​Last week, the Centre for International Governance Innovation’s Wesley Wark published an article in The Globe and Mail calling on Ottawa to close the Russian embassy, recall the Canadian ambassador from Moscow, and reduce the staff at the Canadian embassy “to a small consular establishment.”
 
Wark finds it “repugnant” that Ottawa continues to maintain diplomatic relations with a country whose military is committing war crimes in Ukraine.
 
He also does not believe that the staff at the Canadian embassy in Moscow can do much of anything right now.
 
“There are no back channels to call into play,” he contends, “no helpful fixer role to be played.”
 
Moreover, whereas our EU allies have expelled over 230 Russian officials since Ukraine was attacked, Canada has not expelled any.
 
When reporters asked Prime Minister Trudeau about the idea, he noted that Russia would likely respond similarly, and he wasn’t sure whether “the symbolic gesture of excluding Russian diplomats from what they are doing in Canada is worth the cost of losing our diplomats in Moscow.”
 
As for Canadian officials in Russia being ineffective, the prime minister claimed they were “giving us feedback on what the Russian people are doing, connecting with civil society and understanding and supporting Canadians and others who happen to be in Russia at this time.”
 
I would make Trudeau's case somewhat differently:
 
Canadian interests are best served within an international system based upon transparent and predictable rules and laws.
 
We can’t compete when more powerful states make up the rules as they go along; we do better when we can plan ahead.
 
A sudden closure of the Russian embassy in Ottawa would undermine our commitment to a predictable diplomatic order.
 
If Russian aggression was the problem, why didn’t we order the embassy closed a month ago?
 
If Russian war crimes were the reason, why does Syria still have an embassy in Ottawa?
 
To me, the fact that our EU allies are reducing their missions in Moscow makes the case to stay the course even more compelling.
 
By remaining in Moscow, Canadian diplomats can augment the EU’s consular capacity should EU citizens in Russia become endangered.
 
Such capacity matters.

Recall just two years ago, when Iran shot down Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752, killing 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents.
 
Having shuttered our embassy in 2012, Ottawa’s response was slowed by the need to rely on Italy to coordinate on its behalf.
 
To his credit, Wark does call for Canada to maintain a bare-bones consular presence in Russia, but he seems to assume that Moscow will allow that to happen.
 
I’m not so sure.
 
Twice in the last five years, Canadian adversaries have reacted disproportionately to Ottawa’s diplomatic actions.
 
Consider Saudi Arabia’s over-the-top response to a Tweet from Global Affairs Canada in August 2018.
 
Or Chinese hostage diplomacy in the aftermath of Canada’s arrest of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou in fulfillment of a US extradition request.
 
It seems to me that an order to close the Russian Embassy in Ottawa could just as easily lead Moscow to not only close ours right back, eliminating consular access for Canadians in need, but also take further steps to punish innocent Canadians arbitrarily.
 
All of this is not to say that Russian diplomats in Canada should get a free pass. Rather, Ottawa should respond to any inappropriate Russian activity on a case-by-case basis.
 
So, by all means, order individual Russian representatives responsible for Tweeting out disinformation to go home, but do so because they violated Canadian policy “against manipulated, deceptively altered or fabricated media.”
 
Such a measured, transparent move would preserve our interest in a stable and predictable international order as well as Ottawa’s capacity to support Canadians (and others) in Russia as needed.
 
In sum, now is not the time to take unnecessary diplomatic risks so that we can feel better inside.
 
***
On the disproportionate diplomatic responses that Canada has faced of late, see this thoughtful piece by the University of Ottawa’s Roland Paris.
 
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Last week, Canada’s former chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in a case that focused on whether he had pressured a subordinate, Major Kellie Brennan, to lie to military police about their long-term sexual relationship.
 
As per his plea agreement, he was granted a conditional discharge:
 
In exchange for his full confession, the successful completion of a year of probation (including a communications ban with Brennan on issues other than care for the child they had together), the payment of child support, and 80 hours of community service, Vance will emerge from the ordeal without a criminal record.
 
According to reports from the National Post, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star, Ontario Court Justice Robert Wadden noted that while Vance’s actions were “serious,” it appeared to him that “other than this, [he] was a man of good character.”
 
“I don’t feel it is necessary to burden you with a criminal conviction,” Wadden added, “because I feel that will allow you now to go on and to make further contributions to society.”
 
