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.
 
***
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.
 
***
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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I’ve written about what I call constructive opposition on this blog a couple of times before (here and here).
 
In each case, I’ve referred to the failure of Canada’s non-governing political parties to criticize the Trudeau Liberals in a manner that differentiates them in a positive way.
 
Having read the Globe and Mail’s coverage of the foreign aid community’s response to the federal budget, it seems to me that the problem is not just with our elected opposition.  
 
The article notes that Ottawa will be providing Global Affairs Canada with up to $375 million to support Canada’s international pandemic response in this coming year, along with another $165 million for international humanitarian assistance writ large.
 
The government has also promised annual increases to Canada’s development assistance budget for the next five years ($1.4 billion total), new money to respond to the Rohingya crisis ($288.3 million over three years), and assistance for Venezuelan refugees ($80.3 million over two years).
 
When asked for his reaction, Nicolas Moyer, the CEO of Cooperation Canada (formerly the Canadian Council for International Cooperation) which purports to speak for over 80 international development and humanitarian organizations, responded:
 
“In a moment where the world is facing its greatest crisis of a generation, the apparent ambivalence of our budget to the global crisis can arguably be interpreted as negligence.”
 
Cooperation Canada wants Ottawa to allocate 1% of Canada’s domestic COVID spending (or about $1.9 billion) to the international effort.
 
I am sympathetic to the basic argument that the pandemic will not end until it ends everywhere. Moreover, as one of the world’s wealthiest countries, Canada is certainly well positioned to contribute more than its fair share to make that happen.
 
But I can all-but-promise you that the Trudeau Liberals brushed off Moyer’s comments without flinching (if they noticed them at all).
 
I see three problems with his approach.

First, calling for more money is so predictable that the government would have factored such a critique into its announcement.
 
In other words, the Liberals were well aware that some groups wouldn’t be satisfied with the extent of their international commitment; that’s always the case.
 
Second, 1% is arbitrary. Why not 0.7% (to mimic the 0.7% of gross national income that the UN has called on all developed countries to contribute to international assistance)? Or 2%?
 
Or should percentages have anything to do with Canada’s commitment – the needs of the world have no direct relationship with the extent of the Canadian government’s domestic COVID-19 response budget.
 
A number without a compelling narrative is unhelpful.
 
Most important, there is little constructive in Moyer’s comments. 
 
Far more interesting, at least to me, would have been observations about the lack of an explicit strategy to distribute excess Canadian vaccines to countries in need.
 
Should our surplus be donated to COVAX? Handed out directly to governments? How might Ottawa prioritize? Cooperation Canada has the expertise to provide credible answers to these questions.
 
It is a shame that Moyer appears to have missed the opportunity to do so.
 
***
A pox (plague) on both their houses:
 
Back in 2014, the governing Conservative Party faced a major scandal surrounding how it dealt with Senator Mike Duffy’s expense claims. Those who follow politics will recall the controversy over how much Prime Minister Stephen Harper knew about the actions of his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, who paid Duffy’s bill to try to make the problem go away. At the time, Conservative partisans were adamant that Harper never knew that Wright had written a personal cheque. Members of the opposition, including the Liberals, were incredulous.
 
Flash forward to 2021 and the governing Liberal Party faces a scandal over how it dealt with allegations of sexual misconduct by the chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance. It turns out that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, had been briefed about the allegations. Now Liberal partisans are adamant that Trudeau should be taken at his word when he says he was not personally aware of the case, and the Conservatives are incredulous.
 
Going into politics is honourable. What excessive partisanship does to so many of our elected officials (and their supporters) is not.
 
***
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The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs’ David Carment and two of his graduate students, Ted Fraser and Sydney Stewart, wrote a commentary for the Hill Times last week that got me thinking.
 
(Disclosure: In the late 1990s, I took one of Carment’s classes. More recently, he contributed to my book with Chris Kukucha on the Harper government’s approach to world affairs).
 
The article is called “Why Trudeau can afford to fail on foreign policy,” and the pull-quote reads:
 
“Foreign policy rarely, if ever, decides elections, and the Trudeau government should be thankful for this.”
 
The authors use the essay to promote their Foreign Policy Report Card, an annual summary of the thinking of some of NPSIA’s experts on international affairs.
 
You are welcome to read the 68-page document in full (spoiler: the government got its worst overall grade yet, a ‘C’), but it is the argument about accountability in foreign policy that intrigues me here.
 
Carment and his students seem to be suggesting that Canadians should express their pleasure and disappointment with the government’s foreign policy through the ballot box.
 
I have three concerns with this line of thinking.
 
First, it assumes that individual governments exercise sufficient control over Canadian foreign policy so as to justify holding them exclusively accountable for its outcomes.
 
I’m not so sure: From where I sit, the constraints facing our practitioners are overwhelming.
 
