For the past decade, Jeremy Kinsman — former Canadian Ambassador to Russia, Italy and the European Union, and former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom — has been Policy magazine’s GPS, providing a level of insight and analysis previously confined to the indispensable diplomatic briefings he so long provided to ministers and prime ministers. Herewith his briefing on the past decade of telescoped change.

Jeremy Kinsman

Back in the day, Bob Dylan drawled “the times they are a-changin”. In our time, change is accelerating, shifting alignments, power rankings, assumptions, global memes and 1930s. Nationalism’s back, like in the thirties, illiberal, autocratic, aggressive, and globalist only in the polarizing effect of its radiation through the cesspool of digital amplification.

Where is Canada in this? How have Canada’s foreign policy projections and influence changed in the last decade or so?

One fact that is unchangeable is the overwhelming importance of our bilateral relationship with the United States. Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz famously bemoaned being “So far from God and so close to the United States.” Canadians get that sense of opportunity and apprehension in our own way.

It was a comfort that January’s Three Amigos Summit in Mexico City partially re-set Ronald Reagan’s shared strategic vision for North America, which Donald Trump had squashed. But proportional weights sustain huge bilateral dependencies: the US GDP is $25 trillion, ours $2.2, and Mexico’s $1.4; the US takes nearly 75 percent of our exports, 80 percent of Mexico’s.

Additionally, our US bilateral preoccupation has always co-existed in a foreign policy dyad, adjacent to enduring Canadian commitment to a multilateral rules-based system that acts as a hedge against such over-reliance on our potentially volatile neighbour and provides Canada with a more visible international role. It is when Canada has effectively managed both elements of the dyad that our foreign policy has been most effective.

When Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland met on the margins of the trilateral summit in Mexico City with her US counterpart, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, she presented the emerita Berkeley professor with a new edition of former Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Present at the Creation.

Presumably, Freeland knew that her scholarly colleague would have already come across Acheson’s epic account of the “creation” of the postwar rules-based international order. The gift was meant to convey a Canadian identity point — this is who Canadians are — globalists, right from the “creation’s” get-go.

These two legacy priorities — the bilateral challenge and our multilateral vocation — are (and must be) interrelated, not competitive. Some have argued that our global activity should generally be deployed to shore up political capital in Washington to support our dominant bilateral interests. But experience has shown that we accrue political capital with key American constituencies by demonstrating that Canada can reach parts of the world in our own, unique way to strengthen the global system.

We did so, from Lester Pearson on, while contesting some US choices — to bomb Hanoi, suffocate Cuba, invade Iraq, and so on.

Pierre Trudeau became a world figure. His global contacts and policy preoccupations such as North-South relations and the nuclear arms race synchronized with Jimmy Carter, but annoyed Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, while Reagan tolerated them.

Brian Mulroney re-set the bilateral priority en route to NAFTA, but also operated as a globally engaged leader with first-rate relationships, from Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to François Mitterrand and Margaret Thatcher. He and External Affairs Minister Joe Clark pressed the international campaign against the inhumanity of apartheid in South Africa. President George H.W. Bush was sufficiently impressed to have promoted the idea of Mulroney as UN secretary general, a prospect the former PM ruled out at the time. 

Jean Chrétien’s Team Canada missions blitzed key world markets. He said “non” to invading Iraq, promoted Lloyd Axworthy’s Canada-led campaign for norm-changing initiatives for human security that enabled the anti-personnel land mines treaty, the International Criminal Court, and the UN R2P initiative, the “Responsibility to Protect.” I once asked Chrétien to name his closest “soul mates” out there, expecting to hear “Clinton and Chirac”. He had extremely good relationships (often friendships) with many world leaders including his golfing buddy Clinton, but he cited leaders from Brazil, Mexico, and Italy as the ones with whom he had immediate policy comfort. He understood well the need to tend to both elements of the dyad.

Paul Martin, who basically invented the G20, was dean of globalist finance ministers (with arguably the most successful national balance sheet). As prime minister, he put Indigenous peoples on the international agenda.

But it was on Martin’s watch that we started to lose focus and that internationalist impulses went interventionist, with a gung-ho chief of defence staff spreading maps on the carpet of 24 Sussex, first of Darfur, and then of Afghanistan.

Stephen Harper went all-in on Afghanistan. Well-meant as solidarity within NATO, the all-consuming effort forfeited other foreign policy opportunities. We overestimated our impact. Mired in a losing struggle against the Taliban’s stronger political hold on its homeland, Harper definitively ended the exhausting expedition in 2014.

Harper was driven by values and antipathies. He connected only with like-minded “allies”, usually fellow conservatives. His PMO imposed a conservative line on our embassies, ruling out even the phrase “human security.” Abroad, saving money and avoiding risk replaced initiative, and at home, he imposed on the disruptive Department of Foreign Affairs a series of process-focused deputy ministers from domestic government departments, with no foreign policy experience. As one relevant senior official recalls: “He allowed his staff to completely undermine the ability of the department to think and move with the agility needed to allow Canada to play a leading role on the world stage.”

It wasn’t because of foreign policy that Justin Trudeau won a landslide 2015 election, though Canadians clearly preferred US President Barack Obama’s global policy instincts over Harper’s.

Trudeau had earlier formed a “Foreign Policy Council” co-chaired by Marc Garneau and retired General Andy Leslie (I was a participant). It debated with him how to show the world, post-election, that “Canada’s back,” a prospect that became increasingly real as Trudeau’s polls improved. Trudeau himself participated from the perspective of an activist internationalist, providing hope that Canada might indeed come “back,” but politics and circumstances have driven things in other directions.

