Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, June 10, 2023/Adam Scotti

By Jeremy Kinsman

February 21, 2024

It is a great pity that Canadian foreign policy and Canada’s role in the world are unlikely to figure prominently in the next election campaign. Most Canadians may not notice, being submerged in the familiar water of Canada World.

The inwardness of minority government reinforces the effect of more or less total self-involvement. Public and political priorities are pocketbook issues: housing costs, an over-stressed and increasingly dysfunctional health monopoly in most provinces, and clogged streets in the bigger cities, where higher population density has outstripped services.

Of course, the most dramatic world issues do make it to our virtual “front page,” notably two wars, between Ukraine and Russia, and between Israel and Hamas/Palestine. But there is little discussion of what, if any, role Canada might have in how they end. Canadians have seemingly become accustomed to being spectators of such defining world events. Our government issues declarations once a consensus has been formed by our allies. These communications try to placate Canadian opinion, supportive of Ukraine and Israel, but sitting on the fence over the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) onslaught on Gaza.

But on developments, political and other, in the United States, Canadians are more alert, because it remains our ever-predominant market, and because American attitudes and trends have a way of crossing the border into our own political discourse. The way Donald Trump’s extremism and hostility have eviscerated the centre in the US is pretty painful to Canada’s comfort zone, which was built with the bricks of moderate accommodation. A very large majority of Canadians recoil from Trump (only 14% approved of his performance in recent polls), though his MAGA nationalist agenda has some emotional purchase, particularly in Alberta.

By contrast, Canadian opinion has been generally aligned with the Biden administration’s globalist perspective. Trump’s “America First” mantra, and apparent isolationist instincts, offend Canadian predispositions about the world (though Biden has increasingly adopted a set of protectionist reflexes himself, on trade, and on border security). But the Trudeau government has not taken the lead on any international issue, beyond its inane claim to have a “feminist foreign policy” and ritualistic and performative proclamations on the politics of identity.

Specific activism in world issues does reverberate among diaspora interests that agitate Canadian communities. The political competition, riding-by-riding, to enlist the support of specific voting groups intensifies under minority governments. Trudeau has opposed farm reforms in India that Canadian Sikhs object to, and has seemed to sympathize with their avidity for a separate Sikh state. Abroad, our embassies fly the rainbow flag on Pride Day, defiantly in capitals where progress toward same-sex unions and civil rights is blocked by traditional custom and culture.

But apart from such gestures, Canada isn’t really leading anywhere. “How could we?” Canadians ask, doubting whether, in the chaotic multipolar world they hear about, we still have the heft internationally to make a difference.

But we once did, coming out of World War II. Canadian policy-makers insisted then that human and civil rights be at the core of the United Nations; and that NATO concern itself with democracy as well as security. In those foundation years that established some essential global norms, Canadians were multilateral front-line designers of rule-of-law international governance institutions for trade and finance, health, labour, international infrastructure, maritime law, and humanitarian intervention. As the world changed, decolonized, and the international community diversified toward the Global South, Canadians committed to “external aid.” We built relationships that have largely atrophied.

This was the perspective generally set by Foreign Minister Louis St. Laurent’s declaration in 1948 that Canada’s dual priorities would be its bilateral relationship with the US in North America, balanced by a “humanist” and multilateral foreign policy abroad.  Mike Pearson won the Nobel Prize for conceiving the peacekeeping vehicle that eased the Middle East out of the 1956 Suez Crisis and past the second Arab-Israeli War.

Pierre Trudeau was a change agent who earned a world role on North/South relations with advocacy of “power-sharing” that was not welcomed by Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan but which addressed the preoccupations of much of the world. He didn’t win the hearts and minds of either — briefly, early on — Lyndon Johnson, or of Richard Nixon, with his stance on the Vietnam War, but preceded Nixon and Kissinger when Canada broke an international freeze on recognizing China. The Reagan White House was less than impressed with his 1983 nuclear peace initiative but Trudeau correctly anticipated the potential and need for East-West full detente.

Relationships matter at the top. Canada’s foreign policy surfed on Trudeau’s wide connections, with Nyerere, Palme, Schmidt, Lee Kuan Yew, Carter, and Mitterrand. He finally restored Franco-Canadian relations after the 1967 rupture with the senescent De Gaulle over “Vive le Québec libre!”. Along with the effort to articulate a “Third Option” to enable greater Canadian nation-building capacity in a branch-plant national landscape, the Trudeau government had its hands full in Washington with defending our nation-building agenda, which featured repatriation of the Constitution and our Charter of Rights, and the miscalculated National Energy Policy.

Though stylistically different, Brian Mulroney was equally and successfully committed to key foreign policy files, and reconciled our nation-building agenda with first the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), then its broadening into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Under Mulroney and Foreign Minister Joe Clark, Canada stepped right up and into anti-apartheid activism, and advocated a human rights agenda for both the Commonwealth and the somewhat more resistant Francophonie. As the Cold War wound down, Mulroney was a leader both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin listened to. He was an influential voice at the G7 table. US presidents and secretaries of state valued his counsel, not because he subsumed Canadian policy in theirs but because he anchored it to internationalist realities and connections that their own national situations and self-absorbed national perspectives sometimes didn’t capture.

