Transcript
Transcript: Reflections by P. Tom Jenkins
[00:00:00 Montage of a series of images. Text on screen: Leadership; Policy; Governance; Innovation.]
[00:00:16 Text on screen: Review and Reflection; Produced by the Canada School of Public Service.]
Introduction: 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.
[00:00:26 Tom Jenkins appears full screen.]
Taki Sarantakis: Welcome to another session of the Review and Reflection series. Where we highlight interesting and prominent Canadians, and we talk a little bit about them and a little bit about their achievements so that you get to know your country a little bit better.
Today we are talking to a living legend. We are talking to P. Thomas Jenkins. Welcome.
Tom Jenkins: Pleasure to be here.
[00:00:57 Text on screen: Tom Jenkins, Chair of the Board, OpenText.]
Taki Sarantakis: What's the P stand for?
Tom Jenkins: Paul.
Taki Sarantakis: Paul?
Tom Jenkins: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: How come you went with Thomas or Tom?
Tom Jenkins: My parents had a disagreement as to what they were going to call me, so I ended up being called Tommy instead of Paul. It was two different grandfathers, and it ended up being Tommy.
[00:01:14 Overlaid image of Tom Jenkins as a child.]
Tom Jenkins: And, of course, if you have to navigate a passport, it's a bit of a curse because they call you Paul. And then you sit around going, where's Paul? And then of course they go, Paul Thomas, and then you show up. So, it's a bit of a curse. So, a note to everyone listening, don't name your children after their second name, stick to the first name.
Taki Sarantakis: And where were you born, Tom?
[00:01:38 Overlaid aerial image of Hamilton, ON.]
Tom Jenkins: I was born in Hamilton, Ontario.
Taki Sarantakis: What was Hamilton like back then?
Tom Jenkins: Hamilton's a steel town, so it was blue collar, and people there told you what they thought. You went to Hamilton Ticats games, and it was a very straightforward town.
[00:01:57 Overlaid image of University of Toronto.]
Tom Jenkins: When I went to University of Toronto, it was much more difficult to navigate because people didn't exactly tell you what they thought. In Hamilton, you never had to guess.
Taki Sarantakis: Were you a Ticats fan or an Argo fan?
Tom Jenkins: You said "were" as in past tense. I am still to this day a long-suffering Hamilton Ticats fan. In fact, Taki, I was born on Grey Cup Day.
Taki Sarantakis: Wow. And I know that you are also— speaking of long-suffering – you are also a long-suffering, like me, Toronto Maple Leafs fan.
Tom Jenkins: Yes, this is going to be a very difficult session. We've now covered the Hamilton Ticats and unfortunately the Toronto Maple Leafs. Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: And you have something that I wish I had from the Toronto Maple Leafs somewhere in your basement, I'm told. What is it?
Tom Jenkins: Oh, we're really going to talk about stuff here.
[00:02:56 Overlaid image of Maple Leaf Gardens.]
Tom Jenkins: Well, when the Maple Leaf Gardens was being dismantled and reassembled, all of the artifacts of the Toronto Maple Leafs were auctioned off, and I won the bid for the players' dressing room.
Taki Sarantakis: Wow. What's in the players' dressing room?
Tom Jenkins: The stuff that everyone knows from every hockey rink. The door, and the players' bench and stalls, and what have you.
Taki Sarantakis: Holy smokes. So—
Tom Jenkins: But I also have something else.
Taki Sarantakis: What do you have?
Tom Jenkins: I have the players' bench from the Montreal Forum.
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, boo Montreal.
Tom Jenkins: And of course, I tell all my Montreal friends that when Toronto wins the Stanley Cup, that I will burn in a bonfire the players' bench, that Béliveau – And of course, the response of the Habs fans has always been, "Oh, you're only going to burn it when the Leafs win the Stanley Cup? It's in safe hands".
Taki Sarantakis: Oh, and as we speak, for the irate Montreal Canadiens fans right now that are listening to this as we speak, you should know that the Toronto Maple Leafs did not make the playoffs, and the Montreal Canadiens are still in the playoffs. Now, let's fast forward a little bit. What'd your mom do? What'd your dad do?
