Last week, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced a new trilateral security partnership to counter Chinese aggression in the South Pacific (AUKUS).
 
AUKUS’s first project will see Washington negotiate the sale of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, making Australia the only country other than Britain with access to such sensitive and powerful American technology.
 
The announcement was covered in the Canadian press in a manner that I found rather parochial.
 
The Globe and Mail’s front page read: “Canada left out as U.S., U.K., Australia strike deal to counter China.”
 
The National Post titled a piece from Reuters: “Canada left out of security deal between U.S., Australia and U.K. Trudeau unconcerned.”
 
And the Toronto Sun went with: “Trudeau’s Canada left out of new American-led security alliance.”
 
Fortunately, it did not take long for voices of reason to emerge. On his blog, the dean of Canadian foreign policy academics, Kim Richard Nossal, noted that Canada’s absence from the agreement was hardly news.
 
For one, the pact is deliberately exclusive. It does not include fellow US Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partners Japan and India, fellow US, UK, and Australia Five Eyes intelligence alliance partner New Zealand, or a long list of NATO partners who share an interest in China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the Indo-Pacific.
 
Second, Canada has never been a serious Pacific player, so there was no reason to anticipate Ottawa's involvement.
 
Two of this country’s best national security and intelligence practitioner-turned scholars, Stephanie Carvin and Thomas Juneau, were similarly unsurprised.
 
They echoed Nossal’s critique of Ottawa’s failure to take international security seriously, and added: “It is not clear that Canada would even want to join a partnership involving nuclear technologies, which has implications for proliferation.”
 
I am hardly afraid to express my disappointment with successive Canadian governments' approaches to foreign policy and national security (the way I would put it is that Canada is not important enough to be excluded from AUKUS), but given the new details that have emerged about the partnership since the announcement, I am relieved by this country’s absence.
 
The impetus for the arrangement appears to have been Australian disappointment with a $65 billion - $90 billion agreement to purchase diesel-powered submarines from France.
 
Apparently, Canberra secretly negotiated a better deal with Washington, and London somehow inserted itself into what has become, at least on paper, a broader arrangement.
 
Since the announcement, a furious Macron government has recalled its ambassadors from both Australia and the United States for “consultations," and French officials have gone so far as to accuse Canberra of “treason.”
 
Given the obvious sensitivities surrounding the agreement, it is no wonder that the Canadian government was caught by surprise, and equally obvious why it has been so open about its lack of awareness.
 
Three of Canada’s Five Eyes allies, two of whom are also NATO members and major trading partners, are now feuding with another NATO ally, significant trading partner, and co-founder (along with the Sûreté du Québec) of Francopol, an organization that promotes cooperation among French-speaking police forces.
 
Canada relies on collaboration with like-minded countries to survive and prosper; it is particularly exposed when its alliances are under threat.
 
Ottawa cannot solve this problem (unless it has a spare $60 billion to purchase the French submarines), and it lacks the diplomatic heft it might once have had to mediate.
 
In this particular case, then, there’s nothing wrong with being left out.
 
***
I very much look forward to Carvin and Juneau’s forthcoming book, Intelligence Analysis and Policymaking: The Canadian Experience. It is set for release in December.
 
***
On this election day in Canada, let me express my profound gratitude to every Canadian who put their name forward as a federal candidate. Although I might not agree with your politics, I have the highest respect for your willingness to stand up for your beliefs in the face of what has become an increasingly toxic political atmosphere.
 
An additional shout-out to those candidates who faced inexcusable abuse because of their gender, race, religion, or ethnicity. Your courage matters, as does your commitment to this obviously flawed, but still great country. 

***
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I wrote about my ambivalence towards discussions of Canadian foreign policy during federal elections back in April.
 
To me, given (1) how little room Ottawa has to manoeuvre in the international realm; (2) the difficulty opposition parties inevitably face in explaining how they would do things differently without access to the top secret intelligence that only Canadian governments receive; and (3) the need to include the views of non-Canadians in any credible assessment of Ottawa’s global posture, I don’t see how we can anticipate the serious foreign policy debate called for by a number of experts during an election.
 
Take the current effort to rescue Afghans fleeing the Taliban, for example.
 
