Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by Barry Appleton
[00:00:00 Video opens with a series of images: people walking along busy urban streets; a Canadian flag flying on the side of a building; an aerial view of Parliament Hill and downtown Ottawa; the interior of a library; a view of Earth from space. Text on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation.]
Narrator: Public servants, thought leaders and experts from across Canada are reflecting on the ideas shaping public service – leadership, policy, governance, innovation and beyond. This is the Review and Reflection Series produced by the Canada School of Public Service.
[00:00:24 Barry Appleton appears full screen. Text on screen: Barry Appleton, International Trade, Investment & Digital Economy Expert | Lawyer & Policy Strategist]
Taki Sarantakis: Welcome. Thank you for joining us today at the Canada School of Public Service. Today, as always, we have a treat for you. Our treat is somebody you may not be familiar with, but he's here because he's a Canadian with a remarkably interesting basket of skills and experiences and capabilities that in many ways speak to us as Canadians. And also, one of the ways that speaks to us as Canadians is he's a Canadian that goes back and forth between Canada and the US a lot. So we are here today with Professor Barry Appleton,
[00:01:10 Text on screen: Correction: Professor Barry Appleton is affiliated with New York Law School, not New York University.]
Taki Sarantakis: who is a law professor at New York University. He's a Canadian, and he's a few other things that we're going to talk about over the next little while. Barry, welcome.
Barry Appleton: Thanks for having me.
Taki Sarantakis: Barry, tell us a little bit about yourself. Let's start off. Where were you born?
Barry Appleton: I was born in Philadelphia.
[00:01:27 An image of the downtown Philadelphia skyline appears.]
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, wait a second. I just introduced you as a Canadian.
[00:01:31 Barry Appleton appears full screen]
Barry Appleton: I am a Canadian. Both my parents were Canadians. Like many Canadians, they went away to do some graduate education. My father was a doctor who was doing post-graduate medical work at the University of Pennsylvania, where I just happened to be born.
[00:01:44 An image of the University of Pennsylvania entrance sign appears]
Barry Appleton: And then we moved back. But it was interesting because being born in the United States meant that I could start my sojourning back and forth across the border and what later would become a career in trying to understand Americans for Canadians and Canadians for Americans. I was born into it.
Taki Sarantakis: Wow. So you're like, I'll call you a Nexus child, a Nexus baby. So you said your parents went back after you were born. Where was back?
Barry Appleton: Toronto.
[00:02:17 An image of the downtown Toronto skyline appears]
Taki Sarantakis: Toronto. Tell us a little bit about Toronto when you were growing up. Was it a fun place? Was it a scary place? What kind of place was Toronto when you were growing up?
[00:02:26 Barry Appleton appears full screen]
Barry Appleton: Toronto was wonderful, but unbelievably boring. It was a very boring... This is before we had a great influx of people from Montreal that made it interesting, from other parts of the world made it interesting.
[00:02:42 An image of a young Barry Appleton appears]
Barry Appleton: So when I was a really young kid in Toronto, it was still stale and pale and as boring as it got, which is probably fine when you're very young, but very quickly you learn it's a lot more interesting to have the diversity and pluralism that makes Toronto great today.
Taki Sarantakis: So this is like the Toronto the good, the Toronto where fun forgot. Is this the, maybe we'll call it the "Blue Tory" Toronto, the prim and proper?
Barry Appleton: This is the old Orange Order. This is the Toronto where everybody wanted to go either to Montreal where it was really interesting, or if you really want to do something, you could go to Buffalo. Think about that.
Taki Sarantakis: Well, I'm a Torontanian, so I remember every year we would go to Buffalo to buy our winter clothes for the next school year coming up.
Barry Appleton: We got to work on that one.
Taki Sarantakis: Where did you go to school?
Barry Appleton: First, I went to a small private school where I did French immersion. Then by the time I was about eight, my parents said "You don't know anybody in the neighborhood. That's no good." So I went to the local public school, and I went to high school as well in Toronto. I really enjoy the sense of communities. I got very involved in local things, things with the Board of Education, things in the city, because Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods and communities. And the more you could get involved in community, the more interesting and enriching life became.
Taki Sarantakis: It's fascinating. You talk about the old Toronto and the Toronto that we know today. And the Toronto that we know today is one of the world's most cosmopolitan, multicultural, multilingual societies. It wasn't like that when you were growing up.
