Dear Prime Minister, Congratulations on your election (or re-election). You deserve a rest, but regrettably you will not get one, because now you must govern. During the campaign, your attention was focused on the daily battle for votes, but now the future stretches before you. Your most important task—like that of all your predecessors—is to create the conditions in which Canadians and Canada can thrive, now and in the years to come.
Doing so, however, requires a measure of foresight. Wayne Gretzky’s hockey adage—that you need to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been—has become something of a cliché, but it is an apt description of the policy challenge you face.
Today, this challenge is particularly important, and difficult, in relation to foreign policy, because the world is changing so...
Roland Paris is director of the Centre for International Policy Studies at the University of Ottawa. An academic and former federal public servant under both Liberal and Conservative governments, he has provided policy advice to international organizations, national governments and political leaders—including, most recently, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau.
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