bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1996) — Spring 1996 // Printemps 1996, pp. 14–16
by Evan H. Potter
Introduction
The old ways of Canadian statecraft, those of “quiet diplomacy” and the measured approaches of a small, Oxonian elite charting Canada’s international course are only today slowly giving way to a more consultative approach to foreign-policy making. What may have worked during the Golden Age of Pearsonian diplomacy, is anachronistic during the “information revolution,” in an increasingly multicultural, export-dependent country in which the national consensus on foreign policy priorities has disappeared along with the cold war. Under these circumstances, both practitioners and observers agree that there is merit in “opening” or “democratizing” Canada’s foreign policy. However, there does not appear to be a consensus on whether democratization is a means or an end
Will democratization lead to more effective diplomacy, or is it a pressure-release valve designed primarily to placate a citizenry disillusioned with unaccountable bureaucrats and unresponsive politicians? Can we say that we have achieved democratization with one, two or 100 consultations? Are parliamentary votes on major foreign policy decisions synonymous with democratization? Indeed, does anyone seriously believe that a majority government committed to, for example, increasing business opportunities with China will be dissuaded from doing so by dissenting views from the Bloc Québécois and the Reform Party?
For some, democratization is inherently a positive term. It permits the collective voice of so-called “average” Canadians to be heard in Ottawa’s policy-making circles, leading perhaps to an impact on policy outcomes such as the linking of Canada’s aid expenditures to the military expenditures of developing countries. Others, however, are less optimistic about the value of democratization, especially if it is promoted and financed in large part by the very institutions it is trying to open.
Defining Democratization Democratization of foreign policy has three broad components: consultation, outreach, and research. Consultation, is a long-practiced method of building consensus in, and gaining advice from, elite communities such as those in law, academia, the media, and business. Specific policy problems are presented to expert communities outside government in order that cabinet ministers can obtain a panoply of policy options that are unfiltered by their political or departmental staff. There is a great tradition in Canada in this regard with royal commissions and government advisory councils often stimulating major research programs and informing the public policy debate.
Outreach, on the other hand, is the broadest form of democratization. It is two-pronged, with the first, “track-one” outreach, referring to top-down management of Canadian foreign policy. From an institutional perspective this refers to the brochures, country studies, press releases and other communications “products” of the federal government and especially the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Canadians, through editorial boards, town-hall meetings, open-line radio shows, and the like, are invited to express their views (or more likely, to vent their frustrations) on Canada’s international role to the Prime Minister, and his foreign, defence, trade and international development ministers. The second prong, “track-two” (hereafter “outreach track-two”), is reaching out to include a broader citizenry in the foreign policy-decision-making process. It is this form of outreach that is most underdeveloped in Canada. It permits the “bottom-up” input of a cross-section of Canadians on the less technical and usually more visceral foreign policy issues such as sending peacekeepers abroad, protecting Canada’s natural resources (e.g., fish stocks, oil & gas), and the pursuit of commerce with countries having poor human rights records.
Finally, the building of policy-capacity outside of government, that is, the creation of centres of research across Canada with a capacity to, in a sustained fashion, produce analysis that is relevant to policy makers, is often overlooked in the democratization process. Independent research may be one of the most important instruments for democratization. By providing citizens with background information on Canada’s current foreign-policy challenges, it is a natural complement to the track-two outreach.
The last two years have witnessed the greatest bout of introspection, analysis and public debate on how Canada conducts its international relations since the Trudeau government’s Foreign Policy for Canadians. The overlapping reviews in 1994-95, following the Liberal Party’s own highly detailed May 1993 Foreign Policy Handbook (prepared by the Hon. Lloyd Axworthy and the Hon. Christine Stewart), include:
• the Canada 21 Report, a privately-supported research program on Canada’s foreign and defence policy priorities for the next century (March 1994);
• the first National Forum on Canada’s International Relations (March 1994);
• a full re-assessment of Canada’s foreign and defence policies by two parliamentary Special Joint Committees (April-November 1994), prompting a Defence White Paper (December 1994) and the Government’s foreign policy Statement along with a detailed response to the parliamentary report (February 1995);
• a private-sector review of Canada’s international business programs;
• a review by Serge Joyal of the federal government’s role and operations in the field of international cultural and academic relations;
• a parliamentary review of international financial institutions (May 1995) that preceded the Halifax G-7 Summit with the same agenda; and • a public review of Canada’s commitment to international organizations at the second annual National Forum on Canada’s International Relations (September 1995).
