Last week, the National Post’s editorial board released a fascinating article: “If COVID-19 has taught us one thing, it’s that Canada needs to be more self-sufficient.”
 
The essay calls into question the Post’s long-time promotion of free markets and open trade. Over the next few weeks, articles in the paper will “ask tough questions about how our desire for more and freer trade must be balanced against our responsibility to always ensure that Canada can look after Canadians.”
 
Inasmuch as proponents of protectionist initiatives like supply management and Canada's Industrial and Technological Benefits Policy might say ‘I told you so,’ the Post’s position is hardly a turn to the political left.
 
Looked upon favourably, it is a prudent re-imagination of the national interest. More critically, it is also a surrender to those who seek an end to the liberal democratic world order that has dominated the international system since the end of the Second World War.
 
That order, anchored by the United Nations and its affiliated organizations and agencies, has been held together by two complementary forces: first, the immunity of the great powers (the United States, the Soviet Union / now Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France) from its reach; and second, the unspoken commitment of the United States to defend its integrity (presumably on their behalf).
 
There are plenty of flaws within this framework: for instance, it ignores the wants and needs of the Global South. Nonetheless, the trade-off has meant that in times of existential emergencies, Canada's only critical ally in terms of security, economic prosperity, and just about everything else could be counted on to engage.
 
The authors at the Post seem to be implying that Washington has abandoned its preserver role for good. All Canada can do now is look out for itself.
 
Perhaps they’re right. Arguments that the current US administration is less an aberration than representative of an ongoing American withdrawal from global leadership abound.
 
But it seems to me that it’s too soon to give up.

I can’t disagree with the argument that Ottawa should think seriously about “how much of our safety should be kept in Canadian hands.”
 
But the best future for Canada still includes renewed American leadership within the liberal democratic system that it did so much to create.

Now is not the time to give up on the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the G20, and the other international institutions that have served Canadian interests so well over the last 75 years.

If we do, they are even more likely to be undermined, if not replaced. And whatever comes next will be far worse than what we have now.

***
 
On international organizations, I like the work of David Bosco. You can find some of his writing here. On the future of the Canadian economy, the work of Sean Speer (a Conservative) and Robert Asselin (a Liberal) is getting a lot of good press. You can find some of it here. And if you’re on Twitter and are looking for a combination of thoughtful commentary, wit, and good humour, why not follow @loleen_berdahl, a true role model for Canadian academics.
 
If you need something longer to read while sheltering from the virus at home, you can find some my books here, here, or here.
 
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Late last week, Michelle Carbert and Janice Dickson of The Globe and Mail published an important article that seems to have had only limited pick-up.
 
“Ottawa to role out foreign aid as part of the fight against COVID-19 spread,” detailed an announcement by Canada’s minister of international development, Karina Gould, that promised what is expected to ultimately be a $1 billion corronavirus response package to countries struggling to cope with the pandemic.
 
The article quotes the minister: “We can’t prioritize one population over another because it doesn’t matter who you are, where you live or what your socio-economic background is. The virus doesn’t care about those things.”
 
What Gould said is accurate, but I wonder whether there might be a better way to justify Canadian policy right now.
 
The minister framed the international assistance in humanitarian terms. Canadians, she suggested, have a moral duty to fight the virus everywhere, not just at home.
 
I don’t disagree, but it is worth recalling that over 6 million Canadians voted for a party less than a year ago that promised to cut foreign aid by 25 percent in order to focus federal budget expenditures on Canadian citizens.
 
So when hospitals across the country are scrambling to secure equipment, and thousands of Canadians are being laid off,  calls for precious government dollars to be spent abroad are likely to be disconcerting to some.
 
(Indeed, while I was working on this post, one of the candidates in the Conservative Party’s leadership campaign tweeted out: “Foreign aid can wait. Right now, the Trudeau government should prioritize Canadians.”)
 
It is a shame that Gould didn’t frame the global covid-19 rescue package as part of the government’s defence of the national interest.
 
Global pandemics don’t end when one country rids itself of the problem.
 
Until the virus is totally eradicated, or scientists produce a viable vaccine, we all remain at risk of a second wave. All it takes is one asymptomatic traveller to restart the need for social distancing all over again. (The Chinese are dealing with this already.)
 
It follows that Canadians should be paying attention to every new case, not just the ones here.
 
And since we are fortunate to have the wealth necessary to support the eradication of this virus beyond our borders, it makes perfect sense to invest accordingly.
  
