bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), pp. 43–44
Canada and the International Seabed —
Domestic Interests and External
Constraints, by Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon,
McGill-Queens University Press, 1989,
225 pages, $32.95.
The time is fast approaching when Canadians may be anxiously asking themselves whatever did become of Canada in this twentieth century that Wilfrid Laurier predicted, with due allowance for the politician’s fallibility factor, would belong to us. Policy practitioners, watchers and consultants — especially the last who have spread like creeping myrtle in the past decade — ought to be concentrating now on the Trudeau decade of the seventies. It was, as nobody in the know surely I needs to be reminded, a time of ferment, fervour and even fury, in the policy-shaping : trade, stirring for some, hare-brained for many, and just plain hairy for the few kept close to the cutting edge. It may have been the first and possibly the last experiment of its kind for government in this country.
Not all of the three operational echelons in External Affairs were similarly bowed down by the heavy responsibilities for reviewing past policy, which the Trudeau self-proclaimed reformers thrust upon selected bureaucracies around town. The External lawyers, in what became about that time the burgeoning Bureau of Legal Affairs, were relatively unburdened in that task and left free to indulge themselves in forward-looking pursuits across the broad fields of international law. In the autumn of 1970, the United Nations General Assembly, obligingly opened the door to a wide-ranging exploration of the international law of the sea (LOS), which subject had been languishing in impasse during the decade preceding. The eagerness of the lawyers to press on was further enhanced by the fact that the Government and the recently-emancipated management of External (“Foreign Policy for Canadians” hit the fan on June 25, 1970) were that autumn almost wholly engrossed in the FLQ crisis. And as the decade unfolded, there were other divertissements including Nixonomics, the Third Option, the Yom Kippur War, the Arab oil embargo, FIRA, NEP, galloping inflation and all the related issues we seniors hear about regularly on Parliamentary TV’s soap opera, Question Period … in the “answers” that is.
Ms. Riddell-Dixon has provided a very solid report on her study of a case history, of one major sector in the ten-year evolution of Canadian policy on the LOS. It may have even been the key sector, since it raised issues in relation to the mining of the seabed which evoked formidable opposition to the proposed LOS Treaty, starting with the United States.
The international forces in opposition have worked to keep the treaty in the dead letter department since the early eighties. This book is largely concerned, as it should be, with domestic interests, within the federal and provincial governments, in the Canadian mining industry and in Canadian communities. The book concerns itself too with external constraints — those in the world around us — but in my view it is less successful in assessing them, except as regards strategic and especially tactical considerations at the ongoing LOS Conference and its several committees, principally Committee One in this case study. Six years after my retirement in 1978, I did an impressionistic analysis on “Multilateralism: Canada and the United Nations,” which involved numerous interviews in Ottawa and New York, and it yielded a very gloomy view of some deep-seated political malaises, throughout the UN system (indiscriminate bloc voting for example), which almost certainly must have had their own impact on the LOS proceedings.
Having said that, I want to congratulate Ms. Riddell-Dixon on the high quality of her work in a very complex field. Her book is well-organized, it sticks to its main theme and is fundamentally sound in its judgments about what transpired. It is well-written and skilfully avoids the verbal garbage that frequently clogs studies of international law questions. In sum, her report makes light reading — in the sense of informative and stimulating presentation — of what could easily have been very heavy going, for the average reader not versed in the law.
With my Public Service experience, I was naturally more interested in what the book has to say about the policy process in and around Ottawa, especially since I did a study for Historical Division in 1981, which was concerned with the interdepartmental process involved in back-stopping the LOS Conference. It centred on the Interdepartmental Committee on the Law of the Sea (ICLOS). Ms. Riddell-Dixon has learned quite a lot about ICLOS, its functions and modus operandi, mainly from its principal participants. This tends to colour some of her judgments on what actually transpired or was accomplished.
Perhaps the most fascinating chapter in this book is Chapter Four on “Federal Government Actors.” It seeks to explain how it was that the various departments and agencies, represented or under- and overrepresented in ICLOS, managed not to produce agreed government policies and positions, which the Canadian Delegation to the LOS Conference, during a whole decade and more, pursued nonetheless. My own study showed quite conclusively that: (a) there was some slippage in consulting some departments adequately or soon enough, about moves that they were almost certain to oppose; and (b) there was a remarkable lack of interest at the senior-most levels of External and in some of the other “bureaux, including the economists, who should have been most concerned, about the year-in-year-out activities that the lawyers were up to. it is time that somebody made a comprehensive report on the broad policy picture, from the early Trudeau years, Ms. Riddell-Dixon’s concentrated case study offers a Ben Johnson kick-start along the right track.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), pp. 43–44. Read the rest of this issue →