The two common threads running through the reviews were the need to make “hard choices” about Canada’s foreign policy priorities and the axiom that Canada’s success internationally would reinforce Canadian identity and unity at home.
The question is whether this intensive process constituted democratization or whether it was an exercise in elite accommodation, and at the extreme, co-optation. Certainly, the majority of reviews were much better at laying out the criteria for making choices than in actually making them. The notable exceptions were the Canada 21 Report, which bluntly stated that the Canadian Forces should be shorn of some of their traditional military capabilities; the Reform Party’s dissenting opinion on the Special Joint Committee’s report reviewing Canadian foreign policy, which castigated the other political parties for making recommendations that would in Reform’s eyes increase rather than decrease foreign policy spending; and the report reviewing Canada’s international business programs, which called for over $100 million in cuts to government spending. And an even more radical perspective, such as the University of Toronto’s Franklyn Griffiths’s assertion that Canada’s best security policy is a strong cultural policy, that did not find its way into the parliamentary documents, was nevertheless “heard” through through its publication in a non-official publication — the Canadian Foreign Policy journal.
What can be concluded from this process? The parliamentary review — a product of 561 briefs from more than 550 organizations or individuals in some 80 meetings — hedged its recommendations; the Government’s response to those recommendations tended towards the non-committal, resulting in an expensive series of consultations that, while arguably having “democratized” the policy-making process, to date have not produced any wide ranging changes in the conduct of Canadian foreign policy. Nevertheless, had the process really been one of co-optation, as some critics suggested, then the parliamentary committee would surely not have published the dissenting views of the Reform and Bloc members. In fact, the process may have been too democratic. Canada’s international partners marvelled at the level of introspection and dissection of Canada’s foreign policy that took place — a level of debate that would be tolerated in few other democratic countries.
Many groups outside government seem to be under the misapprehension that there is a direct causal relationship between consultation and influence on policy outcomes. When a policy emerges that does not conform with their recommendations, letters of regret are swiftly remitted to ministers’ offices; NGO press releases inform that Ottawa is not meeting its foreign policy targets, a favourite complaint being that Canada’s total Official Development Assistance is not anywhere near 0.7 per cent of its GNP. With the frontlines thus drawn, contacts between non-governmental organizations and policy makers have in the past resembled dialogues of the deaf and paralyzed constructive consultations between officials and citizens, which in turn has militated against giving Canadians a larger stake in the decision-making process. This lack of mutual trust ensures that societal pressures make little headway in changing the conduct and directions of Canadian foreign policy.
In fact, it has been the government-wide Program Review (spear-headed by Treasury Board and Finance), whose mandate it is to reduce the federal deficit by making government more efficient, and not the democratization process as expressed through overlapping foreign policy reviews, that has and will likely continue to force Ottawa’s foreign policy planners to make hard choices with regard to their policies and programs. Indeed, this raises the question of whether democratization can result in significant shifts in public policy. It can if the public is far ahead of government and demands change as was the case when pressure from emigré communities and the private sector forced the Mulroney government to take a less sceptical approach to the democratization sweeping across Eastern Europe in the waning days of the cold war. However, the more broadly government engages in outreach, the more difficult it will be to reconcile dissenting views, and thus the less likely that Ottawa will achieve a broad consensus on actions to resolve specific foreign-policy problems. This is the “catch-22” of the democratization, and specifically of the “outreach track-two,” process. For instance, although most Canadians now support a public policy emphasizing greater trade liberalization and less protectionism, there is considerable disconsensus with regard to the trade-off between human rights and trade. And finally, no other public policy area presents as many barriers to democratization and the sharp change in policy direction as does foreign-policy making, given that diplomacy still deals primarily with inter-state relations (much of which is confidential) and that the conduct of statecraft is by its very nature disjointed and incremental.