The real danger is that other wealthy states won’t do the same
 
We must do more than just flatten the curve here at home. We must ensure that the curve is flattened everywhere.
 
A generous international assistance package to complement our domestic effort is utterly consistent with the national interest.
 
***
On the history of Canada’s international assistance policy, I like the work of Jill Campbell-Miller. She has a chapter in a new, open access book by Greg Donaghy and David Webster, A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid. On foreign aid today, I always check to see what Stephen Brown has to say. On global health politics, check out the work of Jeremy Youde.
 
If you need something longer to read while sheltering from the virus at home, you can find some my books here, here, or here.
 
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COVID-19 is justifiably dominating the news of late. As a result, a number of stories that were percolating in early February have gone silent. One of them is the selection of Canada’s next ambassador to the United States.

Six weeks ago, the CBC’s Katie Simpson reported that Canada’s former ambassador, David McNaughton, was “urging” the government to choose the acting ambassador, Kirsten Hillman. Hillman, a lawyer and trade expert by training and a long-time public servant, would be the first woman ever to hold the position.

A few days later, the Toronto Star’s Susan Delacourt framed the story differently. Hillman’s selection, she noted, “would fit well with what seems to be a depoliticization trend in Canada’s foreign affairs these past few weeks.” The last time a career public servant had served as Canada’s leading representative in Washington was 2005. Prior to that, it was 1989.

Both articles were products of sound reporting and analysis.

Canada has had 20 ambassadors to the United States since the position was created in 1943. That all 20 have been men is symptomatic of a still-strong old-boys club that continues to dominate political appointments processes across the country.

And in a minority Parliament, it makes sense to try to take the politics out of Canada’s most significant bilateral relationship.

Moreover, Hillman is impressive: smart, articulate, open, and fearless. She’s briefed my students a number of times and is on a short list of speakers who have left a lasting and overwhelmingly positive impression with me.

But the last line of Simpson’s piece hints at a different story: In his pitch, McNaughton was apparently planning “to point out that appointing a career diplomat to such an important role would send a positive signal to all of the foreign service.” (my italics)

That signal, for those unfamiliar with the politics of Canadian diplomacy, is that it will no longer be impossible to rise through the ranks of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to a top position.

When the Trudeau government arrived in 2015, it announced that it would end its predecessor’s habit of parachuting partisan loyalists into major postings.

The Harper government’s approach had demoralized GAC officials. No matter how well they served their country, under the Conservatives, they would never rise to a position of serious influence. (Sure, they could become deputy minister of the department, but most diplomats join the foreign service to work abroad; they don’t aspire to a high-level bureaucratic position in Ottawa.)

At first, the Liberals seemed serious. When Ottawa announced 26 new foreign service appointments in July 2016, Maclean’s’ Shannon Proudfoot wrote: “The list is heavy on foreign service experience, short on overtly political appointments and pristinely gender balanced.”

Admittedly, the government has chosen its own (older, white, male) ambassadors to the United States and the United Nations. Those two files were top prime ministerial priorities and needed representatives who had already earned the personal trust of Mr. Trudeau.

But for the most part, the Liberals seemed to acknowledge that diplomacy was a learned skill. There was value in having experts representing Canadian interests abroad.

Less than a year later, two older, white, male former ministers, Stéphane Dion and John McCallum, were dispatched to Germany and China. Pretty soon, the Trudeau government faced the same criticisms that had been leveled at the Conservatives.

Today, to the best of my understanding, morale in the foreign service is hardly better than it was during the Harper years. Some might even call it worse, because of the disappointment caused by the Liberals’ broken promises.

Making Kirsten Hillman ambassador to the United States wouldn’t solve the morale problem overnight. But if her appointment came with explicit recognition that patronage diplomacy is hit-and-miss, while the best of Canada’s career diplomats rarely disappoint, it would be a move in the right direction.

And I can imagine few more deserving of being the face of such a move than Ambassador Hillman.

***
To learn more about the diplomatic process, take a look at the latest volume of the history of Canada’s Department of External Affairs by John Hilliker, Mary Halloran, and Greg Donaghy.

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Should the Canadian government promote respect for human rights around the world? Absolutely. How to do so is more complicated.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced significant criticism last week while visiting Africa to solicit support for Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.

