This article was downloaded by: [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal]

On: 01 December 2014, At: 17:58

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Canadian Foreign Policy Journal

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcfp20

Canada 21: A moment and a model

a
Janice Gross Stein
a
Harrowston Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation , University of Toronto
Published online: 14 Mar 2011.

To cite this article: Janice Gross Stein (1994) Canada 21: A moment and a model, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, 2:1, 9-13,
DOI: 10.1080/11926422.1994.9673019

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/11926422.1994.9673019

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained
in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the
Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and
should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for
any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of
the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic
reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://
www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
 9

CANADA 21: A MOMENT AND A MODEL

JANICE GROSS STEIN

Introduction
Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 17:58 01 December 2014

A group of men and women gathered together in the spring of 1993 to consider the
important choices that would face any new government that would take office after a long-
anticipated election. They agreed that the world had changed dramatically in the wake of the end
of the Cold War but that Canadian institutions and policies had not kept pace. The scope and
intensity of change were creating unique challenges and opportunities for Canadians. The
choices a new government would make would shape Canada’s future for decades.

From this meeting grew CANADA 21, a project designed to encourage independent non-
partisan thinking and to stimulate public debate on fundamental issues of Canadian security.
Those who worked on CANADA 21 were agreed on the moment and the model. The moment
was extraordinary in its potential for new opportunities for Canada and Canadians. The model
was a commission drawn from the private sector that was free to think about new directions for
Canadian Foreign Policy.

Meeting throughout the spring, the group formed a steering committee, assembled a research
team, invited outstanding Canadians with long and diverse experience in public life to join the
CANADA 21 Council, and solicited funding exclusively from the private sector to finance
research and the publication of a report. Those who joined the CANADA 21 Council agreed to
participate actively in setting the agenda, evaluating the research papers, and in preparing the
final report. Council members attended several meetings in the autumn of 1993, met with the
research consultants to discuss their papers, and reviewed several drafts of the final report. The
CANADA 21 Council was bands-on throughout the’

Assumptions Underlying the Research Agenda of CANADA 21

A set of common assumptions informed the research agenda of CANADA 21. The Council
agreed that the prospect of an attack by the armed forces of a
Janice Gross Stein is the Harrowston Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation at the University
of Toronto, and was the Project Director for the CANADA 21 Council

1. Members of the CANADA 21 Council include: Ivan L. Head, Chair, Thomas S. Axworthy, John Kim
Bell, S. Robert Blair, Jean Paul Brodeur, Tim Broadhead, Annamarie P. Castrilli, the Honourable Jacques
Courtois, Arthur A. Defehr, Admiral Robert H. Falls, Arthur S. Hara, the Honourable Donald S.
Macdonald, Ann Medina, Knowlton Nash, Sylvia Ostry, the Honourable Gerard Pelletier, John C. Polanyi,
Joseph L. Rotman, the Rt. Honourable Robert Lorne Stanfield, and the Honourable Maurice F. Strong.
The CANADA 21 Report can be obtained from the Centre of International Studies, University of Toronto,
170 Bloor St.,W., 5th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5S 1T9.
 Canadian Foreign Policy - ISSN 1192-6422, Vol. 2, No.1, (SprIng 1994), pp. 9-13
 10 CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY
powerful state directly upon Canada or upon our allies is now unlikely. Canada is consequently
freer to make choices about its security than it was throughout the long Cold War. The
autonomous capacity to make choices is a fundamental component of sovereignty and it is in this
sense that CANADA 21 feels that Canada is newly empowered. The need for Canada to make
choices - even difficult choices - is also greater than it ever has been.

The need to choose arises from conditions within and outside Canada. The Council
recognized that the divide between domestic and foreign policy has all but disappeared. Capital,
labour, information, technology and ideas now cross frontiers effortlessly and governments have
less autonomy in the management of their economies. At home, Canada is burdened by large
Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 17:58 01 December 2014

debt and troubled by the unemployment of a disproportionately large number of its young
people. In an interdependent web of international and transnational relations, the government has
less control of the economy and a reduced capacity to ensure the well-being of Canadians.
Governmental policies and institutions often seem ineffective. Canadians are consequently
troubled by a “democratic deficit” that inescapably grows out of domestic and international
constraints on our government.

