The Importance
of Critical Infrastructure

Why understanding the whole system matters

COVID-19 has upended the world today, but its long-term effects may be more important tomorrow. The pandemic has sharpened the need to confront critical issues we have been facing even before the lockdowns began.

Rather than lurch from crisis to crisis, Canadians, and indeed all North Americans, need to understand how our society works as a complex system. As citizens, lawmakers and private industry players, we all need a firm grasp on the reality of how things get done.  

Joni Mitchell wrote that, “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” but in Canada and across North America now, we’re also learning to separate what we want from what we need, and therefore discover what is truly essential. At this time, while the pandemic is bringing these matters top of mind in society, we need a more focused long-term consideration for how we make and distribute all the goods and services required here in North America to keep our free and democratic society safe, secure, and prosperous.

Upgrading critical infrastructure and building more resilient supply chains affects all aspects of our lives. Many of us who did not consider this before the pandemic are only now realizing the importance of where the essential items and services that we rely on come from.

The critical infrastructure supply chain that brings these materials and goods is the support system that lets us determine our very future – distinguishing  between war and peace, comfort and cold, full bellies and hunger. Indeed, critical infrastructure between mere survival versus the ability to grow and thrive. It deserves far more attention from all of us than it tends to receive.

It’s time for an honest conversation about manufacturing resilience and risk mitigation. Today’s uncertainty points to our need to know how to assure our society’s essential production capabilities and capacity when the unexpected occurs. We live in an era when we have to expect the unexpected.

In the past, this conversation has centred around the defence supply chain. Today it encompasses more than defence. It’s a matter of understanding how to build reliable and securable supply chains for every aspect of our future safety, security, health and prosperity. This is the challenge we face today.

This challenge in building and maintaining this resiliency comes with costs. It’s costly to source and stockpile civilian goods in times of peace and stability in sufficient volumes to maintain capacity for those times that are uncertain. It’s costly to have that capability available on short notice to protect us. It’s also costly to be caught short. This is what we have learned from struggling with vaccine and PPE production.

A Challenge in Plain Sight

Critical infrastructure might sound boring or overly obvious to some, but it’s the challenge that’s hiding in plain sight. It may not always be apparent day to day, but in the long term, understanding, planning and organizing our supply chains more thoughtfully and rationally is key to how we as free and sovereign peoples will get through this decade, our lifetimes, this century and beyond.

Our lurching and difficult response in the West to the pandemic – including Canada’s – shows what happens when systemic thinking about infrastructure is neglected or ignored. We often tend to put problems into silos, look at immediate challenges as catastrophic and at long-term solutions as remote.

Sometimes this scattered approach works – but usually only for a while. Then when some semblance of equilibrium returns, we go back to pushing away our long-term thinking about systems. Yet we can no longer afford to consider society’s problems as isolated events. Rather we must consider history carefully, reflecting honestly on the shortcomings of past solutions. If we look more closely at how all the seemingly different problems we face are related, we’ll discover that many of the solutions are related too.

With systemic thinking we can develop new and better solutions to meet the challenge of problems that inevitably recur in our free society. We can create systems to support critical infrastructure that will be better adapted to face bigger and more complex challenges.

Systemic thinking makes a difference – whether the problem is tackling climate change, increasing our opportunities for high skilled and high paying jobs, building stronger ties with allies, or building back better in the aftermath of the pandemic. Systemic thinking is how we ensure we are ready.

In the Western Hemisphere this holistic strategy is sometimes referred to as Fortress North America. That’s a meaningful concept, but building a robust critical infrastructure is about much more than securing the perimeter, military interoperability or maintaining the Defence Industrial Base. A Fortress North America approach to continental resiliency and hemispheric defence means building a resilient infrastructure for peacetime too.

Beyond building a traditional fortress, this concept means building an infrastructure strong enough to manufacture and deliver everything that’s needed for a better life, using the continent’s industrial capability and its resources to keep us healthy, safe and  secure both now and if peace is ever challenged.

Canada will be a stronger world leader if we can develop clear industrial policy that recognizes the opportunities to work with our fellow, free North American partners. We can build resiliency and capability and share strength if we start to recognize the already clear interdependence that exists between different parts of our industries and their supply chains.

At its core, critical infrastructure is really what each of us already know and deal with every day. The reality is that before, during and after the pandemic, the materials we use, the products we make and how we deliver and use them are all part of one giant complex supply chain network, regardless of what sector they belong to.

It’s time to understand this reality better– as a system. And it’s vital to our future that more of us do so. From industry leaders to politicians to everyday citizens – we need to understand and respect the processes and practices that bring safety to our world.

A series of forthcoming articles will look at the challenges we face in this century, how these challenges relate to each other and how understanding these supply relationships – for both material goods and for defence materiel – can bring solutions.

 We live in an era in which constant change is the new normal. We do not move from one static norm to a new situation; rather we go through change all the time, in the way we live and work, in our societies and in our geopolitical relationships. That’s why systemic thinking is so key – we need to look at all the moving parts, all the time. Only through understanding the details of systems can we appreciate the impact of constant change. And only through systemic thinking about critical infrastructure can we manage change.

The problems we face are all-encompassing – climate crisis, political upheaval, a coming to terms with a collective past permeated with racism and injustice, a widespread rise in authoritarianism, clampdowns on free expression and military challenges ranging from regional sabre-rattling to existential threats.

The solutions are wide-ranging too – investment in the hard, tangible elements of manufacturing and transportation, more sustainable ways of procuring raw materials and resources, cleaner energy, rapid innovation and deploying the exponential advances in technology to protect and enhance the way we live. To truly appreciate the suite of solutions and the ways that they can be implemented, one must get into the weeds but not get entangled. We need to pay attention to the details, and not bow to convenience by ignoring the flaws or compromises that each solution might require. We need to look and see.

Why Infrastructure Matters

The world is changing fast. The Fourth Industrial Revolution – the digital age – permeates everything, affecting jobs, education, training and how we acquire, distribute and deploy raw materials. Climate change affects not only what we traditionally call the environment, but our infrastructure and livelihoods too.

Over the last 50 years, there was a widely held theory that liberalization of trade would inherently lead to liberalization of human rights and laws, with great optimism when the Cold War ended. Despite progress in some instances, this theory has been disproven over time by current and evolving geopolitical events.

Today, authoritarian regimes both large, such as China, and small, for example, some ex-Soviet republics, now thrive in a liberalized trade environment while still restricting human rights and freedoms. We in the free world must admit that our trade activities with authoritarian non-free states do not always have a positive impact on the people who live there. 

Thanks to geography, the safety of the North American continent was virtually guaranteed in past conflicts. That is no longer so. Technology such as hypersonic engines and airframes, launch-to-glide, not to mention cyber-attacks in the phase zero, or pre-kinetic conflict period are all very real threats. In future conflicts, critical infrastructure like dams, nuclear power plants, electric grids, energy pipelines, and even the continent’s manufacturing production capacity for war materiel would be under threat. This will alter the course of any future conflict.

How easily can Canada, the United States and Mexico pivot to become a literal Fortress North America if security is threatened? How nimble is our critical infrastructure? How quickly can we switch from ploughshares to swords and back again?

The way to counter and compete with authoritarian, anti-democratic states, is to build our resiliency at home. It’s time to enhance and renew North America’s infrastructure systematically — every aspect of it — so that we are in a position of true independent capacity that can be used to ensure our safety, security, and prosperity, and that of our free and democratic allies.