No matter the government, the primacy of Canada’s relationship with the United States endures. Foreign policy is simply easier under certain administrations.
 
Add to that the benefits we accrue by the persistence of a liberal world order, and the room for manoeuvre becomes even more limited.
 
Significant deviations from the Canadian foreign policy norm will often amount to cutting off your nose to spite your face.
 
Indeed, Carment himself was just as critical of the previous Conservative government’s foreign policy as he is of the approach today.
 
Which leads to my second concern: Opposition parties are poorly positioned to offer plausible foreign policy alternatives.
 
In Canada, the government has a virtual monopoly on top-secret level security briefings. Without them, opposition proposals inevitably lack credibility.
 
For example, the third-party Trudeau Liberals might have articulated their 2015 peacekeeping promises less boldly had they been able to run them by our diplomatic corps and the Department of National Defence.
 
Third, Canadians shouldn’t be the exclusive assessors of Ottawa’s international conduct.
 
Surely, the Latvians’ views on Operation Reassurance should play a role in evaluating the effectiveness of our contribution. Recipients of Canadian international assistance should be consulted about the quality of our development programming. And to gage the acuity of our trade negotiators, their counterparts on the other side of the table should be consulted.
 
I don’t mean to suggest that a Canadian government’s foreign policy should get a free pass.
 
I, too, am critical of the Trudeau Liberals’ approach to global affairs, but my criticisms tend to focus on issues that are within Ottawa’s control.
 
For example, I am disappointed by the appointment of four foreign ministers in less than six years.
 
Mastering the international file takes time. Minister Champagne was only beginning to find his way when he was so abruptly replaced.
 
I also find the number of senior officials in Global Affairs Canada who have never taken the foreign service exam discomforting.
 
Morale is better when diplomats can legitimately envision themselves ascending to the most influential policy roles in their department.
 
When I vote, however, these concerns (among others) will form only a small part of my decision.
 
I see more harm that good in single-issue voting, especially when the issue offers limited potential for serious alternatives in policy approach.
 
***
On the politics of Canadian foreign policy, there is nothing more comprehensive than the book of the same name by Kim Richard Nossal, Stéphane Roussel, and Stéphane Paquin. It’s now in its fourth edition. I hope the fifth includes more about the place of Indigenous peoples in Canada’s international realm. Speaking of which, Alicia Campney’s recent piece about “How the Supreme Court’s carbon price review intersects with Indigenous rights and reconciliation” is worth a look. I learned a lot from it.

***
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Ever since Queen’s University’s Stéfanie von Hlatky and Tandy Thomas called for “a journey of culture change” within the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to stamp out sexual misconduct, I’ve been thinking a lot about specific steps available to the CAF to meet this challenge.
 
I claim no expertise in the area of gender and security, but as a faculty member at the Canadian Forces College (CFC), I have spent the last 15 years teaching and learning from over 100 senior officers (colonels and naval captains) and more than 1000 others at the mid-career level (majors and lieutenant-commanders), all of whom were selected to attend the CFC because of their leadership potential.
 
To be clear, then, I have no experience with non-commissioned members, nor have I worked with more junior officers.
 
With these caveats, and with the full academic freedom that I have been granted as a professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, here are three anecdotes that might inspire tangible change.
 
A training development officer once explained to me that they never expected to come to the CFC because people in their trade never progressed much further than the rank of major.
 
In class, they demonstrated genuine potential, but the scars from being told implicitly (and perhaps also explicitly) that they would never be a real leader in the Canadian Armed Forces were obvious.
 
Another officer was a star on the mid-career program. They remained at the College the following year as defence staff (part-time professional mentor, part-time co-instructor), and excelled again.
 
The collective institutional feeling at the time, to the best of my understanding, was that they were already everything the CAF could ask for in a future leader.
 
And I think they do still want to lead, but they would like to make their difference as a military chaplain.
 
Qualifying as a chaplain means not only going back to school, but also accepting a two-rank demotion. So they are no longer on the leadership track.
 
Finally, a few years ago, we welcomed the first military doctor to our executive-level program.
 
At the time, the CAF as an institution had yet to grasp the traumatic impact of service in Afghanistan on so many of its members.
 
The doctor’s intervention in a spontaneous conversation about mental health marked the first time that I’d seen some of the officers who had still had doubts about the seriousness of non-physical injuries sit up and listen.
 
He spoke humbly, but also with just the right amount of authority to break through.
 
All three of these officers are the sorts of people who could make a real difference within the CAF’s senior leadership.
 
But none of them ever will. (The doctor has already left.)
 
Written and unwritten rules prevent training development officers, chaplains, doctors, lawyers, military police, reservists, and all sorts of others who form part of our military’s proverbial “tail” (a disproportionate number of whom are women) from ever reaching the most senior ranks.
 