It’s easy to criticize what the Globe’s John Ibbitson has called the “debacle in Kabul,” but it’s near impossible for the Conservatives or New Democrats to explain exactly what they might have done differently.
 
Similarly, every reasonable political party is going to be concerned with China’s rise as an illiberal state; with Russia’s cyber aggression; and with a nuclear-armed North Korea’s instability.
 
But Canada cannot respond to such challenges on its own, and Canadian foreign policy will inevitably be shaped by the positions of our most significant allies.
 
To be fair, I applaud the Conservatives for identifying critical minerals, money laundering, and an international corruption court as policy priorities.
 
It’s unusual for an opposition party to acknowledge some of the less flashy global issues that face Canadians today.
 
But again, it’s hard for me to believe that they would tackle them much differently than the Liberals. (Indeed, without a commitment to increase the budget of Global Affairs Canada (GAC), I’m not sure that they could.)
 
On the other hand, there are at least three foreign policy-related issues over which Canadian governments do have more control, and no party has talked about them at all since the election started:
 
1.      The selection of our foreign minister 

Under Stephen Harper, the Conservatives employed six foreign ministers over less than ten years.
 
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been no better, with four ministers in less than six.
 
So both parties have consistently undermined our capacity to build high-level bilateral and multilateral relationships in favour of other political priorities.
 
2.      Ambassadorial appointments 

While in Opposition, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives criticized the governing Liberals for reserving senior postings abroad for their friends.
 
When they took power, however, they accelerated the trend.
 
At first, the Trudeau Liberals seemed poised to reinvigorate the diplomatic corps. Most of the Harper patronage appointees were replaced by career public officials.
 
But more recently, they, too, have chosen partisans for Canada’s most notable international postings.
 
Erin O’Toole’s failure to condemn the move suggests to me that a new Conservative government would likely mean more of the same.
 
So both parties appear to underestimate the value of the expertise that career officials – and Canada’s are among the world’s best – have to offer.
 
3.      The management of our diplomatic corps 

The Harper government’s attitude towards Canada’s foreign policy specialists was contemptuous.
 
Embassies were shut, budgets were slashed, and officials were silenced, leading to a wave of early retirements and a persistent decline in morale.
 
The Trudeau Liberals’ sins have been less deliberate, but equally devastating.
 
Today, GAC is led by four deputy ministers, only one of whom (to the best of my understanding) has formal diplomatic experience in a posting abroad, and he been working in Ottawa since 2012. [Note: The original version of this post suggested that none of the four deputy ministers had ever served abroad. I thank David Ljunggren for correcting me on Twitter.]
 
While I recognize the need for deputies who can navigate political Ottawa, given the unique professional culture of our overseas cadre, it behooves any responsible government to ensure the presence of at least a couple of officials with experience deploying on Canada’s behalf at GAC's highest levels.
 
Indeed, GAC personnel cite a lack of empathy from their superiors as a reason for their personal and professional dissatisfaction.
 
I don’t expect that the O'Toole Conservatives would do better.
 
Page 97 of their platform rightly commits to addressing “the challenges of deployments and postings,” felt by military families, but it says nothing about the similar difficulties faced by foreign service officers.
 
In sum, Canada is not a great power. We promote and preserve our interests on the world stage through skilled diplomacy, which has traditionally been made possible by treating our foreign policy mandarins with the respect they have earned.
 
Such reverence has all but vanished under successive Liberal and Conservative governments, and I see no indication that it will be returning any time soon.
 
So if we’re going to talk about foreign policy during the final days of this election, let’s talk about that.
 
***
For a summary of some of the defence and security issues that our next government will inevitably face, take a look at this press release from the CDA Institute. If you read French, Jocelyn Coulon is one of the few journalists with a history of taking foreign policy seriously. He generally writes for La Presse.

***
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Last week, as the disaster in Afghanistan began to unfold more quickly than anticipated, the CBC’s Katie Simpson asked Minister of Foreign Affairs Marc Garneau whether Canada would recognize a Taliban government.
 
It was a reasonable question, seeing as Washington had warned the Taliban that if Afghanistan was taken by force, it would not be recognized internationally.
 
Garneau answered that it was too soon to say what Canada would or would not do, just like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had suggested earlier the same day.
 
