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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent trip to France and the United Kingdom was a reminder there is a world beyond Donald Trump. It’s been quite a while since Canadians and their government talked about much of anything except the United States. It’s also been quite a while since Canada had a foreign policy.
Even before Trump’s return to the White House, Canada was struggling to adapt to a fundamentally reshaped global landscape. Writing in Canada Among Nations 2023: Twenty-First Century National Security, our colleague Jennifer Welsh vividly described the ways Canada’s world was being changed and challenged by:
the rebalancing of world politics in the direction of Asia;
a fracturing multilateral system;
the retreat of democracy;
the heightened prospect of conflict between the great powers;
the length and lethal nature of civil wars around the globe;
the catastrophic risks of climate change, pandemics and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction;
disruptive technology.
For years, Canada has been slow to respond appropriately to global threats that have been accumulating in number and severity.
The Justin Trudeau government became the prisoner of its tactics. Foreign policy was at best transactional, at worst adrift.
There were attempts to address problems, especially in the realm of defence and national security. Yet these were piecemeal and pursued only after a combination of domestic demands and pressure from Canada’s allies.
Now, Trump has added another layer of complexity to an already turbulent world. Faced with seismic shifts in the global environment, it is time for Canadian foreign policy to be revisited and fundamentally redefined to serve the national interest and provide some degree of strategic autonomy.
The next government should undertake a comprehensive reassessment of Canada’s role in the world based on five pillars: achieving strategic coherence; recognizing that domestic priorities are often foreign policy priorities; understanding that the bilateral relationship with the U.S., while under threat, will remain central; strengthening trade and security ties beyond North America; and bolstering foreign policy capacity based on appropriate levels of funding.
Strategic coherence: The last time a Canadian government gave serious consideration to thinking through its foreign policy was under former prime minister Paul Martin‘s Liberal government in 2005.
The Trudeau government set out policy guidance in a handful of ministerial speeches dating back to 2016 that were short on detail and often contradictory.
More recently, Ottawa has unveiled regional strategies – on the Indo-Pacific, on the Arctic and on Africa – that have been helpful, but that offered little innovation and relied on limited resources for implementation.
Regional initiatives are of little value if not anchored in a global approach that prioritizes them and explains how they fit together.
Is the Indo-Pacific now the regional imperative? Is it Europe? Or is it the two working in tandem? Is Africa finally to be taken seriously? Are there specific objectives and interests (the environment, human rights, disarmament) that Canada wishes to emphasize?
Foreign policy begins at home: Canada can project power and relevance outside its borders only if its own house is in order.
Key domestic policies have an important international dimension, whether it is increasing economic productivity; tearing down interprovincial trade barriers; getting natural resources to diverse markets; strengthening the defence industrial base; mining critical minerals; revitalizing the Arctic; revamping immigration policies; or strengthening borders.
Although international policy is ultimately a federal government responsibility, the provinces, territories, private sector and civil society organizations should be invested in foreign policy if it is to work for all Canadians.
The United States is unavoidable: No matter how disruptive the second Trump administration might be, the bilateral relationship is at the heart of Canada’s economic well-being and national security.
Trump has cracked the foundations laid by decades of Canadians and Americans living beside one another interdependently, but the gravitational pull southward will not magically disappear. Nor will the reality that the two countries share a continent and have no choice but to protect it together.
Canada has strengths that can be leveraged against the United States. With time, Trump will realize Canada is not going away.
Canada’s natural resources, its contributions to NORAD (including the recently announced development of over-the-horizon radar) and its management of the border are vital to the national interest of the United States. Canada must seek paths to collaborate when possible but resist when necessary.
Other partners are more important than ever: Canada must reach out to other places to ensure prosperity and security. Finding more inroads into the Indo-Pacific region and Europe is not an option but a necessity. Canada needs to strengthen trade ties, and solidify defence and security relationships in both regions, then look further afield.
NATO in its current form, with the U.S. as the core member, is close to gone. Canada should enhance its defence ties with its European counterparts. Co-operation with the Nordic countries in the Arctic is moving forward. Relationships with Australia, Japan and South Korea can be bolstered.
Canadians also ought to reevaluate their engagement with multilateral organizations, especially given America’s withdrawal from so many international bodies. Canada once was very good at international activism. Multilateralism combats bilateralism, the saying goes, and that’s true.
Building capacity with resources to match: The expenditure of two per cent of GDP on defence can no longer be put off. Canada needs a concrete plan to reach that target fast and then start preparing for 2.5 per cent, three per cent or even higher.
But there are other instruments of power, including diplomacy, development and intelligence gathering, that require strengthening and funding.
Global Affairs Canada must be restored as the robust and respected arm of government it once was. Serious consideration should be given to the establishment of a foreign intelligence agency.
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Development assistance will be a tempting target for cuts in government spending, but the example of the U.S. and the United Kingdom in gutting their aid programs should not be followed. Development assistance contributes to stability in troubled regions of the world and puts Canada and its values on the map.
The time is right for a serious debate about Canada’s place in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world. The discussion must be about much more than the bilateral relationship with the U.S.
Canada needs a foreign policy that views the world and its shifting dynamics in the clear light of day, identifies objectives, then calculates the resources and tradeoffs that must accompany them.
Trump’s America is predatory. It trains its sights on friends, openly courts previous foes such as Russia, puts longstanding alliances on life support and turns the rules-based international order on its head. But there are a world of opportunities beyond Trump.
A comprehensive reassessment of Canada’s role in the world will put the relationship with the U.S. in its proper perspective and exploit the possibilities opened up by Trump’s narcissistic international behaviour.
Study and analysis are the prerequisites of a smart foreign policy, but they cannot be drawn out and become an end in themselves, as they were in the Paul Martin era.
A good start would be to use the current election campaign to ask the leaders of all federal political parties how they intend to plan for, and pay for, the changes that are necessary to bring Canadian foreign policy into line with the hard realities of the 2020s.
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