Under Erin O’Toole, the Conservative Party has made a deliberate effort to differentiate itself from the governing Liberals on foreign policy.
 
The Conservatives’ 2021 election platform, Canada’s Recovery Plan, dedicated significantly more space to international relations than the Liberals’ Forward, For Everyone. And while I did not agree with every promise, the package as a whole struck me as thoughtful, and serious.
 
In that context, I am particularly disappointed in Mr. O’Toole’s recent foreign policy musings.
 
According to the CBC, just over a week ago, at a virtual meeting with Nova Scotia chambers of commerce, Mr. O’Toole criticized the current government in a manner that was not only over-the-top, but also suggested a profound ignorance of how Canada-US relations work.
 
“We have never seen, in modern Canadian history, Canada-U.S. relations at such a low point,” he said.
 
“We just lost a recent trade battle with respect to supply management – we’ve been losing on agriculture. We’re losing on forestry products. There’s been steel and aluminum tariffs and Buy America that has us losing on manufacturing.”
 
“It’s easy for the U.S. to dominate, easy for the U.S. to win with the current prime minister,” he added.
 
I see two problems with these comments.
 
First, to suggest that Canada’s relations with the United States are the worst in modern history because of a series of ongoing trade disputes is rather silly.
 
Every recent prime minister has struggled to deal with Washington.
 
Check out the late Jim Prentice’s memoir, Triple Crown: Winning Canada’s Energy Future, for a sense of the disdain with which the Obama administration viewed the Harper government.
 
Or recall that, after the combination of the ballistic missile defence fiasco, and the Martin government’s decision to attack the United States’ (superior) environmental record just before the 2006 election, the Bush administration was all but counting down the days until the Liberals were defeated.
 
Going back a bit further, the Americans were flabbergasted by Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program in 1981, and Ottawa was equally taken aback by the Nixon shock in 1971.
 
I could go on…
 
More important, to suggest that Canada-US relations are about “winning” is unbecoming of a leader who surely must know better.
 
The goal in preserving what the Conservatives themselves called an “indispensable alliance” in their election platform is not to win.
 
Rather, to paraphrase Canada’s Recovery Plan, it is to work with our US partners; to share responsibility for the security of North America; and to benefit jointly from our integrated economies.
 
When it comes to the bilateral relationship, Canada does not win when the Americans lose, and vice-versa. Nor can any Canadian government set the priorities of a US administration, or even just prevent Washington from enacting self-defeating protectionist policies.
 
This is not to say that the Liberals’ foreign policy record has been flawless.
 
For an effective critique, take a look at this recent article by Rita Trichur of the Globe and Mail.
 
Trichur has been tracking Ottawa’s disappointing performance on an issue that, ironically, the Conservatives recognized as important in Canada’s Recovery Plan: money laundering.
 
Apparently, the Trudeau government is backsliding on its commitment to make Canada’s forthcoming beneficial ownership registry publicly accessible.
 
The most recent mandate letters issued by the Prime Minister’s Office reiterated a promise to create the registry, but omitted the original guarantee of public accessibility.
 
As Trichur notes, without a commitment to public accessibility, “Canada’s forthcoming beneficial ownership registry will be a guaranteed flop.”
 
The Globe has been following up with Ottawa to see whether the mandate letters’ omission was deliberate, and has thus far been denied a clear response.
 
Trichur is to be commended for her diligence, but a serious opposition party should be all over this. Instead, Canadians have been treated to hyperbole and oversimplifications.
 
Mr. O’Toole and his party can do better.
 
***
Perhaps the leader of the opposition just had a bad week. Others have been equally critical of his recent criticism of the Liberals’ domestic policy. And as for those Liberals, I continue to struggle to understand how a government that has been so good at procuring vaccines for, and distributing them to, Canadians is struggling do the same for countries of lesser means. This pandemic won’t end here until it ends everywhere.
 
***
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Last week, Edward Keenan, the Toronto Star’s excellent Washington correspondent, wrote an end-of-year piece about the state of Canada-US relations under President Joe Biden.
 
Keenan’s observations reflect a degree of pessimism that seems to pervade contemporary analyses:
 
“Has Biden been friendlier? Sure, in his photo-op platitudes. But has that made anything easier for Canada? It’s hard to see how.”
 
