The last time that a government in Ottawa reviewed Canada’s foreign policy was after Paul Martin took over as prime minister from Jean Chrétien in December 2003. He initiated a full review of Canada’s international policy in 2004 and published it in 2005 under the title A Role of Pride and Influence in the World, with separate statements on diplomacy, defence, development assistance, and trade. However, after Stephen Harper took office after the Conservative Party of Canada won the January 2006 election, the new government decided that it would not follow the path of every new prime minister since Pierre Elliott Trudeau and launch a foreign policy review. Harper governed for nine years without a review. Justin Trudeau made exactly the same decision after the Liberal Party of Canada won the October 2015 election.
Twenty years in politics is a long time. But the twenty years after 2004 has proved to be an exceptionally dramatic period. In just two decades, global politics has been transformed by three crucial developments. The first has been the rise of China, which under paramount leader Xi Jinping has pursued a nationalist policy that has often been unapologetically aggressive in its assertion of Chinese national interests. The second has been the long-term policy of the Russian Federation under President Vladimir Putin to reject cooperation with the West in favour of a revanchist effort to return to Russian dominance in its own neighbourhood that has seen the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale war against Ukraine that began in February 2022.
The third — and in my view the most important — transformation has been in the United States, with the rise of Donald J. Trump and his America First policies. Between 2017 and 2021, Trump’s unambiguous rejection of the American-led rules-based international order strained relations between the United States and its friends and allies. While the election of Joe Biden in 2020 provided some relief from Trump’s bizarre diplomacy, the relief has been limited. For the Biden administration, despite all of its much-appreciated efforts to undo the damage that the Trump administration did to American global leadership, is actually as deeply protectionist as the Trump Republicans. Moreover, the relief may be temporary. Trump is seeking to return to the White House. All signs point to him breezing to the Republican nomination for president in 2024. Importantly, he also has a plausible path to victory. But even if a Democratic administration is re-elected, the United States has been severely weakened by the continued strength of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement; by the fact that the Republican Party continues to be the party of Trump; and by the continued enthusiastic support of tens of millions of American voters for Trumpism and for a Republican Party that continues to embrace illiberalism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.
While the Trudeau government has adjusted some aspects of Canada’s foreign and defence policies to take into account these dramatic changes, the coming about has been limited. Canada’s international policy today remains essentially designed for a world that is in the process of disappearing. And if Trump that world will most assuredly be gone.
Unfortunately, the unwillingness of both Conservative and Liberal governments in the last two decades to review foreign policy has left Canadians fundamentally unprepared to grapple with this new — and unfamiliar — geostrategic environment. Instead, Canadians have been encouraged by their governors, both Liberal and Conservative, not to take global politics seriously — or the spending that invariably comes with taking global politics seriously.
While Canadian leaders often sniff at foreign policy reviews as a navel-gazing waste of time, they tend to overlook one of the key functions of such reviews: the educative function. This is particularly true if these reviews feature a public element of the sort that the reviews undertaken by both the Mulroney Conservatives and Chrétien Liberals featured, when Parliament was intimately involved in the review exercise. But even when the reviews are undertaken by the bureaucracy — as the foreign policy reviews of Trudeau père (1970) and Martin (2005) were, or the defence reviews of Trudeau père (1971), Martin (2005), Harper (2008), and Trudeau fils (2017) were — the published results inevitably spark a public debate that serves to educate Canadians by familiarizing them with contemporary shifts in global politics and providing them with a discussion of possible options for dealing with that new environment.
What kind of review of foreign and defence policy would best start a conversation with Canadians about their new geostrategic environment? While the kind of review undertaken in the past would be better than nothing, the profound geostrategic changes of the last decade call for a departure from the ordinary.
A real change would involve the government appointing a royal commission to review Canada’s international policy. Royal commissions have particular advantages for taking a fresh look at long-running and complex policy issues of the sort that Canadians are facing globally in the 2020s. Consider the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, the commission appointed by Trudeau père in 1982 and headed by a former minister of finance in his government, Donald S. Macdonald. The Macdonald Commission was well financed, independent of the government of the day, and undertook a range of studies on a range of topics. Its final report, in three volumes and backed up by a vast library of seventy-two volumes of academic research specially commissioned for the project, recommended that Canada embrace comprehensive free trade with the United States, a recommendation that was accepted by the new Mulroney government.
The Royal Commission model for a foreign and defence policy review was advocated first by Roland Paris of the University of Ottawa in October 2019, and echoed the next year by Jean-Christophe Boucher of the University of Calgary. The royal commission option would provide a number of benefits. First, a royal commission would mean that the process of examining future foreign policy options for Canada would be out of the hands of both elected members of Parliament in Cabinet and the bureaucrats in Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence. This would ensure that the review would not be hung up providing justifications for existing policy or rationales for policies that would primarily serve the partisan interests of politicians or the bureaucratic interests of civil servants.
A royal commission would also have the kind of freedom to discuss matters openly that governments simply do not have. No Cabinet minister is in a position to discuss sensitive geostrategic issues such as the likely impact of global politics on Canada frankly and freely without having to worry that their views would be politicized. The ability to talk freely — and thus possibly undiplomatically — about the tectonics of contemporary global politics is crucial for providing Canadians with a better understanding of the political challenges — and the mounting tax bills that will invariably come with taking geopolitics more seriously — that they will face in the years ahead.
Kim Richard Nossal 