“Democratizing” DFAIT With regard to how the department engages in democratization, the term “corporate outreach” refers in the most general manner to all of DFAIT’s activities that heighten the public profile of its policies, programs and operations — both in Canada and abroad. It is the way in which DFAIT engages and increases the understanding of Canadian foreign policy among such diverse extra-Departmental constituencies as the media, labour, academia, business and Parliament. To suggest that “outreach” is a polite way of describing a public relations strategy in which the Department makes grants to “stakeholder” organizations such as the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, the Atlantic Council of Canada, Canadian universities, and individual scholars, is to appreciate only half of the picture. Corporate outreach not only enables DFAIT to gauge and increase the level of awareness in Canada of Canadian foreign policy and the level of interest in Canadian affairs abroad, it also contributes to the renewal of the Department itself. This is done by drawing in new people from other parts of the federal and provincial bureaucracies and the private sector through executive interchange programs and through academic fellowships. In this way, unorthodox ideas are permitted greater ventilation in the foreign policy-making process. In short, corporate outreach is the Department’s attempt to “bridge the gap” between itself and all its extra-Departmental constituencies.
The Department’s geographic bureaux and functional bureaux engage in a wide variety of outreach and consultation activity with different foreign policy constituencies as part of their day-to-day operations. This process is perhaps most institutionalized on the academic side through DFAIT’s management of Canadian studies programs abroad (through the Cultural Relations bureau); its “diplomats in residence” program at Canadian universities (through the Canadian Foreign Service Institute); the procedures it has in place to give scholars access to Departmental files (through the Communications bureau); and the scholars on contract to advise on specific issues (in the International Security and Global Issues bureaux). However, the motherhouse within the Department for outreach to the academic community is the Policy Branch. The policy planners, by remaining largely outside day-to-day operations and acting as a reservoir of potentially contrarian views on foreign policy directions, have a functional mandate to tap into and incorporate the views and research of scholars and other nongovernmental experts.
But despite all these points of contact, historically, DFAIT has not displayed an intrinsic sense of the importance of engaging the Canadian public. Foreign service officers do not get promoted for doing this in Canada, where a misquote in The Globe and Mail can be hazardous to one’s career prospects. It is indeed ironic that although they are schooled in the intricacies of state-to-state negotiations where the stakes are high and engage in complex advocacy campaigns abroad, many officials are uncomfortable in explaining Canada’s national interests to ’ordinary’ Canadians. This should not be surprising, however. Few joined the Department so that they could tour Canada and explain to “concerned Canadians” why it serves the national interest to continue to trade with governments engaged in gross human rights violations, why for years Canada turned a blind eye to foreign overfishing, and why Canadian governments permitted the clearcutting of virgin forests in British Columbia.
The reasons for this antipathy towards public consultation and “outreach track two” are structural, as well. In Canada, under a Westminster system, national foreign policy interests and priorities have more often than not not been defined in the corridors of Parliament by elected representatives, but rather through the complex process of ’pulling and hauling’ among the Prime Minister’s Office (especially during the Trudeau and Mulroney governments and less so under the Chrétien Government), the Privy Council Office, the International Trade and Foreign ministers’ offices and their departmental officials. As a result of this situation, memoranda go to ministers with detailed observations on what key international partners such as the Americans i think about a particular foreign policy problem, but rarely reflect or make specific references to domestic Canadian opinion. Canada’s foreign policy practitioners are skittish because the perception is that outside communities — especially the media and certain NGOs — only criticize government policy and rarely present a balanced portrait of Canada’s international interests.
In short, the democratization of foreign policy does not come naturally for DFAIT. That being said, DFAIT has made progress on the business side through its International Trade Advisory Committees (ITACs) and the Sector Advisory Groups on International Trade (SAGITs), initially created to channel business views to the government during the Canada-US free trade negotiations. Less successful have been DFAIT’s attempts to engage in a structured dialogue with the NGO community; and, although there are numerous Departmental points of contact with the Canadian academic community, scholarly views and expertise have not been integrated into Departmental thinking in a comprehensive and coordinated way. Indeed, the lessons from the ITAC and SAGIT experience are only now being applied to the political and security side of the Department’s mandate through the newly-created “Mechanism for Foreign Policy Outreach,” that is administered out of the Department’s Policy Branch. This responds to the Liberal Party’s own call while in Opposition for a foreign policy development think-tank and indicates that people are now working to develop an “outreach track two approach. Picking up on this promise, the final reports of both the first National Forum on Canada’s International Relations and the Special Joint Parliamentary Committee that examined Canada’s foreign policy in 1994, recommended the creation of such an institutional arrangement to “build bridges” between different groups of Canadians on foreign policy. Although initially envisaged by officials as being outside the federal bureaucracy as a remodeled Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security (abolished by the Conservative government in 1992), for reasons of fiscal austerity the political decision was made to reconstitute the idea within the Pearson Building.