The article highlights a series of White House actions, as well as instances of inaction, that demonstrate President Biden’s apparent lack of concern for Canadian interests: cancelling the Keystone Pipeline; increasing tariffs on softwood lumber; proposing new Buy American provisions for electric car manufacturing; failing to offer support during Ottawa’s dispute with Michigan over the Line 5 Pipeline.
 
Biden gets credit for securing the release of the two Michaels from imprisonment in China, and a series of “productive meetings” have taken place among the leadership of the two countries, but Keenan still concludes that “Even when the faces were friendlier, a lot of 2021’s conversations were still very, very hard.”
 
It seems to me that such an assessment risks mistaking the forest for the trees.
 
My reading of the history of Canada-US relations suggests that the day-to-day bilateral differences Keenan has highlighted are all but inevitable, no matter the president.
 
Consider the mid-late 1980s when, under the leadership of Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, relations were said to be at their peak.
 
It’s easy to forget that, during this period of “good will and true partnership,” a lengthy shakes and shingles dispute nearly derailed free trade; Reagan stonewalled Mulroney on efforts to curb acid rain and protest South African apartheid; and Canada refused to join Washington’s ballistic missile defence program.
 
Given the disparity in power between the two countries, not to mention America’s global responsibilities, the White House will never give Canadian issues the degree of attention that Ottawa feels they deserve.
 
It follows that if you want to evaluate state of the Canada-US relationship by the degree or intensity of these bilateral differences, you will always see room for significant improvement.
 
I think there is a bigger picture, though.
 
The United States has been the guarantor of a liberal-democratic world order that has served Canadian interests exceptionally well for close to 80 years.
 
Under President Trump, Washington disavowed such global responsibilities.
 
It withdrew from the Paris Agreement, undermining international momentum for collective action on climate change.
 
It planned to leave the World Health Organization, all but guaranteeing an increase in Beijing’s global influence in the midst of the most destructive pandemic in a century.
 
It allowed the World Trade Organization to wilt, opening the door yet further to an international system dominated by states that reject liberal rules and laws.
 
Perhaps most important, President Trump deliberately sowed division among the American people, leaving the state critically weakened and poorly positioned to play a constructive global role under any successor.
 
President Biden has, at the very least, slowed down the decline in America’s influence. However imperfectly, he has recommitted to NATO, and to pursuing multilateral solutions to international problems. He has also made a genuine effort – thus far unsuccessful – to bring Americans together.
 
If you believe, as I do, that one of the gravest threats to Canadian interests today is the dissolution of a US-led liberal international order, then it is hard to see President Biden’s ascent to power in anything but positive terms.
 
The real question, as we head into 2022, is not whether the lives of Canadian representatives in Washington have gotten easier since Biden took office, it’s whether his efforts to bring calm to America and restore US influence in the world will be sufficient to prevent the collapse of a system that is key to Canada’s long-term security and prosperity.  
 
***
On Canada-US relations, see Stephen Azzi’s Reconcilable Differences and Robert Bothwell’s Your Country, My Country. The official Canadian government view can be found here. Canada’s current ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, is outstanding. She recently spoke with Politico about the state of Canada-US relations. You can find the interview here.
 
***
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​Last week, Marcus Gee published a piece in the Globe and Mail critical of Quebec’s Bill 21. (You can find the text of the bill itself here.)
 
Like many Canadians (both within and outside of Quebec), Gee takes deep offence to the legislation which prevents Quebeckers in positions of public authority – including teachers, transit workers, prosecutors, etc. – from wearing religious symbols or attire in the workplace.
 
As he explains: “That such a thing could have happened in 21st-century Canada almost defies belief… There is no evidence at all that a teacher in a hijab or a cop in a turban somehow threatens the secular status of the public service, the gains of the Quiet Revolution, or the Quebec way of life.”
 
He is therefore delighted that a number of Canada’s big city mayors have recently spoken out strongly against the law, especially since federal leaders have largely held their tongues.
 
Gee acknowledges the common objection to the mayors’ posture. When anglophones from outside of Quebec criticize that province’s legislation, there is a risk that “their campaign could blow up in their face, leading Quebeckers to rally around the fleur-de-lis and lowering the odds of overturning the law through Quebec’s internal political process.”
 