Within hours, Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole released a rather different response:
 
“The use of force by the Taliban is completely unacceptable and that’s why today I am announcing that a Conservative government will not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.” 
 
The other opposition parties echoed his position.
 
Not much later, government critics were out in force:
 
“Once again, with Trudeau at the helm, Canada’s foreign policy is weak, equivocating and unable to condemn oppressive regimes … Canadians deserve better than this.”
 
Another analyst later described O’Toole’s posture as a “powerful stand against the violent, bloodthirsty terrorist organization,” and “yet another example of our weak-kneed national leader following rather than leading on important issues.”
 
Clearly feeling the pressure in the midst of an election that he should never have enabled, Prime Minister Trudeau changed his tune, threw his foreign minister under the bus, and declared that Ottawa had seen enough, and no longer had any plans to recognize the Taliban.
 
It seems to me that this record of events highlights a collective failure among analysts and practitioners of Canadian foreign policy to appreciate the role of diplomacy in international crisis management.
 
And I fear that the consequences of Ottawa’s reversal could be deadly for the very people we are trying to help.
 
Let me explain:
 
I suspect that the majority of readers would agree with the prime minister’s suggestion that Canada’s top priority in Afghanistan should be “getting Afghans who worked for the Canadian military and federal agencies out of the country safely.”
 
The Taliban is indeed the cruel, vengeful organization portrayed by government critics.
 
Even if its pledge to grant amnesty to former opponents were truthful (and it clearly isn’t), there is no guarantee that Taliban sympathizers wouldn’t take matters into their own hands and murder any perceived ‘traitor’ at the earliest opportunity.
 
In this context, with every Afghan who ever supported the Canadian intervention in grave danger, the last thing that Ottawa should be doing is deliberately increasing the size of the bullseye on the back of their heads.
 
Condemning the Taliban definitively, no matter how justifiable, does just that.
 
In contrast, Ottawa’s initial position might have bought our evacuation team some time by daring the Taliban to protect the lives of Afghans with Canadian ties as evidence of its professed commitment to change.
 
Regardless of whether the tactic might have succeeded, the government had left its options open. (Minister Garneau was quite clear in the interview that Canadian recognition was unlikely.)
 
Unfortunately, elected officials (and their advisors) too often view foreign policy as a venue to demonstrate their virility.
 
They should know better.
 
In my 20+ years studying Canadian foreign policy, I have rarely seen a significant world actor cower in response to Ottawa’s tough talk, and I’ve never seen it happen in response to threats from the leader of the Canadian opposition.
 
So what now?
 
The Afghans we are trying to rescue are less safe; our minister of foreign affairs has been discredited and humiliated by his boss; and the public has been left with the impression that foreign policy is about puffing your chest and being “strong.”
 
Canadians do indeed deserve better than this.
 
***
For more on my concerns with the ongoing national obsession with foreign policy leadership, take a look at this essay. On Afghanistan, I’ve been paying particularly close attention to tweets coming from Global Affairs Canada’s Colin Townson (a deep-thinking graduate of the Canadian Forces College’s National Security Programme). I also blogged about it in a previous post.

***
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Last week, the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, Jagmeet Singh, wrote a letter to our newly installed governor general, Mary Simon, asking her to turn down Prime Minister Justin Trudeau if he tries to precipitate a snap election by requesting a dissolution of Parliament.
 
As The Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson has noted, “Mr. Singh was speaking nonsense.”
 
At this point, if the prime minister asks for an election, the governor general will have no realistic choice but to grant his request.
 
If you don’t believe Ibbitson (or me), take a look at these two blogs (here and here) by the expert on this issue, Carleton University’s Philippe Lagassé.
 
And if that isn’t good enough for you, try Lagassé’s 18-page academic explanation, complete with 80 footnotes.
 
Like Ibbitson and others, I suspect that Lagassé is disappointed in Singh’s actions.
 
Such letters, he suggests in an earlier blog, “are mostly performative. The writers know it’s not going to happen, but it helps draw attention to their cause. But it also feeds ignorance about our constitution and undermines our democratic principles. That doesn’t help anybody.”
 
Put another way, Singh is deliberately spreading misinformation, and for that he should be ashamed.
 
It seems to me, however, that such criticism lets the NDP leader off too easily.
 
In this particular case, Singh’s hypocrisy is absolutely breath-taking.
 
