Greg. Matt. My name is Matt Peltier. I'm a fourth year student at Arthur Kroger College. My question sort of revolves around the topic of, I guess it's called civic nationalism, sort of movements that brand themselves as nationalist but are in a sense complementary to the ideals of, I guess, economic liberalism. So the case is, I guess, the Scottish National Party, which although it's at its root a nationalist movement, it's in favour of integrating further with the European Union and was very much opposed, as the Brexit referendum showed, very much opposed to leaving the union. What sort of future do civic nationalist movements have, in terms of their survival and their sustainability, when compared to the sort of the more harder nationalist movements that we're concerned about right now? So I wasn't aware of that term and I can't admit that I've thought about it a lot, but I do, you do bring up something which I think is quite interesting. So in my remarks I mentioned how over the last 400 years, most statesmen would have been shocked to hear nationalism described as a bad thing, because for a lot of countries that are with us today, a sense of nationalism was, in fact, you know, the juice that got them independence and so on. And in many nationalist movements from Scotland to Quebec, as you described, see their sort of founding principles of the nation they want to create as also embracing those open and liberal values that we talked about. Which is why I think it's important to say that nationalism is not intrinsically in tension with or at odds with some of those things that we care about. If you look at Israel, for example, I mean Israel was founded on a complete nationalist theory, but they've tried to put in place all its existence, all the sort of the principles of liberalism that you see in all these western democracies. They, too, face tensions because, you know, the non-Jewish, the Arab population is growing faster than the Jewish population there. But I think that, I'm glad you brought that up, because I do think it shows that there is a constructive, or not even the word constructive, but there is a neutral role for nationalism and it doesn't need to be a regressive force. And that, in some sense, once, if I'm right, that eventually the intrinsic merit of the globalized system shows itself through. And if the advocates and the defenders of that system recognize where they've overreached, recognize where they have pushed populations further than they want to go and correct accordingly, then some of the nationalist backlash that we see today will recede. But in that environment, there will still be the more, as you call them, the civic nationalist movements, that there have always been. You know what I mean? Perhaps the Catalans will one day get independence. Perhaps the Scots will one day get independence. Perhaps one day the Isle of Man will have that referendum and secede from the United Kingdom. Hi, my name is Nicholas. I'm an MA in political economy. First of all, just thank you very much. I thought your sober analysis was very refreshing. Thank you. I guess my question is, there's a sense among certain political economists of the left, Wolfgang Streak, and those kinds of guys, that globalism is somehow antithetical to the modern nation state and its sovereignty. So I guess, do you see any correlation or any truth to that, that it would somehow affect the democratic process and make states more vulnerable to the kind of wave of populism that we've been seeing? I agree with that more than you might think. I actually absolutely do believe that there is a fundamental tension between nationalism and globalism, and that is why we are in this moment today. And I think the most obvious example would be the European Union, where they decided the European Union right from the signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 is right in the charter. This, the end goal, is political union. And so, with each passing year, European Union has defined success as shunting more and more sovereignty up to the European level. And so, even before immigration became the hot-button issue that it is in Britain, the sense that the European Commission was a bunch of interfering technocratic like European French-speaking annoyances had become a major burden. I mean, that is why heteroskepticism had such a strong following within the Conservative Party, even before immigration became the issue that it was. And I do believe that sometimes globalist movements do begin to allow the aim of more supernatural sovereignty to become the end rather than the means. You know, frankly, the World Trade Organization has features of that, and I think that it needs to revisit how it goes about some of the things. And certainly, the European Union needs to revisit those. And by the way, a lot of people in the European Union, including Donald Tusk's current president, say the same thing. Hi there, my name is Meredith Lilly. I'm a professor here at Carleton. I teach international trade, including a course on NAFTA. I'm frequently asked to comment in the media about the state of Canada-U.S. trade relations because of that also because of previous experience that I had negotiating trade agreements on behalf of Canada. And I try to make myself available to the media, but I find increasingly that I feel like I'm kind of part of a charade. And what I mean by that is that I think initially, after Donald Trump was elected, I felt some patriotic duty to kind of push back against some of the misinformation. And I think that I saw and I know that I read quite a bit of discussion about this in the U.S. media, that the U.S. media also kind of wanted to figure out a way to call fake news what it was when it was. But I think over time I feel like the media is now playing the game that the president would like them to play. And by that I mean, you know, you mentioned the withdrawal of chorus from the moment that I heard that I read the first tweet that suggested this might be possible. I said, oh, he's not going to do that. And so what's going to happen is he's going to do exactly what he did with NAFTAs. He's going to threaten to do this. He's going to get the headlines after kind of people stop writing about this. He's going to change direction and he's not going to proceed and everything will go back the way it was. And so far that's exactly what's happened. And so yesterday's news was Wilbur Ross, Five Year Sunset Clause on NAFTA, also something that's just a non-starter. And so I guess my question to you is, do you think it's a fair observation that the media now seems to be accepting these headlines as if kind of quite uncritically, and oh, expert, would you please talk about this headline as if