Prime Minister Trudeau, who has recently expressed his deep personal opposition to Bill 21, argued similarly in an interview with the CBC.
 
He was not involving the federal government in legal action at this point to “ensure that it is Quebeckers themselves” making the case to the Quebec government that the law is discriminatory, without giving an “excuse to the Quebec government that this is federal interference.”
 
Gee’s response is unwavering:
 
“The argument has been wrong before and it is wrong now. This is a matter not of politics or strategy but of principle, and the principle – that no Canadian should face discrimination on the basis of religious belief – could hardly be more important. The mayors are right to take the stand. It’s never a bad time to speak up about rights.”
 
Such a position might make some readers feel good inside, but it’s not going to change the mind of the Quebec government.
 
That doesn’t mean, however, that the mayors should stay silent.
 
I would much prefer that the $100,000 Brampton City Council has pledged to support the legal fight against the legislation be spent on a public relations campaign welcoming any and all Quebeckers to move to Brampton (or Toronto, or Calgary, or London, or anywhere else in Canada for that matter) and apply for any job that suits them.
 
Quebec’s religious minority communities need to know that there are nine other provinces and three territories that would be delighted if they chose to teach, serve as police officers, or practice medicine in their jurisdictions.
 
It seems to me that this sort of positive campaign would send a much more practical message to Quebec Premier François Legault and his supporters.
 
Discrimination on the basis of religion is not just morally deplorable, it’s also a terrible business strategy, especially in a province that is already desperately short of health care and other public sector workers.
 
In sum, Bill 21 must be contested in the courts but, at this point, that battle is best left to Quebeckers.
 
Individual Canadians are welcome to support the current legal challenge, but municipal leaders might best demonstrate their opposition to the legislation by letting those who have been disenfranchised know that there are jobs waiting for them across the rest of the country.
 
A mass exodus of Quebeckers might not convince the entire provincial political establishment that Bill 21 is wrong, but it will certainly send a practical message that needs to be heard.
 
***
For a summary of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s campaign against the legislation, see here. To understand why nearly 2/3 of Quebeckers support Bill 21, see this thoughtful article by André Pratte.
 
***
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The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) has just released a major report: “Reimagining a Canadian National Security Strategy.”
 
(Disclosure: Although I did not contribute to the report, I am currently working with CIGI on two separate projects.)
 
The paper, authored by Aaron Shull and Wesley Wark, is based on an extensive, year-long consultative process that included 250 subject matter experts from across the country.
 
A blog like this cannot do justice to the 20 pages of serious analysis that Shull and Wark have produced, and I therefore encourage you to read the report for yourself.
 
I do, however, want to draw attention to what appears to me to be an inconsistency in the recommendations section.
 
I noticed it because a number of years ago I made the same mistake.
 
The authors suggest, convincingly, that Canada and Canadians would benefit from greater transparency and public reporting on issues of national security.
 
To that end, they call on the prime minister to issue two annual statements to Parliament (one on worldwide threats and one on intelligence priorities), an idea that I quite like.
 
It seems to me, however, that a separate recommendation about national security governance could undermine that same spirit of transparency.
 
The report proposes the (re-)establishment of a cabinet committee on national security, to be chaired by the prime minister.
 
Eight years ago, when the Harper government disbanded a similar committee, I criticized the decision as “regressive” in a blog for the Toronto Star.
 
“Its existence [had] confirmed,” I suggested, “that, in spite of Ottawa’s refusal to update the Liberals’ 2004 national security strategy, not to mention its unwillingness to issue a white paper on foreign policy, the Conservative government nevertheless understood the importance of thinking seriously about Canada’s long-term strategic posture in world affairs.”
 
Scrapping the committee suggested to me that the prime minister was deprioritizing national security.
 
With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that I was wrong.
 
In the Canadian system of government, prime ministers get the strategic-decision making process that they want.
 
For a time, Prime Minister Harper believed that chairing a cabinet committee on national security would provide him with the information he needed to govern effectively.
 
Two years later, he changed his mind. Apparently, he preferred to liaise with his National Security Advisor directly, and alone.
 
