Foreign Policy and the Election: An Uncertain Trumpet

Abstract

It doubtful if questions of foreign policy are of primary importance in elections even in such powerful and mature democracies as the United States and Great Britain. Canada certainly not a powerful country, and many would question its maturity. Yet foreign policy, in the broadest sense, has often been a major concern in our elections. There was the issue of Unrestricted Reciprocity with the United States in 1891, the controversy over Canadian participation in the Boer War in 1900, the dual question of reciprocity with the United States and naval policy in 1911, the fuzzy issue of imperial relations and dominion autonomy in 1926 and, perhaps, the vague problem of CanadianAmerican relations in the 1957 election. To many electors in times past these foreign policy problems doubtless loomed less large than they have to later textbook writers. Historians have exaggerated the electoral importance of external affairs if only because mouth-filling statements about foreign policy have been easier to isolate than the small, local discontents and bread-and-butter issues which today's omniscient, omnipresent pollsters tell us are the real determinants in voting. At any rate it would be particularly difficult to calculate the number of votes that were cast on April 8 with a particular eye to some complicated problem of Canada's role in international politics. Indeed some commentators and politicians maintained that defence and foreign policy problems should not be election issues for they were too complicated, too emotion-packed to be capable of democratic decision. Nuclear policy/' the Toronto Globe and Mail pontificated on February 19, is not a legitimate issue because it a matter involving high emotions which has nothing whatever to do with the future of this country. Yet, despite this and many similar preachments, foreign and defence policy statements kept slipping into speeches on economic planning, biculturalism, unemployment, stable government and what American