Barry Appleton: It started. I started speaking French. My best friend when I was a young kid, his family had come from Italy. I learned Italian at a young age. So I got that multiculturalism and diversity, but not to the same extent that I would have today, but it was great. It was so interesting, and it gave you opportunities. The nice thing about it was if you really wanted to engage, if you really wanted to do things, everything was open.
Taki Sarantakis: You're one of the world's top international trade lawyers. You have particular expertise in our Canada-US agreements. You're also a law professor at New York University.
[00:05:25 An image of the New York Law School sign appears.]
Taki Sarantakis: That means I assume you have a law degree, you went to law school, you went to university. Tell us a little bit about that period
[00:05:34 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Taki Sarantakis: and tell us a little bit about what drew you to law school, why you ended up focusing on international trade. Tell us a little bit about that part of your story.
Barry Appleton: Well, I went to the University of Toronto first
[00:05:47 An image of the exterior of the University College building at the University of Toronto appears.]
Barry Appleton: and studied, actually, to be a diplomat. So I did international relations, and I was very fortunate.
[00:05:56 Barry Appleton appears full screen]
Barry Appleton: One of the great fathers, so to speak, of Canadian foreign policy, his name was John Holmes, and he took me in under his wing. And I learned a lot about the nature – he was very engaged at the time of Lester Pearson.
[00:06:08 An image of the Lester B. Pearson appears. Text on screen: Lester B. Pearson served as Canada's 14th Prime Minister from 1963 to 1968.]
Barry Appleton: I understood about the nature – there's the great period of Canadian foreign policy and Canadian engagement on a global basis.
[00:06:17 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: He really inspired me to be able to go and do things like that. Then my mother took ill, and I had to take care of her when she was sick and raise my family. I did that. Then I went off – my mother passed away after that, I went off to law school.
[00:06:38 An image of the exterior of the Joseph S. Stauffer Library at Queen's University appears.]
Barry Appleton: I went to Queen's. At that time, Queen's had the largest program in international law in the country. I did some work on constitutional law.
[00:06:48 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: I'm interested about constitutional ordering, and I did work on international law. I took every course they possibly had. Then I had to make a decision. Did I want to go into the Foreign Service in Canada, or did I want to continue on with my legal education and do things from there? I spent a lot of time thinking about that. Basically, I couldn't make up my mind. I did my articling in Toronto, which is what you're required to do to become a lawyer.
Then I went to Cambridge University.
[00:07:23 An image of the exterior of the Old Court of Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge appears.]
Barry Appleton: At Cambridge, I studied International Law, and I was very fortunate to be taken in as one of the last students of a very famous Professor, Sir Derek Bowett.
[00:07:32 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: He was the expert on the international law of war and peace. He was exceedingly generous with his time and his advice. I really got to understand the nature of international law in a very different way than I ever experienced in Canada.
Taki Sarantakis: We'll come back to your international law experience and your trade experience in a moment. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about some of the stops you had along the way. I'm going to mention a name or an agreement or something, and just tell us a little bit about your involvement or your relationship. The first is not Justin Trudeau, but Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Barry Appleton: Well, when I was still in Toronto, I had the opportunity to work with – at the time, he was the Secretary of State. His name was John Roberts. John had a profound influence on me. That was the 1979 election where he lost. But I ran an event with him and Pierre Trudeau.
[00:08:40 An image of Pierre Trudeau appears. Text on screen: Pierre Elliot Trudeau served as Canada's 15th prime minister from 1968 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1984.]
Barry Appleton: I couldn't drive yet, but I was able to do a big event. All of a sudden, in 1980, Pierre Trudeau was back,
[00:08:49 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: and I had the opportunity to work with Mr. Trudeau and a number of people on his team. I learned so much about the nature of governance and public policy and because I was interested in foreign policy, and he was getting quite interested in foreign policy at that time too, I had some real opportunities. Plus, everyone was very nice to me because I was a young kid. It was a real interesting introduction to a very different world from people who knew a lot.
Taki Sarantakis: Keith Davey.
[00:09:18 An image of Keith Davey appears. Text on screen: The Hon. Keith Douglas Davey, O.C. was a highly influential Canadian Liberal strategist and long-serving Senator, appointed in 1966 and known as "The Rainmaker" for shaping modern political campaigning in Canada.]
