Jean Chrétien is not remembered for his foreign policy chops as prime minister. One reason is his leadership style, which was to pick capable ministers and give them broad autonomy. Another is his character. Chrétien was not a grand visionary but an intuitive leader focused on building relationships. He was at heart a troubleshooter and admitted as much. “I solve problems,” he once said. Bring him one, and he’d fix it.
Yet it was Chrétien who made the call on a range of thorny issues — joining the Kyoto Protocol, pushing NATO to intervene in Kosovo, sitting out the second Gulf War — that gave Canadian foreign policy its particular contours during his decade in power. It would be a big stretch to call this a doctrine, but it was not improvisation either. Underneath Chrétien’s approach lay a clear set of beliefs.
It is these beliefs that twenty-odd former cabinet ministers, retired civil servants, and academics parse in Chrétien and the World. The...
Martin Laflamme is a Canadian diplomat, currently posted to Tokyo. The views presented in the magazine are his own.
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