[00:04:13 Overlaid image of Tom and his mother at a Hamilton Tiger-Cats game.]
Tom Jenkins: My mother was a British war bride.
[00:04:16 Overlaid image of Tom's father in his Army uniform.]
Tom Jenkins: My father landed at D-Day and on furlough from the Canadian Army, he met my mother. And so my father was born and bred in Hamilton. In fact, comes from, as far back as I've gotten now, 12 generations of Army and engineers, believe it or not. My 5th great-grandfather built the fort at Burlington Heights, which became Dundurn Castle.
[00:04:45 Overlaid image of Dundurn Castle.]
Tom Jenkins: And it's during the War of 1812. That's how I ended up in Hamilton. Because Colour Sergeant John Jenkins of the Royal Engineers had to rebuild and build forts for the War of 1812.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's interesting because it talks about, or it foreshadows, a couple of the themes of your public life.
[00:05:13 Overlaid images of Tom Jenkins in a Canadian Armed Forces uniform, in a RCAF jet; in camouflage fatigues in a wooded area; on a tarmac with a RCAF jet in the background.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, the first is you have a relationship with the Canadian Armed Forces that continues to this day. Tell us about the beginning of your Canadian Armed Forces Association and how it's gone over the years.
Tom Jenkins: Well, my father landed at D-Day with the Army, and when it was time for me to put a uniform on, he said, "You're going into the Air Force", so I ended up as an Air Force officer, and that's the association. And today I sit on the Air Board of the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Taki Sarantakis: What does it mean to you to still have an association with our military?
Tom Jenkins: Well, it means everything to me. It's part of our heritage. It's who we are, what we have done. I had the great honour to write the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Air Force history book with General Mike Hood, the commander.
[00:06:06 Overlaid image of the book, "Pathway to the Stars", by Michael Hood & Tom Jenkins.]
Tom Jenkins: It's called Pathway to the Stars, and it's a wonderful read for any Canadian. You can't help but be proud of your country when you read what this country has done.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, the very first time I heard you speak and the very first time I met you, it was virtually, when virtual was not a thing. And you were giving a presentation to a leadership program in the Government of Canada. And you started talking about, not about your time at OpenText, not about the many, many things that we all know you for, you spent a lot of your time talking about your time in the Army. And you said a sentence that I had never heard before, and it knocked me off my feet. You said, "The Army taught me how to be a leader from behind."
Tom Jenkins: Yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Talk to me about that sentence.
Tom Jenkins: See, in business, we're taught spreadsheets, and we're taught things to manage. We're taught to be managers. When I reflected on my career, one of the most important things that I had been taught in Officer Cadet School was to lead. And I still remember to this day all of the different courses I was on, and you were always taught [that] all of your people ate their meal first; you ate the meal last. This was an ethos of the officer cadre.
And many of those principles served me very well in business because it was about leading and about leading from behind. And it's a subtle point, but as I reflected on my career, it became a very important point.
Taki Sarantakis: So, that's a nice segue into where most Canadians have heard your name, and that's in business, specifically in high tech. You were one of the first people, not just in Canada, but you were one of the first people to grab a hold and make something of this new thing called the World Wide Web, or the net, or I don't know what you were calling it back then.
Tom Jenkins: It's called the Information Superhighway.
Taki Sarantakis: Yes.
[00:08:35 Overlaid image of Senator Albert Gore, Sr.]
Tom Jenkins: And it was invented by Al Gore's father. Those were the terminologies of the time. Of course, we started to call it the internet, but then it really became known as the web. And the World Wide Web needed something to be able to find the needle in the haystack. And at the time, in the algorithm world, we called that an inverted Boolean index. And of course, that's a mouthful, so people just called it a search engine.
And of course, at that time, when I would say to people, "Well, we build search engines", they thought that was part of a car. So, yes, much of the nomenclature we take for granted today.
[00:09:26 Overlaid images of corporate logos, as described.]
Taki Sarantakis: So, talk to us about that world a little bit. If I remember right, it was like Netscape, it was AltaVista, it was Ask Jeeves. Take us back a little bit for those who don't remember the days before the internet.
[00:09:40 Overlaid image of a floppy disk.]
Tom Jenkins: Well, in those days, we had floppy disks that had 360 kilobytes on it.