Barry Appleton: Senator Davy was basically – we'll call him my political godfather.
[00:09:28 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: He would check in on me every week with his wife, Dorothy. They became family. I had to get approval from them before I would date anybody. It was pretty interesting.
But I learned a lot about the politics of joy, that public policy wasn't just about being able to engage just in good policy, but you could do so in a way that was engaging and that would resonate about sovereignty, for example, but still you could enjoy yourself, and he knew how to have fun.
Taki Sarantakis: John Turner.
[00:09:57 An image of John Turner appears. Text on screen: John Turner served as Canada's 17th Prime Minister in 1984 and had previously served as a cabinet minister under Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau.]
Barry Appleton: John Turner, he ran after he had been in the government for a long time.
[00:10:07 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: I had the opportunity to run what was called his Policy Analysis Group and help brief him on new policies. It was really interesting because he had been the President of WTO when he was our Finance Minister. He knew everybody. I would do calls, would come to the office from all over the world. US Secretary of State would call. But he hadn't been engaged in day-to-day policy. I had to really get myself up to speed on policy and then sit down and understand how to brief somebody who at the time he was the leading candidate and later became the Prime Minister. And that was a challenge, learning how to be able to deal with that. I got better at being able to deal with different audiences and different approaches, but there was still a learning experience. But he was a very thoughtful person.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. For those of us who remember the Chrétien-Martin dynamic and the Prime Minister-in-waiting Martin. We also had that with, I think, with Mr. Trudeau the first, and Mr. Turner. It was like the "Prime Minister-in-waiting". Did you have that sense that here you were working with somebody that was probably going to be the next Prime Minister of Canada?
Barry Appleton: I thought so, but you didn't know for sure. But at the end of the day, it was more about the opportunity to engage in public policy. I think I got that bug early, and I think that was what was so appealing. It gave me an insight because it isn't that you had the power to make a decision. It's what would be the right decision, and how do you think about it, not just for now, but going forward? A lot of these people were thinking long-term. We don't do that so much anymore, but long-term ideas were more important at another age.
Taki Sarantakis: Meech and Charlottetown, do you want to do them together? Do you want to talk about one of them and not the other?
Barry Appleton: They're different. During Meech Lake, I was at law school, and I had the opportunity to work with John D. Whyte, and he had been very involved in the patriation of the Constitution. He worked with the Whyte-Romanow –
[00:12:26 An image of a paper written by John D. Whyte appears. Text on screen: The Constitution and Natural Resource Revenues.]
Taki Sarantakis: Constitutional scholar.
Barry Appleton: Constitutional scholar, but he had been the former Deputy Attorney General of Saskatchewan, and later became Deputy Attorney General again.
[00:12:36 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: But he was part of that process. When Meech occurred, I had the opportunity to think a lot about the nature of Meech Lake and the impact on minority rights. I spent a lot of time working on that, discussing with that. I had the opportunity to talk with Mr. Trudeau somewhat about it and other people, some of which who later went to the Supreme Court and other people that later went into very powerful positions in government, to understand the complexity and the nature of Canadian society and the interrelationship between multiculturalism in Quebec, another very significant issue. So Meech was interesting.
Charlottetown, I had the opportunity to work for the government of Ontario in those negotiations. I spent maybe 19 months and I became the rapporteur for the provinces and the division of powers. Division of powers is that section of federalism about who gets what, who gets what powers.
Taki Sarantakis: '91 and '92. The core of our Constitution.
Barry Appleton: A couple more to go in there, too. And the early discussions about interprovincial trade were in there, too. And so I spent a lot of time in very, very extensive negotiations. I think I learned a lot about listening. I think that this was the first time that we had First Nations groups as part of this process. Quebec would not participate at that time, so we had issues to try to deal with that. It was complicated. It had many different values, the appreciation and the thought that public policy had to do more than just get us to a solution for today. We had to have something that would work on an ongoing basis. At the end of the day, that agreement didn't make that test, and it was rejected.
Taki Sarantakis: It was rejected, though, like Meech was rejected in very different ways. Meech was what we call in the business a function of executive federalism, where the Premiers and the Prime Minister got together and said, "Oh, we've changed the Constitution". And then maybe as an afterthought, people remembered, "Oh, yes, the 1982 patriation meant we now had an amending formula, meant they had to go through legislatures".
Charlottetown was very different.
