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.
 
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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.
 
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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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