Balkan Devlen of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) was back again last week with the third and final installment of the MLI’s investigation of the Canadian public’s thinking about foreign policy.
 
(For my takes on the previous releases, see here and here.)
 
As my RMC colleague Christian Leuprecht notes, “The results largely confirm what we already know.”
 
Only 14% of Canadians consider foreign policy to be very important, and less than a third expect foreign policy to play more of a role in their voting decision in the next election.
 
If there is so little that is new here, why write about it? Because the raw data are fascinating, particularly when it comes to age and gender.
 
Consider the following: “Canada should more often side with the alliance of democracies rather than always go along with what multilateral organizations like the UN want.”

A full 25% of men age 55 and over strongly agreed with this statement. Just 2% of women between 18 and 34 did.
 
Even more interesting, 54% of these women answered that they didn’t know, as did 40% of the women polled between the ages of 35 and 54. No more than 24% of men of any age group were similarly unsure.
 
When asked whether “Canada should build closer relationships with other democratic countries in the IndoPacific region,” 48% of women between ages 18 and 34 again had no opinion, while only 12% of men from the same age cohort answered the same way.
 
A similar gap was evident in a question about whether Canada should pursue a seat on the UN Security Council, and another about whether Canada should be more active in NATO.
 
On the other hand, the same female cohort was twice as likely to think that Canada should spend less on defence, and more supportive than any other cohort of a national commitment to global poverty eradication.
 
Part of the differences here are likely explained by men’s propensity to over-estimate their expertise and express strong opinions on issues that they might not actually know very much about.
 
But I suspect that there is more than that at play.
 
The majority of the foreign policy preferences examined in the survey lean conservative – and Conservative – and as Western Washington University’s Catherine Wineinger has noted, “The under-representation of women in right-wing parties is a global phenomenon.”
 
Devlen suggests that “the contours of a plausible consensus on Canadian foreign policy,” that includes “A resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder with democracies from around the world, proactively bolstering the Euro-Atlantic community, while strengthening Canada’s ties with fellow democracies in the Indo-Pacific and spending commensurate amounts on defence to assert Canada’s interests,” could be forthcoming.
 
Such a vision resonates among Canadian Conservatives already, but the MLI’s own data seem to indicate that it does not represent the predominant views of the next generation of Canadian women.
 
In that context, maybe doubling down on foreign policy isn’t the best way to expand the big blue tent.
 
Advisors to Erin O’Toole had best look at these numbers very carefully.
 
***
 
I am nowhere near qualified to examine the role of gender in foreign policy in serious depth. For that, I would suggest turning to my colleague, Andrea Lane. On gender and international security more broadly, take a look at the work of the University of Florida’s Laura Sjoberg. Not only is she incredibly prolific, she is also one of the most professional scholars I had the privilege of dealing with when I co-edited International Journal.
 
***
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the controversy that erupted last week when Canadians learned that we will be receiving 1.9 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine from a global initiative known as COVAX before the end of June.
 
The CBC has provided a reasonable summary of the program and the controversy here.
 
To summarize, Canada has long been an anchor donor to international efforts to increase vaccination rates around the world.
 
So when the World Health Organization, the European Commission, and France launched a global campaign to improve access to COVID-19 vaccines, Ottawa signed up.
 
The program asks wealthy countries to pre-purchase enough doses to vaccinate up to 20% of their own populations as well as an equivalent number of people from poorer states.
 
The theory behind the program is that in order to end this pandemic, we need to inoculate an overwhelming majority of the world’s population before variants of COVID-19 emerge that the vaccines can’t handle (or at least can’t handle well).
 
Since we know that variants are more likely to arise when the virus is spreading uncontrollably, the best way to defeat COVID-19 is therefore not necessarily to vaccinate your own population first, but rather to get the number of cases around the world under sufficient control that we encounter fewer variants during the process of vaccination.
 
Theoretically, then, every country in the world should be a part of COVAX; money that wealthy countries have independently invested in vaccines should have been funnelled through the consortium; and the vaccination process should privilege not just individuals at the highest risk of death, but also locations where the virus is at the greatest risk of mutating.
 
In the real world, things have evolved differently.
 
The Trump administration refused to join COVAX and made vaccinating Americans its top priority.
 
