Review: An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? Challenges and Choices for the Future

Abstract

AN INDEPENDENT FOREIGN POLICY FOR CANADA? Challenges Choices for Future Brian Bow Patrick Lennox, editors Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 248Pp7 $24.95 PaPer ISBN 978-0-8020-9634-0John English's biography of Pierre Trudeau recounts a White House discussion following prime minister's 1971 visit to Washington. We understand Canada has its own right to its destiny, Richard Nixon told his advisors, and Canadian politician could survive without that ideology. The remark came at a moment when relatively easy days of Canada-US relations were a faded dream. Canadian nationalists were alarmed at rising level of American foreign direct investment in Canada's economy. Public opinion towards US, which was in thick ofthe Vietnam War, was similarly negative. Reflecting these sentiments, political scientist Stephen Clarkson published a collection of essays entitled An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? The contributors - a range of academics former policymakers - reassessed traditional tenets of Canadian explored whether Ottawa had means to conduct a foreign policy that would be both independent from Washington a break from diplomacy that had guided bilateral relations since 1945. Clarkson called for a more robust autonomous approach to conduct of Canadian foreign relations. Forty years later, political scientists Brian Bow Patrick Lennox have assembled a new generation of scholars - all political scientists, save one - to revisit issues that inspired Clarkson's work. The new volume considers question of Canadian foreign policy in an era of unparalleled American power (xvi) .Bow's Lennox's introduction nicely describes context of Clarkson's collection posits that there are numerous parallels between 1968 2008. There are, however, some early factual errors. Did [m]ost Canadians really have no reservations about Canada's dependence on Britain in first half ofthe twentieth century (9)? Such a claim is ignores sentiments of majority of Quebeckers. also overlooks both small but prominent group of isolationists in Department of External Affairs, including O. D. Skelton, as well as nationalist sympathies of some prominent Liberals members of Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Further, Gordon commission study on Canadian economy appeared in 1958, not 1968, contractual link was not with Europe but rather European Economic Community (9-10). These are important distinctions in a study of Canadian foreign policy. Lastly, claim that the current Conservative government of Stephen Harper seems to have moved away from Chretien-era focus on trade with China is an early indication that this work already risks becoming dated (10).The collection of 10 essays is divided into five thematic parts. In part one, lone historian, Adam Chapnick, provides a vital examination of evolving independence that sparked original volume. He is sharply persuasively critical of a debate that created a binary misleading analytical framework that gives too much attention to Canada's relationship with US. He bemoans fact that this paradigm-especially its simple focus on value of quiet meaning of Canadian foreign policy - has dominated discussion of Canadian foreign policy over last 40 years (36).Part two examines how Ottawa has managed relations with Washington. Brian Bow evaluates suggestion that Canadian foreign policy has shifted closer to that of US out of fear that individual high-level bilateral disputes may elicit American retaliation against an independent Canadian stance. It is striking how little solid [archival] evidence there is of any clearcut retaliation over last sixty years, Bow concludes (67). That said, he suggests that grudge linkages between presidents prime ministers have occasionally affected handling of disputes, citing tense relationship between Diefenbaker Kennedy (74). …