The following day, the Post’s Sabrina Maddeaux offered a scathing critique of the case’s outcome:
 
“The ongoing saga of retired general and ex-defence chief Jonathan Vance is a prime example of how our courts fail the vulnerable while tipping the scales of justice in favour of the wealthy, the decorated and the male.
 
… Vance was allowed to walk away from his sole criminal charge with what can’t even be described as a slap on the wrist. Rather, the presiding judge practically held his hand in solidarity.”
 
Although I understand Maddeaux’s reaction, I wonder whether one element of the outcome might be more complicated than she lets on.
 
Consider the sense of urgency evident in this excerpt from Major Brennan’s victim impact statement: “I don’t want him to have any power over me or the ability to influence me in my lifetime. I want to live free of fear of ever doing anything he tells me to do. I want to be free, heal, and keep my children safe, happy, and look to the future.”
 
The plea agreement seems to allow Major Brennan to begin her healing process sooner than would otherwise have been possible.
 
If she supported it, as Crown attorney Mark Holmes says she did, then I can see why the Crown might have chosen to close the case quickly, even if that meant agreeing to a lighter sentence than may have been possible otherwise.
 
On the other hand, I’m really struggling to understand Justice Wadden’s comments.
 
Presumably, he could have justified his decision to accept the plea by noting that both sides had agreed to it.
 
How could he not realize that his reflections on Vance’s character were, at the very least, remarkably insensitive – at a time when the cultural challenges facing the Canadian Armed Forces make such insensitivity inexcusable?
 
Back in 2017, Conservative MP Rona Ambrose introduced a private member’s bill which sought to compel any lawyer that wanted to become a judge to take a course in sexual assault law.
 
The bill was a response to Federal Court Justice Robin Camp’s conduct in a 2014 sexual assault trial, during which he asked the victim why she didn’t just keep her “knees together” to prevent the assault.
 
Ambrose’s bill died prior to the 2019 election, but was re-introduced as government legislation in February 2020. (I believed it died again last summer.)
 
The bill has always made me nervous.
 
As my former colleague at Massey College, Gib van Ert, has argued, taking responsibility for judicial training out of the hands of the arms-length Canadian Judicial Council risks politicizing the legal process and “undermining public confidence in our judges’ independence from government.”
 
The Vance case is forcing me to reconsider that view.
 
It’s been five years since Camp was forced to resign. The Canadian Judicial Council has had plenty of time to improve its education programs on its own yet, clearly, more still needs to be done.
 
I can only hope that members of the legal profession recognize how critical it is that they get this right, and soon.
 
If not, it will be hard to criticize Ottawa for stepping in.
 
***
On culture and the Canadian Armed Forces, there are some good essays in Alistair Edgar, Rupinder Mangat, and Bessma Momani’s Strengthening the Canadian Armed Forces through Diversity and Inclusion.
 
***
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It was Commonwealth Day last week (I, too, didn’t know there was such a thing), and both the CBC and Open Canada published articles about it that got me thinking.
 
At the CBC, Janet Davison, noted the “longstanding debate and questions over the role and relevance of the organization” without coming to any strong conclusions.  
 
The article on Open Canada, by community advocate Spencer van Vloten, called for Ottawa to abandon the club altogether.
 
Van Vloten argues that even as the Commonwealth claims to be dedicated to promoting “equality, diversity, and shared values,” it includes as members a number of states well-known for their human rights abuses.
 
Canada gains little economically from the association, most of which is with Great Britain anyways.
 
As for our historical Commonwealth ties, Canadians are growing increasingly detached from the monarchy, and contemporary Canadian values are “at odds with a system of hereditary privilege” that forms its basis.
 
The article concludes as follows:
 
“When it comes to the Commonwealth, the tens of millions of dollars* Canada contributes each year to keep this ineffective, increasingly irrelevant club afloat could instead be spent improving the lives of Canadians in a time of great need.”
 
[*Canada actually contributes just over $10 million per year, hardly a negligible amount of money, but much less than “tens of millions.”]
 
It seems to me that there are at least three strong reasons to reject van Vloten’s argument, each of which speaks to the importance of understanding the role of diplomacy in contemporary Canadian statecraft.
 
First, and most important, the Commonwealth offers Ottawa a significant (54-country) venue for international negotiations that does not include the United States.
 
