Foreign Policy: The Youth Version

This 107-page report from Canada25 reaches us, on gusts of puffery from Michael Ignatieff, Jennifer Welsh and The Walrus’s Ken Alexander, as a communiqué from a terrific initiative.

Four years ago, a number of young Canadians, including three working at the McKinsey consulting firm, concerned about the brain drain from Canada to (mainly) the United States and having concluded that working through political parties was slow and not always a satisfactory way of achieving either impact or fulfillment, sought to generate a much larger community of similarly minded compatriots in Canada and abroad, to discuss and eventually influence Canadian foreign policy. They have been at it ever since, now drawing on 400 or so contributors and participants in regional and thematic roundtables that have unfolded in Canada, the U.S. and in London, England. They are fans of Andrew Cohen (as am I) and subscribe to his view of Canada’s decline in international relations (with...