Review: An Independent Foreign Policy for Canada? Challenges and Choices for the Future
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| Author | Ryan Touhey |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070201006500117 |
| Subject Matter | Coming AttractionsReview |
| 258 | Winter 2009-10 | International Journal |
| Reviews |
AN INDEPENDENT FOREIGN POLICY FOR CANADA?
Challenges and Choices for the Future
Brian Bow and Patrick Lennox, editors
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. 248pp, $24.95 paper
ISBN 978-0-8020-9634-0
John English’s biography of Pierre Trudeau recounts a White House
discussion following the prime minister’s 1971 visit to Washington. “We
understand Canada has its own right to its destiny,” Richard Nixon told his
advisors, “and no Canadian politician could survive without that ideology.”
The remark came at a moment when the relatively easy days of Canada-US
relations were a faded dream. Canadian nationalists were alarmed at the rising
level of American foreign direct investment in Canada’s economy. Public
opinion towards the US, which was in the thick of the 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 and former
policymakers—reassessed the traditional tenets of Canadian diplomacy and
explored whether Ottawa had the means to conduct a foreign policy that
would be both independent from Washington and a break from the “quiet
diplomacy” that had guided bilateral relations since 1945. Clarkson called for
a more robust and autonomous approach to the conduct of Canadian foreign
relations. Forty years later, political scientists Brian Bow and Patrick Lennox
have assembled a new generation of scholars—all political scientists, save
one—to revisit the issues that inspired Clarkson’s work. The new volume
considers the question of Canadian foreign policy independence in an era of
“unparalleled American power” (xvi).
Bow’s and Lennox’s introduction nicely describes the context of
Clarkson’s collection and posits that there are numerous parallels between
1968 and 2008. There are, however, some early factual errors. Did
“[m]ost Canadians” really have “no reservations about Canada’s dependence
on Britain in the first half of the twentieth century” (9)? Such a claim is
misleading and ignores the sentiments of the majority of Quebeckers. It
also overlooks both the small but prominent group of isolationists in the
Department of External Affairs, including O.D. Skelton, as well as the
nationalist sympathies of some prominent Liberals and members of the
Cooperative Commonwealth Federation. Further, the Gordon commission
study on the Canadian economy appeared in 1958, not 1968, and the
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