Less than a year ago, the NDP premier of British Columbia, John Horgan, approached BC’s lieutenant governor, Janet Austin, to request a snap election.
 
At the time, just like Prime Minister Trudeau, Horgan held a minority of the seats in the BC legislature.
 
But, again like Trudeau, his grasp on power, and consequent ability to run the business of government, was secure – in this case thanks to a signed confidence and supply agreement with the BC Green Party.
 
Horgan’s decision was widely criticized at the time as a cynical attempt at a power grab by a leader who the polls suggested was well-positioned to secure a majority.
 
But I don’t recall Singh or his party having any problem with it.
 
Personally, I was disappointed by Horgan’s actions, and if Prime Minister Trudeau takes us to an election prior to October 2023, I will find his move similarly upsetting.
 
I don’t see a compelling public policy reason to force an election right now, especially given the likelihood of a fourth wave of COVID-19 this fall.
 
I was also less than impressed in 2010 when Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested that “losers don’t get to form coalitions” under the Westminster-style system.
 
His statement was both crass and untrue (any combination of political parties that can secure the confidence of the House can form a government, no matter whether any of them won the most seats in the previous election), and he knew it.
 
His close ally, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, had done exactly that one year earlier, and Mr. Harper certainly didn’t object then.
 
Some readers might counter that politics has always been ugly, and that it is naïve to expect better of our elected representatives.
 
I understand the sentiment, but Mr. Singh has been appealing to Canadian youth by suggesting that he’s a different sort of politician.
 
His letter to Mary Simon suggests otherwise.
 
And that is a shame.
 
***
I suspect that you will find a more sympathetic take on Mr. Singh’s thinking about political life in his memoir, Love & Courage: My Story of Family, Resilience, and Overcoming the Unexpected.
 
***
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Last week, the United States evacuated the majority of its remaining military personnel from Afghanistan.
 
As the country descended into further lawlessness, Canada’s acting chief of the defence staff, Wayne Eyre, reflected on the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF’s) experience in the region from 2001-2014:
 
“Many of us have been asking, some for years, ‘was it worth it?’ Answers will be deeply personal, and not all have reached a final conclusion other than ‘time will tell’.”
 
It seems to me that the CAF’s engagement in Afghanistan was entirely consistent with the national interest, even if it also exposed the terrible costs that sometimes accompany membership in the US-led Western alliance.
 
In 2001, Afghanistan did not constitute a significant security threat to Canada. Our economic engagement with the country was limited. And the Canadian International Development Agency did not believe that Afghanistan was a realistic candidate for an international assistance partnership.
 
Certainly, the human rights situation in the country was abhorrent, but it was hardly unique.
 
So why did Ottawa deploy the CAF on a mission that cost over 150 members their lives and left countless others injured physically and psychologically?
 
The answer is in the 2008 report of the Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan.
 
The document was produced at the request of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the midst of a prolonged national debate over whether the seven year-old mission should continue.
 
It begins by recalling how, on September 11th, 2001, Al Qaeda, used Taliban-controlled land in Afghanistan as a base to plan and launch a terrorist attack on the United States, killing nearly 3000 innocent people.
 
The following day, the United Nations Security Council “formally recognized the right of individual and collective self defence and called on all member states to cooperate in Afghanistan ‘to bring to justice the perpetrators, organizers and sponsors of these terrorist attacks’.”
 
The council anticipated, or at least hoped for, a universal, collective response. Regrettably, US President George W. Bush preferred to act unilaterally.
 
His attitude made the real reason for Ottawa’s engagement critical.
 
As the report notes, in addition to the Security Council’s response, “governments in NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) invoked the collective-defence provisions of the NATO treaty and declared the attack against the United States as an attack against all NATO members.”
 
Under NATO’s Article 5, every member of the organization was therefore obligated to “assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”
 
As Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland explained to the House of Commons in 2017, “NATO and Article 5 are at the heart of Canada’s national security policy.”
 
It follows that Ottawa deployed the CAF to Afghanistan to affirm to the United States in particular, and to our NATO allies more broadly, that Canada was committed to the collective defence provisions of the organization.
 
(Conveniently, those provisions also constrain the United States from acting unilaterally in the global arena).
 
