Global Affairs review a golden opportunity to shift gears on Canada’s incoherent foreign policy

It's good Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly has launched an operational review of Global Affairs Canada (GAC) to modernize her department’s culture and its cadre. As Daniel Livermore, senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, has observed, “the problems at GAC are so profound that they defy easy diagnosis. … Policy has been subordinated to sound-bites, and GAC has been reduced to a briefing note factory.” Joly should be very careful, therefore, not to turn this into a run-of-the-mill exercise about human resources, recruitment, or incremental administrative tweaks. That fact is some of our country’s best and brightest minds work for GAC. In terms of bureaucratic street cred, working at GAC is considered second only to working at the Privy Council Office. In other words, the problem is not the rank and file, nor the departmental culture. It is the lack of political leadership and informed policy direction. Since the Trudeau government came into power, Canada has had five foreign affairs ministers, each lasting on average a year and half. The results are obvious: our foreign policy is incoherent, mostly reactive, and it functions without any legible framework. The bureaucrats can’t be blamed for that. Things haven’t changed much under Joly. Perhaps she’s been distracted by the government’s gung-ho support of the war in Ukraine. Perhaps her hands are tied by the political operatives in the Prime Minister’s Office. Either way, from anti-China chest-thumping to 'never say never' to NATO, we appear to be stuck in an outdated terrain of reinforcing old alliances and hard-wiring foreign policy to defence and security. It's all about impending doom and gloom of uncertain times. This strange shift means we don’t talk about diplomacy, mediation, or trade and commerce, for that matter. Instead, as Budget 2022 made it abundantly clear, we talk only about fighter jets, missiles, and lethal assets. In the worst of times, a nation’s foreign policy should advance its strategic self interests. In the best of times, it should strengthen international institutions and the rule of law. In Canada, however, we appear to be following neither of these options. This is too bad. Our foreign policy independence of the Diefenbaker, Pearson, Trudeau senior, and Mulroney heydays has gone by the wayside, replaced with an increasingly offensive mode of alliance strengthening with the United States, with little or no tangential link to Canada’s self-interest, unless that interest is to lose our identity and agency to the Americans. The turfing of our ability to make independent decisions has limited our foreign policy options. With the political discussion focused only on wars, potential wars, regime changes, sanctions, and the like, we have narrowed Canada’s potential and influence in the world. Joly has a golden opportunity to shift gears. The modernization review of her department should be imaginative, inspired, and inventive. It should set us ahead of the curve from the rest of the world. There are major global issues that need Canada’s leadership: from climate change and the coronavirus, to the decline of democracy. The millions of people killed in the last two years were not killed by the Russians, they were killed by a micro-organism. The existentialist threat to the islands in the Indo-Pacific is not from China, they are sinking because of climate change. Likewise, liberal democracy is not running scared of some communist bogeymen, it is quivering under the weight of right-wing populism. And the trajectory of the tango between the United States and China is not heading to strengthen international rule of law, it's heading straight toward war. All of this is a zero-sum gain. Why would Canada want to get tangled up in it? Fact is, Canada’s foreign service officers don’t need fixing. They are smart and shrewd. They know how to get good policy work done. What they need is vision and creative direction. They need to be able to speak truth to the partisan power brokers. But above all, they need seasoned political leadership that innately understands the maxim that good policy makes good politics, not the other way around. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired director general with the federal government. He is a community organizer with a keen interest in Canadian foreign policy issues. The Hill Times

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Global Affairs review a golden opportunity to shift gears on Canada’s incoherent foreign policy

Our foreign policy is incoherent, mostly reactive, and it functions without any legible framework. The bureaucrats can’t be blamed for that.

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