[00:09:44 Overlaid archival image of Tom Jenkins and Jerry Yang.
Text on screen: Tom Jenkins with Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, launching the original Yahoo! search engine with Canadian technology.]
Tom Jenkins: And in the first year we crawled the entire internet, it was the sum total, the whole World Wide Web was 1 gigabyte.
Taki Sarantakis: Which is what in ordinary language today? Is it like on my smartphone?
Tom Jenkins: Oh my goodness, a thumb drive or something like that, that would have a terabyte on it now. No, no, a gigabyte is an afterthought today. But at the time, a gigabyte memory on a VAX 11750 cost $35 million, roughly, and filled a room. Those were the early days of the internet.
Taki Sarantakis: Now you, when people were running off on the internet, you actually started working on the alter ego of the internet, the intranet. Talk to us about that a little bit.
[00:10:44 Overlaid image of the OpenText homepage.]
Tom Jenkins: Well, it was a typical Canadian moment. At the time, we were running, for about 3 years in a row, the OpenText Index was pre-Google, pre-Bing, and in fact was the search engine of Netscape and Microsoft Network and what have you.
[00:10:50 Overlaid image of the Microsoft logo.]
Tom Jenkins: But so many different companies were coming into that race, it became a very consumer-oriented thing. So, we, being Canadian and not in New York City or Los Angeles, and not wanting to move to New York City or Los Angeles, decided that from Waterloo, Ontario, maybe the best play would be to go behind what is called the firewall, which meant that we started to build the search engines inside the firewall of every company and government of the world.
Taki Sarantakis: So that they could find their information, they could sort their information, they could use their information for business applications, business intelligence.
Tom Jenkins: Yes, well, that's correct. And what happened was we ended up writing a book about it called Enterprise Content Management, which became the name for the industry, which is today a multi, multi-billion dollar multinational industry. And that's exactly right. We started to help people discover the needles in their own haystack as opposed to public.
What we didn't know, which we know today, but we didn't know at the time, a lot of people would be very surprised to hear that whether it's Google or Facebook or whatever, that's only 2% of the information in the world. We hadn't realized that we were stumbling on an iceberg and that what we could see publicly was a fraction.
[00:12:27 Overlaid image of the Boeing logo.]
Tom Jenkins: Do you know for the first 10 years of the internet, Boeing, their internal internet was bigger than the public internet because of all the technical manuals of all the airline, etc.
Taki Sarantakis: That's remarkable. And it gives us a sense of scale and how exponentially, in explosive terms, both the internet and various intranets have become.
Now, when you say we, it's OpenText, which you've been associated with for, I think, 3 decades. OpenText, if I remember right, started as some project at the University of Waterloo.
Tom Jenkins: Yes, yes.
Taki Sarantakis: Tell us about that.
[00:13:14 Overlaid image of volumes 3-9 of the Oxford English Dictionary.]
Tom Jenkins: So, it began its life at the University of Waterloo. It was basically digitizing the Oxford English Dictionary. And the Oxford English Dictionary was a 640-megabyte huge thing, dozens of books on a shelf, and no one knew how to have digital recall. And so we actually, at the university, designed the algorithm to be able to find the needle in that haystack, and that led to OpenText being founded. So, it was a spin-off.
Taki Sarantakis: And did you scan? Did you take pictures of the physical Oxford English Dictionary?
Tom Jenkins: Yes, we did. In fact, what we did was, at the time, it was the nascent moment of optical character recognition, where machines were just starting to be able to figure out what a word was, what a letter was. And so, we were able to scan in, early days, scan in all the information, and that's actually how I started with OpenText because I had been at, yet another University of Waterloo startup, called DALSA.
And DALSA was a maker of scanners, and we were scanning so many things we couldn't find them. And then I realized that the professors that had been designing the OpenText algorithm were on to something much, much more profound.
Taki Sarantakis: Now your association with OpenText has been, I think, 3 decades. You have taken this company that started in Waterloo as an offshoot of a university project, and you have made it one of the Canadian global champions.
[00:15:05 Overlaid image of a group photo of OpenText colleagues.
Text on screen: OpenText is the first company to open the NASDAQ in Canada with Minister Champagne at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Feb 3, 2023.]
