bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 8–9
It is so easy to figure out what the Americans are thinking about the latest coup, declaration of war or arms cut proposals from abroad.
They tell you.
James Baker goes on Meet the Press, Dick Cheney chats with the gang at CNN and Barbara Bush does Oprah. As long as it is not a domestic matter, even the President will do an availability session.
But what is the Canadian take on the latest disaster/disorder/desirable outcome?
“I’m sorry, the Minister is involved in constitutional discussions — call back after the deal is signed,” an apologetic aide will explain.
What does the Prime Minister think?
“He’s on the phone with Robert Bourassa and he’s already got Ovide Mercredi, Bob Rae, Clyde Wells and Mila on hold. Why don’t you ask him at the New Years levee?” a bemused assistant in the PMO will say.
So, what is a poor foreign affairs writer on deadline to do?
There is always the academic option. You can try your luck phoning an expert and hope they will not appear on The Journal before they appear in your journal.
But academics tend to be ambling along a different timescape from the daily newspaper writer. Ask about the political crisis in Greece and you are as likely to hear about the ancient Peloponnesian War as about the recent parliamentary instability.
So, you break down and call the desk officer at External and promise on the head of your first-born never to tell anyone — especially not your readers or the officer’s Director General — that the conversation ever took place. And you get an insightful, nuanced, humane account of what is going on in Moscow, Rio, Lagos or Tokyo. Anywhere, but in Ottawa.
For a country with as complex and as significant an international role as Canada, there is an astonishing lack of discussion or debate of foreign policy issues in the public forum. There almost seems to be a conspiracy of indifference to the public interest between news-makers and news-gatherers.
The Canadian government is strangely passive about seeking attention for its foreign policy agenda. And the Canadian media is strangely dismissive of those few issues for which the government or its critics aggressively seek attention.
You cannot say that the press does not cover foreign policy matters because they are dull. Nothing could be as dull as our extraordinarily well-documented and apparently endless constitutional crisis.
Press conferences are called daily in Canada to discuss constitutional matters so arcane that only a very few sages with a cabalistic grasp of the nation’s legal and historical underpinnings could have any hope of comprehending the issues. And from these events, news stories of baffling complexity and overwhelming length appear in even the most popular Canadian papers.
The net effect of this want of information about foreign policy matters or debate about what Canada’s policies should be in the public forum is the general impression that not much is going on. And of course, that is not true but, in some sense because the public is rarely prodded to think about foreign policy matters, there really is less going on in this country than there might be.
Some of this is probably pretty easy to explain. The leaders of our friendly neighbourhood superpower have views about almost everything in the world, because they unabashedly define their sphere of interest to be almost everywhere in the world.
And they want to get their views out.
An activist middle-power like Canada, uneasily cohabiting a continent with the world’s leading power, does not and cannot have views about everything the way the Americans can and do. And by force of circumstance, Canadian diplomacy puts a much higher value on discretion than on disclosure.
When Canada acts internationally, it tends to be in a more sophisticated and very private way. Canadian diplomacy proceeds more successfully by confidential communication than by rostrum rant.
What that means is that on the big, evolving story of the day, Canadian news-makers are not really interested in talking to Canadian news-gatherers. In fact, to accomplish the ends of their diplomacy, they feel they cannot do their work with the press and the public looking over their shoulders.
The media, for its part, is not particularly well organized to pursue foreign policy issues. Most of the journalists in the gallery in Ottawa are hard pressed to fulfill their primary responsibilities — telling the story of the nation and relating the place of their city or region in the national story.
Editorialists and columnists who do bring analytic energies to foreign policy issues mostly live outside Ottawa. And although they are anxious to explore and explain Canada’s place in the world, they face frequent frustrations.
Texts of policy statements by the Prime Minister or the Secretary of State for External Affairs or the Minister for External Relations and International Development are rarely made available outside Canada. Formal notice that policy changes or real news are about to come out rarely filters out much further than the parliamentary press gallery.
Opportunities to question the ministers or their deputies are infrequent for the luckiest outside the capital and almost non-existent for the majority.
Many of these problems get solved for the short term at least when journalists, civil servants and politicians develop personal working relationships. But those relationships grow slowly at the end of a phone line or a fax machine. And then, one of the players moves along to a new assignment and the confidence-building process must start all over again.
None of these problems is unresolvable. More members of the media could, and ought to, show more consistent interest in the evolution of Canadian foreign policy and seek more passionately to understand and explain the country’s role in the world. For their part, External and the PMO could find more creative ways to give the media — and through the media, the Canadian people — a continuing sense of how the government’s foreign policy thinking and its international agenda are evolving.
The constitutional negotiation process both reflects and reinforces Canadians’ lamentable tendency toward insecure self-questioning. We seem destined to endure many months of national self-absorption.
But, unless we reflect upon our interests and our responsibilities in the world beyond our borders, we will be unable to understand ourselves or even to trace reliably the indelible image of Canada’s international presence.
The challenge for all of us involved in the foreign policy process is to provide Canadians with the information they need to understand their country and even to imagine its future.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1992) — Winter 1992 // Hiver 1992, pp. 8–9. Read the rest of this issue →