[00:14:59 An image of a title page of a report appears entitled "Consensus Report on the Constitution"]
Taki Sarantakis: Charlottetown, if Meech was a little bit, let's call it secretive, a little top-down, so to speak, Charlottetown, my God, it was about as participatory as you got in Canada.
[00:15:11 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: It was the most participatory we ever had. One of the reasons why it failed,
[00:15:18 An image of a newspaper headline from 1992 appears. Text on screen: Canadians Reject Charter Changes.]
Barry Appleton: because people were ready for transparency, for having the windows open, for having that full impact. And that was actually good for democracy, but bad for that process.
[00:15:28 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Taki Sarantakis: Yes. And in fact, it was where a legislature or two, depending on how you count, rejected Meech or didn't vote on Meech. In Charlottetown, it was actually the Canadian population that said no, which was, I guess, the ultimate demonstration of how far we've come in terms of the sovereignty of Canadians thinking into this.
Now, we're not going to get whiplash, but we're going to fast forward, oh, gosh, three decades. And I just mentioned the word sovereignty. Now we're at a period where a different set of political actors are using the word sovereignty because, again, it matters. But this time, it's outside of the constitutional realm. It is vis-a-vis a whole different set of issues. I'm going to ask you a little bit about some of those modern issues of sovereignty. The first is data. What is data sovereignty?
Barry Appleton: Data sovereignty is foundationally the concept that either you can control the data that's around you or you're controlled by it. It's that foundational choice. It's a governmental idea. Does the government get to control the nature? Does it get to regulate it? Can it require that it be made transparent? Can it impact on whether the computer systems give you answers in certain ways, which might be important for election interference or for personal rights or for the protection against predation. That's data sovereignty. It sounds complicated, but really, it's not that complicated. It's either you control or you're controlled.
Taki Sarantakis: Is that the same with sovereignty in compute? We're hearing a lot of that right now in Canada – "We need sovereign compute". What is that? Why is that important?
Barry Appleton: Well, sovereign compute is different because data sovereignty is about the cloud. It's about all types of things in general. Sovereign compute is the ability of the government to ensure that certain core foundational things: your health data; your tax data; your national defense information; your border information is kept entirely in encrypted Canadian hands so that Canadian courts can review it, so Canadian authorities can decide how that works. And the reason that becomes important is that if you give part of that outside of Canada, you may find that Canadian courts lose jurisdiction to be able to deal with it. Or the flip side, you may find that Canadians and this very private data is surveilled by outsiders, and that can be very problematic. So, it's about keeping the ability of government, the capacity of government to be able to do its job, which is to govern. It loses that if it doesn't have that. If you don't regulate, you become the governed.
Taki Sarantakis: While we're talking quite a bit about sovereignty in the last year or two in Canada, I think it's fair to say that the last time before this current period that we talked a lot about sovereignty was actually when we started negotiating one of the big three trade agreements that we have with our American cousins, neighbors. We have three trade agreements, or we negotiated in succession three trade agreements. I want you to talk to us a little bit about each. Let's start with the Free Trade Agreement, the original Free Trade Agreement with your old, I don't know if he was your boss, but Mr. Turner said it was the fight of his life to make sure that that trade agreement did not pass. Talk to us a little bit about the original Free Trade Agreement.
[00:19:33 A stylized image of the United States and Canadian flags appears. Text on screen: CUSFTA (1988) was Canada's first modern trade deal with the U.S., sparking debate about sovereignty and dependence while boosting cross-border trade.]
Barry Appleton: The first Trade Agreement was a real question about whether or not Canada would be prepared to enter into a relationship that could be dependent.
[00:19:41 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: The concern about the first Free Trade Agreement was that it might be that Canada might become overdependent on the US markets, and that that would mean that we would lose our capacity and our ability to be able to sell to other parts of the world or to ourselves. In other words, it was so easy to sell to the Americans. They were so close. Our dollar was a little bit lower, though at some point at that time, our dollar was actually higher than it is right now. The idea was somehow we would lose something if we were to go there. In fact, the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, when it came through, became very successful. We probably didn't lose too much of our sovereignty, but we lost a lot of our edge. We had lost a lot of our innovation because we no longer had to innovate to get markets because it was just so easy. It was just proximity. That basically gave us, and later on, we're going to pay the price for that. But at the time, it worked out much better than maybe we had thought.
