Last week, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States announced a new trilateral security partnership to counter Chinese aggression in the South Pacific (AUKUS).
 
AUKUS’s first project will see Washington negotiate the sale of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy, making Australia the only country other than Britain with access to such sensitive and powerful American technology.
 
The announcement was covered in the Canadian press in a manner that I found rather parochial.
 
The Globe and Mail’s front page read: “Canada left out as U.S., U.K., Australia strike deal to counter China.”
 
The National Post titled a piece from Reuters: “Canada left out of security deal between U.S., Australia and U.K. Trudeau unconcerned.”
 
And the Toronto Sun went with: “Trudeau’s Canada left out of new American-led security alliance.”
 
Fortunately, it did not take long for voices of reason to emerge. On his blog, the dean of Canadian foreign policy academics, Kim Richard Nossal, noted that Canada’s absence from the agreement was hardly news.
 
For one, the pact is deliberately exclusive. It does not include fellow US Quadrilateral Security Dialogue partners Japan and India, fellow US, UK, and Australia Five Eyes intelligence alliance partner New Zealand, or a long list of NATO partners who share an interest in China’s increasingly aggressive posture in the Indo-Pacific.
 
Second, Canada has never been a serious Pacific player, so there was no reason to anticipate Ottawa's involvement.
 
Two of this country’s best national security and intelligence practitioner-turned scholars, Stephanie Carvin and Thomas Juneau, were similarly unsurprised.
 
They echoed Nossal’s critique of Ottawa’s failure to take international security seriously, and added: “It is not clear that Canada would even want to join a partnership involving nuclear technologies, which has implications for proliferation.”
 
I am hardly afraid to express my disappointment with successive Canadian governments' approaches to foreign policy and national security (the way I would put it is that Canada is not important enough to be excluded from AUKUS), but given the new details that have emerged about the partnership since the announcement, I am relieved by this country’s absence.
 
The impetus for the arrangement appears to have been Australian disappointment with a $65 billion - $90 billion agreement to purchase diesel-powered submarines from France.
 
Apparently, Canberra secretly negotiated a better deal with Washington, and London somehow inserted itself into what has become, at least on paper, a broader arrangement.
 
Since the announcement, a furious Macron government has recalled its ambassadors from both Australia and the United States for “consultations," and French officials have gone so far as to accuse Canberra of “treason.”
 
Given the obvious sensitivities surrounding the agreement, it is no wonder that the Canadian government was caught by surprise, and equally obvious why it has been so open about its lack of awareness.
 
Three of Canada’s Five Eyes allies, two of whom are also NATO members and major trading partners, are now feuding with another NATO ally, significant trading partner, and co-founder (along with the Sûreté du Québec) of Francopol, an organization that promotes cooperation among French-speaking police forces.
 
Canada relies on collaboration with like-minded countries to survive and prosper; it is particularly exposed when its alliances are under threat.
 
Ottawa cannot solve this problem (unless it has a spare $60 billion to purchase the French submarines), and it lacks the diplomatic heft it might once have had to mediate.
 
In this particular case, then, there’s nothing wrong with being left out.
 
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I very much look forward to Carvin and Juneau’s forthcoming book, Intelligence Analysis and Policymaking: The Canadian Experience. It is set for release in December.
 
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On this election day in Canada, let me express my profound gratitude to every Canadian who put their name forward as a federal candidate. Although I might not agree with your politics, I have the highest respect for your willingness to stand up for your beliefs in the face of what has become an increasingly toxic political atmosphere.
 
An additional shout-out to those candidates who faced inexcusable abuse because of their gender, race, religion, or ethnicity. Your courage matters, as does your commitment to this obviously flawed, but still great country. 

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I wrote about my ambivalence towards discussions of Canadian foreign policy during federal elections back in April.
 
To me, given (1) how little room Ottawa has to manoeuvre in the international realm; (2) the difficulty opposition parties inevitably face in explaining how they would do things differently without access to the top secret intelligence that only Canadian governments receive; and (3) the need to include the views of non-Canadians in any credible assessment of Ottawa’s global posture, I don’t see how we can anticipate the serious foreign policy debate called for by a number of experts during an election.
 