When Prime Minister Trudeau took over in 2015, he chaired a cabinet committee on intelligence and emergency management.
 
It, too, didn’t last. Again, it appears that, for whatever reason, the prime minister did not find it useful.
 
My point here is not that a cabinet committee on national security chaired by the prime minister is necessarily a bad idea.
 
Rather, it’s that our last two prime ministers have explicitly rejected it because it hasn’t worked for them personally.
 
It follows that if such a structure were imposed, they would inevitably work around it, and Canadians would be left misled in terms of where national security decisions were really being made.
 
Consider the situation in the United States: regardless of the formal structures in place, each president still delegates power, authority, and influence among the secretary of state, the national security advisor, and the vice-president differently.
 
In sum, if we want greater transparency from government, it’s best to let the prime minister design the system in a way that works for them, and then to ask pointed questions until we get the answers we’re looking for.
 
If Mr. Trudeau doesn’t want to chair a cabinet committee on national security, perhaps start by asking him why.
 
***
Foreign Affairs published a great essay on the role of the US national security advisor back in 2009. It was based on a book that is summarized here. For more on the Canadian side, take a look at this older paper by Andrew Brunatti as well as Greg Fyffe’s chapter in Top Secret Canada.
 
***
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For much of the last two weeks, I’ve been struggling with how to respond to a Globe and Mail article by the Hon. Jean Charest, Zachary Paikin, and Stéphanie Chouinard, titled: “A more independent Canadian foreign policy requires embracing bilingualism.”
 
My difficulties have been twofold:
 
First, I have worked with two of the authors and have the deepest respect for them.
 
Mr. Charest is one of the best guests ever to appear in my strategic decision-making course. His presentations are inspiring, and I always find myself agreeing with the general tenor of his message.
 
Professor Chouinard is a rising star at the Royal Military College in Kingston, and she too impressed me deeply when we participated on a panel together a couple of months ago.
 
Second, I could not agree more with the first half of their argument:
 
“Canada’s place on the world stage … depends on us embracing our bilingual history and character.”
 
As they suggest, Canada’s diplomatic corps must be, at minimum, fully bilingual.
 
Indeed, I would hope that the majority of our senior diplomats learn a third language as they progress in their careers.
 
Understanding other languages and cultures is one of the most reliable ways of developing empathy, intercultural awareness, and the ability to think flexibly and creatively.
 
And that is in addition to the well-documented cognitive and neurological benefits.
 
What’s more, seeing as over half the world now speaks more than one language, it is hard to imagine how any state, other than perhaps a superpower, could function effectively on the global stage without a multilingual diplomatic corps.
 
My problem, then, is with the rest of what the article has to say.
 
The authors maintain that Canada has a “growing reputation” as a “vassal state” of the United States.
 
The choice of words is shocking, seeing as for the last three years they have been invoked regularly by the Canadian commentator Irvin Studin in support of his opposition to NAFTA – an agreement that Mr. Charest in particular has actively supported.
 
Charest, Paikin, and Chouinard suggest that emphasizing Canadian bilingualism would draw international attention to Canada’s independence from the United States, and that such independence would promote the national interest.
 
“Canada requires a more independent foreign policy” they say.
 
I see things differently.
 
On its own, Canadian bilingualism hardly differentiates this country on the world stage. Rather, it’s American monolingualism, and indeed the monolingualism of the rest of the Five Eyes alliance, that stands out.
 
Put differently, Canadian bilingualism derives much of its meaning from of our close relations with the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
 
Our capacity to negotiate with French-speaking countries that do business with the Five Eyes in their language of choice is part of what has always made us disproportionately relevant internationally.
 
The weaker our Five Eyes relations, and especially our relations with the United States, the less relevant our bilingualism becomes to our diplomatic toolkit.
 
A deep and durable relationship with the Americans is therefore not only critical to our continental interests, it also enhances our international influence.
 
So by all means, let’s increase the linguistic proficiency of our diplomatic corps, but to advance the national interest and benefit fully from these skills, we must also strengthen and promote our close ties to the United States.
 
***
A number of years ago, I wrote a book chapter about why independence in Canadian foreign policy was over-rated. You can find it here. That collection of essays served to update and reflect on the late Stephen Clarkson’s edited book on independence in Canadian foreign policy, first published in 1968.
 