Put more practically, the Commonwealth’s biannual heads of government meeting provides Canadian prime ministers with a regularized opportunity to meet with their UK, Australia, and New Zealand counterparts (the other non-American Five Eyes members) without drawing potentially embarrassing attention to Washington’s exclusion.
 
Canadian prime ministers gain similarly privileged, unimpeded access to the heads of government of India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Singapore, among others.
 
Second, at the operational level, Commonwealth membership provides Ottawa with regular access to nearly all of CARICOM, some of the fastest-growing countries in Africa, as well as a majority of the world’s small-island developing states.
 
In these latter cases, Canada’s status as the second-largest Commonwealth donor (along with its close relationship to the United States) makes it a country to which many of these smaller states will gravitate.
 
Such gravitation is what I suspect (and hope?) Foreign Minister Joly meant last week when she heralded Canada’s convening power: the depth and scope of our diplomatic network enables Canadian officials to assemble diverse groups of states with otherwise divergent interests on behalf of allies whose Rolodexes might be leaner.
 
Such convening power increases our international relevance, and occasionally allows Ottawa to shape the broader global diplomatic agenda in line with the national interest.
 
Finally, I wonder whether van Vloten has underestimated the strategic implications of a Canadian decision to unilaterally exit the Commonwealth.
 
Were the organization to lose its second largest donor, if it were to survive at all, it would be a shell of its former self, and Canada would be to blame.
 
Such negative international attention would be particularly harmful to a country whose interests are best promoted and protected in a multilateral system of rules and laws.
 
Once we make our own commitment to international organization conditional (and based solely on an overly rigid conception of 'what's in it for us'), we compromise our ability to criticize others for doing the same.
 
In sum, the practice of diplomacy in the modern era is significantly more complicated than a simple quantification of the measurable benefits and drawbacks of membership in an international organization.
 
For a country like Canada, that typically lacks the resources to effect drastic change in bilateral negotiations with the more powerful states, venues that allow for relationship-building with some of the international community’s smaller members – outside of the American shadow – should be welcomed, not nickel-and-dimed.
 
***
On the history of Canadian multilateralism, see the third edition of Tom Keating’s, Canada and World Order: The Multilateralist Tradition in Canadian Foreign Policy.

***
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I read a lot of stories last week about whether the crisis in Ukraine will lead Ottawa to increase the defence budget to 2% of gross domestic product (GDP).
 
The arguments to do so typically include that:

• we committed to this NATO target a number of years ago but have never come close to meeting it;
• the world has gotten more dangerous and we can no longer afford to spend any less;
• among NATO’s 30 members, only Slovenia, Belgium, Spain, and Luxembourg spend a lower percentage of GDP on defence than we do;
• now that our fellow shirkers, Denmark and Germany, have pledged significant increases to their defence budgets, we really have no excuse.

 
Carleton University’s Steve Saideman has provided a compelling, straightforward explanation as to what the focus on 2% of GDP tends to miss:
 
“I mean, Canada was not criticized for being under two per cent when it had 3,000 troops in Kandahar and was engaged in difficult combat.”
 
I’d explain things even more crassly.
 
Canada could spend 2% of its gross domestic product on defence tomorrow if we doubled the salary of every member of the Canadian Armed Forces.
 
And while such a move might help a bit with recruitment and retention, it would do next to nothing for Ukraine, for NATO, or for North American defence.
 
What’s more, basing your defence budget on the size of your economy doesn’t make logical sense.
 
Major conflict often leads to an economic recession, which means a decline in a country’s GDP. So if you track your defence budget to GDP, you might end up cutting defence spending while at war.
 
All of this is not to suggest that Canada spends enough on defence, but rather that, instead of focusing on it as a percentage of GDP, Ottawa should be (1) determining what needs to be defended; (2) ensuring that we have the capacity to do so (we have some pretty serious recruitment, retention, and procurement problems right now that make me wonder what the Department of National Defence would do if too much new money arrived all at once); (3) costing the commitments; and then (4) figuring out how to pay for them.
 
Even more important, it seems to me that if the national conversation in response to the situation in Ukraine ends up emphasizing how much we spend, or don't spend, on defence, then many of the lessons that were supposed to have been learned from Afghanistan have already been forgotten.
 
