We’re in the middle of another round of calls for a new vision for Canadian foreign policy — ranging from Allan Rock and Sergo Marchi calling for Canada to learn lessons from the Security Council campaign, to the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute and its list of ten questions for a foreign policy reset, to David Mulroney insisting that Canadians must be at the heart of Canadian foreign policy. 

These are all great. As Mulroney says, “Foreign policy for Canadians must be worked out with Canadians.” Doing that, as Rock and Marchi argue, will require resources for consultations, and a real infrastructure. And of course, Canada must ask itself difficult questions, or nothing will change.

But Canadians and the world need much more – they need an original ‘think,’ not yet another re-think of foreign policy. It needs to be driven by a genuinely creative process, which requires fresh assumptions, a fresh framework, and different people in the room. It needs to take on and digest the challenge of climate change.

The historical premise of foreign policy is that it’s something that ‘we’ (from ‘here’) do ‘there’ to further ‘our’ interests. But, in an increasingly digital world of migration and economic integration, the notions of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are not just problematic. They may be strikingly irrelevant and profoundly undesirable as a basis for designing policy.

Let’s start with the first principle of Canadian foreign policy: America, its power, and its protection. There’s been much written about how American passports are no longer useful, in this time of plague. There’s a tendency to see this as a function of COVID-19, but as this searing article suggests, this might better be seen as a symptom of “Anglo-America’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health system.” Indeed, as the article notes, “the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in history still comes as a shock.”

What happens when that very basic premise is not just undermined, but inverted? What does it mean that the US and its uncertainty may be as much of a risk – and the Deputy Prime Minister’s office has to state that “decisions about Canada’s border are made by Canadians, for Canadians?” The core assumptions on the role of the US (and the UK) in the world have to be examined with fresh eyes. 

But that’s not quite enough. These assumptions are embedded in a deeper and problematic framework. Three brilliant recent pieces in Foreign Policy have clearly laid out how deeply racialized and colonial the intellectual edifice of foreign policy remains – and the “wilful amnesia on the question of race” that Sankaran Krishna, and many others, have flagged for decades.  

In order for Canada to play a global role in building a better world order, it will have to recognize this reality, set aside the intellectual architecture of foreign policy and its racist foundations, and do the work of developing a new, radically inclusive framework.

In order for Canada to play a global role in building a better world order, it will have to recognize this reality, set aside the intellectual architecture of foreign policy and its racist foundations, and do the work of developing a new, radically inclusive framework. It will, equally urgently, have to find a way to integrate climate realities and the need for global adaptation into the fabric of its thought – for that remains the core challenge for our time.

And to do so will require different people. It will require understanding what Canada is and what it means to all its people – its young people, its immigrants, its overseas citizens, everyone.  A new foreign policy process must deeply reflect and respect Indigenous perspectives on the world — not just secure treaty compliance. It must include immigrants, Canadian women of all classes, and the private sector. It should consult with partners and friends around the world, to really understand how they see Canada, and what they want and expect from us in years to come. It needs to include Canadian cities as core actors, and understand what they need from the world, what they have to offer, and how foreign policy can work for them – because it needs to represent Canada as it lives today, over 80 percent urban. That’s a long list of inclusion. To do it properly requires a process that both reflects the rich diversity of Canada that may be its greatest asset, as well as the rich diversity of the world that may bring it great allies.

To embrace all these asks – new ideas, new frameworks and new people – will require a new model of where we’re starting and where we’re trying to go with foreign policy. And for this, Canada would do well to look, as Marie Berry and Milli Lake have asked us, to centre a response in care and solidarity, rather than in competition and self-interest. The climate movement agrees on this: that we must derive meaning from our connectedness to humans and the natural world, if we are to sustain civilisation.

These are the demands today’s world place on a foreign policy review. It has to tell us what compassion means for Canada in the modern world. It should pass the Greta test — it must not fail future generations. Less the first half of Minister Freeland’s superb 2017 speech to parliament “preserves and nurtures Canadian prosperity and security” and more the second half: “our collective goal of a better, safer, more just, more prosperous world.” It must understand both that the former flows from the latter – as COVID has made all too clear, but also that the ethical basis for the latter approach is right. We accept refugees not because they contribute economically, but because it is what we should hope that others would do to us should we be in need. 

A foreign policy for a new, digital world, and a post-COVID era has to move away from the belief that Canadians, because of our enlightened position, should necessarily sit on more Councils (Security or otherwise) – and into an argument for a compassionate international system of order.

And not the idea, from the same speech, that the “peace and prosperity we in the West have enjoyed these past 70 years are desired by all,” but the recognition that this peace and prosperity has only been made possible by exporting of emissions and their impacts, by rapacious extractive industries, and by an international system of order that was set up to perpetuate a particular type of power and exclusion – not equity and opportunity. 

Key to that – to embracing the challenge of a politics of care — is to face up to the past. The government has begun to recognize the social harms it has inflicted on Indigenous peoples – it must do more. It must recognize the environmental price of Canadian economic foreign policy and its mining corporations. It must own the consequences of these actions, on which Canadian prosperity has been built. 

This isn’t just about looking backwards and righting wrongs, much as that matters. One of the key tasks for diplomacy will be managing a global digital shift, and trying to ensure that it reflects the values that Canada wishes to see in the world. Sabelo Mhlambi’s paper for the Carr Center for Human Rights, outlines the reality of how artificial intelligence has emerged from a specific view of personhood that has enabled colonialism and power structures of discrimination, and therefore “reproduces those dehumanizations” leading to harmful outcomes. 

This is not abstract theory. The terrible effects of Twitter and Facebook on democracy and disinformation make it clear that this is a core responsibility that must not be abnegated to the casual amorality of Silicon Valley. People with an interest in our humanity, not just making money, must govern and regulate the global digital sphere, and Canadian diplomats will have to help to ensure that this happens. Canada’s efforts to build an AI supercluster in Montréal may help it to play an outsized global role in this space (and indeed, a review of foreign policy may wish to look at how its other superclusters can support a new foreign policy agenda).

Will the outcome of such a process tell Global Affairs about how to interact with a large, hostile-ish power that has complex designs on the Arctic, general disdain for our political system, and a deeply troublesome leader? Maybe. Maybe not. To really ‘think,’ rather than just ‘re-think,’ the process has to step outside specific questions and try to build a framework that equips a new generation of diplomats with the tools to find answers.

In doing so, it might meet that hope that Commissioner Michèle Audette offered in the preface to “Reclaiming Power and Place” – the final report of the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls: “Today is the first day of the Canada of tomorrow. We cannot change the past, but we can work together to shape a better future built on the strengths of each and every community.”

It seems, to me, a good place to start. 

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