it's real, when in fact I think perhaps these are negotiating positions that are being taken by the administration. And so I just kind of wonder about your views on the media, Trump, and the accepting headlines for being actual news. So I guess I would hope that one of the things you would say on those interviews is I believe this to be just a negotiating position. And you could say that if you've ever been part of any bargaining, whether it's like you were buying a house or trying to decide with your spouse where to go on vacation, you ask for this, you ask for the moon, you settle for the top soil, you know what I mean? It's like this is a negotiation and Trump himself admits this. I mean, he was the first guy in the history of presidential campaigns that I followed who put out a tax plan and immediately said he didn't plan to actually stick to it. It was just a starting place. So that I think just bringing that point of view as a negotiator, never mind an economist, but as a negotiator is a very valuable thing and I would hope that my peers here in Canada will come to you and ask you and actually use that quote on the air in their article to point that fact out. Now, the broader picture of what is the media's role in the age of Trump. So I think there's sort of like two risks. One is that you take what he says or implies and you run with it, you know, in some sense take him as he's saying, you take him literally but not seriously. And I think that there, I can't really think of a way around that. When the President of the United States says, I'm going to pull us out of Korea, the chorus, you kind of have to report that, right? And we don't know what's going on in his head or what he's thinking. He might do it. So, and honestly, Korea pulling out of Korea sells more headlines than, you know, mentioned he's by pull out of Korea, we don't ignore, don't pay attention, right? So I'm going to sort of like, I'm not just, well, I guess I am defending it, but we're going to keep doing that, okay? And we're going to keep doing that when Chelsea Clinton is president and so on. So that part's not going to change. There's a somewhat different picture which is that because so many things that Trump has done or proposed are so unusual and so outside the, you know, the guardrails of what we used to see in the United States, that there are some media organizations and some journalists who are inclined to be skeptical or critical of virtually everything he says. They almost take the attitude that because Trump is for it, it can't be right. And so there is a tendency to search every little piece of what he does or said and sort of like then either say it's wrong or go and hopefully find you to say that it's wrong. And, um, no, okay. But you might find in your interview that you say he's right about this and wrong about that, but the only part they put on the air is the wrong about that part. I don't want to presume that's what's going on, but I can imagine that that happens. And I think the problem with that is, well, it's pretty obvious, is that you're doing a disservice in some sense to Trump, but you're doing a disservice to your readers in the sense that you're not actually telling them what's really going on. I mean, I'll give you an example. One of the things that the American negotiators are very unhappy about is the rules of origin in NAFTA, okay? They say the rules of origin are written in such a way that as long as a certain, I can't remember what percentage of a content of a car is North American, it can move duty-free, right? Well, when Mexico then moves a car, a ton of their content may have actually come from China, first of all, right? And so it ends up that, you know, is that like Germany will put, will assemble cars in Mexico where 40% of the value has came from China or Germany or something like that and then moves through the rest of the country. And they don't think that's the way it should have been. They don't want to actually rewrite the rules and say there should be an American amount. Well, at first because I kind of thought NAFTA was a good thing, I was dismissive, but the more I thought about that, you know, it's kind of got a point there, right? It's kind of got a point there. And I'll give you another example. A lot of the media were pointing out how few laws Trump has passed. And Trump was in some sense just bringing it on himself because he would boast about how his was the most productive presidency in history accomplished more than any other president could possibly have. That FDR was such a piker. And so media would point out, look, no important laws passed except they renamed a post office like in Nashville or something like that. And I said, well, okay, so I'm going to point out that this is just not true. Trump has done a crap load of stuff. Okay. And the reason you're not aware of that is because he appointed tons of people to place like the Security and Exchange Commission, the Office of the Controller of the Currency, the Food and Drug Administration, agencies that you can't even pronounce much less understand what they do, and they are taking decisions with extraordinary importance on the economy and on your ordinary lives with no oversight and no recourse to Congress. This is actually kind of the logical conclusion of what I call the imperial presidency of the United States. Presidents that can accomplish a lot without a Congress. And I am proud to say that that is a point of view that is becoming more widespread. We're waking up to the fact that there are people appointed by Trump that are doing really consequential things below the radar. But those who are getting their news from organizations that were dwelling ad nauseam on the absence of legislation would have been misled into thinking that nothing important is going on. So I would give you that example. Let me first thank you for the presentation. I'm not an economist, so forgive me if I take it. I'll take this in a different direction, but I very much appreciated the perspective that you're looking at things from. I wondered why you talked about globalism versus nationalism and republics and Democrats and so on, but you didn't get into the religion aspect of it. And obviously for us in Canada, religion is not really a factor in politics, but it is in the United States. It's a huge factor and the role that the Christian right did in the election of Trump is not trivial. And very recently when you saw them praying over him in that famous scene with all the heads of churches around praying over him, and I know from friends in the United States when he was elected, the Facebook logo was Jesus is now in the White House. And the reason I'm interested in this perspective of the religion is that