In Senegal, home to a regime that continues to criminalize homosexuality, Trudeau was alleged to have “pulled his punches” when given the opportunity to publicly deplore the heinous law.

To be sure, the prime minister had it coming. Back in 2018, in the midst of a dispute with Saudi Arabia that erupted after Global Affairs Canada criticized Riyadh’s imprisonment of female human rights activists, Trudeau proclaimed:

“Canadians have always expected our government to speak strongly, firmly, clearly and politely about the need to respect human rights at home and around the world. We will continue to do that, we will continue to stand up for Canadian values and indeed for universal values and human rights at any occasion.”

In this case, the prime minister did speak up politely, but he was hardly strong, firm, and clear.

But even if criticism of his hypocrisy is warranted, that doesn’t mean that his actions were ill-considered.

Since the end of the Cold War, successive Canadian governments have conditioned us to believe that international relations are all about feeling good inside. In that sense, there is little difference between the Harper government’s principled foreign policy and the values-based posture currently trumpeted by the Trudeau Liberals.

Both approaches appeal to a sense of Canadian pride. We in Canada know best, they seem to suggest. The world could learn a lot from following our lead.

Such sentiment, sometimes referred to as virtue signalling or pulpit diplomacy, is not only arrogant, it is also a rather unhelpful approach to international relations.

For one, it rarely works. As UQAM’s Justin Massie noted on Twitter recently, Vladimir Putin did not leave Crimea because Stephen Harper told him to. Indeed, Russia’s still there.

Similarly, no African leader is going to change their country’s laws on LGTBQ+ rights because Justin Trudeau called them out on the world stage. Canada simply doesn’t have that kind of clout.

Second, the focus on values distracts Canadians from a difficult truth. At its core, foreign policy is an exercise in advancing the national interest, and sometimes doing so means making awkward compromises.

That’s why the virulently anti-communist British prime minister Winston Churchill willingly cooperated with the murderous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin during the Second World War. (And yes, they even shook hands a few times.)

Does that mean that the government of Canada should ignore the repression of members of the LGBTQ+ community around the world? Of course not. But there are more effective means to promote sexual freedom than by ‘standing up for Canadian values’ with our chests puffed out.

Here are a few ideas:

First, accept more refugees. Provide more members of the LGBTQ+ community with a haven from persecution, and make sure that their path to citizenship is affordable and accessible.

Second, increase international assistance for non-governmental organizations that promote LGBTQ+ rights around the world. They are best positioned to determine the most appropriate strategies to effect change from within.

Third, if you do plan to go public with human rights concerns, do so as part of a coalition of like-minded states and non-state actors. When it comes to calling out world leaders, there is strength in numbers.

Finally, try not to put this country in the position of needing to curry favours from unsavory regimes in the first place. Had the Trudeau government not insisted on bidding for a Security Council seat that was already contested, this particular situation could have been avoided.
***
The classic critiques of Canadian diplomatic posturing include Fen Osler Hampson and Dean Oliver’s “Pulpit diplomacy,” Kim Richard Nossal’s “Pinchpenny diplomacy,” and Denis Stairs’ “Canada in the 1990s: Speak loudly and carry a bent twig.” For fresh thinking on Canadian foreign policy, take a look at the Generations Project launched by my colleague Andrea Lane and Dalhousie University’s Brian Bow. They will be releasing a new book later through UBC Press this year.

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A couple of weeks ago, an article in the National Post asked whether Governor General Julie Payette’s efforts to solicit support for Canada’s bid for election to the United Nations Security Council for 2021-22 crossed a political line. Not only was the Crown’s representative acting diplomatically on Canada’s behalf, she was doing so to advance an issue with partisan undertones.
 
The article raises two issues: (1) whether it’s appropriate for governors general to be political and (2) whether lobbying for a Security Council seat should be considered partisan.
 
I will leave it to constitutional experts like Philippe Lagassé to answer the first question. I am more concerned by implication that, through her actions, Payette was inserting herself into partisan politics.
 
A seat on the Security Council would belong to Canada - not to the Liberal Party. On paper, then, interventions to secure that seat seem to further the national interest, not one party’s partisan agenda.
 
Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gone to great lengths to brand the Security Council campaign in his image. For the first time in Canada’s history, it was he – and not the minister of foreign affairs or a senior public servant – who officially announced Canada’s intent to bid. What’s more, the decision to pursue a seat was framed in the context of a distinctly Liberal message that Canada was “back” on the world stage after a ten-year hiatus under the Harper Conservatives.
 