Taki Sarantakis: Talk to us a little bit about what it means to be a Canadian global champion as opposed to just a global champion?
Tom Jenkins: Well, certainly we started above a Dairy Queen in Waterloo, just down from the university, and there was 6 of us, and that was 35 years ago. So, the 35th year for OpenText is coming up in a few months, and it's been quite a journey, whether Canadian or not Canadian, very few companies today – OpenText is about $7.5 billion and about 22,500 people – so, Canadian or not, it's quite a journey.
But it was wonderful as a Canadian because 98% of all the activity, the revenue of OpenText, is actually outside of Canada, and more than 50% is outside North America. So, I've had the privilege of traveling the world, as a Canadian, presenting different technologies to different organizations. And it's been a spectacular experience.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you yourself have become a Canadian champion. You yourself are, in Olympic terms, you're a flag bearer. Tell us how you started getting interested in that part because you have had a profound love and involvement of public policy, Canadian public policy, and that doesn't seem to be typical in Canada of the business class.
Tom Jenkins: Members of the business community do get involved. It's just very difficult because you're busy. So, what happened with me was I had started very young and after being a CEO for 20 years, and the average length of a CEO on NASDAQ is about 36 months. So, after 20 years, it was sort of I was interested in doing something else. And because I had been in the Army, I'd been in the Air Force, and I had always been very devoted to doing things for the public good, it was a natural thing.
[00:17:15 Overlaid image of Kevin Lynch.]
Tom Jenkins: Kevin Lynch, one of our great Clerks and public servants, basically got to know me because Kevin was one of the members of the service that believed in getting outside of Ottawa.
[00:17:31 Overlaid images of John Manly, Jim Flaherty, and Stephen Harper.]
Tom Jenkins: And so, I got to know him and John Manley, Minister of Industry at the time, and started working with them. And then was asked by Jim Flaherty, our Minister of Finance, and by the Prime Minister at the time, Stephen Harper, to start joining commissions. And I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Red Wilson. And Red Wilson just passed away this year. He and Richard Dicerni were wonderful, wonderful mentors.
Taki Sarantakis: So, the thing that you're most well-known for in the public policy sphere has been the one big word, and that one big word is innovation. And it seems to have been be-devilling us, as Canadians. I know I've been in the public service for 29 years. If there is one word that has been a constant throughout that whole period, it has been innovation.
Tell us a little bit, from your perspective, what you think we get right in public policy vis-à-vis innovation, and what you think maybe we're not getting as right vis-à-vis that word.
Tom Jenkins: Yes, it's been part of our public policy discourse for the better part of 30 years. Part of the issue is structural for Canada. Canada, as Richard Dicerni would always tell me, is really two engines. One engine in the east was manufacturing in that era, and the engine in the west was natural resources.
That gives a country a bit of a dilemma because most countries that have two engines like that – and there are several to compare to, Australia being one – when you have such deep riches and blessings as a nation, to have the blessing of those resources, you tend to not have to work as hard, let's say on the other part of your economy. Now, that of course is a dangerous thing to do, and various governments over the years have done their best to arrest it.
If you were to unpack that from a policy point of view and look specifically at the productivity, shall we say, our international players, whether it's an OpenText or a Linamar, we're as good as anyone in the world, because by definition we would not survive if we weren't. So, when you look and isolate it – but we have another sort of artifact, if you will, because we are associated with the largest economy in the world to the south of our border.
That has led us to create protected sectors. Whenever you create a protected sector and you do that to maintain your sovereignty, your national identity, when you do that, that constrains competition, which then constrains innovation. So, it's a bit of a complicated story. It's sort of a three-legged stool, if you will. We have natural resources, we have manufacturing, but then we have industries that, by public policy, and all Canadians want us to, is to maintain those as sovereign.
Taki Sarantakis: Is it fair to say that being next door to that big economic market, and having a very large natural resource endowment, and having several key sectors of our economy, like telecommunications and banking, be protected affected industries. Is it fair to say that we're maybe a little bit more complacent than we otherwise would be?
