Bob Rae

ideas in the mix

As the Internet becomes more comprehensive and complex, political leaders are faced with the challenge of developing a picture in their own minds of how the people that they govern are interacting both domestically and internationally. More difficult still for a politician is the challenge of examining that picture and imagining the opportunities that may be open for various individuals, groups, and businesses.

It is tempting if perhaps lazy for politicians to think only of the value that online coordination offers during an election campaign. The day-to-day business of government also stands to be reinvigorated. For Canadians this thought may prompt a question or two. Who among our politicians is putting forward ideas that acknowledge the promise as well as the limitations of the online world? Who is articulating a vision of how the Internet might help to enhance Canadian political life domestically and assist in increasing our economic and cultural weight overseas? Perhaps surprisingly it turns out that one answer is Bob Rae, the former Premier of Ontario and current foreign affairs critic for the federal Liberal party.

Two recent articles written by Rae suggest that he is trying to indicate how the Canadian government might better tap the potential of the Internet. First, he has commented on the potential for increased public diplomacy to help strengthen our reputation abroad. Rae defines public diplomacy as ‘the practice of a government communicating directly with the citizens of foreign countries’. The need to think carefully about this idea comes from the rise of social networking websites, digital radio and citizen journalism, which have combined to produce ‘a new class of potential ambassadors’. Provocatively Rae has suggested that the federal government should embrace this new reality and take the lead in attempting to coordinate the message that the world hears from Canada. Second, he has suggested that Canada very much needs a national strategy for research and international education in order to help us compete globally. The thrust of this initiative would be to have the government actively engage the private sector to provide greater funding for students wishing to study abroad. At the same time there is a need to increase our efforts to draw more students to study here in Canada. The Internet offers countless possibilities for economic and cultural exchanges, but the barriers that stand in the way have to be addressed. With this in mind Rae comments that we must do more to encourage Canadian students to become multilingual.

This interview took place on the fourth of June 2009. Five days later Bob Rae took a flight to Sri Lanka to gather information regarding conditions following the end of the twenty-five year civil war in that country. It was widely reported that, on the ninth of June, Rae was denied entry to Sri Lanka at the airport in Colombo. Although there is some mention in our interview of the conflict in Sri Lanka and the Tamil protestors that rallied in Toronto this spring, the primary purpose of the interview was to ask some questions that younger readers might find interesting. For all the highs and lows of his lengthy political career, it is clear that the Honorable Bob Rae remains committed to bringing forward new ideas to meet new circumstances.

CI: In the past six months or so there has been the suggestion from many corners – Steve Paikin and Rex Murphy and a number of others – that the approach that you took to the economy in Ontario in the early nineties has been replicated now in Ontario as well as federally. The implication in that is that you must be comfortable with what is going on now in Ontario or here in Ottawa. At the federal level, with a deficit going to $50 billion, how comfortable are you actually with what is happening?

BR: Well I don’t think anybody could be comfortable. My argument always was and has been that people talk about the deficit that we had in Ontario, but a deficit is really just a reflection of a bunch of underlying things that are happening. If you have a recession, you have a deficit, and we had a recession. I haven’t heard any serious person suggest for a second that I was somehow responsible for the recession. So we had a deficit, and for particular reasons it affected Ontario harder than others. We had to pay a price for that. As the economy improved, we had to try to get out of it. We had to try, without slowing the economy down and without hurting people, to take some steps to make the difference.

It is not that I am comfortable with where we are because we are where we are because of the recession. The recession is very troublesome for people. It is very tough, certainly tough for Canada, tough for Ontario, and tough for the U.S. Obama’s deficit numbers are in the trillions. What we are facing in Canada is somewhat less dramatic but still very dramatic in terms of our public finances. I don’t think anybody looks at this and thinks it’s great because it’s not great. It’s tough.

CI: With a view more to the younger audience, I notice on your website, more than many other politicians, you have embraced the new communications technologies – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. I interviewed recently a professor at Mount Allison University, Tamara Small. She looks at the impact of new communications technologies on politics. There is some debate about how useful these things are for politicians. In your experience, have you found it to be a useful way to communicate with citizens, especially young people?

BR: I find Twitter to be useless. I am not comfortable with it because it forces you into the position of saying ‘I am watching this’, or ‘I’m standing backstage’, and to me it is just kind of meaningless. There is no content to it. It is a technology where the technology just doesn’t do it for me.