Militaries do not fight 21st century wars alone. We need diplomats at relevant international fora; intelligence gatherers in the field; humanitarian aid workers on the ground; immigration officials administering the increasing numbers of refugees and displaced persons that wars create; settlement workers supporting those refugees once they arrive here; mental health professionals dealing with their trauma.
 
There is a tendency for people who study national security to talk a good game about these additional folks during peacetime, and then to forget about them when bullets start to fly.
 
Such was the case in Afghanistan, and it made a mess of the relationships between the Department of National Defence and the broader national security community; compromised Canada’s overall effectiveness; and left bureaucratic scars that have yet to fully heal.
 
So rather than having a conversation about the defence budget, let’s have one about national security writ large. And then let’s spend what it takes to keep Canadians, and the liberal democratic order upon which we depend, safe and prosperous.
 
***
One of Canada’s leading historians of security and intelligence, the University of Toronto’s Tim Sayle, had a provocative piece in the National Post last week about how Canada might best contribute to NATO in the future. Sayle wrote the book on the history of NATO, and his argument deserves serious consideration.
 
***
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The ongoing tragedy in Ukraine has revived the climate debate here in Canada, and not for the better.
 
On one side seems to be just about everybody who wrote for the National Post last week. Consider, for example, this piece by Colin Craig, president of a think tank called SecondStreet.org.  
 
In “How we helped pay for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Craig claims that the Trudeau government’s failure to build oil and gas pipelines to Europe and Asia has compelled our overseas allies to rely on Russia for energy, hence fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
 
Setting aside the obvious partisanship (the Harper government didn’t build overseas pipelines either), the argument assumes that deriving energy from fossil fuels is the only way to grow an economy.
 
Surely, one could also use Craig’s premise – that oil and gas revenues are paying for Putin’s war – to conclude that if the West had fully weaned itself off fossil fuels by now, we could have so disrupted Russia’s economic centre of gravity that Putin would not have been able to attack Ukraine in the first place.
 
On the other side are people like environmental journalist Arno Kopeky, whose recent essay in the Globe and Mail comes with the headline: “Increasing fossil fuel production will not lead to peace.”
 
Kopeky argues that “From the moment they were discovered, fossil fuels have been intimately tied to the largest outbreaks of violence in our species’ history.”
 
To him, fossil fuels are basically evil.
 
Setting aside the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who have been lifted out of poverty by the productivity increases achieved through fossil fuel energy, the argument seems to assume that all of these fuels are equally problematic.
 
It’s as if burning coal and burning natural gas cause the same environmental damage.
 
When such arguments form the framework of a debate, I wonder whether either side even wants to convince the other to change its mind.
 
It seems to me that a serious conversation would have to begin with an agreement on some basic ideas:
 
The discovery and successful exploitation of fossils fuels around the world has led to extraordinary growth, but that growth has come at a cost to the environment.
 
It has also enriched and empowered a number of brutal dictators along the way.
 
The long-term solution is a global economy that runs on renewable energy. But we won’t get there tomorrow, and there is a compelling logic – at least in the short term – to using natural gas to help wean us off coal, and then oil. (Nuclear power could also help.)
 
What does this mean for Ukraine? Next to nothing.
 
We aren’t going to build the infrastructure necessary to export liquid natural gas to Europe in time to make any difference to the current war.
 
But to expect Europeans to wean themselves off fossil fuels cold turkey is to disregard the extraordinary harm that would be inflicted upon the continent’s most vulnerable during the process.
 
In short, there is no easy solution here, and turning the crisis in Ukraine into a hyperbolic debate about fossil fuels and climate change doesn’t help anyone.
 
***
On the environment and Canadian politics, I will be watching how Lisa Raitt, Jim Dinning, and Ken Boessenkool’s new organization, Conservatives for Clean Growth, affects the party’s leadership race.
 
***
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​Last week, as things in Ukraine went from awful to catastrophic, the Globe and Mail published a lengthy analysis of the potential financial impacts of international sanctions against Russia on Canadian businesses.
 
It turns out that because Canada, Ukraine, and Russia produce a number of the same products, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to destroy the liberal democratic order that has kept us safe for close to 80 years could actually benefit quite a few Canadian producers.
 
Farmers (wheat), miners, and people in the fertilizer business (potash and phosphates) are among those set to profit the most, along with members of the forestry and energy sectors.
 
