The retired Canadian diplomat John Graham wrote a piece for the Hill Times last week recalling that it has been nearly ten years since the Harper government ended Ottawa’s support for the teaching of Canadian Studies overseas.
 
For 38 years, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade’s (DFAIT’s) “Understanding Canada” program had made about $5 million available annually to university faculty studying Canada from abroad who wanted to travel here for research.
 
In exchange for the financial support, the professors committed to teach Canadian Studies courses at their home institutions for a number of years thereafter.
 
At the time, eliminating funding for what practitioners call cultural diplomacy was supposed to be an easy political decision, especially for a government committed to returning the budget to balance in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
 
Indeed, withdrawing support to haughty university professors who might well have used their trips to produce research critical of the prime minister and his party must have pleased the Conservative base.
 
The only problem was that an internal DFAIT report had concluded that Understanding Canada was growing the Canadian economy by $70 million per year.
 
It turns out that those professors spent a lot of money while they were here. Many also brought their families, and their students, with them.
 
Nonetheless, the Harper government’s majority in the House of Commons assured the program’s demise.
 
Outside of international Canadian Studies departments that had to scramble to survive, Understanding Canada was rarely mentioned again until June 2019, when the Senate’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (chaired, ironically, by a Conservative, A. Raynell Andreychuk) released a 103-page report: “Cultural Diplomacy at the Front Stage of Canada’s Foreign Policy.”
 
The committee recommended that Global Affairs “support the creation of a modernized Canadian Studies program that would contribute to knowledge about Canada in the world.” 

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

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

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

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

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