Successive Liberal and Conservative governments later added all sorts of other aims to the mission to make it more palatable to a Canadian public that had been conditioned to believe that war was easy, or at least not messy.
 
In retrospect, considering how close the Trump administration recently came to pulling out of NATO, the decision to prop up the credibility of the organization 20 years ago seems prescient. A weaker NATO might not have withstood President Trump’s challenge.
 
But cloaking a necessary alliance obligation in the amorphous language of values was never a good idea.
 
Canadians who believe that we sent the CAF to Afghanistan to make lives better for the Afghan people have every right to conclude that the intervention failed.
 
And they will continue to be disappointed in this country’s foreign policy posture until our political leaders have the courage to be clearer about Canadian national interests.
 
***
The best summary of the Canada’s experience in Afghanistan that I’ve read is Jean-Christophe Boucher and Kim Richard Nossal’s The Politics of War: Canada’s Afghanistan Mission, 2001-14. Steve Saideman’s Adapting in the Dust: Lessons Learned from Canada’s War in Afghanistan is also helpful.
 
Finally, it is worth tracking Ottawa’s current effort to enable Afghan interpreters immigrate to Canada to evade almost certain death at the hands of the Taliban. It is the right thing to do, and if we don’t, we risk the future safety and security of all of our embassies that employ local staff.

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The Canadian International Council (CIC), formerly the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, is Canada’s oldest foreign policy think tank.
 
In its heyday in the post-Second World War era, its active members included Canada’s most prominent foreign policy analysts and practitioners; it housed the best Canadian foreign policy library in the country; and it was (and remains) the publisher of International Journal, this country’s premier scholarly periodical in the field.
 
(Disclosure: I used to edit International Journal, and currently sit on its editorial board.)
 
The CIC has had its ups and downs, but under the direction of the former diplomat Ben Rowswell, it appears determined to reassert itself as “a platform for citizens to engage in discussions on international issues.”
 
To that end, the organization recently joined with the Canadian Partnership for Women and Children’s Health and Global Canada to launch Foreign Policy by Canadians, “the largest deliberative democracy exercise in our country’s history.”
 
(For more on deliberative democracy, see here.)
 
Between March and April of this year, almost 450 Canadians were assembled into 39 online groups and spent 8-12 hours discussing Canada and its place in the world.
 
Most of their priorities appear to be largely consistent with Ottawa’s: more funding for the military and for international assistance; a greater focus on the Arctic and on cyber security; an embrace of digital innovation.
 
(The full results of the exercise can be found here.)
 
I am quite concerned, however, by how they propose to pay for these investments.
 
“Canadians were markedly more uncertain about the value of diplomacy,” reads the report. Apparently, many would consider closing embassies to save money.
 
The report writers summarize the position tactfully: “citizens prefer to focus on the ends and not the means of foreign policy.”
 
Such a posture is fine in theory, but it becomes a real problem when a plane containing 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents is shot down by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and Ottawa lacks an embassy on the ground to coordinate the national response.
 
As the University of Ottawa’s Thomas Juneau noted at the time: “Without an embassy, it [was] more difficult for Canadian officials to support victims’ families, communicate with Iranian officials, cooperate with allies in Tehran, and gather information essential for optimal decision-making.”
 
Great powers can occasionally get away with ignoring the means of foreign policy. In a crisis, they can use their overwhelming strength to impose their will and manage the ramifications later.
 
Countries of Canada’s size and stature don’t have that option.
 
We are therefore best served by a system of international rules and laws that must be cultivated and maintained.
 
Embassies (and consulates and missions) not only coordinate expressions of Canadian national interests abroad, they also enable our diplomats to defend the system of global governance upon which we so depend.
 
We need officials positioned around the world to gather intelligence, to build relationships, and to identify emerging threats to the international system.
 
Relying on the generosity of other states to create so-called efficiencies is not only petty, it also risks compromising Canada’s capacity to effect change in the evolving international order.
 
In sum, I applaud the CIC for its efforts to bring more Canadians into the foreign policy conversation, but I deeply regret that so many seem to have emerged from their discussions without a proper appreciation for the critical work of our officials from Global Affairs Canada.
 
If Canada’s minister of foreign affairs draws anything from Foreign Policy by Canadians, it should be that his department is failing to articulate its value to Canadians writ large.
 