The losers could include restaurants, food producers, grocery stores and, of course, individual Canadians who should expect to see increases to the cost of living continue to accelerate.
 
The article got me thinking about the difference between supporting a cause, and sacrificing for it.
 
In Canadians’ recent experience with international conflict, we’ve been good at the former, but rarely called upon to do the latter.
 
Consider Afghanistan: For the first time in our history, Liberal and Conservative governments in Ottawa cut personal and corporate taxes while members of the Canadian Armed Forces were losing their lives in combat overseas.
 
Put crassly, while the CAF (and their families) went to war, the rest of Canada went shopping.
 
Sure, most of us supported the troops and their families, but it sure didn’t cost us much.
 
If the Ukrainians can continue to hold off Putin and his thugs, and the international sanctions regime against Russia remains in place indefinitely, Canadians will likely be asked to do more than just support Ukraine; most of us will have to make sacrifices.
 
Environmentalists will have to hold their noses while Western Europe burns coal to compensate for a lack of access to Russian oil and natural gas.
 
Fiscal conservatives might have to come to grips with tax increases to pay for enhancements to our armed forces, our cyber defences, and our domestic security operations to defend the national interest in a significantly more dangerous world.

New parents might have to deal with a delay in the achievement of $10-a-day childcare  as Ottawa reprioritizes spending on national and international security.
  
Businesses with plans in place to welcome new immigrant workers might have to wait so that Ottawa can offer those immigration opportunities to Ukrainian refugees.
 
New Canadians could face delays in their ability to sponsor family members to move here for the same reason.

(Responsible) provincial leaders whose fiscal balance sheets are benefiting from the death and destruction of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe might have to recalculate their budgets to enable the successful integration an influx of unanticipated refugees.
 
All of us will almost certainly have to deal with higher prices at the pump, a bigger number on our grocery bills, and new costs to improve our individual and collective cyber hygiene to defend against the Russian threat.
 
No one should expect this to be easy.
 
The national willingness to make sacrifices for the greater good at the beginning of the current pandemic was inspirational, but the last few months in particular have seen too many Canadians privilege their own “freedoms” over the idea of collective safety and security.
 
In that context, it seems to me that if there ever was a time for our political leaders to level with us about what might lay ahead, now would be it.
 
The onus is on the federal government to make the first move. But Canadians will only believe a prime minister with negative approval ratings if members of the opposition back him up.
 
***
For a sense of the societal transformation that could be necessary here in Canada, take a look at what's happening in Germany.

To support Ukrainian refugees, you can donate here.
 
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​Ryan Tumilty had a story in the National Post this weekend that provides a fairly comprehensive summary of the events leading up to the federal government’s imposition of the Emergencies Act.
 
That said, I wonder whether he’s missed something on the foreign policy side.
 
Tumilty identifies the turning point in federal policy as the weekend of February 12-13. He notes that even early on Friday, February 11th, Prime Minister Trudeau was calling the blockades a local law-enforcement issue.
 
He then quotes a source that says: “The absolute state of mayhem that it was over the (second) weekend, I think cemented to everyone that this is beyond the capacity of local law enforcement.”
 
I accept the timeline, but I’m not certain we can really understand the change in the government’s posture without taking into consideration the personal intervention of US president Joe Biden that Friday.
 
Biden called Ottawa to make clear that the blockades at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor and at other border crossings were unacceptable and had to be ended.
 
The American read-out of the conversation noted that “The Prime Minister promised quick action in enforcing the law.”
 
The Canadian read-out added: “The leaders agreed to continue closely coordinating bilateral efforts to ensure our respective authorities have all of the tools and information required to bring these illegal actions to an end as quickly as possible.”
 
In my experience studying the history of Canada-US relations, taking these two sentences together suggests that if Ottawa did not resolve the border situation soon, Washington would do so on its behalf.
 
As CTV News’s Rachel Aiello and Sarah Turnbull reported, almost immediately following Biden’s call, the prime minister’s tone changed.
 
All of a sudden, “‘everything’ – with the exception of deploying the Canadian Armed Forces” was on the table.
 
If you read the text of the Emergencies Act announcement, you’ll find a number of references to the Ambassador Bridge and to border security.
 
There’s a similar reference in subsection (b) (iii) of the February 14th Order in Council.
 