I personally am a Canadian citizen who happens to be a Muslim and who happens to be following in the Muslim countries the rise of the people there against mixing religion with politics, which was quite obviously a bit of a mess. People tried it and they saw that Islamism from that perspective did not bring in the justice that they were looking for and they just brought in horrible, horrible things. So there is a massive pushback against mixing religion and politics in the Muslim world, in the Arab Muslim world, which may or may not be making it to the world news over here. But as a person who knows what's happening over there when I watch the U.S., I literally have a one-to-one correspondence. I will give you, I'm an engineer too, I'll give you an Excel sheet and I will put on the left what the Islamists did in the Arab world and then I will put to you what Trump is doing. It's one-to-one correspondence and people know Mike Pence's background and position. So the question is, did you look at it from a religion perspective of the rise of the Christian right, extremist Christian right, that very much corresponds to the extremist any religion and what role that plays in the politics of the United States now? It's not my area of expertise. I would say that I do not believe that even the most extreme Christian right or that you cannot, I think to compare the Christian right in the United States with some of these theocratic regimes as a category error, there's just no comparison. I mean, the United States Constitution is extremely strong on this point. And I think that you would, first of all, the influence of the Christian right in the United States is not a new thing, it's been there for quite a few decades. So I don't think it has played a unique role in Trump's presidency. And the rise of the Christian right in some sense was a reaction to what they saw as the unnecessary desecularization of American life by unelected judges. Now, I want to sort of like separate the question of whether these, who's right or wrong about these things, whether there should be freedom of abortion or not. These are difficult questions, not my place tonight to sort of say yes or no to these things. But it is a true statement that a lot of those questions were not decided in legislatures or referendums or elections, but they were decided by judges. And at some point, those who felt very strongly about those issues realized that if they wanted those issues to be decided in the way they would prefer, they would have to be the ones who point the judges. And so you see in the United States, the judicial nomination process, in particular for the Supreme Court of the United States, has become this gigantic wedge issue that is so important. And that's one of the things that has got, that makes the Christian right a cohesive and motivated group of people. And I've heard it said, and I think it's an underappreciated fact, that Mitch McConnell, who's the leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, essentially delivered the presidency to Donald Trump. And how did he do that? Because a year before the election, Anton Scalia died. And so there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and Barack Obama nominated a very capable jurist named Merrick Garland. And McConnell refused to have a hearing. Basically said, we're going to leave that seat open until another president is elected. And as a result, the Christian right, which might have sat on the sidelines because Trump was not a kind of president that they naturally had any affinity for, felt they had to go out and vote because if they didn't vote for Trump, then Hillary Clinton would win, and they would not like the person she appointed to the Supreme Court. So these are the subtleties you have to understand there. So I understand what you're saying, and I do think that there are some regrettable aspects, but it is a category error to compare the role of the Christian right in the United States with some of the theocratic regimes in the Muslim world that I think you're referring to. Thank you very much, and thank you, Greg, for a wonderful last night. As Greg explained, this week is throwback here at Carleton where a number of events to bring alumni back to campus. And so last night was the economics event, and Greg presented or gave a speech to a bunch of economists. And one of the things he said was that what economists should try to do, one thing economists should try to do is kind of, it's not what you said, but you'll get the point, is kind of to talk economics to non-economists in the way that they'll actually understand so that there is amongst economists this tribal language that for people who don't know or like economics sounds really bizarre, but there are some useful tidbits in there. And so you have to find a way of getting the useful tidbits out. Well, we've got a lot of tidbits tonight in a way that actually was accessible, as Barry has said, to abroad. So you didn't realize that you got a lot of economics tonight, and it's a credit to Greg for having been able to do this. So thank you very much. So over the last two years in the Faculty of Public Affairs, we've had a project called 75 for the 75th. So it really started about a year, you know, 15 months from last June to highlight 75 prominent alumni from programs of study offered by units in the Faculty of Public Affairs. We developed a list in consultation with chairs and directors of units in the Faculty, and tonight was the big party. We invited all of the 75 to come and join us for dinner immediately prior to the lecture. Greg, of course, was one of the 75. So many of them are here. It was wonderful to have you back on campus. So again, thank you to all of the 75 who joined us this evening. One thing I'd like to mention is that the Faculty of Public Affairs runs a number of events over the course of the year, and we have something called a book club without the guilt. It's called Author... So you don't have to read the book as the punchline. So it's called Author Meets Readers. So it is the author being a faculty member in the Faculty of Public Affairs, and then we have an event where they talk about the book. We get other people who've read the book to come and tell you about the book. And so it's at Irene's Pub in the Glebe. You get the point. And it starts... Our first is on September 28th. It usually starts at 5.30. Please feel free to join us. It's a great evening and we buy snacks. So just in case you're... like a lot of people around here respond to snacks. So thank you again to all of you for coming tonight. Thank you to Greg for a wonderful presentation. And as Barry mentioned, the reception rights outside in the hall, please join us. Thanks. Good night.