The politicization of Canada’s Security Council aspirations is a relatively new phenomenon. In the last successful campaign of 1998, the opposition Reform Party offered the governing Liberals their full support.
 
Things changed at some point during the Harper government’s unsuccessful campaign for a seat for 2011-12.
 
Conservative supporters blame the Liberals, whose leader, Michael Ignatieff, publicly questioned whether Canada “deserved” a seat on the council in light of what he deemed to be the Harper government’s confrontational and ineffective foreign policy.
 
Conservative critics fault the Harper government for refusing to solicit or accept assistance from the opposition parties during the campaign and then blaming Ignatieff for the defeat.
 
Neither side is innocent.
 
More important, though, is what the current government can do differently over the five months that remain before the vote on June 17th. Here are three ideas:
 
First, offer opposition leaders a confidential briefing on the state of the campaign and the way ahead. Particularly in a minority Parliament, such outreach should be automatic.
 
Second, invite qualified members of the opposition to participate in the current bid. Conservative MP Peter Kent lobbied for council votes effectively on the Harper government’s behalf in Latin America in 2010. The NDP’s Heather McPherson is the former executive director of the Alberta Council on Global Co-operation and has previously served on a Canadian delegation to the UN.
 
Finally, form a non-partisan advisory council to feed into Global Affairs Canada’s thinking on all things Security Council-related. The group’s composition and mandate should mirror the NAFTA Council that served the Trudeau government well in 2017-18.
 
In short, it doesn’t matter whose fault it was for injecting politics into Canada’s Security Council aspirations. Partisanship hurts the bid, and the Trudeau government should do everything it can to eliminate it.
 
***
 
To learn more about Canada’s history on the Security Council (and why pursuing a seat is consistent with the national interest), please check out my new book or the podcast that discusses it. The Canadian Global Affairs Institute also just released a shorter, policy brief that I wrote about the history of Ottawa’s nine efforts to pursue a council seat. My research draws extensively from the excellent scholarship of David Malone, currently the rector of United Nations University and a former director general in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and David Bosco, whose own history of the UN Security Council, Five to Rule them All, is outstanding. If you are interested in the UN more generally, take a look at some of the scholarship by the University of Manitoba’s Andrea Charron or my RMC colleague, Jane Boulden.  
 
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It’s rare that columnists from the National Post and the Toronto Star agree, but last Friday John Ivison of the Post and Heather Scoffield of the Star wrote remarkably similar columns criticizing Justin Trudeau’s initial, measured response to the tragic plane crash in Iran.
 
To Ivison, the prime minister’s reaction did not “instil confidence that the families of the [57] Canadians who perished will see any kind of justice.”
 
“If Canadians were looking for their prime minister to express their fury and the anguish,” he added, “they were sorely disappointed.”
 
Scoffield described Trudeau’s response as “subdued.” She called his preference for quiet diplomacy a failure, and asked: “Would indignation work any better? Maybe not — but at least we’d be telling Trump that we see his recklessness for what it is. And this week, it would certainly have reflected the mood of an angry and grieving nation. Sometimes, that’s a leader’s job.”
 
Neither thought there was any chance that the Iranians would admit liability and open up the country to an international investigation.
 
No doubt both are now eating humble pie, and it is not my intent to humiliate them further. (Having eaten my share of humble pie in the past, I empathize with their position.)
 
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the Trudeau government’s diplomatic approach to dealing with the Iranian government has already achieved far more than any expressions of fury and indignation ever could.
 
Diplomacy is not, as these journalists (and countless politicians and activists from across the political spectrum) are inclined to suggest, a sign of weakness. In this case in particular, it was almost certainly more difficult for Trudeau not to lash out in anger than it was to remain calm and offer Teheran every opportunity to save face.
 
Having closed our embassy in Iran, Ottawa needed to be invited into the country to investigate and repatriate the remains of those who lost their lives. So long as there remained the slightest chance that Tehran would open its doors, it made no rational sense to be provocative. (And even now that Canadians are inside the country, it’s still worth treading cautiously, seeing as Iran does not recognize dual citizenship. To the regime, the majority of Canadians who perished are Iranian citizens.)
 
The last 20 years of Canadian foreign policy, under Liberals and Conservatives, have too often seen our leaders privilege feeling good about ourselves over achieving results. Regrettably, columns like Ivison’s and Scoffield’s encourage such shallowness.
 