When I first asked why such choke-points existed, I was told that those who fight on the “frontlines” wouldn’t serve under anyone who had worked primarily in “supporting” roles.
 
I am ashamed that, at the time, I thought it made sense. I was as much a product of that same cult of masculinity as those explaining it to me.
 
What I have come to realize, however, is that not only does such thinking prevent some incredible people from fulfilling their potential as officers in the service of our country, it also denies those who do reach such positions of authority access to the diversity of thinking and experience that might otherwise inform and enhance military advice to government (not to mention efforts to improve the CAF as a whole).
 
No matter your intent, it’s hard to be empathetic when you have so little exposure to how the other half lives.
 
Fortunately, a growing number of senior CAF leaders agree: the increasing appearance of medical practitioners and military police on our executive-level course is a measure of real progress.
 
But doubters remain, and that’s a problem.
 
I continue to witness too many exceptional individuals who have unfailingly put service before self in support of their country leave the Canadian Armed Forces too soon, all because the institution has deemed them unqualified to lead at the most senior levels.
 
In sum, to change the CAF’s culture, it might be time to reconsider how we choose our most senior general and flag officers.
 
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For a similar argument by feminists who study these issues academically, take a look at this recent article in the Ottawa Citizen. As the authors note, Mount Saint Vincent University’s Maya Eichler is also a critical source.

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This past week, Trent University’s Christopher Dummitt and Concordia’s Zachary Patterson published a commentary in the National Post provocatively titled, “The results are in – there is an ingrained bias in academia against conservatives.”
 
(Disclosure: I have known Chris for years and have great respect for his work and his professionalism.)
 
The article summarized the findings of a report by a new American think tank, the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, called “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship.”
 
The report is hardly the first to suggest that a significant majority of university professors in the West situate their politics to the left of centre.
 
But it does appear to be the first to have included Canadian academics.
 
Dummitt and Patterson aren’t surprised by the results, nor am I, but we seem to see the implications of the study a little bit differently.
 
Dummitt and Patterson are most concerned that the relative homogeneity of theoretical and philosophical leanings among university faculty risks compromising the quality of peer-reviewed scholarship.
 
Like all human beings, scholars are naturally inclined to hold the arguments of others with similar beliefs to a lower standard of proof. So if left-leaning faculty dominate the academy, not only will left-leaning scholarship inevitably dominate the scholarly realm, it is also likely to get off easy during the peer review process.
 
“If universities continue to be dominated by only one part of the political spectrum,” they go on to write, “a large section of the population will have good reason to feel that their views are not being represented… leading to greater political polarization, diminished support for universities and distrust in the veracity of academic research.”
 
While there must be scholars who consciously give the benefit of the doubt to their like-minded colleagues, I apparently have more faith in the majority of my peers’ commitment to do their best to evaluate all scholarship objectively.
 
Personally, I not only make a deliberate effort to park my own views before serving as a reviewer, I have also refused to assess papers when I have had concerns about my ability, or willingness, to be impartial.
 
From a public policy perspective, then, I’m more interested in what the report's findings mean for conservative scholarship.
 
The fact that the overwhelming majority of Canadian faculty in the humanities and social sciences leans left doesn’t mean that there aren’t conservatives among us.
 
It just means that conservatives often end up working outside of the traditional academic setting. Indeed, a growing number can be found in think tanks that explicitly support scholarship with a conservative tilt.
 
(See, for example, my posts on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute here, here, and here.)
 
Since think tanks have strong incentives to publish findings that further their ideological agenda, it seems to me that conservative research fellows are even more likely than left-leaning university professors to arrive at conclusions that have not be subject to genuinely critical scrutiny.
 
At a time when Canadians are clamoring for new and better ways to deal with all sorts of pressing global challenges – from inequality, to climate change, to threats to the future of the liberal world order – we desperately need rigorous, innovative thinking from all sides of the political spectrum.
 
I regret that I don’t have any comprehensive solutions to offer. (Dummitt and Patterson’s suggestion that granting agencies should explicitly identify reviewers with particular political perspectives to basically “red team” research proposals with a political bent is neither feasible nor, I think, advisable.)
 
I do think, however, that those of us who write about contemporary public policy need to consciously subject our work to critics who are inclined to reject it more often, and we need to listen and respond thoughtfully to their objections. 
 
Doing so takes courage, but it is critical to the maintenance of the integrity of our profession.
 
As flawed as it can be, rigorous peer review remains the best means of assuring that Canadian strategic-decision makers are offered a diverse suite of policy solutions to navigate the challenges of the 21st century.
 
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Although I don’t always agree with either of them, I have found that Andrea Eidinger and Sean Speer can be relied upon to offer sincere and thoughtful commentary from the left and the right, respectively.

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