Without the US, COVAX never stood a chance of reaching its full potential.
 
As a result, the Trudeau government did what successive Canadian governments have done since the end of the Second World War:
 
It looked out for itself (and its re-election prospects) by purchasing as many doses of as many vaccines as possible, but also joined COVAX to demonstrate Canada's continued commitment to a global solution to the ongoing pandemic.
 
Canadians believe in international cooperation, but we aren’t martyrs. If the Americans (and the Russians, and a handful of smaller countries) are intent on undermining the global effort, then we’re going to take care of ourselves, too.
 
Critics of Ottawa’s decision to accept the Oxford-AstraZeneca doses come from both sides of the political spectrum.
 
On the left, the Liberals have been accused of taking vaccines way from countries in greater need.
 
Personally, I find this suggestion spurious. For one, our government has been clear from the beginning that it would take its share, so no one is actually missing out.
 
More important, COVAX is not a charity. It was designed as an investment that was, at least theoretically, utterly consistent with the national interest.
 
Ottawa should continue to treat it that way, lest the Canadian public question our contribution in its entirety. The last thing we need is for future governments to propose a “Canada first” approach to international pandemic response.
 
Advocates from the political right want to keep the 1.9 million doses, but suggest that the Trudeau government should never have put Canadians in the position to need them in the first place.
 
That argument is also unconvincing.
 
This interview with the co-chair of Canada’s vaccine task force makes it clear that Ottawa, while imperfect, was hardly lackadaisical.
 
And again, an every-country-for-itself response to a global catastrophe should never be our starting point.
 
It seems to me that the Trudeau government’s real failure here has been in communication.
 
Consider the line Ottawa has used in response to questions about COVAX:
 
“Our top priority is that Canadians have vaccines.”
 
If that were truly the case, then we should not have invested in COVAX at all.
 
In reality, we have been trying to balance two competing priorities – (1) vaccinating Canadians as quickly as possible and (2) minimizing the capacity of the virus to mutate – ever since the United States decided to go it alone.
 
Apart from leveling with Canadians, Ottawa would do well to pursue two complementary policies:
 
First, along with other like-minded and committed multilateralists, we should be lobbying the Biden administration to invest in a successor to COVAX to respond to the next pandemic.
 
Second, and I suspect this is being done already, we should be developing a plan to share our excess vaccines once the situation at home is under control.
 
***
 
For a sense of Ottawa’s history of pragmatism in international affairs, take at look at this edited collection by the late Greg Donaghy. The essays by Denis Stairs and John English are particularly revealing.
 
I regret to note that Canadian foreign policy lost yet another treasured scholar recently: James Eayrs has passed away. For a sense of his outsized academic contribution to the study of Canada and its place in the world, check out this special issue of International Journal.

***
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If the polls are any guide, 2020 was a really good year to be in government in Canada.
 
Provincial governments were re-elected in New Brunswick, BC, and Saskatchewan. The PEI Progressive Conservatives transformed their minority into a majority.
 
In Ottawa, the Liberals’ approval ratings, and the personal ratings of the prime minister, also improved.
 
One Conservative strategist has recently explained the problem facing those not in power this way:
 
“It’s really hard for an opposition party to sort of break through, and in a pandemic it’s that much more difficult. The issue here is that when there’s a crisis, the public seems to turn to government and the polling and data shows that the Canadian public thinks that so far, Justin Trudeau has handled the pandemic response quite well. The challenge for Erin O’Toole and other opposition party leaders is really going to have to be to find a way to take the shine away from him a little bit.”
 
I realize that I am not a professional strategist, but I can’t help but wonder whether “taking the shine away” is really what opposition parties should be doing right now to improve their political fortunes.
 
I first wrote about constructive opposition back in August.
 
In light of ever-increasing election speculation, I think the idea is worth fleshing out.
 
Consider the difference between constructive and destructive opposition tactics to be similar to how scholars Dan Bernhard and Meenakshi Ghosha differentiate between positive and negative campaigning:
 
“Positive campaigning builds a candidate’s reputation; negative campaigning damages a rival’s.”
 
It seems to me that, just as Canadian election campaigns have become more negative, so too have opposition parties become less constructive.
 