Diplomacy is hard, and it’s ugly. It often fails. And even when it works, the results aren’t always ideal. Still, when it comes to a country like Canada – lacking in the population size and military strength necessary to impose its interests – diplomacy is what we have. Kudos to the government for continuing to exhibit patience and firmness in the face of such heart-breaking devastation.
 
***
For commentary on this issue, I will always want to know what Thomas Juneau has to say. The indefatigable Bessma Momani is also consistently helpful. On Iran, please look up my colleague, Pierre Pahlavi. The Canadian who encapsulated the best of quiet diplomacy was the former assistant deputy minister of external affairs and president of the old Canadian Institute of International Affairs (now the Canadian International Council), John Holmes. I wrote a book about him a while back.
 
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​Almost every year, as part of my teaching duties at the Canadian Forces College, I accompany students to Question Period in Ottawa. The experience makes my skin crawl. For 45 minutes, grown women and men – many of whom have been extraordinarily successful in their previous careers and have reputations for carrying themselves with dignity – belittle one another like schoolyard bullies.
 
They heckle, demean, and interrupt their fellow elected colleagues – all, apparently, in support of the interests of Canadians like you and me.
 
Parliamentary behaviour – and the partisanship that drives it – is disgusting, and shameful. It seems to target women disproportionately, and it likely prevents some Canadians from even thinking about running for office.
 
It’s therefore hardly surprising that, every decade or so, some new political leader pledges to “do politics differently.”
 
Taking their cue from the Obama Democrats, who proposed in 2008 to “turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington,” in 2015, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals promised “real change.”
 
Touting reforms he had already begun to make in the Senate (kicking Liberal senators out of caucus; pledging to create a new, non-partisan and transparent appointment process to choose senators if elected), Trudeau claimed to embody a new way of doing politics.
 
To his credit, after the October 2015 election, there were noticeable changes.
 
During our 2016-18 visits to Question Period, a significant number of my students noted the difference between the behaviour of the Liberal members of Parliament (who did not applaud, and generally did not heckle), and the more obnoxious conduct of the opposition.
 
Some students wondered, as I have, how opposing members could possibly explain their behaviour in the house of Commons when they returned home to their kids. How would they respond to a school principal if their children were accused of, or the victims of, bullying?
 
It follows that many of my students emerged from Question Period with new respect for the Liberal government, regardless of what they thought of its policies.
 
Regrettably, much of that respect was likely lost by the 2019 election.
 
Question Period in 2019 was as bad as it’s ever been, if not worse. The election campaign that followed saw all of the major parties, Liberals included, resort to the same demeaning tactics that their advisors seem to think are necessary to “win” in Canada.
 
I couldn’t watch more than a few minutes of the leaders’ debates, and I get paid to talk about them. (I’ll always read the transcripts if I’m asked to comment publicly.)
 
So what gives?
 
I think that part of the problem was the 2015 promise itself. If the Liberals were genuinely committed to improving parliamentary behaviour, they should have paid closer attention to President Obama’s failed experiment.
 
By pledging to work with the Republicans, he gave his opponents an irresistible incentive to obstruct him. Cooperating in the Democrats in Congress would have enabled Obama to keep a promise and claim political victory.
 
The 2015 Trudeau Liberals asked Canadians to judge them based the state of decorum in the House of Commons.
 
In that context, it’s easy to understand why the opposition resisted calls to behave more civilly. They could not risk increasing the number of “promises achieved” on the TrudeauMeter.
 
Perhaps I’m naïve, but I don’t see the situation as hopeless. In Alberta, Jason Kenney has introduced a series of proposals to improve parliamentary decorum, some of which seem to be having at least a degree of effect. The key, I think, is that he isn’t bragging about what he’s done.
 
It seems to me that, to succeeed, long-term reform to political behaviour, especially in the House of Commons, needs to be a non-partisan initiative. The moment one party takes ownership, there’s reason to anticipate that things will only get worse.
 
***
 
To learn more about this issue, take a look at the Samara Centre for Democracy’s January 2016 Report, “Cheering or Jeering? Members of Parliament Open up about Civility in the House of Commons.” A PDF of the report is available here or here in French. It includes references to some of the published academic literature on the topic. Maclean’s has also published a number of pieces on heckling. I wrote about this issue myself a number of years ago while I was blogging for a Canadian newspaper.
 
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