Joly curious choice for foreign minister

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This article was published 10/11/2021 (1672 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WE have had more bizarre choices of foreign minister. One still shudders at the memory of “Mad Max” Bernier promoting Canada to the world. We have had revolving doors of foreign ministers before. David Emerson lasted less than six months. We have had 11 (11!) ministers since Stephen Harper came to power. And yet, rarely have we had a foreign minister with so little obvious qualification for the role.

Melanie Joly was one of the first promoters of Justin Trudeau’s leadership bid, an important early booster prominent in Montreal. She was rewarded with a cabinet position on her arrival in Ottawa. Her term at Heritage Canada was decidedly mixed, first ironically crossing swords with the very Quebec cultural community from which she came, then clashing with the entire Canadian cultural sector over what was widely seen as her surrender to Netflix’s refusal to pay Canadian taxes. Upon her demotion to minister of tourism, the cabinet equivalent of being sent down to the minors, she admitted to “rookie mistakes.”

In the tourism role, and her subsequent junior assignment, economic development, she virtually disappeared. For reasons that are not clear, she was allowed to hang on to the responsibility for La Francophonie and official languages. One thing is very clear, however; she has no obvious experience in international relations, and less ministerial exposure to the world than perhaps a dozen other ministers from agriculture to finance who play key roles with their international peers.

Given all these other ministerial colleagues with far greater credentials and experience than our new face of Canada to the world, why did she get the job in the cabinet shuffle two weeks ago? A typical Ottawa insider explanation when a very junior minister gets the top international job — this is far from the first time — is that the PMO will run global affairs and the PM will be his own foreign minister. To some extent this is always true, so that seems unlikely to be the reason.

Others point to her increasing leadership ambitions and credit fellow aspirant Chrystia Freeland engineering to have Joly be handed a poisoned political chalice, one that will keep her well out of the country. Perhaps, but Zoom makes that seem a poor explanation as well. Joly has been agitating for a serious economic portfolio for years, on the basis of what experience is not clear. Perhaps this was seen as a consolation for once again being rejected.

The most obvious reason is that this prime minister, more than any in recent years, wants his most loyal and obedient friends in the inner circle of his cabinet. Perhaps it is also an insurance policy about his probable successor, in case Freeland badly drops the ball.

What good is a foreign minister, you may ask? Similar grumbles are made about the entire diplomatic corps. The answer is no less true today than in the 16th century, when nations began placing senior advisers in foreign capitals: relationships and intelligence.

Would the two Michaels have been released without the tireless interventions of one of Canada’s leading China experts, our ambassador to Beijing, Dominic Barton? Would Canada have successfully pushed the world towards banning land mines without former minister Lloyd Axworthy’s years of global networking? Without a well-connected ambassador like Allan Gottlieb, would Canada have executed so successfully the strategy that led to the free trade agreement? Probably not, is surely the answer in each case.

Perhaps Joly has private networks of global relationships, and an ability to infer from snippets of intelligence our negotiating partners’ true goals. But given her biography, it does rather strain credulity. By contrast, China’s ambassador to Washington retired recently after nearly two decades in the role. Sergei Lavrov has been Russia’s foreign minister for almost as long.

With the news that Ottawa is preparing a new Indo-Pacific strategy, we might hope that many months from now, Joly may be offered some strategic guidance there. That’s good news, at least on that crucial region, but it offers little comfort on national security, the Middle East and an array of other files. Another newbie minister, with no guiding strategic goals, is surely a recipe for Canada’s continuing drift toward global irrelevance.

Robin V. Sears was an NDP strategist for 20 years and later served as a communications adviser to businesses and governments on three continents. He is a freelance contributing columnist for the Toronto Star.