Justin Ling: If Carney wants to influence global affairs, he’ll need to fix Global Affairs first - Toronto Star

An ambitious foreign policy doesn’t only describe the world we want but also shows us how to get there.

Prime Minister Mark Carney, photographed during an address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, is trying to unite the world’s middle powers.

Justin Ling is a staff columnist for the Star and an investigative journalist based in Montreal. Reach him by email: jling@thestar.ca

The Carney government is publishing some serious stacks of paper describing how it plans to make Canada relevant again, including a national security strategy, released on Thursday; a new defence policy, already in effect but not yet published; and a full foreign policy.

While no country has ever sunk a flotilla or defended its borders with glossy-covered policy documents, these three are nevertheless important. They will give us, at long last, a clearer picture of how Prime Minister Mark Carney hopes to reshape a world thrown on its side by U.S. President Donald Trump. 

I’ve been speaking with insiders and experts lately, trying to jam together the strategic puzzle pieces and see the bigger picture. I’ll start with the trickiest of the three: our new foreign policy, set to be released before the end of the year.

“My sense,” said Adam Chapnick, a professor at the Canadian Forces College, “is that the government has a firmer idea of how it wants to position Canada in the world than we have had in at least a decade. And in order to get the public service aligned with the government’s vision, there’s a belief that we have to put this stuff on paper.” 

Canada hasn’t published a foreign policy since 2005. Before then, it was a far more normal practice. In 1970, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau dubbed his sweeping agenda to navigate between the Cold War superpowers “Foreign Policy for Canadians,” and he published it in six slickly produced booklets, intended for public consumption.

Carney’s pitch is well known by now. The prime minister believes the middle powers, including Canada, should band together to reduce the leverage wielded by hegemons such as the United States and China. And he hasn’t waited for the release of this policy to begin re-engaging with the world. He’s spent the past year shaking hands and signing deals — just this week, he hosted the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi in Ottawa, followed by a phalanx of European Union officials in Montreal. 

A truly ambitious foreign policy doesn’t merely describe the world we want; it also tells us how to get there. And Global Affairs Canada — beset with staffing problems and lacking the capacity to do big things — isn’t ready. The department, which runs our network of embassies and missions abroad, is the tool through which we conduct diplomacy, negotiate trade deals and secure new customers. But it suffers under an aging bureaucracy and sagging morale.

Canadian foreign policy — and our capacity to execute it — degenerated after the Cold War. In 2023, a Senate committee found that two decades of declining recruitment and investment had “undermined Canada’s ability to influence and shape global issues and effect change.”

The chair of that committee was Senator Peter Boehm, a career diplomat who served as Sherpa for multiple G7 summits. “We could be doing a lot more,” he told me last month in his East Block office, whose walls are lined with souvenirs from his long career. “The question is how we do it and how to push it.” 

Boehm agreed the “multi-headed beast” of Global Affairs is a limiting factor. It is, as his committee’s study found, a top-heavy, risk-averse department beset by malaise, lacking specialization, painfully risk-averse and without the surge capacity to deal with a world of colliding crises. One damning indictment summed up our efforts as “less foreign, more office”; another concluded, “much of Canada’s diplomatic presence is a Potemkin village.”

The report spurred then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to task a senior diplomat with modernizing operations at Fort Pearson, as the department’s headquarters is sometimes called. Shortly after, Global Affairs released two big, if vague, strategies — one on the Indo-Pacific and another on Africa. Both led to a careful expansion of Canada’s diplomatic presence abroad.

Carney inherited a foreign service that has been cautiously trying to repair itself, yet many of the problems Boehm and his fellow senators identified remain. Some of this is down to resources, Boehm said. “If you’re going to really take on change and transform, you can’t do it without putting more money into it.”

Global Affairs has a morale problem, too. “When you have a public service that is both being pushed really hard, in which morale is not that high,” Chapnick said, “you can only, it seems to me, institute so much change at once.”

Canada once boasted an enviable foreign service that functioned as a real meritocracy. Fort Pearson attracted bright young mandarins, eager to climb the ranks and earn better and better foreign posts and serve in ever more critical roles abroad.

This system has, to some degree, fallen apart. It is increasingly common for staff at Global Affairs to spend their whole careers in Ottawa. Those who serve in the missions, meanwhile, have seen prestigious posts go to political appointees: just last month, Carney sent one of his senior staffers to become ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Budget cuts have only soured the mood at the department.

For Canada to matter again, and to become richer in the process, we need more talent, more specialists, more risk-takers and more polyglots working in the Department of Foreign Affairs. As Boehm put it: “The ship has to right itself.”

The risk, as with everything in Carney-world, is that the prime minister and his staff will try to do everything themselves. I’m told foreign affairs has been run, to a huge degree, from inside Carney’s office. 

That’s been enabled by “a very small, overworked cell in the Privy Council Office advising him,” Chapnick said. If Carney hopes to do what he’s promising without sharing some of the burden with Global Affairs and its staff of 13,000-plus, “the agenda will probably be limited,” he added. “The prime minister can only do so many things.” 

Brian Mulroney faced a similar challenge. As he wrote in his memoirs, Mulroney inherited a foreign service characterized by silos, infighting and poor analysis, with “an official culture and view of the world that only they understood.” But he set ambitious priorities and installed trusted lieutenants to whip the department into shape. With former prime minister Joe Clark as his foreign minister, Mulroney got big things done, spearheading an acid-raid accord and helping topple Apartheid South Africa.

Carney needs a Joe Clark of his own.

His current foreign minister, Anita Anand, is widely regarded as hard-working and detail-oriented. But as multiple Liberal sources have told me over the past year, she has little experience with her file, is struggling to manage its sprawling complexity and is an abysmal communicator.

If Anand is shuffled out of the job, Carney could use someone with experience, expertise and a manageable ego who can both act as his surrogate and is comfortable playing second fiddle.

Here’s a suggestion: Senator Peter Boehm.

Boehm wouldn’t be an unprecedented choice. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tapped David Cameron, one of his predecessors, as foreign secretary, giving Cameron a seat in the House of Lords in order to do so. A foreign secretary from outside the House of Commons could easily spend more time abroad.

The senator laughed off my suggestion — and he disagrees with my assessment of Anand, calling her a “strong” minister. Still, Boehm could provide a nuanced vision of what Canadian foreign policy ought to be. In an essay for Policy magazine last year, he called for a return to the “functional principle.”

The idea is that, in a world of superpowers, smaller countries — even rich ones — need to pick their priorities carefully in order to maximize their impact. That’s how Canada became a military-industrial powerhouse during the Second World War, a scholar of international law at founding of the United Nations and a peacekeeper in the latter half of the 20th century. We balanced what needed doing against what we could accomplish. A.J. Miller, a political scientist, once described the principle as an “equation of power and influence, capacity and responsibility.”

Canada has lost the ability to do this math. We have failed to determine when to take the lead, when to play a supporting role and when to leave it to other nations. Instead, we have tried to do everything — and accomplished next to nothing. That’s not helping the mood at Fort Pearson.

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