That has to change.
 
***
I cover a good portion of the history of the Canadian International Council in my biography of John Wendell Holmes. Holmes was the driving force behind what was then the CIIA throughout the 1960s and 1970s. For a depressing assessment of morale in the US State Department, see this Foreign Policy article by Amy Mackinnon and Robbie Gramer. I fear that the situation in Ottawa is not that different from the one they describe.

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Terry Glavin had an article in Maclean’s last week claiming that “Canadians are leading the push for a global [international] anti-corruption court [IACC].”
 
The piece is about a diplomatic effort to create a body that operates similarly to the International Criminal Court, but would focus on enforcing a global anti-corruption regime.
 
Put another way, if a country refused to crack down on corruption within its own physical or virtual borders, the violators could be pursued at the IACC.
 
And if enough powerful states participated, the court could have real teeth.
 
I suspect that Glavin’s claims of Canadian leadership are exaggerated.
 
Certainly, former Liberal cabinet ministers Lloyd Axworthy and Allan Rock have endorsed the court on behalf of the World Refugee and Migration Council, as has the former Conservative cabinet minister Peter MacKay as part of Integrity Initiatives International, but it looks to me that they have come to the idea fairly recently.
 
The initiative appears to have begun with an American judge, Mark L. Wolf, who proposed such a court in 2012 and later published the most comprehensive argument in favour of an IACC through the Brookings Institute in 2014.
 
No matter whose idea it is, it’s one that any Canadian government should be able to get behind.
 
Back in 2014, Wolf estimated that:
 
“$1 trillion is paid in bribes annually, and the cost of all forms of corruption is more than 5% of global GDP. An estimated $8.4 trillion was lost in developing regions due to illicit financial flows between 2000 and 2009, which is ten times more than those regions received in foreign aid.”
 
The arguments against the initiative are predictable, and legitimate.
 
For one, an IACC will only work with sufficient international support, and too many global leaders benefit directly from the corruption that plagues their countries.
 
Moreover, the cost of standing up a new global body would be steep, and those funds might be used more efficiently to fight corruption at its source.
 
Nonetheless, this particular cause should resonate with Canadians who prefer that Ottawa derive its foreign policy from our national interests.
 
International corruption comprises our foreign aid program and enriches our adversaries. An end to it would also strengthen the as yet still weak anti-money laundering regime that exists here at home.
 
We have the diplomatic capacity within Global Affairs Canada to contribute constructively to this cause, and with Axworthy, Rock, and MacKay visibly onside, there appears to be potential to approach the issue in a non-partisan manner.
 
To be clear, I’m not calling for the type of Canadian leadership that Glavin celebrates. That would be presumptuous, particularly given this country’s remarkably disappointing record on money laundering and tax havens to date.
 
But I do hope that Canadians with an interest in foreign policy track the IACC negotiations, and that those with influence ask our government about it regularly.
 
Combatting global corruption is a cost-effective way of promoting and defending the liberal international order that continues to serve Canada’s national interests.
 
***
For a general background on money laundering in Canada, take a look at some of the work coming out of the Financial Transactions and Report Analysis Centre. The most recent Canadian legislation can be found here.
 
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As we near the end of the worst of this pandemic, we will all be hearing a lot about how Canada might “build back better.”
 
Over the last couple of weeks, for example, the University of Saskatchewan’s Loleen Berdhal and the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson each published articles about reforming the public service. (See here and here for Berdhal; and here for Ibbitson.)
 
Berdhal and Ibbitson believe that the largely successful transition to remote work by so many of the 120,000 officials located in the Ottawa region this past year means that many could probably work from elsewhere permanently.
 
Berdhal advocates spreading government offices across the provinces and territories. Ibbitson envisions more telework.
 
The two identify a similar set of benefits to decentralization:

• Potential cost savings (from selling expensive Ottawa real estate);
• Reduced critical infrastructure vulnerability (by limiting the concentration of government functions in a single geographical space);
• Decreased cynicism towards government (by bringing services physically closer to more Canadians);
• More widely-distributed private sector economic spin-offs (from the new concentration of government offices in different regions);
• Stronger regional voices in government; and
• More equitable access to government for regionally-based advocacy groups.

