Wednesday night saw The Walrus Talks Resilience bring lively and diverse discussion to Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario. Resilience being a looser topic than the Walrus’ previous visit to Toronto, it was difficult to predict what the night’s speakers would bring to the metaphorical table.
Resilience can be defined in a number of ways, but at its core, it’s the ability of a person or thing to overcome difficulty and come back stronger than ever. The Walrus was inspired to hold a talk on this subject after its June 2014 story on Calgary, a year after it was battered by heavy flooding.
The speakers’ backgrounds came from many different disciplines; speakers ranged from a high-up in Cisco to the head of the Guelph Jazz festival to a “recovering politician.”
Sig@Waterloo‘s Frances Westley was a smart choice for first speaker, as she laid the groundwork for the discussion that followed. She explained the cycle of resilience, which involves a system that establishes itself, faces an unnatural event and comes out of it stronger than before. She then applied the thinking to businesses, and why so many startups fail: high-ups fall victim to traps like the “rigidity trap,” in which a business leader won’t let go of an idea, rather than change with the times.
From there, resilience took on whole new meanings depending on who was talking. Annie Kidder of People For Education spoke about education and its role in fostering resilience in children. Because 95 percent of Canadian children are raised in public schools, it’s important to discuss what these kids are learning. Kidder said that while promotion of core skills (reading, writing, math) are important, educators could do better to start looking at other skills that will help children thrive as the next generation of leaders. Social skills are often neglected as things to learn in school, and Kidder said that People For Education is now studying how curricula can be changed to promote skills like resilience and creativity.
Resilience is especially meaningful to Gabrielle Scrimshaw of the Aboriginal Professional Association of Canada. Starting in a small community in northern Ontario and living among poverty, she became the first person in her family to complete her post-secondary education. She’s now established in Canada and started the Aboriginal Professional Association of Canada, which serves more than 600 Aboriginal people, usually in urban areas, across Canada.
For Rick Huijbregts of Cisco, resilience in communities can revolve around adapting to the ever-encroaching Internet of Things, in which more and more objects become “smart” and connect to each other and to the Internet. The statistics certainly back it up — Huijbregts said that there are currently 13 billion smart objects in existence (largely smartphones), but that number will balloon to 50 billion by 2020,
Huijbregts argued that more cities need to get on board with creating the infrastructure to deal with Big Data. One example is Barcelona, Spain, which is known as the “Mobile World Capital” and as a result has created 56,000 new jobs and plays host to 1,500 companies. Huijbregts called for global open standards on Internet practices and more collaboration between the public and private sector.
Despite introducing himself as a “recovering politician,” former Toronto mayor David Miller, now part of WWF Canada, spoke with great eloquence — and without notes. He mentioned the staggering recent WWF report that says that since 1970, 52 percent of the world’s wildlife has disappeared. He then pointed to something that is much better news — that salmon are now thriving in the Humber River, a prospect once thought impossible.
To the audience, he said everyone has a choice, and that choice must be to help preserve the environment. Whether that’s in the form of countries or cities investing in clean energy (like Germany) or making a conscious decision to drive electric vehicles, use public transportation or walk or bike. By doing this, he says, we can put less stress on the planet as climate change continues to bring freak storms like December’s ice storm or Calgary’s flooding.
The night ended on a dynamic note with local poet Mustafa Ahmed, who once again redefined resilience as it applied to his friend Yusuf (who was killed on Monday) and Ahmed’s own experiences growing up in Regent Park. He said that he isn’t asking anyone to make a radical change; just to honour Yusuf’s memory. He closed with his spoken-word piece “Close,” which earned him a standing ovation.
The night’s talk, as usual, was thought-provoking and relevant and proved that resilience — on a personal and worldwide level — is more than possible.