And don’t forget the always perceptive Paul Wells of Macleans, who drew attention to the significance of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland’s comments justifying the new policy:
 
“We fought tooth and nail to protect Canada’s privileged relationship with the United States during the NAFTA negotiations, and we stood up to the 232 tariffs that were illegal and unjustified. We won’t let these hard-won victories be tarnished. The world is watching us. Our jobs, prosperity and livelihoods are at stake. That’s why the government is acting.”
 
As an outsider who was not privy to the Biden-Trudeau conversation, it’s hard for me to be certain of anything, but based on what I’ve read, the Canadian government might well have imposed the Emergencies Act as a form of what the late Norwegian historian Nils Ørvik once called “defence against help.”
 
In other words, Ottawa did whatever it took to defend itself against “help” from Washington that would have compromised Canada’s sovereignty.
 
Why does this matter?
 
Because once things have calmed back down, I suspect that most Canadians will be focused on understanding what happened in Ottawa itself: the failures of the local police, the provincial Tories, and the federal Liberals to respond meaningfully until the situation was out of control.
 
We need an explanation for those failures, but if we don’t take the time to think seriously about the future of Canada-US border security, I fear that we will miss one of the critical lessons of this terrible month.
 
***
On “defence against help,” I recommend an article by Philippe Lagassé from International Journal. Don Barry and Duane Bratt wrote a longer piece here. There is also a more recent essay by P. Whitney Lackenbauer here. The original 1973 article can be found here.
 
***
A couple of additional political musings for a deeply political time:

• In his 2019 book, Promise and Peril: Justin Trudeau in Power, the CBC’s Aaron Wherry noted that the prime minister seems to be at his “most vulnerable when he [feels he] is doing well.” I can’t disagree. We seem to have a prime minister who too often plays down to the level of his competition. It cost Canadians dearly this month.

 

• In the period leading up to the 1995 referendum, Canadians faced a crisis of national unity far greater than the one we face today. At the time, we were led by a Liberal prime minister who failed to take the threat of Quebec separatism seriously until it was almost too late. Fortunately, the leader of the Progressive Conservatives, Jean Charest, put aside partisanship to help to keep Canada together. I can only imagine what might have happened had Charest thought instead: “So we need to turn this into the (prime minister’s) problem.” It’s easy to forget that there was a time when Conservatives took pride in being the adults in the room.

 
***
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I spent some time yesterday thinking about the so-called freedom convoy through the lens of foreign policy.
 
Setting aside the hyperbolic foolishness of one former leader of the Official Opposition, I remain convinced that the greatest threat to the security – and therefore also to the freedom – of Canadians is a successful attack on the United States planned in and/or launched from Canada.
 
In that context, inasmuch as I understand the media’s fixation on the horrific situation in Ottawa, it’s also worth paying attention to the problem along the Canada-US border in Coutts, Alberta.
 
I shudder to think of the impact of even a single lone wolf who were to use the chaos caused by the protestors to do serious harm to US travellers, or border officials.
 
More broadly, it seems to me that the greatest threat today to the liberal democratic values and ideals that have shaped the international order under which Canadians have prospered is the deterioration of respect for our fellow citizens that these sorts of convoys engender.
 
Disunity at home undermines our ability to promote and defend our interests abroad.
 
Consider, for example, how ongoing domestic chaos risks compromising Ottawa’s position as a dependable NATO ally in the face of increasing Russian military pressure on Ukraine.
 
I have therefore struggled to understand how members of the Opposition can criticize the government for failing to offer sufficient support to the people of Ukraine, and yet still all but welcome the disorder into which our capital has fallen on account of the extremists among the protestors.
 
Surely, they too can see Vladimir Putin grinning as the chief of the Ottawa police muses about requesting that our already over-committed Canadian Armed Forces take their eyes off of Eastern Europe to help restore order at home.
 
And I wonder whether Xi Jinping could even manufacture better evidence to support the claim he makes around the world that the liberal democratic way is inferior to China’s “proper socialist values.”
 
While I am therefore disappointed with members of the Opposition for their ignorance and self-aggrandizing behaviour, I cannot help but be critical of the government as well.
 
A serious conversation about global affairs in this country must begin at the top. And when you refuse to speak about Canada’s national interests in language that is at once nuanced yet also accessible, eventually the public comes to believe that foreign policy is both easy and unimportant.
 