 
They also acknowledge some of the challenges that such a move would entail:

• Many Ottawa residents wouldn’t want to, or wouldn’t be able to, relocate;
• Those who do leave the capital would incur significant up-front moving costs; and
• Recruiting bilingual workers might be difficult in parts of the country where speaking French is less common.

 
I am intrigued by Berdhal’s argument in particular, but I am also concerned about potential second- and third-order effects.
 
Most important to me is that disbursing official Ottawa across the country will likely make it even harder for certain groups of Canadians to become senior public service executives.
 
Here’s why:
 
Presumably, for national security reasons, no matter how decentralized our government becomes, one would have to keep a number of departments in the capital, beginning with the Privy Council Office (PCO), known in other countries as the Department of the Prime Minister.
 
Officially, the PCO “helps the government in implementing its vision, goals and decisions in a timely manner.”
 
More specifically, among its many duties, the PCO lets the government know if “line departments” are working at cross-purposes. (This is part of what is known as the "challenge function.")
 
Since most of the issues that face the federal government today cannot be solved by a single department or agency, the office has become absolutely critical.
 
Consider the National Water Agency that Ottawa recently pledged to create.
 
Natural Resources Canada and the Department of Agriculture are running the consultation process to launch its development, but Indigenous Services Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans also have a stake in the outcome.
 
The International Joint Commission should be engaged, and I suspect that both the Navy and the Coast Guard could be, too.
 
The public servants who ultimately lead the agency will need to build relationships with a variety of stakeholders, and it has long been recognized in official circles that the best way to gain the necessary perspective is to spend time working in the PCO.
 
Indeed, in Canada today, it is all but impossible to reach the highest levels of the bureaucracy without at least a year or two of experience in one of Canada’s central agencies.
 
It follows that if federal departments are scattered across the country, the top public service jobs will be limited to individuals who are willing to relocate multiple times over the course of their career.
 
In this context, cultural and gender inequities are likely to prevent a number of Canadians who would otherwise make great public service leaders from acquiring the experience necessary to move up.
 
There are ways to minimize this challenge, but few really good ones.
 
So let’s build back better, but let’s do so carefully, and prudently. Otherwise, for every problem we solve, we risk creating another.
 
***
On how the Canadian government works, check out the indefatigable Alex Marland and Jared Wesley’s The Public Servant’s Guide to Government in Canada. Marland’s latest book, Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada, was just shortlisted for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.
 
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has dominated the national news over the past couple of weeks, and yet the official response from Ottawa has been fairly low-key.
 
To understand why, I think it’s worth reviewing the Canadian government’s general position.
 
It can be found on the Global Affairs Canada website under the title: “Canadian policy on key issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
 
And while partisans on both sides will inevitably find fault with the details, as an analyst of Canadian foreign policy, I find them to be quite reasonable.
 
To begin, Canada “supports Israel’s right to live in peace with its neighbours within secure boundaries and recognizes Israel’s right to assure its own security.”
 
More specifically, “Israel has a right under international law to take the necessary measures, in accordance with human rights and international humanitarian law, to protect the security of its citizens from attacks by terrorist groups.” 
 
At the same time, “Canada recognizes the Palestinian right to self-determination and supports the creation of a sovereign, independent, viable, democratic and territorially contiguous Palestinian state, as part of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace settlement.”
 
Ottawa maintains that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be settled peaceably, and that the final agreement should based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973).
 
Canada doesn’t “recognize Israel’s unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem,” nor does it recognize “permanent Israeli control over territories occupied in 1967.”
 
(There is, in other words, a difference between military occupation, which can be acceptable under certain circumstances, and the construction of permanent settlements and security barriers on occupied land; the latter violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and are therefore illegal under international law.)
 
Finally, Ottawa has listed Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades as terrorist groups. As a result, it does not recognize them as legitimate international actors.
 
What does all of this mean?
 
Based on recent media coverage, while an unusual number of individual Canadians appear to claim a personal stake in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Canada’s fundamental national interests are less implicated in the recent violence than they are in the long-term impact of the ongoing dispute on the international order.
 
Canada prospers within a peaceful and stable world where conflict is settled through diplomacy. We are at a disadvantage when state and non-state actors pursue their objectives by force (and at an even greater disadvantage when they do so illegally).
 