***
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Last week’s North American Leaders’ Summit, which was framed in the Canadian press as key to Ottawa’s ongoing effort to prevent the passage of a buy American incentive for the purchase of electric vehicles in the United States – a provision that could, by all accounts, destroy the Canadian auto industry – has been portrayed in near fatal terms by much of our national media.
 
Brian Lilley of the Toronto Sun was the bluntest: “Trudeau failed in Washington; he waited too long to make a push to support one of Canada’s biggest and most valuable industries and then couldn’t use his supposed connections to get a deal.”
 
John Ivison of the National Post concluded that the American non-response to Canadian pleas to revise or eliminate the provision demonstrated that, rather than taking Canada seriously, President Biden thinks of our country as “an immature, undependable younger sibling.”
 
The CBC's Alexander Panetta suggested that Prime Minister Trudeau’s “failure to persuade Americans to ease up on Canada in a landmark electric-vehicle plan capped a visit that served as a long, loud wake-up call” to “a tough new reality Canadians face.”
 
“Our challenge now,” he continued, “involves living beside a worried superpower that’s distracted by generational challenges in which Canada is at best a bit player.”
 
Campbell Clark of the Globe and Mail was more measured, noting that, as was the case during the NAFTA negotiations, the prime minister was playing the long game by reminding the White House that good relations with Canada were in America’s best interest, and there was never any chance of the president moving on the vehicle subsidy during the summit.
 
Still, he added: “The risk is that the helpful Canadian approach won’t have an impact on a Biden administration fixated on a struggle to get through its domestic agenda.”
 
The Toronto Star’s Edward Keenan was the most optimistic, but even he expressed concern: “the fellow feeling for Canadians is strong in the U.S., but … Canada’s issues barely rate a footnote on the American agenda.”
 
Here’s my take:
 
First, Clark is right. There was never any chance of reaching an agreement last week. For all intents and purposes, the bill is out of President Biden’s hands until the Senate is finished with it.
 
When the president said, “I don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with, quite frankly, when it comes out of legislation. So, we’ll talk about it then,” he was speaking truthfully.
 
The job of the prime minister last week was to keep the issue alive while Canadian negotiators – official and otherwise – furiously lobbied their contacts in Congress.
 
If the provision is not dropped, Ottawa will have laid the groundwork for a Canadian exemption that can be negotiated after-the-fact.
 
There is precedent for such measures and, this time, Canada has leverage. Those American-made electric vehicles are useless without batteries that rely on Canadian critical minerals.
 
According to Ivison, “nobody believes that Trudeau would dare to withhold Canada’s mineral wealth.”
 
I disagree.
 
Recall that when the Trump administration threatened to prevent the delivery of N95 masks to Canada last year, our “ambassador to the U.S., Kirsten Hillman, drew up a long list of levers Canada could pull, including Canadians who work in hospitals in Detroit, medical equipment suppliers in Canada, and even the electrical supply for northern Maine, which is dependent on electricity from New Brunswick.”
 
Indeed, what the former defence minister and now president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce Perrin Beatty describes as a relationship that has devolved from “special” to “transactional” makes Ottawa’s trade negotiating prowess a benefit, and America’s failure to take it seriously a significant advantage.
 
Moreover, it is far better to be ignored by the United States than to be noticed for consistently shirking on our defence obligations within North America.
 
This is not to say that all is well. Negotiating an exemption will not be easy, and one can only play hardball with the White House so many times, but there are worse things for Canadian national interests than a lack of attention from Washington.
 
***
Whenever Canada-US relations get tricky, it is worth going back to a brilliant book by Dalhousie’s Brian Bow, The Politics of Linkage. For a broader historical overview, try Robert Bothwell’s Your Country, My Country: A Unified History of the United States and Canada or Stephen Azzi’s Reconcilable Differences: A History of Canada-US Relations. On energy, I continue to follow the work of Monica Gattinger.
 
***
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​Konrad Yakabuski wrote an article for the Globe and Mail last week that accused the 40,000 participants at the UN’s COP26 climate conference of “playing a game of virtual reality.”
 