Taki Sarantakis: Maybe I'm going to put words in your mouth, and if they're the wrong words, take them right out of your mouth and tell me, no, no, they're the wrong words. But it didn't cost us our sovereignty. But if I'm hearing you correctly, it might have cost us a little bit of complacency.
Barry Appleton: Cost us a lot of complacency.
Taki Sarantakis: Second agreement, North American Free Trade Agreement.
[00:20:03 A stylized image of the United States, Mexican and Canadian flags appears. Text on screen: NAFTA (1994) expanded CUSFTA to include Mexico, creating a trilateral North American trade zone and adding protections for investment and services.]
Taki Sarantakis: We liked the first agreement so much, we went back for more, and we brought in a new dance partner, too.
[00:21:12 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: Well, first of all, on the NAFTA, we didn't bring the dance partner. We were the new dance partner. The Americans were doing a deal with the Mexicans, and we weren't involved. We actually went to the Americans and said, "Hey, let us in". They were already advanced. We came into an existing set of arrangements. At the end of the day, enhancing protection on investments, enhancing the scope of the original agreement made a lot of sense for Canadians because Canadians were investing in the United States, but we didn't have protections. Canadians were engaged in cross-border services. We didn't have any of those provisions that were in the original agreement. It was a natural second step after having experienced for a number of years for the first.
Taki Sarantakis: The first trade agreement, a lot of angst one way or the other. Second trade agreement, I think it's fair to say a lot less angst. It was like, it's just a natural progression. After all, we live in a globalized world. Capital flies around the world. Goods fly around the world. This is natural. The third trade agreement, which, ironically, has two names, depending on where you are uttering the name. We're in Canada, so let's call it CUSMA. Talk to us about that trade agreement.
[00:22:31 A stylized image of the United States, Mexican and Canadian flags appears. Text on screen: CUSMA (2018) updated NAFTA to modernize rules, address digital trade, and strengthen labour and environmental standards across North America.]
Barry Appleton: Well, CUSMA, or ACEUM in French.
Taki Sarantakis: Actually, it has three names.
[00:22:41 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: Actually, it has four because the Mexicans have a name for it, too. It's totally different. It's the most amazing agreement because everybody has a name for it. Basically, everybody hated it while it was in operation, but now they all love it because they don't want it to go down, except perhaps the Americans. We don't really know.
Okay, so the CUSMA, what it is – Canada had the opportunity of having all types of open access to the US market from the NAFTA. We didn't want to lose that. President Trump comes in, he wants to renegotiate. There's a risk of losing the access. The access was key for Canadian business because almost three quarters of our trade, a little bit more, it goes to the United States. We wanted to protect that access and not have to pay for it. So CUSMA, as it is, gave us that access. There was some difficult negotiation. We had to give up some stuff. From NAFTA, we're going downwards a little bit to the CUSMA agreement, but we still had the opportunity to get access to the market, and that was critical for Canada. We put some water in our wine, and that's where we were at.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you mentioned President Trump. President Trump comes in in 2016, originally, and starts saying, "I'm not sure this is a good deal for us". What's going on?
Barry Appleton: Well, later, he said it was the best deal ever. So he must have improved it. That's all I can say, because it was his deal. All right, so look, we got the deal. The Canadian public policymakers aren't particularly happy. It's tricky to get that deal because there's a transition of government going on in Mexico. That transition is going on. We had to fit it into their transition. We weren't happy with the terms. The Americans weren't happy that we were slow. It left a lot of very unhappy feelings that we thought would be fine in Canada until Trump comes back later. So for that time, it was something we could live with, but it was less than we had, not more. That's the story.
Taki Sarantakis: And now we're sitting here in late 2025, for those of you that are going to watch this later to make sure that we're situated properly in time. And not only is CUSMA back at issue, but it is also potentially not just about renegotiating, but we're hearing things out of the President's orbit about maybe we won't have a trade agreement with Canada.
Barry Appleton: Look, what I think you're seeing is that CUSMA, as a trilateral agreement, has basically lived its life. It's going to be over. The Americans don't want another trilateral. They want bilaterals. They have more leverage. They want one with Mexico and one with Canada. So whether you want to call the new one with Canada CUSMA 2, which I hope we don't, or you want to call it something else, which I hope we do, there's going to be something else happening.
