Pursuit and Policy

Along with stakeholders from business, academia, and the public at large, employees of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (as it was then known) were invited to take part in a major policy review in 1994 and 1995. I volunteered. Over the course of several sessions, I heard many officers, especially younger ones, advocate for a stronger emphasis on Canadian values. Others asserted the importance of defending and projecting our interests abroad. Thus was displayed the policy spectrum that spans liberal idealism at one end and conservative realism at the other. Liberal idealists strive to remake or at least improve the world. But conservative realists shun rose-coloured glasses. Squinting in the bright sunlight, they watch for trouble and are diligently wary. In Harper’s World, a rich essay collection on the foreign policy of Stephen Harper’s government between 2006 and 2015, the Queen’s University professor emeritus Kim Richard Nossal conducts a...