The bold declarations on ending deforestation and transitioning to zero emissions vehicles that emerged from the negotiations were replete with caveats and were not endorsed by the states and private sector firms that had the power to make them meaningful.
 
As for the US-China commitment to cooperate “to tackle the climate crisis,” it was “thin gruel, even by UN standards.”
 
“The whole event had a prepackaged feel to it,” Yakabuski concludes, “and more than a whiff of self-indulgence among the participants who live for such gatherings and the networking opportunity they represent.”
 
There was a time when I would have agreed with him, but I have come to believe that to recognize the value of international conferences, you can’t take them literally.
 
The way I see it, international gatherings like COP26 make four significant contributions to efforts to effect global environment reform.
 
First, the institutionalization of an annual meeting all but forces participating member-states to review their environmental positions on a regular basis.
 
In liberal democracies like Canada, this means that environmental policy receives serious attention from Cabinet every year.
 
It is that attention, rather than the details of the policy, that can often make the difference between progress and stagnation.
 
Second, the networking opportunities decried by Yakabuski are in fact terribly important geopolitically, even if their significance cannot be measured in traditional terms.
 
International conferences enable states with shared interests to establish new partnerships, to gather new intelligence, and even to deal with issues that have little to do with the meeting itself.
 
It would be foolish to assume, for example, that Prime Minister Trudeau limited his conversations in Scotland with his fellow heads of state and government to the environment.
 
Third, the outcomes of these conferences serve as signals to the private sector. In doing so, they affect decision-making on the investments in new technologies that will be so critical to reform in the future.
 
I find it hard to believe that India’s adamant refusal to support the phase out of coal as a source of energy will deter speculators from acknowledging that the end of coal as a viable investment is near.
 
Finally, end-of-conference declarations shape international norms.
 
Over time, the global default position on the need for environmental reform has shifted.
 
Whereas delegates used to debate whether the science of climate change was real, now they argue over how urgently they need to respond.
 
National publics that pay little attention to world affairs internalize these shifts, often without even knowing that they have.
 
In this case, the acknowledgement (or validation) of the reality of climate change has led them to demand more of their governments.
 
So, sure, the COP26 conference delegates spent hours debating – perhaps sanctimoniously at times – the inclusion or removal of commas, semicolons, adverbs, and adjectives in statements that the overwhelming majority of us will never notice.
 
And, sure, the resultant conference declaration was aspirational, unenforceable, and is unlikely to be fulfilled.
 
But process matters in diplomacy. It draws attention, strengthens relationships, sends signals to the public and to the private sector, and moves international goalposts.
 
The problem is not events like COP26, it’s our expectations of them.
 
***
The best summary I've seen of COP26 thus far is this one by the always thoughtful Adam Radwanski. On the broader subject of environmental politics, look out for Michael Manulak’s forthcoming book, Change in Global Environmental Politics: Temporal Focal Points and the Reform of International Institutions.
 
***
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Stephanie Carvin, a prolific and thoughtful scholar at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, published a very good essay a couple of weeks ago on the website of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
 
It’s called “Beyond AUKUS: Canada May Not Need Nuclear Subs — but It Is in Dire Need of a Strategy,” and it suggests that while the hype over Canada’s alleged exclusion from the recent Australia-UK-US security pact has been significantly overblown, Ottawa has a lot of work to do on the foreign and security policy front.
 
Most important to Carvin – and what makes the essay original in the context of an analysis of AUKUS – is a significant investment in the modernization of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD).
 
Carvin interprets AUKUS as part of a broader American response to the rise of China that calls on US allies to take greater responsibility for their own defence.
 
I don’t disagree with her analysis of American thinking, nor with her policy recommendation per se, but I see the value of NORAD modernization through a different lens.
 
Whereas Carvin, among many others, emphasizes the centrality of the very real Chinese threat to global security, I’m less convinced that the impact of Beijing’s increasingly aggressive posture fundamentally alters Canadian geopolitics.
 
Consider the following statement:
 
“We, too, have our obligations as a good friendly neighbour, and one of them is to see that, at our own insistence, our country is made as immune from attack or possible invasion as we can reasonably be expected to make it, and that, should the occasion ever arise, enemy forces should not be able to pursue their way, either by land, sea or air, to the United States, across Canadian territory.”
 