Now, let's really focus in, though. Is that good for Canada or is it bad for Canada? And the answer is it doesn't make a difference. Why? Because the existing agreement is no longer worth the paper it's written on because it's not being followed. Partly, the administration in the United States is following part of it right now with respect to what they call CUSMA-compliant goods, but with these massive, Section 232, these massive sectoral tariffs on autos, on steel, on aluminum, on copper, on lumber. It's totally usurping the playing field, and that requires something new. The problem is for Canada, that we've become so reliant since going through that process, from going right back to that first trade agreement, we've become so reliant on the United States, and we didn't innovate. We didn't become more productive. We didn't add those elements that we would really need to do to be able to sell around the world. So we're stuck selling to the Americans on the basis of low cost and proximity.
Taki Sarantakis: But wait a second. My understanding, I keep getting told by all the people in my orbit that Canada has the most trade agreements in the world, that there isn't another country that has negotiated as many trade agreements as we have. But you're saying we're still as reliant on the United States as ever. Am I hearing you correctly?
Barry Appleton: When three quarters of your business is with one client, you are in a very vulnerable spot, and they know that. And of course, the other part about that is that the terms of the CUSMA are different from other treaties in that it had a limited term across the board, and it had a six-month clause. That means that it could be gone in six months unless it was renegotiated. So whether Canada renegotiates it on its own or whether it's forced into a renegotiation, there's going to be a profound realignment. And that fits into the concept of the end of neoliberalism, the end of having that concept where all those trade agreements are good. Canada hit the apotheosis of having the most number of trade agreements at a time when that was an important figure, an important standard. But now we're in a different time, and maybe it doesn't mean as much as it did before. So instead, we want the ability to trade all over, but you got to have products, you got to have innovation, you've got to have the things that people want to buy.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, in addition to advising governments – and you do fairly regular testimony in the United States representing Canada as a Canadian, not as part of the Canadian government, mostly. You have a lot of private sector clients. Tell us a little bit about some of the things that they worry about. I imagine they worry about things like regulations. I imagine they worry about things like intellectual property. I imagine they worry a little bit about investment flows, not just trade flows, where your capital stock is going to go. Tell us a little bit about maybe if I can put the whole burden of the private sector on your shoulders, how some private sector corporations, be they American or Canadian, think about these things.
Barry Appleton: Most important thing for the private sector is predictability. That's what they want more than anything. They'll adjust to anything, but they want to know that it's predictable. The second thing they want is the rule of law and due process. They go together. So predictability and the rule of law, you put that together, it's good for business, it's good for government, it's good across the board. Right now, they don't have that. So right now, they don't know what to do. And most of the time when they don't know what to do, they're not making any investment. So I'm seeing no new inbound investment in Canada. It's frozen since these issues with the Americans have started. Maybe that will get fixed if there's a new agreement. Until that time, I don't see a lot of opportunity there. They have a choice. They can invest in the United States, have access to the whole market, or they can invest in Canada and maybe have access or maybe not. Where would you put your money? It's not like in AI and in data and all those areas, tremendous amount of investment going on in the US, almost no investment in Canada.
Taki Sarantakis: Billions upon billions upon billions of dollars in AI, in compute, in data centers, et cetera. Do you have a prediction about how this part will play out before we move into the next part of our discussion?
Barry Appleton: Sure.
Taki Sarantakis: Remember, Yogi Berra said that "Making predictions was really, really difficult, especially if those predictions were about the future".
Barry Appleton: Thank you. Let's put it this way. I don't worry about what I read in the newspaper. Senator Davey used to say to me, "Today's newspaper wraps tomorrow's fish". Of course, that was the time when we still had newspapers. We still have fish, we just don't have the newspapers. At the end of the day, I think on a longer-term basis, I think what we're going to see is a new arrangement with the United States. That arrangement is not going to be particularly beneficial to Canada. I think Canada is going to have to pay for access to market. I think we're going to have something very much like what the EU has, but maybe even at a higher rate. So 15% or 20% across the board. That may stop the pain on some of those sectorals. But foundationally, some of those businesses, the older businesses are gone. My focus and my concern is that the new economy isn't wrecked. That's got to be important for us because our futures are in a new economy, not just in the old. So higher value-added with things we have, critical minerals are a really good example of that, refining and being able to deal with that rather just ripping it out of the ground and shipping it out as low as possible.