So it was for Jean Chretien, often underestimated by other leaders (such as Tony Blair, at first), but valourized as a close counsellor by Clinton, Chirac, Zedillo, Cardozo, and Kofi Annan, among others, for the fairness and scope of his judgment. He carried weight with the presidents of China and Russia. His financeminister, Paul Martin, held high international influence because he led, as did Chretien’s most prominent foreign minister, Lloyd Axworthy, who spearheaded Canada’s paradigm-shifting focus on international human security. At first, the US didn’t welcome some Canadian-sponsored initiatives, such as the Arctic Council, which Mulroney had been the first to push, or the International Criminal Court (ICC), or the Land Mines Treaty, though the US has come to terms with the validity of their prescriptions, as it has on the existential merits of the conclusions of the Kyoto and ultimately the Paris conferences on climate change.

International times are tough. But history doesn’t advance in a straight line. It lapses backwards, slides sideways, and then moves forward again.

The George W. Bush administration didn’t like Canada’s defection on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but were we ever right. As we had earlier been right to give American distress our full spontaneous support, heart and soul, after 9/11. That mix revealed the authentic Canada — globalist, neighbourly, and truthful in our voice, though some Canadian voices advised against disagreeing with Washington for the sake of our bilateral interests. Chretien did the right thing instead, as did his predecessors who accepted the challenge of leading.

Justin Trudeau doesn’t operate on the same level or with the same grasp. Maybe Canadians are OK with that. But if there is one question Canadian professionals and internationalist citizens hear out there in the world more than any other, it’s “What’s happened to Canada?”

Leadership matters. Others can argue that Justin Trudeau has positioned Canada on files with which he is more familiar. No question, his successive ministers of the environment have been international climate activists. As minister of trade and then a high-profile minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland brokered a norm-setting economic cooperation agreement with the European Union (EU) and safeguarded our existential NAFTA arrangements with the US. Trudeau’s hands-on leadership enabled Canada to manage the COVID pandemic better than almost all developed-country peers, though our participation in global pandemic management was pretty self-involved.

Overall, though, on foreign affairs, and on defence, our capacities to lead were degraded by neglect from the centre. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) used foreign postings as offerings to Liberal party loyalists, many of whom stumbled in comfort. Trudeau is liked by other leaders, because his decency is what they expect from Canada, but he brings little to the debate except assent (though on Ukraine, it counts). Events have caused us to lose all influence in Beijing, Delhi, and, of course, and inevitably, in Moscow. Deferring to an extraordinary extraterritorial demand by an overreaching US Department of Justice to arrest the CFO of a Chinese telecommunications company led to an imbroglio through poor handling.

We should not be surprised that Canadian expectations of foreign policy activism have so receded given our extremely parochial media. Look at the CBC English website and weep at what isn’t there about what’s happening in the world. To say, as CBC English TV management does, that they are reporting on the local preoccupations of their audience (now down to 3 1/2% of TV viewers in English), is to come to a completely different conclusion from Radio-Canada RCI, whose international coverage is excellent.

In the eventual election campaign, there will no doubt be over-heated attention to foreign interference in our elections, or to ritualistic carbon abatement clauses in our treaties, but little debate about Canada’s role in the world. The Liberals seem to think that anti-Trumpism in Canada can be hung on Conservative leader Poilievre. The best they can think of in the way of stand-out foreign policy initiatives is to adapt Chretien’s “Team Canada” brand of outreach for Canadian market access defence in what could be a menacing US political landscape by assigning to ministers what our Washington embassy, consulates, and multiple citizens and economic actors have been doing in a full-court political press in the US for a decade.

It would be gratifying if a decisive Arctic policy were a feature of the election campaign. Sustained materiel and financial aid to Ukraine ought to be, especially if the Conservative base seems influenced by MAGA Trump supporters in the US to favour cutting back on support. Trudeau has to reiterate why Ukraine’s defence is our own, and that of the most essential of international norms. But it isn’t just a matter of sanctioning Russians. It needs strenuous Canadian leadership to build back world-wide recommitment to viable and fair international rule of law. 

The election probably turns most on personal suitability to lead, a choice of styles and evaluations of character. Incumbents in every democracy are having a tough time with disgruntled publics tired of over-exposed leaders. Some, like New Zealand’s change-agent prime minister so popular several years ago, Jacinda Ardern, decided time’s up, and graciously stepped out of the fray. The most recent Nanos poll has Justin Trudeau as first preference of only 20% of Canadians.

International times are tough. But history doesn’t advance in a straight line. It lapses backwards, slides sideways, and then moves forward again. A Canadian government needs to return to the front of that necessary advance and mobilize the support of Canadians for that effort in their internationalist interest.

Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s Ambassador to Russia, Italy and the European Union and as High Commissioner to the UK. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.