Take the federal Conservatives. Of late, they appear to have been most interested in convincing Canadians that the Trudeau Liberals have utterly bungled the vaccine roll-out.
 
I am not surprised that this approach has not helped them in the polls.
 
If Canadians who don’t follow politics even notice, they are likely to have their distrust of all politicians reinforced.
 
Those who keep up with politics casually know better than to believe that our provincial governments (many of which are Conservative) have been better pandemic managers.
 
As someone who teaches strategic decision-making, I am personally most concerned with the impact of the  Conservative critique on Ottawa’s ongoing negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry.
 
Government relations representatives from Pfizer, Moderna, and the other firms are fully aware that the Liberals’ grip on power is uncertain.
 
The weaker the governing party, the more leverage these companies have in negotiations over vaccine price, and delivery dates.
 
So how, in this context, might the Conservatives present themselves as a preferred alternative to the Liberals convincingly and without compromising the national interest?
 
What about focusing on vaccine hesitancy?
 
The new variants of COVID-19 that are already spreading across the country have increased the percentage of Canadians that will need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity.
 
Conservative members of Parliament (and prospective candidates) could launch a virtual cross-country campaign to convince skeptical Canadians that the vaccines approved by Health Canada are not just safe, but also critical to our social and economic recovery.
 
As an added bonus, since a significant number of vaccine-hesitant Canadians come from marginalized communities that have not all typically voted Conservative, there is an opportunity to broaden the big blue tent.
 
The NDP could launch a similar campaign to increase awareness of the two weeks of paid sick leave that Ottawa now offers to any Canadian in need.
 
Unfortunately, many potential beneficiaries don’t realize that the policy exists, and pushing the Liberals to adopt it remains one of the NDP’s legislative successes of the last year.
 
My suggestions might not score the opposition parties a lot of points during Question Period.
 
But it seems pretty clear that very little will right now.
 
So why not try to be constructive? I suspect that Canadians who are personally affected by such efforts would remember.

***
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Earlier this week, the Toronto Star’s Alex Boyd asked: “Is delaying second COVID vaccine doses a ‘half-baked solution’ to supply woes?”
 
Her article provides an excellent summary of the ongoing debate over whether, in light of the paucity of available COVID-19 vaccines, it might be worthwhile to hold off on administering the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine in order to provide more people with their first shot more quickly.
 
As Boyd notes, the argument in favour “is that it’s better to give more people the limited protection a single dose appears to deliver [52% rather than 95%] and they can still get their second shot, just a little later.”
 
I am more convinced by the arguments against, and there are plenty.
 
Dr. Alan Bernstein, a member of Canada’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, offers eight, ranging from the dangers of tampering with “vaccines based on RNA technology that have never been tried on humans before,” to providing individuals with insufficient protection, to undermining faith in the integrity of public health recommendations, to upsetting Pfizer to the point that the company refuses to ship us more product.
 
Regrettably, Bernstein’s list of reasons does not appear to be sufficiently compelling to prevent some of our provinces, not to mention a number of Canada’s major allies, from planning to experiment.
 
So here is one more reason worth considering:
 
The global vaccination effort is no longer just a public health challenge; it has also become part of an ongoing diplomatic competition between China and the Western world.
 
For years, Beijing has tried to reshape the international order to better align with its interests.
 
To oversimplify, Chinese foreign policy has aimed to convince members of the global commons that Beijing’s illiberal approach to domestic and world affairs is superior to the liberal, democratic model typically championed by the United States and much preferred by the rest of the West.
 
And it seems to be working. Global confidence in democracy has been waning.
 
Most recently, Beijing has pointed to how its heavy-handed lockdowns and intrusive contact tracing methods have largely held the virus at bay, allowing the Chinese economy to rebound while the West continues to struggle.
 
So far, however, Beijing has not come close to demonstrating superiority in terms of its vaccines.
 
A recent article in The Economist details a Chinese approach to immunization that has included risky mass inoculations of untested products, inconsistent data, and a failure to match the 95% efficacy of Pfizer or the 94.1% efficacy of Moderna.
 
For now, then, it remains possible that when this pandemic finally ends, Western scientific discoveries could help discredit the Chinese model.
 