But then the flip side is, how are we going to regulate? How are we going to get jobs and focus with AI, with cloud, with data? That is the future. That's the next generation. That's what I'm worried about. That's what I'm hoping we can get resolved.
Taki Sarantakis: I think I've heard you say something to the effect of, we have to stop focusing on nostalgia. Let's close this section on that. What do you mean by, we have to stop focusing on nostalgia.
Barry Appleton: We were America's best friend, or so we thought. We had the situation of being in a loyal, trade monogamous relationship when we found out it wasn't. We can sit there and grieve, but no matter how much marital therapy you can have in trade, it doesn't work unless both parties want to fix it, and both parties don't. The nostalgia is of a time when we were appreciated, or at least we thought we were appreciated, and then we follow the rules. Those times are over. We got to get our head into a new game or else we're going to be in real trouble.
Taki Sarantakis: Now we're going to turn from a hard-core realpolitik. We're going to turn, I think the audience gets a sense of your energy and your love for this topic. You have energy and love for another Canadian topic, which is one of the reasons why you're here, which is Canadian art. Tell us a little bit about your relationship with Canadian art, and then we'll unpack each of those different segments.
Barry Appleton: While I was at the University of Toronto, I had friends, and they had what I'll call a trading post. It was a store in Toronto. It had furs, it had Aboriginal art.
Taki Sarantakis: Was it the Hudson's Bay Company?
Barry Appleton: No, it was not the Hudson, now a former company, too. No, it was on Yonge Street near Bloor, but it wasn't The Bay. And you'd go there and be able to hear stories about what things were like. I would go there, and they had some really interesting First Nations art, in particular, Inuit art. And so I would save up and save up, and I was able to finally buy something. I was about 20 years old, and I bought a piece of Inuit art by Ovilu Tunnillie, who I later got to know as an artist and a person, but I didn't know any of these things. And that got me started on a real passion. Not only Aboriginal art at the beginning, I did Canadian female artists as well. But that really started me as saying, "You know what? You can actually buy something. You can actually do something and have a sense of it". So I'm not creative personally, but I was able to be able to step in in some way and feel part of the country, part of our heritage in another palpable way. I just enjoyed it so much that started that.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, I think you are the largest collector of Inuit art in private hands?
Barry Appleton: Apparently, that seems to be the case. Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us a little bit about that, that collection.
Barry Appleton: Okay. Well, Because of my interest, actually, in Canadian female artists, I got involved with the Art Gallery of Ontario.
[00:35:35 An image of the exterior of the Art Gallery of Ontario appears.]
Barry Appleton: They thought that was interesting, and then they found out I had other interests as well, and I later became the chair of the Canadian Territorial Committee, the Committee for the Art Gallery of Ontario,
[00:35:45 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: in charge of getting new art for its collection or getting rid of art and de-accessing it. I spent years involved with that. While that was going on, I spent more and more time working with artists from around the country, getting to know more of their stories, and meeting more and more Indigenous artists, especially Inuit artists.
[00:36:06 A series of images of Barry Appleton with Inuit artists appears: Itee Pootoogook; Kenojuak Ashevak; Kananginak Pootook; Tim Pitsilik with his family; and Shuvinai Ashoona.]
Barry Appleton: I started going to Nunavut. I started acquiring more and more works, loaning works out and working with universities and art galleries across Canada, and later in other institutions around the world, to build the capacity for curators to be able to deal with this, to build a cadre of Inuit curators, to be able to talk about their own art.
[00:36:33 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: I later became the chair of the Inuit Art Foundation and the publisher of their magazine, the Inuit Art Quarterly. So no good deed goes unpunished.
Taki Sarantakis: You fell in love with maybe the prototypical Canadian art as it's known around the world, Inuit art. Tell us a little bit, is it masks? Is it sculptures? Is it paintings? Is it drawings? Do any of those particularly draw you?
Barry Appleton: I have very significant holdings, both of prints and drawings, of other graphics.
[00:37:10 A series of images of Inuit art appears created by: Jutai Toonoo; Pitaloosie Salia; Marion Tuu'luq; and Osuitok Ipeelee.]
Barry Appleton: For example, there'll be stone cuts because they're like a wood cut, they don't have wood because you're in the Arctic, so you do it against stone, and also of sculpture.
[00:37:23 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: Over the years, I was taken in by some the wonderful artists, some of the great names.
