“In this age of instantaneous communications also comes the demand for instantaneous responses. The 24/7 multi-channel communications universe now expects 24/7 responses from governments, public services, businesses, from whomever,” he said. “It fundamentally raises the issue of whether the speed of public policy making process can possibly match the expectation for the speed of communications responses.”

Indeed, this is an important point. But this is a matter of policy makers, including politicians, not succumbing to the demand for constant messaging. The point is not that today’s more insistent electronic information culture forces decision makers to think faster, but rather that all the buzz tries to suck them into talking before they’ve thought enough. These are two different things.

Lynch’s third point, that Canada’s policy makers have much to be proud of, is also a claim that I think needs to be considered closely. His prime example is everybody else’s too: stolid financial services regulation. Yes, Canada’s banks appear to be better regulated than those in the U.S. or Britain. This is well documented. Yet, along with sound regulation, there’s the nagging fact that the Liberal government blocked Canadian banks from merging with one another in 1998.

Had the mergers been allowed to go ahead, a couple of big Canadian banks with bloated global aspirations would likely have been far more exposed today than is our comfy banking oligarchy, of which now find ourselves so fond and thankful. But did Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, or their policy advisers, see the long-term financial-market pitfalls of bigger banks? I don’t think so. They saw the short-term political pitfalls of letting a lot of local bank branches close as banks combined forces. They anticipated consumers getting mad as their range of banking choices shrank.

The economic and financial policy elite, as least as I remember it, pretty much embraced the idea of bank mergers, arguing that Canada needed huge banks to compete with the Americans, Japanese, and Europeans. They wanted staid Toronto to feel more like swinging London. These days, of course, Toronto’s caution suits us just fine. But that’s thanks, at least in part, to crass political calculation, not lofty public-policy insight.

So Lynch’s talk raised more questions for me than it answered. He did not, at least I heard him, say much to back up his assertion that the world’s problems are more global and less domestic than ever.

He didn’t convince me that policy makers need to be smarter than ever, except perhaps in the narrow sense that they probably have to be more disciplined about not pronouncing on issues until they’ve thought things through.

And on his point that Canada is lucky to have such good policy makers, I assume that’s true, but I would have been more interested to hear something from him—given that he leaned so heavily on the banking example—about how pure policy considerations and messier political interests can come together.