Facebook I actually find very helpful. I find that, without a lot of difficulty, I can communicate with a large number of people and can get feedback from people who I don’t know. Some of them are regular Facebook contributors. I have no idea who they are. They send me notes, they send me jokes, they send me stuff and they kind of get me going on particular issues. It is very interesting for me to see, for example, on a Facebook status statement that some get eighty or a hundred comments. Some of them get five comments. It sort of tells you that people are really interested in this subject and not interested in that subject. It is one other way for me to connect with people, and from that point of view I find it quite helpful. I don’t think it replaces content. I mean, what do you learn? Are there are a lot of idiotic comments? Yeah. There are a lot of goofballs on Facebook who use the comment section as a chance to show ‘hey, I can put Bob Rae in his place. I’m equal to Bob Rae because he’s on Facebook and so am I and I’m his friend, so here you go Bob, fuck you!’ I mean, what does that do? What does that mean? It doesn’t add any element to the conversation, but they kind of feel like they’ve made a statement.

I was very skeptical at the beginning of Facebook, but I’ve sort of gotten into it. I like connecting with people and hearing back. It is a way of getting that feedback that you would not otherwise get.

CI: Related to this you have also written recently in the Global Currents newsletter about the potential for increased public diplomacy. This is something that many Canadians likely do not think about too much. I know I didn’t, and I read your article and I started to think about it. You noted that the rise and spread of social networking websites, digital radio and citizen journalism have created ‘a new class of potential ambassadors’, but there is some need for the government of Canada to take a role in coordinating how people abroad see Canada given all these new tentacles going out there. How would you imagine that happening?

BR: Well, the first thing that we know about the new technology is that it is very democratic. It is not subject to bureaucratic control. It requires a different culture in government. It requires government to be much more open and less worried about stuff. I’ll give a couple examples.

There are going to be lots of things on my Facebook site that I don’t like and that I don’t agree with. Some of them are so offensive – if I find them and they are really offensive, I just delete them. But there are a lot of other things that I do not agree with, comments criticizing me, and I sort of say, ‘well, that’s a little …’. But you are going to find negativity. If somebody goes into the Facebook site and says, ‘what do you know, somebody here is saying something negative about the Liberal party, and what is Bob Rae doing with that up on the site?’ - well, you have to have a different attitude. You have to say, ‘look, this is an open notice board, this is a bulletin board’. There is going to be a lot of stuff on it that you might not really like. You have to control it the best you can, manage it, but part of it is going to be just this dialogue of people saying things that you don’t agree with.

The thing I find – and I don’t think we really know yet – but the thing I find interesting is to what extent can we get the government to work with the technology, to say ‘alright, this is happening.’ In my political campaigns, for example, it is simply the case that the people who run a lot of that communication stuff in my shop are under twenty-five. They understand how it works. They get it. They want to participate in it. They want to engage in it, and I’ve long believed that the world of diplomacy today is, you know - NGOs have changed everything. It is not about governments talking to governments anymore. It’s people talking to people. It is all kinds of people talking to people around the world. … The bureaucratic culture, the government culture, is very uncomfortable with this because they much prefer controlling and much prefer saying ‘well, I’ve only got eight hours a day and I’ve got to do my job and I can’t spend my life worrying about what all these people are doing.’ But the fact of the matter is that in a great many countries, if you take Sri Lanka or Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere else, there’s a whole lot of people working out there who are not working for the government directly. They are working for themselves or for an NGO or whatever they are doing, and they have very valuable insights and information. They are eyes and ears for us. They can tell us what is going on, and a good embassy will say ‘well, we want to know who these people are and we want to find out what they are doing because they are going to help us do our work’.

CI: As far as promoting Canadian culture abroad by using these new media, is there a role for the Canadian government to give support to musicians and artists?

BR: Oh, totally, that is the other half of it. I think that we do a lousy job because we do not put a high enough value on culture, and we do not put a high enough value on how much that helps people to connect. Whether it is a big institution like an art gallery, or a symphony or a ballet or a theatre company, or just local artists, it makes a lot of sense to get people at the door to connect with them.

CI: You have mentioned also the need for Canada to have a national strategy for research and international education in order to help us compete globally. I thought that this was something else that might appeal to high school and university students. You wrote: “I believe any student wishing to study abroad should have access to enough grants and loans to cover his or her tuition and living costs while overseas. We must push the private sector to become an active contributor to this effort given the tremendous benefit they gain from an internationally experienced workforce.’ I found this interesting just because at university sometimes it is difficult to find those opportunities to go abroad to study.

