daryl.copeland

During its first few months in office the Trudeau government has shown itself admirably adept at harvesting a wide variety of low hanging fruit, both political and public administrative.

Some gestures have been symbolic, others more substantive. In the wake of a lengthy parade of largely indifferent foreign ministers, the PM chose to appoint former party leader Stephane Dion, a thoughtful and experienced academic and who reads his briefs and writes his own speeches. Diplomats have been unmuzzled, and are once again afforded the trust required to engage in unscripted conversations. The curiously retrograde “Sovereign’s Wall” in the lobby of the Pearson Building has been decommissioned, with the oversized portrait of the Queen removed and the magnificent Pellan canvasses restored.

Perhaps most tellingly, the clunky, short-lived Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development has been re-christened Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

What to make of this whirlwind of activity?

The new government certainly embarked from a strikingly diminished base. After a decade of diplomatic inactivity, with the foreign ministry largely sidelined and marginalized by efforts to promote Canada as a “warrior nation”, almost any action was bound to seem significant. Yet changing the amalgamated department’s name – not unlike attending summits, offering a comforting range of international assurances, hosting the UN Secretary General, and endlessly repeating the mantra that “Canada’s back” – was definitely the easy part. Now that the early gains have been registered, the real work must begin.

If Canada is to regain its stature as an innovative, engaged and valuable player on the world stage, and in so doing burnish its tarnished brand, the performance of the foreign ministry will have to improve. Drastically.

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In conversation last week with members of the global elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos, PM Justin Trudeau undoubtedly emphasized once again that “ Canada is back” on the world stage.

Repeating that mantra may be good communications practice, but after a decade of foreign policy retrogression, the substantive case will be more difficult to make.

The Canada to which he refers has been a long time gone.

In such circumstances, the effort to reconnect with this country’s storied internationalist past won’t in itself be enough. But it might represent a useful point of departure.

Canada once contributed imaginatively, generously and energetically to the construction of broadly-based international security and prosperity.

That stature was not merely conjured by spin doctors. It was earned, grounded demonstrably in the diplomacy of the deed.

Lester Pearson and Justin’s father Pierre, for instance, are renown for their commitment to development and peace.

But there is much more.

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Blogger’s Note:  This is the first installment of notes for an address delivered 25 November 2015 at the Canadian Science Policy Conference in Ottawa.

Many thanks to the conference organizers and CSPC volunteers, and warm greetings to all attendees.

I would like try and launch our discussion of the putative role and place of diaspora science communities (DSCs) in international relations by offering an overview of some key considerations and constraints.

The idea of tapping into the skills and expertise resident in diaspora science communities (DSCs) in order to advance international policy goals and more effectively address global challenges is certainly an attractive proposition. That said, much complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity lie just below the surface. The relevant literature is thin, initiatives have been few, and as a result there is little by way of an established track record which might be examined to illuminate the way forward. Moreover, even if it can be demonstrated that scientists who share a common nationality but live abroad do in fact exhibit characteristics of something which could reasonably be described as a community, it is by no means clear that would-be members of DSCs self-identify as such or could be motivated to contribute to the attainment of objectives lying largely outside of the lab.

Would, for example, Chinese or Indian-born scientists living in Canada be willing to participate as a group in any kind of a larger, and in some respects more inherently political enterprise?

Tapping into DSC’s for the purposes of science diplomacy is quite possibly more easily said than done.

In trying to frame and contextualize the issue, there is much to contemplate.

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There is no worse heresy than that high office sanctifies the holder of it.

Lord Acton

These are exciting times across the country, and not least in Ottawa, where the repercussions of Oct.19^th continue to rock the capital.

The sensation of a new beginning is palpable – something akin to awakening from a decade long coma to discover a world on the cusp of transformation.

The debilitating communications gag, which had in particular compromised the work of scientists and diplomats, has been removed. Federal government employees, assured that they may once more speak and write freely about their work and will be treated with trust and respect, are exuberant.

The “Sovereign’s Wall” in the Pearson Building lobby – dominated by a larger than life portrait of Elizabeth II once described to me by a British diplomatic colleague as the expression of a “curious royalist fetish” that induced in him an “out of body” experience – is gone. It has been replaced by the pair of canvasses by Quebec artist Alfred Pellan which were removed on the occasion of a visit by Prince William in 2011. The restoration of these paintings, which celebrate Canada and Canadian artistic achievement rather than our colonial past, is a powerful totem.

More substantively, a striking array of initiatives – on refugees, climate change, foreign and defense policy – have been launched to compliment the raft of symbolic gestures and encouraging statements.

Still, the question must be put: with much of the low hanging fruit now harvested, what are the realistic prospects for bringing in the more complicated and difficult elements of the new government’s program?

That outcome will depend in large part upon the capacity of the public service to deliver, and in that respect, beyond the loss of critical expertise, the challenges may prove unexpectedly formidable.

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