Take the current effort to rescue Afghans fleeing the Taliban, for example.
 
It’s easy to criticize what the Globe’s John Ibbitson has called the “debacle in Kabul,” but it’s near impossible for the Conservatives or New Democrats to explain exactly what they might have done differently.
 
Similarly, every reasonable political party is going to be concerned with China’s rise as an illiberal state; with Russia’s cyber aggression; and with a nuclear-armed North Korea’s instability.
 
But Canada cannot respond to such challenges on its own, and Canadian foreign policy will inevitably be shaped by the positions of our most significant allies.
 
To be fair, I applaud the Conservatives for identifying critical minerals, money laundering, and an international corruption court as policy priorities.
 
It’s unusual for an opposition party to acknowledge some of the less flashy global issues that face Canadians today.
 
But again, it’s hard for me to believe that they would tackle them much differently than the Liberals. (Indeed, without a commitment to increase the budget of Global Affairs Canada (GAC), I’m not sure that they could.)
 
On the other hand, there are at least three foreign policy-related issues over which Canadian governments do have more control, and no party has talked about them at all since the election started:
 
1.      The selection of our foreign minister 

Under Stephen Harper, the Conservatives employed six foreign ministers over less than ten years.
 
Justin Trudeau’s Liberals have been no better, with four ministers in less than six.
 
So both parties have consistently undermined our capacity to build high-level bilateral and multilateral relationships in favour of other political priorities.
 
2.      Ambassadorial appointments 

While in Opposition, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives criticized the governing Liberals for reserving senior postings abroad for their friends.
 
When they took power, however, they accelerated the trend.
 
At first, the Trudeau Liberals seemed poised to reinvigorate the diplomatic corps. Most of the Harper patronage appointees were replaced by career public officials.
 
But more recently, they, too, have chosen partisans for Canada’s most notable international postings.
 
Erin O’Toole’s failure to condemn the move suggests to me that a new Conservative government would likely mean more of the same.
 
So both parties appear to underestimate the value of the expertise that career officials – and Canada’s are among the world’s best – have to offer.
 
3.      The management of our diplomatic corps 

The Harper government’s attitude towards Canada’s foreign policy specialists was contemptuous.
 
Embassies were shut, budgets were slashed, and officials were silenced, leading to a wave of early retirements and a persistent decline in morale.
 
The Trudeau Liberals’ sins have been less deliberate, but equally devastating.
 
Today, GAC is led by four deputy ministers, only one of whom (to the best of my understanding) has formal diplomatic experience in a posting abroad, and he been working in Ottawa since 2012. [Note: The original version of this post suggested that none of the four deputy ministers had ever served abroad. I thank David Ljunggren for correcting me on Twitter.]
 
While I recognize the need for deputies who can navigate political Ottawa, given the unique professional culture of our overseas cadre, it behooves any responsible government to ensure the presence of at least a couple of officials with experience deploying on Canada’s behalf at GAC's highest levels.
 
Indeed, GAC personnel cite a lack of empathy from their superiors as a reason for their personal and professional dissatisfaction.
 
I don’t expect that the O'Toole Conservatives would do better.
 
Page 97 of their platform rightly commits to addressing “the challenges of deployments and postings,” felt by military families, but it says nothing about the similar difficulties faced by foreign service officers.
 
In sum, Canada is not a great power. We promote and preserve our interests on the world stage through skilled diplomacy, which has traditionally been made possible by treating our foreign policy mandarins with the respect they have earned.
 
Such reverence has all but vanished under successive Liberal and Conservative governments, and I see no indication that it will be returning any time soon.
 
So if we’re going to talk about foreign policy during the final days of this election, let’s talk about that.
 
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For a summary of some of the defence and security issues that our next government will inevitably face, take a look at this press release from the CDA Institute. If you read French, Jocelyn Coulon is one of the few journalists with a history of taking foreign policy seriously. He generally writes for La Presse.

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