Swingback: Getting Along in the World with Harper and Trudeau by Mike Blanchfield
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702018811835 |
| Author | Jean-Christophe Boucher |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Russia. On relations with China, Trudeau is accused of considering Beijing only for
its economic and commercial potential. And finally, on relations with US president
Donald Trump, Coulon seems to approve of Trudeau’s strategy to maximize
Canada’s influence with the entourage of the president, members of Congress,
and state governors. But Coulon does not disguise his feeling that the coming to
power of Trump was in fact an excuse to dismiss Dion, rather than the true cause of
his replacement. The reader is thus left to understand that Dion would have done a
better job at dealing with Trump. Freeland is viewed by Coulon as embodying the
left-wing of the Liberal Party and, he warns, would be to blame if the renegotiation
of NAFTA failed.
Mike Blanchfield
Swingback: Getting Along in the World with Harper and Trudeau
Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 304 pp. $31.46 (cloth)
ISBN: 9780773548756
Reviewed by: Jean-Christophe Boucher (jean-christophe.boucher@macewan.ca), MacEwan
University
What is the foreign policy legacy of the Harper government? Academics and
commentators alike still debate, and quite frankly struggle, to understand the
underpinnings of the Harper government’s conduct of foreign policy. There is
no shortage of hypotheses in the literature, but we can find two competing nar-
ratives. The first hypothesis suggests that the Conservatives’ foreign policy was
influenced by ideological considerations. Proponents of the second hypothesis
maintain instead that the Harper government was mostly influenced by domestic
calculations, and used foreign policy to advance the Conservatives’ electoral
agenda.
In Swingback, Mike Blanchfield, from the Canadian Press, contributes to this
debate by suggesting that contemporary Canadian foreign policy is both deter-
mined by political elites’ values defined by their ideologies, and a willingness to
use foreign policy to advance domestic political goals. In this respect, the central
contention of Swingback is that Stephen Harper transformed Canadian foreign
policy. The book then aims to explain why ‘‘Stephen Harper deviate[d] from the
longstanding cross-party consensus of how Canada should govern itself outside its
borders,’’ arguing that ‘‘[i]n part, he was driven by an ideology forged in the long
years leading to the creation of the new conservative movement. The other driver of
Harper’s worldview was much more straightforward: to perpetuate his party’s
power’’ (8). Interestingly, and rightly so, Blanchfield sees this as a feature of
Canadian foreign policy since 2006, and not necessarily one associated specifically
with Conservative foreign policy. Indeed, as the author remarked: ‘‘Their respect-
ive foreign policies differed sharply, but Harper and Trudeau arrived at them the
same way, by adhering to their opposing beliefs as they drove full tilt toward the
same point of the horizon: domestic political power’’ (3).
Book Reviews 625
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