The Council agreed that Canada must put its economic house in order if it is to have the
capacity to engage in the global system. What we can do abroad will depend in large measure on
the health of the domestic economy, but the health of our domestic economy will depend in large
part on what we do abroad. Only through cooperation with others can Canada address the issues
that are fundamental to our economic well-being and security.

The CANADA 21 Council also identified new kinds of challenges to Canada’s security.
Threatening Canada’s well-being and security is an unprecedented conjunction of demographic,
economic, and environmental stresses. Challenges to global security are most likely to arise from
conflict triggered by population growth, poverty involuntary migration, resource scarcities, and
ethnic clashes.

To understand the urgency of making hard choices, we need only look at the threat to the
security of our maritime population that has arisen from the depletion of fish stocks. At home
and abroad, the environment, the economy, and security are inextricably linked. In the search for
environmental security, we cannot solve our problems alone. The major problems Canada faces
directly - degraded water supplies, depleted commercial fishing stocks, acid rain, and toxic waste
- require cooperation from other states to ensure that Canadian communities are sustained.

Canada cannot enhance its security by acting alone. Cooperation with other nations and other
peoples is the only way that we can protect the quality of our life and environment, create and
enhance opportunities for Canadians, and guarantee our security. The security of Canadians rests
on our capacity to cooperate with others to design solution to common problems. In all its
aspects, our security is common.

The Council feels strongly that Canada must develop policies for preventive action to
address the underlying causes of conflict. We must complement our long-standing commitment
to peacekeeping with strategies that address continuing rapid population growth
 CANADA 21: A MOMENT AND A MODEL 11

in the poorest regions, severe economic disparities, environmental degradation, and scarcity of
critical resources. A commitment to preventive diplomacy has serious implications for the way
Canada decides to allocate its limited resources.
The CANADA 21 Council concluded that Canada must draw on a wide range of instruments
and resources if its policies are to be effective and efficient. Fiscal constraints are real and the
government cannot be expected to do more with less. It can, however, do more if its resource
base is expanded and its policies are different. The government must reach out to new strategic
partners within society and use its economic, scientific, and cultural resources, and its social,
human, and intellectual capital - as well as its military assets - in protecting Canadian and pro-
Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 17:58 01 December 2014

moting common security.

The Council also explored the threads that weave together the strands of common security in
Canadian Foreign Policy. When security includes economic, environmental and cultural security
- as well as security from attack at home and abroad - the tight connections among generally
separated policies become dearer. The emphasis on prevention makes the interconnections even
more important.

International trade policy, for example, is closely connected to international assistance,

human rights, sustainable development and to the economic security of Canadians at home.
Defence policy is closely linked to collective security, to peacekeeping and peacemaking, to
humanitarian assistance, and to the economic and environmental security of our maritime and
aboriginal peoples.
Contradictions as well as complementarities exist among the components of Canada’s
foreign and defence policies. When resources are constant or diminishing, it is imperative to look
at policies within this broader context, identify complementarities, and face the trade-offs
squarely.

CANADA 21 conceives of security as broad and deep. It is broad in the agenda it generates
and in the engagement of society as well as government. It is deep in the interconnections that it
identifies among components of policy. To meet these broad and deep challenges, the
government must deploy the resources that it mobilizes to ensure maximum effectiveness.
Canada cannot be everywhere and do everything. If it attempts to do so, it risks dissipating its
resources and sliding into policies of mediocrity. Canada must define its priorities, identify areas
of comparative advantage, develop “niche” policies, and focus its resources so that Canada
contributes distinctively across the broad spectrum of common security.

Sovereignty Strategic Alliances, Peacekeeping, and Defence

The five papers published in this issue of Canadian Foreign Policy are a subset of the research
papers commissioned by the CANADA 21 Council2 They focus on security and share the
overriding assumption that Canada must act in concert with others to address challenges through
preventive action and assure its own security. The five authors accepted the common discipline
of fiscal restraint: given

2. The remaining research papers on the global economy, the global environment, and Canada’s
relationship with die South will be published in the next issue (Vol.2, No.2) of Canadian Foreign Policy.
 12 CANADIAN FOREIGN POLICY
Canada’s financial constraints, recommendations had to fit within the existing envelopes of
budgetary expenditures. Pressing problems, the CANADA 21 Council insisted, could not be
solved through increased government spending. Canadians and their governments have to face
and make difficult and far-seeing choices.