The break-out option preferred by his new PMO was to announce another run for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council to redeem our failed bid in 2010 under Harper. Ex-diplomats on Trudeau’s Council, the late Mike Bell, twice Ambassador to Israel and to Egypt and Jordan, and former Ambassador to Russia Ralph Lysyshyn, and I urged them to understand that we would need first to show Canada’s “back.” Our likely UNSC competitors, Ireland and Norway, were major UN contributors of forces and ideas, and had a significant head start.

The UNSC election was top priority for our new Ambassador to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, a senior Quebec campaign organizer. But in June 2020, we lost again.

We never did show that “Canada’s back.” The PMO’s eager confidence that the youthful, positive, and attractive PM could win over a world that needed good news encouraged appearances over substance from the start, emphasizing Vogue photo-shoots and beneficial charity mixers with celebrities, over engagement and coalition-building to enhance substantive multilateral cooperation. We organized a conference on the reform of peacekeeping but then ducked out of our only commitment, a medivac support operation in Mali, after only a year.

Had she won her 2016 election, a warm working relationship with internationalist president Hilary Clinton might have enabled a substantive policy formulation process to emerge from Trudeau’s PMO. But Trump’s election took the oxygen out of the air, once it became clear that danger couldn’t be headed off by cultivating first daughter Ivanka or consulting billionaire Trump pals like Stephen Schwarzman (“just flatter him”). We would need to defend NAFTA against “America First.”

Then-trade minister Freeland delivered a major foreign policy win with the forward-looking and innovative Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with the EU that both Liberals and Conservatives had chased since 1972 (and which Quebec Premier Jean Charest decisively accelerated).

While Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion was highly interested in substance, the department’s capacity to produce rapidly was throttled from a decade’s fixation on turgid process. In any case, Dion didn’t connect with Trudeau or his PMO.

After replacing Dion in an ineptly executed shuffle, Freeland led an A-team of officials and diplomatic representatives in the US and saved NAFTA from Trump’s “America First” cyclone. But the successful headline struggle left her with little bandwidth for much else. The Prime Minister was hardly a substantive global figure and marred his sorties with stuff like the India dress-up fiasco and lecturing the Chinese about the role of women. The 2018 G7 Charlevoix Summit meant to promote “Women and Girls” was trashed by Trump, who went on to trash NATO, climate accords, Angela Merkel, and much else.

In reaction, Freeland teamed with like-minded German counterparts to launch a “friends of multilateralism and democracy” defensive support group. But otherwise, there was disappointingly little evidence of substantive global engagement initiatives from the renamed “Department of Global Affairs.”

While Joe Biden’s 2020 win over Trump boosted hope for both Canada-US relations and multilateralism, COVID-19 became another all-consuming crisis. It hemmed in Freeland’s short-lived but meritorious successors, François-Philippe Champagne and Garneau, who were already constrained by her oversight role as Deputy Prime Minister, from which Freeland kept her hand on the Canada-US tiller, and insured unwavering support for Ukraine.

Canada’s commitments to defending Ukraine are only partly due to the empathies and politics of its sizeable domestic diaspora. Putin’s invasion created another bandwidth-devouring crisis that challenges Canada’s DNA on the most vital of the postwar norms of the rules-based international order whose “creation” Dean Acheson (and Freeland) exalted: the prohibition of “invasion or attack by the armed forces of a state on the territory of another state, or any military occupation.”

Cabinet focus on the multiple challenges of the Ukraine imperative should not, however, prevent a globalist government from sustaining parallel if less intense attention to the other overriding global issue — the “polycrisis”, the interlinked globalized threats of climate change, pandemics, migration, debt, and general hopelessness for the vulnerable majority of the world’s eight billion people, for whom progress has been absent. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warns that the postwar multilateral system is too siloed and dysfunctional to reform and defend the rules-based order.

The changing world is again divided. Speaking from the standpoint of a rapidly rising new world power, and from that of a nationalist and sectarian governing party, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has said the “world order which is very, very Western (is) being hurried out of existence….to be replaced by a world of ‘multi-alignment’.” He faults the western mind-set which presumes that “Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s.”

Meanwhile in Canada, a Trudeau government task force produced an overdue Indo-Pacific strategy. It calls for deepened ties with the multiple actors in the fastest-growing part of the world, but also solidarity against perceived Chinese coercion in the region. The episode of experience with arbitrary Chinese force from the two Michaels’ arrests, which was a toxic file for two years, had a teachable traumatic effect (though not noticeably accompanied by reflection over what happened between Canada and the US side at the start).

So, with a minority government entangled in fairly inward-looking national issues, pretty exhausted personnel in Ottawa who have little time or energy to think much about the longer-term balance of bilateral and multilateral, or doing much on foreign affairs beyond commenting and reacting, we are where we are.

The prime minister, who is underrated on substance, is reportedly held back by political managers who seem to presume the public is more tuned to Canada than to its role in the world, a choice reinforced by our pathetically parochial news media.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly is certainly trying to be creatively active. But mostly, we have been comfy in the cheering section for (the pretty damn good) Team Biden, while suppressing nervous thoughts about US elections in 2024. Defence of the multilateral system, and communicating its value, is projected mostly by our high-profile and activist UN Ambassador, Bob Rae.

Still, Freeland’s diplomatic reminder that we were “present at the creation” is a sign that Canada’s inter-generational, internationalist DNA is still in our organic system.

We can, she can, and the PM should, make it active again.

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.