In that context, experimenting with the Pfizer vaccine – never a good idea in the first place – becomes an absolutely terrible one.
 
Against an adversary like China, we need all the soft power we can get.
 
***
I don’t follow a lot of people on Twitter, but I’m really impressed by the way that Lieutenant-Commander Amber Comisso (@cdnnavylady) uses her account. The tone and content of her tweets should make the Canadian Navy proud.

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Our World in Data, an outstanding website that provides up-to-the-minute reports on global efforts to solve the international community’s biggest problems, is now producing a handy chart that tracks cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered by countries around the world.
 
The data are what have caused a public fixation on Israel’s thus far unsurpassed effort to vaccinate its population.
 
I fully support Our World in Data’s mandate: transparency is critical to effective public policy.
 
Nonetheless, all data must be understood in context, and I am concerned about the way critics of Canada’s vaccine roll-out have responded to the numbers.
 
As of this past Saturday, Canada ranked 10th in terms of the cumulative COVID-19 vaccination doses administered per 100 people.
 
We were behind Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, the US, Denmark, the UK, Italy, Slovenia, and Lithuania, but ahead of – presumably – well over 150 other countries.
 
Moreover, at 0.78 doses per 100 Canadians, our numbers were more than 2.5 times the global average of 0.3.
 
Still, according to the Globe and Mail’s Konrad Yakabuski, a growing number of Canadians are likely to be concerned that our vaccination campaign “has not kept pace with those under way in Britain and the United States.”
 
I don’t doubt that Yakabuski’s views reflect the thinking of a good portion of our population, but I struggle to understand why Canadians would expect us to be able to keep up with these two states in the first place.
 
The United States is the wealthiest country in the world, with a purchasing power that Canada could never dream of.
 
And while the United Kingdom has four National Health Service systems, Canada has ten independent provincial health systems along with three territories, each of which is difficult to access at the best of times, let alone in the middle of winter.
 
Both the US and the UK also have higher population densities than Canada does, which helps when the vaccines available are difficult to transport.
 
The challenge with charts is that they tend to lack such context.
 
Even worse, since this global vaccination effort is unprecedented, we have no real way to judge what an acceptable pace of vaccination might even be.
 
This difficulty doesn’t mean that we absolve our governments from their responsibility to serve the public interest responsibly, but I fear that we are using the wrong metrics to gauge success.
 
I would suggest that accountability be measured by (1) whether our officials are true to the vaccination schedule that they have already promised; (2) whether we understand how the speed of that process – including the prioritization of the recipients of the vaccines – has been determined; and (3) whether measures are being taken to enable open and transparent reviews of the national and provincial responses to this pandemic when we are finally past it.
 
It is too soon to pass judgment on number one. Information on part of number two is accessible here. Good work by the national media has added further detail.
 
I’m not yet satisfied about number three, but I remain hopeful.
 
In sum, there are lessons to be learned from other countries’ vaccination successes, but managing the COVID-19 vaccination roll-out is not a competition.
 
So let’s use the valuable information offered to us by The World in Data to improve our vaccination efforts, not to complain about our ranking on a list.
 
***
Over the last year, I’ve been really impressed by the work that Michael Garron Hospital has been doing in the Greater Toronto Community. I pay particularly close attention when anyone from Michael Garron has something to say about COVID-19.
 
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The Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI) has released a second commentary as part of its “Leading a community of democracies in the post-COVID world order” project.
 
(You can find my analysis of the first one here.)
 
This report, written by Senior Fellow Balkan Devlen, is focused on Canadian attitudes towards international organizations.
 
As I noted last time, I agree with Devlen’s suggestion that Canada must work “with other democracies and likeminded states” to promote its national interests.
 
Nonetheless, I am concerned by the way he has interpreted the data the MLI has gathered with reference to the United Nations.
 
The report notes that 54% of Canadians have very positive or moderately positive views of the UN, while 19% feel the opposite.
 
The UN therefore gets a “net impression score” of +35%, which seems relatively good, until you compare it to the scores for NATO (+45%) and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (+51%).
 
Devlen concludes from these data that “Canadians are not undifferentiated multilateralists when it comes to international organizations.” They privilege some over others.
 
