New Series Situates Canada in a Changing World

In the past, Canada has aimed to play an outsized role on the world stage, thanks, in part, to its close ties with both the United Kingdom and the United States. Today, pressing problems such as climate change, authoritarianism and digital technology governance and an unfamiliar and potentially unfriendly world order mean that Canada needs a new strategy to construct a prosperous future.

Inspired by the late Canadian diplomat and commentator John Wendell Holmes’s belief that the best public policy emerges from an appreciation of history, 14 experts address six contemporary themes in foreign policy and security policy, melding historical context and policy analysis to offer practical suggestions that can inform Canada’s response to the challenges ahead.

Each morning, the party-state propaganda department for the People’s Republic of China instructs all media on how the day’s news should be reported. Ukraine at war has been a case in point. Geopolitical calculation lies behind China’s tacit support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and reluctance to use its influence to stop the war. Alex He writes that the shifting fortunes of war and possible setbacks due to sanctions may cause Beijing to think twice.

James M. Boughton writes that it is no longer possible to hope that simmering clashes between competing value systems in China, Russia, the European Union, the United States and elsewhere can be reconciled through existing multilateral institutions, most of which were designed almost eight decades ago during the Second World War. The history of Bretton Woods, and the frustrated desire to update it, can guide the global response to the breakdown of order produced by Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

In this op-ed first published in the Chicago Tribune, Michael Den Tandt argues that the Iraq war was a critical step in the descent to this moment of severe global risk: “Any who cheered for it or stood silently by, in the United States and elsewhere, should look hard in the mirror as they celebrate that ‘America is back.’” For the rules-based order to survive the war in Ukraine, Den Tandt writes, the United States must do better and be better; there can be no wars of choice, if there is to be a global community.

Recent years have witnessed the growing use of trade measures as geopolitical weapons. In response, the European Union is introducing a new instrument to deal with cases of economic coercion and, while no specific country is named, it is obvious that the biggest elephant in the room is China. Will the new Anti-Coercion Instrument be effective against Beijing? To answer that question, Henry Gao says, we need to first understand what drives China’s economic coercion.

In this op-ed co-published with openDemocracy, Susie Alegre says that the right to freedom of opinion, including the right to keep our opinions to ourselves and to form our opinions free from manipulation, is protected absolutely in international human rights law as long as those opinions remain inside our heads. But the ways in which online information is managed, targeted and amplified pose serious threats to that right in practice.

Dwayne Winseck takes a look at Canada’s new draft legislation that aims to redress the dominant market power Google and Facebook have amassed by building an online advertising system around third-party content, including news, and people’s online activities. After outlining and weighing the Online News Act’s strengths against an array of problems, Winseck concludes it’s time to go back to the drawing board.