Tom Jenkins: I think if you were to talk to an entrepreneur or a business person, none of them would consider themselves complacent, because they have to compete. But on a macro level, one would be led to such a conclusion. But if you go to an individual who's working quite hard inside any organization, they do not feel complacent, I assure you. But it is an artifact without a doubt of the bounty that Canadians have. We are one of the most blessed countries in the world.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, fast-forwarding a little bit, you mentioned sovereignty, which is now suddenly on the tip of everyone's tongue in Canada and in other countries around the world. In some ways, we are exiting the era of globalization. We are slowing down in the era of globalization. Our Prime Minister has called it a rupturing of previous relationships. One of the things now that you and others are talking a lot about is Sovereign AI. Talk to us about why we should care about Sovereign AI. First, tell us what it is and then tell us why we should care.
Tom Jenkins: Well, I think the macro framing of this is we're really moving from neo-liberalism to neo-royalism, to quote Foreign Affairs magazine from last month. And so, one should think about this as an evolutionary step for the world because we are multipolar. We're not dealing with one superpower anymore. So, one has to frame it first that way. And then secondly, one has to be so appreciative and thankful that we have a fantastic ally right beside us. The Americans are not a problem. They're a fantastic benefit for us.
Having said that, we are allies, not a colony. And, when you look at the alliances over the century, especially this past century, strong allies are very good for America, for Britain, for France, et cetera. So, there's no question there. So, if you take it from a framing that we're an ally of America, that then implies that we should also be sovereign. And that we should choose to be in an alliance with them. So, that then leads to a more subtle definition of sovereignty because we want to share our security with the Americans, for sure. So, we don't need to be sovereign there. That would be foolish. It's not in our self-interest.
[00:24:17 Overlaid image of a data centre.
Text on screen: A hyperscaler is a company that operates vast networks of data centres to provide cloud computing, storage, AI services, and digital infrastructure to millions of users and organisations.]
Tom Jenkins: So, for example, American hyperscalers, if we wanted to get technical, I think they're absolutely essential to our productivity and we should be so thankful that we have Microsoft or Google or AWS available to us. That's a wonderful thing.
However, we also need to maintain our national identity. And that then compels us to take a hybrid approach, where 90%, I'll just make it up, say 90% of our activity should be done with a hyperscaler, but 10% should be done at home.
Taki Sarantakis: And you mentioned 10% – let's use it as the illustrative figure – what types of things would constitute that 10%?
Tom Jenkins: Financial information of an individual or a corporation; the health status; the personal preferences of that individual; their civil rights. Those are guarded by the Parliament of Canada. Those are things that should be sovereign.
But when we're making decisions about a TV we're going to buy or something like that, then we should go to Amazon. There should be a balance. Not unlike what we were talking about before, that previous generations had struck with the protected industries. The generations that came before us knew that telecommunications or banking should be protected to maintain sovereignty. And so, what we were talking about before, the three-legged stool, we're just simply carrying that on into the age of AI.
Taki Sarantakis: So, if I'm hearing you correctly, and please correct me if I'm not hearing you correctly, I think you're making a distinction between a type of a data, let's call it a commodity, that you should just be competing like all commodities on the basis of price and efficiency. Like, I don't really care where I get my salt for my driveway. I really want it to be as accessible and as cost-effective as possible. And then, on the other hand, something that really matters to us as Canadians, something that has a sensitivity, something that defines us as people that live in Ontario, or people that live in Quebec, etc. Is that right?
Tom Jenkins: Oh, you have it. And in fact, we have a tremendous tradition for decades now in legislation of how to govern that. And so in Canada, we have legislation known as PIPEDA. In Europe, they have legislation known as GDPR and so on. The Americans have the same thing. They have USDR.
So, all countries have this. This is not unique to Canada. But what is unique is how do countries grapple with AI? And AI is a much more powerful way of interacting with that data. So, I think what we'll find, all across the world, not just Canada, that legislation throughout the world will simply take the data and move it up into AI because that's the source of the knowledge of an AI.
Taki Sarantakis: You have long been known as somebody that's been working to bring Canada and Germany closer. Tell us a little bit about that.
Tom Jenkins: A particular partnership that OpenText has enjoyed for almost 30 years, in the area of data and information sharing, has been with the German company SAP of Waldorf in Germany.