The comments were first made in 1938, and then reiterated in the House Commons in 1939, by Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King.
 
King was famous for his aversion to concrete commitments of any sort, but even he recognized that the greatest threat to Canadian interests was a successful attack on the United States that had been planned in, and/or launched from Canada.
 
As much as the global dynamic is changing, it seems to me that King’s words are equally true today: the greatest threat to Canadian national security, political autonomy, and economic prosperity remains the collapse of the Canada-US geopolitical partnership.
 
Canada doesn’t need to commit to NORAD modernization because of increasing threats from China or Russia; it must do so to reassure Washington of its reliability as a responsible defender of North America and, by extension, the US-inspired liberal world order.
 
In that context, I take issue with Carvin’s operational policy prescription.
 
She wants Ottawa to lean forward and articulate an explicit strategy to “signal to our allies what Canada’s priorities are. This would help them identify issues of mutual interest and opportunities for collaboration.”
 
To her, “Ad hoc foreign policy is rarely good foreign policy.”
 
I am inclined to disagree. If, as I see it, the greatest threat to Canadian interests comes from our American ally losing faith in our reliability, then it’s critical that Ottawa understands exactly what Washington wants from it.
 
(For example, it is enough that Huawei technology is never used in Canada’s 5G network – a security issue – or must the company’s involvement be explicitly banned – a diplomatic one.)
 
Leaning too far forward requires the Canadian government to make assumptions about those wants. Inevitably, some of those assumptions will be wrong, and will limit Ottawa’s political flexibility.
 
Better, I think, to build a nimble foreign and defence policy establishment that can to respond to our allies’ shifting security priorities as they are made clear.
 
Doing so forgoes any possibility of national leadership on this particular part of world stage, but that shouldn’t matter.
 
Canada has no business leading the Western response to China. We are too vulnerable, and insufficiently powerful.
 
A genuine “we’re ready to contribute when asked” posture (here Carvin is absolutely right: we aren’t close to there yet) is more realistic, and more responsible.
 
***
On NORAD modernization, it’s always worth paying attention to what the University of Manitoba’s Andrea Charron has to say.
 
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The retired Canadian diplomat John Graham wrote a piece for the Hill Times last week recalling that it has been nearly ten years since the Harper government ended Ottawa’s support for the teaching of Canadian Studies overseas.
 
For 38 years, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT’s) “Understanding Canada” program had made about $5 million available annually to university faculty studying Canada from abroad who wanted to travel here for research.
 
In exchange for the financial support, the professors committed to teach Canadian Studies courses at their home institutions for a number of years thereafter.
 
At the time, eliminating funding for what practitioners call cultural diplomacy was supposed to be an easy political decision, especially for a government committed to returning the budget to balance in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
 
Indeed, withdrawing support to haughty university professors who might well have used their trips to produce research critical of the prime minister and his party must have pleased the Conservative base.
 
The only problem was that an internal DFAIT report had concluded that Understanding Canada was growing the Canadian economy by $70 million per year.
 
It turns out that those professors spent a lot of money while they were here. Many also brought their families, and their students, with them.
 
Nonetheless, the Harper government’s majority in the House of Commons assured the program’s demise.
 
Outside of international Canadian Studies departments that had to scramble to survive, Understanding Canada was rarely mentioned again until June 2019, when the Senate’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (chaired, ironically, by a Conservative, A. Raynell Andreychuk) released a 103-page report: “Cultural Diplomacy at the Front Stage of Canada’s Foreign Policy.”
 
The committee recommended that Global Affairs “support the creation of a modernized Canadian Studies program that would contribute to knowledge about Canada in the world.” 

Not much later, pollster and public commentator Nik Nanos assembled a coalition of senior educational, political, and cultural leaders who called on the Liberals to create a modernized version of Understanding Canada at a cost of $8 million - $10 million per year.
 
I take it from John Graham’s Hill Times article that Ottawa remains uninterested.
 
It seems to me that the lack of interest might stem from how the issue has been framed.
 
More specifically, I wonder whether this version of “cultural diplomacy” really belongs in the Global Affairs portfolio.
 
One could also see Understanding Canada as (1) a micro-commercial policy that pays for itself; and (2) a sub-set of Canada’s immigration strategy.
 