BR: It was interesting listening to President Obama today, who gave a great speech, a really good speech, a very important speech this morning. It was broadcast this morning at six o’clock from Egypt. I thought it was really important, and one of the things he emphasized was this question of international education. The fact is – I mean, I am the father of three kids. They very much want to travel, they want to see the world and they want to connect to the world. They want to be actively involved in the world. That really means that we have to support it and find new ways to support it, encouraging people to learn new languages. We need a lot more Arab speakers. We need a lot more Chinese speakers. We need a lot of people who can speak three or four languages and can go out and connect with the world in ways that allow us to really break down some of the barriers. I think we’ve seen part of the challenge that we face, the struggle that we face, for example, with radical extremism in Islam, is a cultural issue. It is about our values and how we connect with people. We are not just about selling people things. It is about what we can bring to the table as a culture.

CI: Presumably one benefit of this initiative would be that, in general, it would just increase the number of people who understand what is going on overseas, for example, with the Tamil protestors in Toronto, and the reaction of much of the public, which was apathy or bewilderment about what was happening. I thought that you might just link those two things, where you have a serious humanitarian crisis in the corner of this island and the Canadian government not really responding to it, but a lot of people not really pushing for a response either.

BR: Well, I think part of the problem is that we do live our lives, most of us, in a fairly non-political way. Most of us go through life without necessarily wanting to be focused on politics. That’s just a reality, so then you say ‘okay, how do we overcome that?’ The challenge that was posed by the Tamil protestors was that it was a very disruptive protest, and it was intended to be. It was intended to be in your face, and to get Canadians to be aware and honk your horn and block roads and potentially block superhighways. They did not hesitate to use whatever techniques or tactics they could use to get people’s attention. The problem is that that sometimes just makes people mad, and it sometimes makes it harder for them to receive other messages. They’ll say ‘well, I don’t really care about this or that. What I care about is that I can’t do what I need to do’.

I think it is something that we have to keep working on, but I think it is important for us to explain to people what these disputes are about and why they are important. I was quite struck by the way the Premier handled it. I thought he handled it very well, that he was saying ‘look, this is not just about traffic, it is about why people are doing what they are doing.’ We don’t want them to disrupt the traffic, and eventually they will move out of the traffic, but we shouldn’t forget why they went into the traffic. We should deal with the underlying issues that are driving these folks. I think that is a big deal for us. A phrase I use all the time is to say ‘look, we are in the world, and the world is in us’. We are out there as a people. As we speak there are millions of Canadians, literally millions of Canadians, living in other countries doing other things, and they are the country. They are business people. They are working and they are trading and writing and on television. They are Canada out there, and the world is in us. We have in Canada people from all over the world. Yesterday it was the Tamils. Today there is a huge Sikh demonstration. We have to figure out how we are going to connect with these communities and these different agencies and institutions, and how we are going to be involved. I think that is going to require much greater communication than we have seen.

In fact, it is interesting, I use the Facebook site and there are a lot of Tamil kids who come on the site. They will start saying ‘what do you know about this, or what do you know about that?’ And we’ll get into it. The same thing is true for every group out there. It is very interesting.

CI: One more question. With Mr. Ignatieff as the leader of the Liberal party now, and Mr. Dion out, I think that there is a little bit of concern amongst young people who are deeply interested in how to build the environmentally sustainable economy. There is some concern that that might get pushed back now from the front of the agenda of the Liberal party. I wonder if you might give some indication of where you think that is going to rank as far as the issues that are going to be put forward. Obviously the focus right now is on the economy, but we do have significant environmental problems.

BR: My own view is that the environment is here to stay as a defining issue. Sustainability is here to stay as a defining value. I also believe that a sustainable, innovative economy is part of how we are going to have to deal with the economic crisis. The two can’t be separated out. I think Mr. Dion was a pioneer in that regard. He was ahead of his time. He was a visionary who had an idea as to how we were going to deal with it. I think that these are ideas that will come back in vogue. People will come back to look at them and deal with them in terms of the need for an economy that is socially just, prosperous, and sustainable. That objective has not gone away. I think Michael knows that. I think he feels that way very strongly. I think he is quite strong on those issues. It will be a real issue for the country in the days ahead.

Date of Interview: 06/04/2009
Location: Confederation Building, Parliament Hill, Ottawa, ON
Link: www.bobrae.ca