Finally, CIDA, for its part, through annual consultation with the NGO community and its Partnership Branch is more institutionally organized to engage systematically in democratization than is DFAIT, although it is not without its own problems.
Collaboration with Civil Society: Solution or Complication?
In this post-cold war, post-industrial age where free trade zones and ethnic cleansing zones exist side-by-side, where advances in information technology spur on further globalization, it is no surprise to hear that the international policy agenda has grown broader and at the same time more complex. As Canada’s foreign ministry faces more issues (e.g., social and labour policy) with less time (i.e., the CNN effect) and a diminishing budget to the turn of the century, there is a greater, not lesser, need for closer consultations between Canada’s foreign policy practitioners and nongovernmental actors. As Draimin and Plewes of the Canadian Council for International Cooperation (CCIC) point out, the increased use of civil society actors and the “democratization” of Canadian foreign policy go hand in hand since “the realm of foreign policy is no longer the exclusive domain of the state,” a message that was delivered in the final report of the 1994 National Forum.
As mentioned, for a variety of structural reasons (e.g., Canada’s underdeveloped policy think-tank community and the ’walls’ created by a professional public service), Canada’s federal bureaucracy has had particular difficulty in tapping and incorporating non-governmental expert views in the policy-making process and in using nongovernmental actors in implementing strategies. This problem has been most acute in the foreign policy arena where the confidentiality of state-to-state relations has militated against the systematic use of nongovernment actors in the pursuit of Canada’s international interests. This will likely have to change, however. The dual trends of (1) a global “associational revolution” that has been facilitated by advances in information technology such as the Internet, and (2) the broadening and deepening of foreign policy issue-areas, have meant that non-state actors may often be as well or better informed than government officials with regard to the details of, say, a non-traditional security problem (e.g., famine, refugee crisis) or crimes committed on cross-border electronic networks.
The professional foreign policy practitioners — usually generalists in a rotational foreign service such as Canada’s — are stretched ever more thinly as a result of budget cuts across a wider variety of specialist areas. This situation raises the option for Ottawa of getting out of certain foreign policy areas — for example, elections monitoring in South Africa and Central America — and leaving the implementation entirely in the hands of the nongovernmental sector, with government retaining the right to set policy direction. In fact, this has already started in an ad hoc way by virtue of the fact that Canada’s official delegations to some international forums such as the negotiations for an Arctic Council have a significant number of nongovernmental delegates.
The Future Democratization Agenda The success of using “outreach track two” to spur the further democratization of Canada’s foreign policy includes four elements. First, the fiscal crunch now facing Ottawa — having to do more with less — is ironically an ally for this process since the diminished research capacity in government means a greater reliance on nongovernmental sources of information that exist in the NGO community, at universities, in the labour movement, and the few remaining foreign policy think-tanks. Second, the existing networks and local chapters of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the United Nations Association of Canada must be urged play a more active role in the articulation of the national foreign policy agenda. Third, although it has been difficult to get Canada’s corporate community to buy into this democratization process (witness the underrepresenation of witnesses and briefs from the business community during the parliamentary foreign policy review in 1994), the success of recent Team Canada trade missions abroad led by the Prime Minister may provide the corporate sector with an incentive to promote the debate of international policy issues in Canada. The fourth element is the increased use of parliamentary committees to advise and articulate Canada’s foreign policy interest. Parliamentarians are that at a time when parliamentary committees are widely considered as the vanguard of the foreign-policy democratization process, they have fewer and fewer resources (e.g., designated research staff, funds for outside research) to allow them to provide some balance to the policy advice being channelled to cabinet by the public servants in the Privy Council Office, Foreign Affairs and International Trade, CIDA and DND
Finally, in the words of Steve Lee, policy advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Department’s Policy Branch: “Opening up foreign-policy making has the potential for two beneficial developments, better policy for Canada and stronger citizen-based democracy at home. Both of these developments will strengthen Canada’s national and global interests.”
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1996) — Spring 1996 // Printemps 1996, pp. 14–16. Read the rest of this issue →