It’s time for fewer media lines about so-called Canadian leadership and more detailed, authentic answers to questions about the thinking behind our actions, and inaction.
 
When the so-called rallies for freedom began, rather than posing for pictures, I would have liked to have seen members of Parliament from all sides of the House of Commons escorting health care workers to hospitals, and the vulnerable to appointments, while doing anything they could to augment the disappointing efforts of the Ottawa police to hold the nefarious elements within the convoy to account.

It should be possible to recognize the right to speak freely while at the same time standing up for the rule of law and the most vulnerable among us. Such a posture would be helpful at home, but it would also send a reassuring message to Canadian allies and counter our adversaries' efforts to undermine the liberal democratic order.

In sum, the foreign policy implications of the “freedom convoy” are too significant to ignore:
 
The situation in Coutts threatens our credibility as a reliable American partner and neighbour; the disappointing response of our political representatives has multiplied the social cleavages among us at a time when NATO needs Canadians to stand together; Ukraine - and the liberal order it has come to represent - is in greater danger than it has been in years; and Putin and Xi are laughing from afar.
 
If that’s what more freedom will get me, I’ll pass.
 
***
On the issue of deploying the Canadian Armed Forces to quell the protests in Ottawa, see this Twitter thread from Carleton’s Leah West.
 
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The late Canadian diplomat turned international affairs commentator, John Holmes, used to say that Canada was a regional power without a region.
 
It was a clever turn of phrase, but it also helped explain why, during the Cold War, Ottawa was well-positioned to pursue a middle-power-like agenda.
 
We looked like a serious country, but when it came to international security, to borrow a phrase from my father, we weren’t busy.
 
I’ve been thinking a lot about that idea recently in the context of ongoing public criticism of Canadian foreign policy.
 
Just last week, John Ivison of the National Post wrote: “The hard truth is that Canada doesn’t matter that much anymore.”
 
In The Line, Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney suggested something similar:
 
“The world is a dangerous, complicated, and challenging place, and getting more so with each passing day. And while our allies and partners are rolling up their sleeves and preparing to meet these challenges head on, they aren’t even bothering to give Canada a call.” 
 
They went on to cite Ottawa’s exclusion from AUKUS; a call by President Biden on Ukraine that included the UK, France, Germany, Poland, the EU, and NATO (but not Prime Minister Trudeau); and a meeting in Norway on Afghanistan that brought together the US, Britain, Germany, Italy, and the EU, but again, not Canada.
 
Gerson and Gurney claim that Ottawa has failed to take international relations seriously:
 
“We don’t spend the money, or put in the effort, or adopt the required policies that would cause our friends and allies to take us seriously. We’re seen as feckless, or free riders, or both, and instead of acknowledging the problem, we spin obvious snubs as signs of our deeper virtue.” 
 
There’s certainly some truth in what they’ve written. Historically, our country has too often pursued a foreign policy that, to crib from my RMC colleague and defence policy expert Joel Sokolsky, has started with the question: How much is just enough?
 
To make matters worse, too many Canadian governments have framed such frugality in absurdly self-congratulatory terms.
 
But I think that part of the challenge is also structural.
 
Take Canada’s rather accidental membership in the G7.
 
Being part of the G7 implies a degree of international importance.
 
But Canada is a country of less than 40 million people. The next smallest G7 member, Italy, has a population of about 60 million.
 
Put another way, the difference in population size between Canada and Italy is about the same as that between Canada and Mali, or Romania, or Chile.
 
The difference in population size between Canada and the smallest of the original G5 members is about the same as that between Canada and the Dominican Republic.
 
But shouldn’t those numbers make it easier for Ottawa to play the role, in Ivison’s terms, of “middle power interlocutor”?
 
Not really in 2022 – we’re too rich for that.
 
Canada has the world’s 10th largest economy, and we have economic interests everywhere. We cannot claim to be the disinterested, smallish impartial state we could in the 1950s when we traded almost exclusively with the United States and the United Kingdom, and Canadians of European descent formed the overwhelming majority of our population.
 
Norway has one-quarter of Canada’s GDP and is significantly more homogeneous. With that much less skin in the international game, it can make a more credible case to the world when it presents itself as a disinterested and well-meaning global problem solver.
 