Students who take courses in Canadian Studies while living abroad are ideal potential immigrants: (mostly) young, well-educated, functional in at least one of our official languages, and relatively knowledgeable about our society and culture.
 
Their professors are members, or quasi-members, of the Canadian diaspora: “hidden assets” that can and should be leveraged to support the national interest.
 
But since federal departments report up individual, siloed chains of command, and Cabinet ministers are rewarded for fulfilling their own departmental mandates, there are limited opportunities for the type of cross-pollination necessary to recognize the value of this meagre “diplomatic” investment.
 
If Graham and Nanos want to effect change, perhaps they should lobby the Minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, or the Minister of Immigration.
 
I suspect that a program that could bring in $70 million per year and promote Canada to foreign university students would interest them quite a lot.
 
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The Canadian Global Affairs Institute explored cultural diplomacy in a podcast back in 2018. You can find information about the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative here. To learn more about Canadian Studies programs around the world, take a look at the International Council for Canadian Studies website.
 
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Last week, the Globe and Mail’s John Ibbitson advocated that Global Affairs Canada “become more permeable.”
 
In other words, the department needed to embed more specialist outsiders on a temporary basis to augment its policy expertise on pressing files.
 
When relations with China are awkward, welcome a scholar from the Asia Pacific Foundation for a year or two.
 
If Canada is crafting policy for the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, create a temporary position for a senior policy leader from a leading non-governmental environmental organization.
 
Ibbitson prefers the American foreign service model: each new administration replaces the bulk of the  senior diplomatic corps with its own appointees.
 
I don’t think that the US approach could work here – note that (1) we don’t have a sufficiently vibrant private sector intellectual marketplace to provide refuge for the cadre of public officials who would find themselves unemployed following a change of government; (2) our Westminster system is not designed to accommodate the confirmation process necessary to keep partisan appointments from spiralling out of control; and (3) without enforceable fixed election dates, there is a risk of overwhelming public sector turn-over much too often – but I’m also not sure Ibbitson’s solution would solve the real problem.
 
As he says himself, “There is a general feeling within the government that foreign affairs, the foreign-policy shops in other departments, officials within the Privy Council Office and those in the Prime Minister’s Office collectively lack the numbers and depth to think through the big challenges facing Canada.”
 
Replacing permanent public servants with temporary appointees might enable Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to bulk up on specific expertise more nimbly (assuming that the selection process is smooth, bilingualism requirements are waived, and security screenings are somehow accelerated), but it will not change the fact that, as one of the next generation’s leading thinkers, Caroline Dunton, has recently noted, even though the Trudeau government has added nearly 1000 officials to the department over the last five years, there were fewer staff in GAC in 2020 than there were in 2010.
 
Dunton’s solution is more comprehensive than Ibbitson’s, less disparaging of public service culture, and more granular in its recommendations. At its core, however, it’s not that different:
 
“The Government of Canada’s investment in its foreign service and broader foreign policy apparatus at Global Affairs requires a significant overhaul and increase in resources, expertise and staffing.”
 
If Ottawa wants to adapt Canada’s foreign policy to meet the needs of an increasingly worrisome  world order, they both say, it will have to spend more.
 
When thoughtful individuals with starkly different political orientations arrive at the same policy solution, one might expect decision-makers in Ottawa to take notice.
 
I don’t think they will.
 
The problem is that neither proposal stipulates where the funding for these new resources should come from.
 
Indeed, there is a much more difficult conversation to be had about whether Canadians have the necessary ambition to pay (either via notable tax increases and/or significant cuts to other government programs) for the changes Ibbitson, Dunton, and the many others cited in Dunton's well-researched essay have proposed.
 
Regrettably, I don’t expect that conversation to end well.
 
In the meantime, as I suggested last month, it might be worth focusing on some of the low-cost moves the Trudeau Liberals could make to improve things around the edges:
 

1. Stick with a foreign minister for long enough to enable them to grasp the challenges facing their department at home and build relationships with their colleagues abroad.

 
    2.   Do more to keep the good people that we already have. From what I understand, most of them               simply want to feel appreciated. 

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On the challenges facing the US diplomatic corps, take a look at this recent essay from Foreign Policy by Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon.

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