[00:27:56 Overlaid image of SAP headquarters.]
Tom Jenkins: We have enjoyed one of the historic partnerships in tech for decades, and so we actually are very collaborative together, enjoy a wonderful relationship. In fact, I've spent a lot of time on the policy side with something called the Atlantik-Brücke.
[00:28:22 Overlaid image of Tom Jenkins and Friedrich Merz.]
Tom Jenkins: My co-chair Friedrich Merz is now the Chancellor of Germany, so he was overachieving and unfortunately I didn't go any further.
[00:28:32 Overlaid image of Angela Merkel, Tom Jenkins, and Stephen Harper.]
Tom Jenkins: But the Brücke has been a Canadian-German policy, let's say, common room for decades now.
Taki Sarantakis: Now, as we come towards the end, tell us a little bit about what you see looking ahead as we're sitting here in 2026. The world looks bleak to a lot of us. We see at least 3 wars. We see protectionism, we see tariffs, we see economic sanctions, we see a lot of not, particularly on the face of them, good things. Tell us what you see a little bit as we sit here in April 2026.
Tom Jenkins: I'm an optimist. I've been an entrepreneur all my life. I've been an optimist. I see, on the global level, a huge challenge for human beings. All of us, all human beings have to grapple with the fact that machines are coming that are faster and more intelligent than we are. It doesn't make them wiser. It doesn't make them more creative, but we have to redefine what our role is in society adjacent to these machines.
And we've always redefined ourselves. Humans are adaptable, but it will be the greatest adaptation challenge, so far. And it's a debate among scientists and scholars whether we'll be able to do that, but I'm optimistic. I think we will.
On the Canadian level, I think Canadians were being challenged to redefine ourselves, but Canadians have done this through its entire history, and I think Canadians will rise to the challenge.
[00:30:34 Overlaid images of Tom Jenkins with Stephen Harper, and Mark Carney.]
Taki Sarantakis: Now, you have worked with Prime Ministers. You talk with Prime Ministers. If you were talking to Prime Ministers again, and I'm not saying you don't, but if you were talking to Prime Ministers again, given your bent for Canadian sovereignty and for Canadian innovation, what would you be telling them about this new world?
Tom Jenkins: Actually, if I may, I actually enjoy talking to Deputy Ministers. As you know, I've always wanted to be a Deputy Minister my whole career. It's ironic as a CEO.
Taki Sarantakis: Do you want to trade? I'm a Deputy Minister.
Tom Jenkins: Absolutely. I'd love it. I'd love to spend a year in your world because Deputy Ministers must take the wishes of a Prime Minister and execute it. It's very complicated because you have to take into account the economics, not just the politics. It's a complex riddle. And so, I've always appreciated that.
But for a Prime Minister, and I think we have a fine Prime Minister right now, I think this Prime Minister understands the complexity of both the 50,000 feet and the 5 inch off the ground. That's hard to do, to be able to zoom in and zoom out. I really don't have any advice for this Prime Minister. I think this Prime Minister has it figured out. The question is, can the rest of the country keep up?
Taki Sarantakis: Now, let's close with this. Most of the people watching this are public servants. If you're too humble to give some advice to the Prime Minister, give a little bit of advice to the rest of us, those that serve under the Prime Minister and in this system of the Public Service of Canada.
Tom Jenkins: Deputy ministers, ADMs, they're there as EX level to lead. So, lead. It's why they aspired to do it. The Deputy Minister, the ADM cadre, they're there to lead. The saying in business is, "Have your resume ready all the time, speak truth to power, and do the right thing." And it's easy to say, hard to do, but in the DM cadre, that's their job. Their job is to lead, to speak truth to the Minister, and to take chances. The single biggest challenge for the service is to overcome risk aversion. And that takes leadership.
And I can tell you, in the private sector, we have to do that every day. We have to balance risk with return.
Taki Sarantakis: Paul Thomas Jenkins, OpenText, public policy entrepreneur, Deputy Minister wannabe, Companion of the Order of Canada, thank you so much for spending some time with us here today.
Tom Jenkins: Thank you.
[00:33:50 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen. Text on screen: canada.ca/school.]
[00:33:56 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]