But that’s not exactly true. As he notes later in the same report, there is an overwhelming (my word) “partisan divide when it comes to the UN.”
 
Conservatives give the organization a net impression score of just +1%. Liberals give it a +62%.
 
If we assume that Green, NDP, and Bloc Québécois supporters are closer to the Liberals than the Conservatives on this one, a significant majority of Canadians are indeed undifferentiated multilateralists.
 
It’s only a (rather large) group of Conservative partisans who seem to differ.
 
If you believe, like Devlen does, that foreign policy development should be “a two-way street between the public and the government,” it seems to me that these findings will make it difficult for Canada’s international negotiators to build up the reserves of diplomatic capital that have traditionally enabled Ottawa to achieve its worldwide goals.
 
Consider some recent history:
 
The SNC-Lavalin affair’s impact on the Liberals’ 2019 re-election prospects had a notable, even if rarely mentioned, effect on Canada’s international posture.
 
The Globe and Mail broke the story in early 2019 while Ottawa was ramping up its campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC).
 
Once the Liberals dropped in the polls, Canadian officials in New York found it increasingly difficult to secure UNSC votes.
 
The countries we sought support from were not confident that a Conservative government would honour “Liberal” commitments.
 
I recognize that some readers might not care about whether a Canadian UNSC campaign succeeds; regardless, the broader lesson here is important:
 
In diplomacy, a country’s word matters.
 
It is difficult for Ottawa to negotiate effectively on the world stage when our two leading political parties disagree so extensively over the place of the UN within Canada’s multilateral universe.
 
This is not to say that there is no room for partisan differences in foreign policy. Rather, in more ideal circumstances, those differences would be largely confined to execution.
 
We cannot develop a long-term strategic vision of Canada’s place in the world without starting from a shared understanding of the national interest (and, by extension, the UN’s place in it).
 
The MLI’s report should therefore set off alarm bells for all Canadian leaders. The politicization of foreign policy has not left this country in a good place.  
 
***
Caroline Dunton is doing some innovative theoretical work on Canada and the UN. Her latest article  can be found here. On Canadian foreign policy more broadly, it’s always worth taking a look at what The Université de Québec à Montréal’s Justin Massie is thinking.
 
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This past week, the Government of Canada released “A Healthy Environment and a Healthy Economy” - its proposed strategy to combat the negative effects of climate change.
 
Most of the media attention thus far has focused on Ottawa’s pledge to increase the price of carbon from $30 per tonne to $170 per tonne over the next decade.
 
Personally, I find that issue rather tedious. Carbon pricing is a market-based, conservative approach to reducing greenhouse gasses.
 
Conservative partisans have made this argument convincingly in Canada and in the United States.
 
Even the National Post’s John Ivison, who has virtually nothing good to say about the roll-out of the Liberal announcement, agrees “with the carbon pricing model the federal government has chosen, at least as long as the rebates equivalent to the carbon tax continue to make their way back to consumers.”
 
I’m much more interested in a foreign policy implication noted on page 30:
 
“The Government is exploring the potential of border carbon adjustments, and will be discussing this issue with its international partners.”
 
Border carbon adjustments are environmental tariffs by another name.
 
In Ottawa’s own words:
 
“Border carbon adjustments level the playing field across jurisdictions: they put a carbon fee on imports from countries that either do not have carbon pricing or price it too low so that those products face the same costs as those supplied by domestic producers who pay a price on carbon pollution. As such, border carbon adjustments can help maintain competitiveness while also encouraging other countries to step up and take effective action to reduce emissions.”
 
The idea is hardly new.
 
In 1991, the United States Senate considered a proposal to tax imports from countries whose pollution controls were less stringent than America’s.
 
The bill failed, and the World Trade Organization has habitually rejected environmental tariffs as counter to the spirit of globalization.
 
But the WTO is tottering, and it looks like Washington will try again.
 
“Carbon adjustment fees” were mentioned in President-elect Joe Biden’s environmental platform. They are also included in the European Union’s plan to mitigate the effects of climate change.
 
Environmental tariffs resonate because they appeal to populists and pragmatists alike.
 
They are unapologetically protectionist, but they also serve a practical, functional end: they prevent the subsidization of pollution.
 
