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Thank you. I welcome the chance to be here. We have one useful practice at the University of Winnipeg that is relevant to these proceedings— the “brown bag lunch” series where students and faculty can get together to harass the president while munching on sandwiches and celery sticks. The tone is not one of highbrow challenges to higher education, but the pragmatics of how to keep tuition low, subsidized parking for the faculty, and a good basketball team for the alumni. It is the academic equivalent of question period. So when Paul asked me to re-emerge from the Academy for a brief fling into the rarefied world of policy discussion, I thought a brown bag approach might be relevant–examining the politics and pragmatics of UN reform—the “how to,” not the “why,” and drawing upon my days as a political practitioner whose job it was to figure out the way to translate good ideas into action. And with apologies to our guests from other countries I want to focus those considerations fundamentally on the role Canada can play in fostering reform because I believe an effective UN is in our interest and we have a vocation to play in helping to make the change. It is with some pride that I can say that I come from a country that has a solid history of endorsing the UN. Even in the dark days of suspicion surrounding the Iraq imbroglio, close to 60 percent of Canadians , when polled, thought the UN made a difference in world peace and security. When compared to the average global range of ten to twelve percent, it paints a picture of the level of commitment Canadians feel for this organization. It is a commitment tinged with a questing, a questioning of what needs to be done in order for the UN to remain the lloyd axworthy 15 MAKING THE CASE FOR CHANGE 169 effective governing body it has been, and of the steps we must take to ensure its continued guiding presence in this ever-changing world of global politics. One thing I learned in politics is that there’s nothing more challenging than trying to get politicians to change their own institution. Turkeys do not vote for Christmas. As a foreign minister I was basically a plumber, fixing leaks. But, I recognized that the leaks were more frequent when the architecture was faulty. Post-Berlin Wall, most accustomed assumptions were challenged , and there was to be a New World Order. By the mid-1990s the bloom was off and everyone was looking for the right compass setting . It was that need for navigation that took us into the realm of ideas because everything else didn’t seem to work. And the first task was simply to recognize how difficult it is to make changes and institute reform. I am reminded of a talk by the great Canadian economist Harold Innis. He gave a presidential address to the Royal Society in 1948 called Minerva’s Owl. Minerva’s Owl only flies at dusk with the light of day behind it. Innis took this to mean that by the time we have become aware that calamity is upon us it is already too late to take action; that we recognize important signs of issues still to come too late to respond. As a result we fall back on old answers or react out of haste, lack of forethought, and inattention. Or we simply get caught flatfooted . A more academic example of this can be found in the writings of the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn argues that paradigmatic shifts of thinking occur with great resistance and only after a point of crisis has been reached. He offers the Copernican and Galilean helio-centric vs. geo-centric model of the solar system as an example of the human rigid adherence to established conceptual norms. Kuhn observed, “Novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” Eventually even the most resilient had to cede in the face of ever mounting evidence to our place in the galaxy. It is only after a tremendous amount of dissonance in response to new cognitions that change begins to take form. According to Kuhn, a shift of paradigm cannot grow from the last, but rather supplants it with a whole new set of cognitions. In that sense a new paradigm cannot grow out of the faulty foundation of the one it replaces. Reform cannot...

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