[00:37:31 Photographs of the artists Kenojuak Ashevak and Kananginak Pootoogook appears]
Barry Appleton: Kenojuak Ashevak, for example, and Kananginak Pootoogook were both very, very thoughtful and kind.
[00:37:39 Barry Appleton appears full screen.]
Barry Appleton: They're both Elders, and they gave me my name in Inuktitut, Atcheargarluk was my name, which means "Swiss army knife". It means something very handy to use if you're stuck on the road. And Inuit life is about innovation and being nimble, something that we could learn in public policy. So having a really handy little tool along the way, probably pretty good. So they said that was a good name. I'll still take that as a good name. But I had the chance to meet and work with artists from all parts of the Inuit Nunangat, and that was really deeply rewarding, and my time with Elders and communities along the way, too. So yes, we built a fabulous collection. More importantly, we're able to share that material in museums around the country and to be able to work on programs and scholarship, too.
Taki Sarantakis: What did they teach you about Canada, about being a Canadian? Clearly, your eyes lit up when you were talking about that.
Barry Appleton: The first thing it taught me is don't give up, no matter how tough it is. That if you give up, you might not make it, so you have to keep going. I would hear stories about things that were really tough, but these are survivors. Canadians can be unbelievably innovative, and they can be unbelievably tough. We don't give ourselves enough credit. We sit back and we talk about how we can't do things. These are people who lived or died because they did or did not do. They taught me it was important to do, and to do it with purpose. I try to keep that mission alive, and I try to deal with it with my public policy work.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you have, as we've talked about a little bit, you have one foot on one side of the 49th parallel, so to speak, and another foot on the other side of the 49th parallel. What do you wish that more Canadians knew about America, and what do you wish that more Americans knew about Canada?
Barry Appleton: Nobody's ever asked me that question. It's a really good one. Foundationally, I wish more Canadians would recognize that even if Americans are going to be in a tough negotiation, it's not because they hate you, it's because of the nature of the markets. It's the way they're wired. They don't hate you because they want a good bargain, but they want the best bargain, and there's usually only one best bargain. And for Canadians, to our American friends, I want them to know that even though we're polite and we clean up after ourselves, at the end of the day, we're pretty tough, too. And so being polite doesn't mean that Canadians are pushovers, and it doesn't mean that Canadians want to be Americans. The fact of the matter that we might like Americans and we might work with Americans doesn't mean that we naturally want to be Americans. It's sometimes difficult because sometimes Americans think everybody want to be Americans. It's a bit of a lesson I have to deal with.
Taki Sarantakis: We are neighbors on a continent. I think it's fair to say this is a moment for the Canada-US relationship. Because you're a legal scholar, I want to close us off on the following note. It's a little philosophical, but I'm pretty sure based on our conversation, you can handle this. The American Constitution speaks about life. Oh, sorry, no, the US Declaration of Independence speaks about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". And the Canadian Constitution, if it has a philosophical twist, it would be in the phrase "peace, order, and good government". Does that accurately capture something important about the people who live north of this line or south of this line?
Barry Appleton: At a time it did. I don't think it does anymore. I think the world has changed. I think the ubiquity of the Internet and global culture has affected in some foundational ways. When I go to Nunavut and people have their phones and they can see what's going on, it no longer had that sense of what we had before. At one point, when I started my career, peace, order and good government would be the way. That would be our Canadian approach. I think we have a little bit more pursuit of happiness and a little bit more liberty that can be in there. When Canadians finally feel that liberty interest is a bridge, then finally we're getting angry, and that's something else I saw for the first time in my life. I don't think we're that different. I think that what we have is a sense of almost a "liason", of bringing this together in a way. But it doesn't mean that we're the same. It just means that maybe we share some common goals, and that might explain why our relationships have been so good until they weren't.
Taki Sarantakis: Professor Barry Appleton, thank you today for taking the time to come and talk to us a little bit about sovereignty, a little bit about Canada-US, a little bit about trade, a little bit about trade agreements, a little bit about art, and a little bit about what it means to be Canadian. Thank you so much, sir.
Barry Appleton: It's "métissage". It's the element of being Canadian. Thank you.
[00:43:36:04 An image of the first page of the United States Declaration of Independence appears. The phrase "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" is highlighted.]
[00:43:46:07 An image of a page of the Canadian Constitution Act appears. The phrase "peace, order and good government" is highlighted.]
[00:43:56 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[00:44:01 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