In this context, the Trudeau government has little choice but to price carbon in Canada aggressively.
 
If it doesn’t, Canadian exports could face new barriers to critical markets.
 
Armed with evidence of an acceptably high carbon price at home, however, Global Affairs Canada will be well-positioned to negotiate a regional, or even global, border carbon adjustment regime with our likeminded allies.
 
The governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Ontario are currently contesting the Trudeau government’s right to tax carbon at the Supreme Court.
 
With Joe Biden about to assume the presidency of the United States, I’m not certain that they should be hoping for a win.
 
***
 
The best summary of recent Canadian thinking on what he calls carbon border adjustments is this prescient article by Adam Radwanski in the Globe and Mail. I’ve noted in a previous post that Radwanski’s reporting on environmental policy has been outstanding.
 
One of the best academics on Canadian environmental policy is Wilfrid Laurier’s Debora VanNijnatten. On energy and the environment, I enjoy the work of the University of Ottawa’s Monica Gattinger. For the Alberta angle, follow Andrew Leach, Trevor Tombe, and Duane Bratt on Twitter, or read their regular public commentaries,
 
 ***
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The Macdonald-Laurier Institute (MLI), a non-partisan think tank that typically produces commentary that appeals to Canada’s centre-right, has a new report out on the future of Canadian foreign policy.
 
(Full disclosure: I have invited the MLI’s managing director, Brian Lee Crowley, to speak to students at the Canadian Forces College a couple of times, generally as part of a think tank panel.)
 
MLI Senior Fellow Balkan Devlen is responsible for the first of a series of commentaries focused on “Leading a community of democracies in the post-COVID world order.”
 
Devlen, or the institute as a whole (it is not entirely clear), advocates a “reorientation of foreign policy.” As we emerge from the pandemic, he argues, Canada must “take the lead in working with other democracies and like-minded states from Europe to the Indo-Pacific.”
 
While I will never understand the emphasis on foreign policy leadership that is so common among analysts from across the political spectrum, it is hard to find fault in the suggestion that Canada should work with natural allies to advance its national interests.
 
I begin to get less comfortable at Devlen’s next paragraph: “Such a reorientation of policy,” he claims, “is only sustainable if it reflects the views and priorities of everyday Canadians and not only the foreign policy elite.”
 
There are two ways to interpret the implications of this suggestion for practitioners.
 
One is that Ottawa should make foreign policy decisions based on what public opinion surveys say matter to Canadians.
 
The other is that when these same surveys suggest that Canadians do not agree with their government’s foreign policy posture, Ottawa should explain itself so convincingly that they come around.
 
You either follow the public, or you lead them.
 
My concern with Devlen’s analysis is that he seems to choose option one when public opinion aligns with the MLI’s views, and option two when it doesn’t.
 
The data provided (Figures 2 and 3 in the report) indicate that 73% of Canadians view China negatively. Seventy-two percent feel the same about Russia.
 
Devlen clearly agrees with the majority in these cases.
 
He quotes MLI Senior Fellow Charles Burton, who condemns the Government of Canada for being too lax, and therefore “out of sync” with public opinion on China.
 
Then he quotes another Senior Fellow, Marcus Kolga, who is similarly critical of Ottawa for failing to be hard enough on Russia.
 
And then things get awkward.
 
The MLI appears to have asked Canadians the same questions about their attitudes towards the United States, but the commentary does not provide a similarly detailed breakdown of the data.
 
We do learn, however, that 63% of Canadians “hold at least a moderately negative view of the U.S.”
 
Indeed, just 20% of Canadians have positive views of America. By way of comparison, 26% of Canadians have positive views of China, and 28% have positive views of Russia.
 
Yet there is no call from Devlen, nor are there quotations from other MLI fellows, to distance ourselves from Washington. Rather, we are reminded that the US is “Canada’s closest ally and trading partner.”
 
Moreover, according to another MLI Senior Fellow, Shuvaloy Majumdar, “the strategic relationship provides the bedrock for Canada’s national security and economy.”
 
In sum, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute clearly wants the Government of Canada to get tough on Russia and China, so it is jumping on opinion polling which suggests similarly and calling on Ottawa to respect the will of the people.
 