Franklyn Griffiths focuses on Canada as a sovereign state and our government’s capacity for
autonomous choice in the post-cold world. His is a provocative analysis of two different types of
challenges to Canadian sovereignty. He argues that protecting and promoting Canadian
sovereignty is less the familiar problem of enforcing writ or title against foreign intruders – the
kind of challenge that has dominated Canadian thinking about security throughout its history.
Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 17:58 01 December 2014

Meeting this kind of challenge requires the mobilization of a basket of assets and instruments
that need only to be focussed and used effectively.

The principal challenge today is rather to maintain control over what happens within Canada
in the context of an increasingly interdependent world. In a porous world where transnational
and international flows cross borders effortlessly, Griffiths argues, Canada must make wise
choices about where and how Canada will be open to the international surround. We cannot do
so, he insists, unless we have the capacity to give voice to values and purposes that unite us.
Canadian sovereignty in the post-Cold War world, Griffiths concludes, is ultimately a function of
political culture.

John Lamb examines Canada’s relationship with the new Russia that emerged from the ashes
of the Soviet Union. He observes that Canada’s relationship with Russia throughout the long
Cold War was subordinate to larger strategic considerations. Now that the Cold War is over,
Canada is free to begin building new relationships with our northern neighbour that serve our
national, regional, and global interests. Canada has not yet seized the moment in its relationship
with Russia, Lamb argues, to take advantage of new opportunities to enhance Canadian security
and prosperity. Canada should invest now in preventive diplomacy. Russia, he concludes, has an
unparalleled ability to endanger Canadian security and an untapped capacity to benefit Canadian
interests.

John Halstead focuses on the continuing relevance of two international security institutions –
the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Conference on Security and
Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) – that have traditionally been important to Canada. Canadians
have long recognized the value of rule-based multilateral regimes and the increasing importance
to Canada of the Asia-Pacific region, the Arctic, and Latin America. He argues, however, that
NATO has an important role to play in bringing Russia and Eastern Europe into the stable
security system and in providing the United Nations (UN) with well trained, cohesive, and
superbly equipped forces. Halstead concludes that Canada should press NATO to transform itself
into a collective security organization that can meet the new challenges.

David Cox examines Canada’s stake in the United Nations as it moves to redefine
peacemaking and peacekeeping in the aftermath of the Cold War. The
 CANADA 21: A MOMENT AND A MODEL 13

demand for peacekeeping has grown exponentially, and Canada now finds itself unable, within
its present force structure, to meet the requests that it receives. Cox argues that Canadian
participation in peacekeeping has given Canada influence at the UN and elsewhere far beyond its
relative position in the hierarchy of states. UN participation serves both Canada’s national
interests and contributes to common security. However, Cox concludes, the UN requires
significant reform to improve its operational capabilities. Canada, for its part, can lead in
pressing for reform and in providing stand-by forces for peacekeeping.
Downloaded by [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal] at 17:58 01 December 2014

Douglas Bland proposes a considerable restructuring of the Canadian Forces to fit the
changed strategic environment. The target of repeated budget cuts over the
last several years, the Canadian Forces risk losing their effectiveness unless they can define
specific roles and missions that are appropriate to the new strategic context and maximize their
effectiveness. Bland details the inefficiencies of the present structure, outlines two approaches to
force structuring, and recommends a specialized force structure that is capable of defending
Canadian sovereignty, aiding civil
authorities, and responding to new international challenges. A restructured Canadian Forces of
the kind he proposes, Bland concludes, would be more efficient and would better complement
the other instruments of Canadian Foreign Policy.

The Beginning of the Debate

The full set of these research papers fed the intensive debates in the CANADA 21 Council as
it considered the new requirements of Canadian and common security. The careful reader of the
CANADA 21 report will note differences between the conclusions of individual research
consultants and the Council that was committed to exploring the linkages among policies, facing
the difficult choices, and making the trade-offs.
A critical debate on foreign and defence policy is now beginning in our country. We are
grateful for the opportunity to publish these research papers and enrich this discussion. We hope
that Canadians will join in the conversation, for out of this discussion will come choices that, as
the CANADA 21 Council argues, will shape our daily lives well into the foreseeable future.