So we’re a regional power without a region; a G7 country lacking the population necessary to keep up; and a middle power that has grown too wealthy and internationally-invested to appeal to the smaller states.
 
All of this is not forgive successive Canadian governments for their collective failures to take our international obligations sufficiently seriously.
 
And there is no question that most states would give anything for Canada’s “problems.”
 
But perhaps it wouldn’t hurt – at least occasionally – to judge political Ottawa with a touch of empathy.
 
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For some thoughtful ideas on where Canadian foreign policy should be heading, take a look at this essay by the former ambassador and current Canadian Forces College mentor, Kerry Buck. For more on the “golden age” of foreign policy, you could try this essay that I wrote a while back.
 
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I’ve been reading a fair bit of late about a paradox that’s become increasingly evident over the last couple of years:
 
Canadians are resilient people, but Canada has a serious resilience problem.
 
Consider this recent interview by the CDA Institute with Josh Bowen, a Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veteran who now teaches in the Disaster and Emergency Management program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
 
Bowen is rightly concerned that we have come to rely on our military too often in response to natural disasters.
 
The CAF is supposed to be “a force of last resort for when there is no other asset or capability available to address a problem.”
 
Nonetheless, Canada seems to lack any alternative, “civilian” means of dealing with floods, forest fires, and other crises.
 
Bowen’s frustration is palpable. “People do want to volunteer,” he writes. “People want to help.”
 
Laura Mitchell is one of those people.
 
Writing in The Line last week, the self-described “double-Pfizered stay-at-home mom with a reliable vehicle and time on my hands” recounted her frustration with not being able to do more to support Albertans on the front lines of managing the COVID-19 pandemic:
 
“I’m not suggesting I scrub in for a gallbladder removal or march in the doors and substitute in physics. But I refuse to entertain suggestions there isn’t administrative or organizational busy work that can be accomplished by an army of volunteers willing to take the weight off those on the front lines.”
 
Neither Bowen nor Mitchell are the first to make such arguments, nor will they be the last. But I have yet to see evidence that any government – federal or provincial – is interested in Bowen’s solution:
 
All we need, he says, is “a coordinated, federally supported, federally funded model to encourage people.”
 
Having taught strategic decision-making to both senior military personnel and senior civilian public servants at the Canadian Forces College for the last fifteen years, I’ve come to believe that part of government's aversion to such a solution comes from the difference between the way a good number of Canadians venerate our military but disdain our public service.
 
I certainly understand the former.
 
Members of the Canadian Armed Forces agree “to being lawfully ordered into harm’s way under conditions that could lead to the loss of their lives.”
 
This concept of unlimited liability “underpins the professional precept of mission, own troops and self, in that order... It also modifies the notion of service before self, extending its meaning beyond merely enduring inconvenience or great hardship.”
 
I share the overwhelming respect Canadians have for the burden that our troops accept on our behalf, and I agree that our government should spend what it takes to enable the CAF to succeed.
 
But look at how Mitchell describes the public servants involved in our response to COVID-19:
 
“Something that has bothered me since the beginning of this mess is the utter lack of imagination from the bureaucrats in charge of our major institutions about how to engage the rest of us in getting through this.”
 
Perhaps I'm too sensitive, but I suspect that her use of the term “bureaucrat” – rather than public, or civil, servant – comes with the implication that officials are habitually inclined to obsess over procedure at the expense of people’s genuine needs.
 
Mitchell is hardly alone in such thinking (indeed, I suspect that some readers feel the same way), which makes it easy for me to understand why a government would hesitate to replace military personnel with civilians in any capacity.
 
As Bowen concedes, even if Canada were to create a civilian volunteer capability to support the national response to emergencies, there would be organizational and training costs, not to mention a requirement to support the employers of these volunteers while also protecting their jobs during deployments.
 
That would mean we’d need some sort of bureaucracy.
 
Unfortunately, contempt for the public service – fueled in part by elements of the political class itself – has become so ingrained that it's easier for governments to risk burning out our military than it is to stand up the administrative structure necessary to support a cost-efficient, pride-inducing domestic civilian disaster response capacity.
 
Only in Canada could we be so frugal and yet so inefficient at the same time.
 
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On the implications of the increasing role of the CAF in domestic emergencies, see this helpful note by the Library of Parliament’s Marie Dumont, Ariel Shapiro and Anne-Marie Therrien-Tremblay.
 
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