But when it comes to Canadian skepticism of the United States, the MLI fellows disagree with the public’s conclusion, and therefore demand that Ottawa find a way around it.
 
To be clear, I would not be so disappointed in this report if I didn’t generally agree with its conclusions.
 
China and Russia are seeking to undermine Canadian national interests, and we cannot defend those interests without cooperating with the United States.
 
Why Devlen and the MLI insist on framing their recommendations – unconvincingly – as reflective of a commitment to democratize the foreign policy process is therefore beyond me.
 
***
In other news, the Conservative finance critic, Pierre Poilievre, published an essay in Policy Options last week that caused me to do a double-take.
 
It’s called “The other lethal pandemic is worklessness,” and it claims that, since the outbreak of COVID-19, too many Canadians have lost “the purpose, pride, and place to go that comes from working.”
 
Work is not just about making money, Poilievre argues, it’s also about ensuring our “health and happiness.”
 
“Far from being a misery needed to pay the bills, work is a basic human need. It activates our brains and bodies in service of others. It makes us players not observers; powerful not powerless.”
 
Funny thing, that’s one of the key arguments raised by proponents of a basic income guarantee when critics (and I believe that Poilievre has generally been one of them) suggest that such a government program would inevitably lead to mass unemployment.
 
I look forward to hearing what the new leader of the Green Party, Annamie Paul, thinks of the essay. She’s been calling for a guaranteed livable income since well before she won the leadership.
 
 ***
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This past week, Maclean’s released an essay by Marie-Danielle Smith about the struggles of Canada’s New Democratic Party.
 
How, Smith asks, can a party with a hip, popular, scandal-free leader whose social-democratic priorities have resonated during this pandemic, and whose efforts in the House of Commons have led to significant Liberal concessions, struggle so mightily to achieve even 20% support in the polls?
 
The answer, she speculates, is that the NDP is mired in an identity crisis.
 
One camp wants it to embrace socialism aggressively and explicitly. Another yearns for a more moderate, pragmatic approach to moving Canadian society to the left. A third calls for patience – supporters must allow leader Jagmeet Singh to grow into the kind of person that Canadians will be able to imagine as their next prime minister.
 
I am not a member of the NDP (I have never joined nor donated to any political party), so I am not well-placed to comment on camps one and two, but I can certainly see where camp three is coming from.
 
It seems to me that Singh’s current approach to foreign policy holds him back significantly.
 
I am thinking specifically about a tweet he released shortly before the US election:
 
“For those that want to build a more just world – silence is not an option. We have a moral imperative to say very clearly, that it would be better for the world if Donald Trump loses.”
 
On the surface, both sentences are unremarkable.
 
Public silence has contributed all too often to the commission of mass atrocities around the world. When we see injustice, and we don’t speak out, we forsake an opportunity to stop it.
 
And Singh was speaking for close to three-quarters of Canadians (and much of the interrnatoinal community) when he advocated a Biden victory.
 
Nonetheless, his comments suggest an understanding of foreign policy that has not yet matured.
 
Every Canadian prime minister eventually recognizes that Canada cannot survive and prosper by limiting its global interactions to leaders and countries with whom it shares values and ideals. We must work with just about everyone.
 
In some cases, we must proceed with extreme caution, but our national interests can only be fulfilled through compromise and negotiation.
 
We work with the Russians at the Arctic Council. We have collaborated with the Chinese on climate change. We are negotiating with Iran to bring justice to those Canadians who died tragically in Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752.
 
When asked who they supported in the US election, Prime Minister Trudeau and Conservative leader Erin O’Toole indicated that they were prepared to work with any American administration.
 
Implicitly, they suggested, prime ministers of Canada (and aspirants to the office) do not have the luxury of indulging their frustrations and disappointments – no matter how intense – when Canada’s ability to advance its national interests is at stake.
 
And since this US president regularly lashes at out perceived, or real, personal affronts, Canadian heads of government must choose their words about him deliberately.
 
This is not to say that we cannot aggressively disagree with the United States.
 
When the Trump administration cut aid for contraception and family planning in 2017, Ottawa immediately increased its contribution to compensate.
 