The Canadian government therefore typically reserves its active engagement in military strife for (1) conflicts that affect this country directly; (2) conflicts that implicate our NORAD, NATO, or Five Eyes allies directly; and (3) conflicts that offer the possibility of non-violent resolution when all of the actors involved are open to, and perhaps even actively seek out, Ottawa’s involvement.
 
Otherwise, Canadian interests dictate that Ottawa remain at the margins since (1) it will generally be powerless to improve the situation; and (2) any expression of criticism, however justifiable, will more likely increase the tension than deflate it.
 
However viscerally the Israeli-Palestinian conflict implicates individual Canadians, it does not threaten this country directly.
 
And while Canada has long been a supporter of the State of Israel, we are not treaty-bound to engage when it is at war.
 
Finally, since there is no reason to believe that either side in the conflict is seriously contemplating a long-term cessation of hostilities, there is little value to be added by Canadian diplomats right now.
 
It seems to me that it is unlikely that the Trudeau government approves of what may have been Israeli provocations in Jerusalem, but it almost certainly also recognizes that when a country faces a barrage of indiscriminate rocket fire from a terrorist group, it is all but obligated to respond with force.
 
In this context, Ottawa’s relatively limited public response to the recent events in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza is consistent with the national interest.
 
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Of all of the pieces that I have read on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the last couple of weeks, I found this one in Foreign Policy magazine, written by the global affairs journalist Elise Labott, to be particularly helpful.

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Three weeks ago, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees, and citizenship, Marco Mendicino, announced that he was opening a “new pathway to permanent residency for over 90,000 essential temporary workers and international graduates.”
 
The policy makes intuitive sense: Canada’s population is aging, and the ratio of working age Canadians to seniors is shrinking.
 
Without immigrants to supplement the workforce (improved productivity would also help), Canadians will be facing a combination of higher taxes, fewer public services, and a lower standard of living for years to come.
 
The pandemic has restricted our immigration intake, and it will be hard to welcome the number of new immigrants we desperately need from outside the country until COVID-19 has been vanquished.
 
So why not accelerate the path to permanent residency for migrants who are already here?
 
What’s more, why not focus on those who are working in essential services – ostensibly to recognize their vital contributions to this country – and graduated international students, who represent a cohort of skilled workers that can contribute to our economic prosperity immediately?
 
Unfortunately, translating this idea into action has gotten complicated.
 
The Migrant Rights Network, which describes itself as “Canada’s largest migrant-led coalition,” issued a scathing report last week, titled: “Exclusion, Disappointment, Chaos & Exploitation: Canada’s New Short-Term Immigration Pathway.” 
 
The organization maintains that the new program is too exclusive and I, too, wonder about the $1000 application fee.
 
But when the paper starts to complain about the requirement for a valid English or French language accreditation, I get uncomfortable.
 
To be fair, part of the problem appears to be the accessibility of the $300 language proficiency tests. The backlog is up to four months long. This two-pronged barrier requires a response from the minister.
 
I am less sympathetic to the story of a farm worker named Gary, whose complaints are highlighted in a press release and repeated in an article in the Toronto Star:
 
“I am excluded from the government’s perm residency program because I cannot pass the English test … If we have survived here working in English for years, why do we need to do a test?”
 
Ironically, the Star provided the answer a few days later in a headline: “Language can be a barrier to COVID-19 vaccine access.”
 
There is an extensive history of academic research documenting how proficiency in one of Canada’s official languages is a critical determinant of economic and social integration.
 
In other words, offering a labourer like Gary permanent residency when he struggles in English (and doesn’t speak French) is likely to condemn him to a life of relative poverty with limited opportunities to break free.
 
It seems to me that the Migrant Rights Network is therefore doing the Garys of this country a disservice in their advocacy.
 
Rather than calling on Minister Mendicino to wave the language test, why not advocate paid language training for all of the temporary foreign workers doing the essential work that is keeping our country functioning instead?
 
Canada’s historical treatment of migrant workers has been shameful. The Migrant Rights Network is right to advocate on their behalf.
 
But offering people a path to permanent residency without the tools they need to prosper is not the solution.
 
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On Canadian immigration policy, take a look at some of the great work being done by the Conference Board of Canada’s National Immigration Centre.

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