But the government left it to Sandeep Prasad, executive director of Action Canada for Sexual Health and Rights, to say:
 
“Trump’s policy represents a gross violation of women’s rights and runs counter to the global trend of liberalizing abortion laws that has resulted in significant decreases in unsafe abortions.”
 
Singh doesn’t seem to grasp the nuance.
 
When it comes to international relations, Canadian prime ministers must play the long game. They cannot make their policy disagreements personal, especially when it comes to our most significant ally.
 
Marie-Danielle Smith’s camp three believes Singh will get there. I hope so, for his sake.
 
***
 
If you’re looking to read more about the NDP, the University of Saskatchewan’s David McGrane recently won a major award for his latest book, The New NDP: Moderation, Modernization, and Political Marketing. On anti-Americanism, I am looking forward to a planned book that will be co-edited by Jennifer Bonder, Susan Colbourn, and Graeme Thompson. The deadline for their call for papers is December 15th.

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Tomorrow marks this year’s deadline for Canadian citizens and permanent residents to submit their “interest to sponsor form” to launch a process that might eventually enable their parents or grandparents to join them in Canada permanently.
 
The next step is a lottery: the government draws enough forms to enable 10,000 successful parent and grandparent applicants to immigrate to Canada.
 
(Next year, that number will be 30,000 so that Ottawa can return to its target of an average of 20,000 new parents and grandparents arriving each year).
 
From there, two application processes begin simultaneously.
 
The Canadian who filled out the interest to sponsor form formally applies to be a sponsor. To be eligible, they must demonstrate that they make enough money to support each parent or grandparent for 20 years.
 
The website that explains all of this even provides a chart that quantifies how much you need to earn to qualify.
 
The parents or grandparents complete their own applications to apply for permanent residence. Both applications are submitted as a single package.
 
The fees for this process come out to a little over $1000, not including the costs of mandatory medical exams, police reports, and biometrics.
 
The parent and grandparent sponsorship program’s popularity has made it an endless head-ache for successive Canadian governments.
 
As John Ivison of the National Post noted a couple of weeks ago, in 2011 the Harper government even stopped considering new applicants for a year to reduce a 165,000 application backlog.
 
Back then, it could take almost a decade to complete the process.
 
That said, if you did manage to submit a successful application before the year’s cap was reached, you could be confident that your parents or grandparents would eventually be able to immigrate.
 
The current government is trying something different. This year, there were three weeks to submit an expression of interest, followed by a lottery to determine who would be invited to apply.
 
Those who are not selected will have to start over next year.
 
This is the second time the Liberals have tried a lottery. The first did not go over well. Nonetheless, the government appears to be convinced that lotteries are the best way to maintain fairness and transparency.
 
First-come, first-served makes it too easy to game the system; it risks preventing the less advantaged from ever getting in.
 
I suspect that some readers would prefer the competitive approach. Presumably, if you have enough money to game the system, your elderly relatives are less likely to ever become a financial burden.
 
Permanent residents qualify for publicly-funded health care, and older Canadians tend to draw extensively from our health care system.
 
Ivison makes that case clearly: “People who have not contributed to Canadian society should not automatically have access to this country’s social programs, just as … demand for those services is about to peak.”
 
The argument is tempting, but it seems to assume that we accept parents and grandparents out of the goodness of our hearts.
 
We don’t.
 
The (relative) ease with which one can sponsor members of the family class is part of what makes this country so attractive to prospective high-skilled immigrants from the economic class - those future Canadians who are critical to our long-term prosperity.
 
Any cost-benefit analysis of the value of the parent and grandparent sponsorship program must consider the possibility that, without such a generous system, sponsors might never come to Canada in the first place.
 
This is not to say that the lottery system is perfect. I’d much prefer a process where your chances improve after any unsuccessful application.
 
Nor is it to suggest that we can’t do more to better integrate parents and grandparents into our paid and volunteer work force.
 
But I do think that, once we are through this pandemic and governments begin to look for ways to cut costs, they should stay away from the parent and grandparent sponsorship program.
 
***
 
On immigration, check out the work of Irene Bloemraad. If you study Canadian foreign policy, please take a look at this new book edited by Brian Bow and my colleague, Andrea Lane. Once you have trudged through my take on why the field is dominated by political scientists, you will find some fascinating essays.
 
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