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Question 2: The 1995 Policy Review and SinceAmid recent global changes, should Canada continue to endorse a balanced ‘three pillar’ approach to its foreign policy objectives, or should the current balance be adjusted? |
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| Contributor: | 1864 |
| Date: |
2003-05-01 01:43:56 |
| Answer: |
The three pillars, Security, Prosperity, and Values and Culture, as set out in the paper, seem, in fact to be six pillars, or three pillars, each with two feet, one planted in Canada and one planted abroad.
The security pillar needs to be re-engineered as having only one foot and that is for the world as a whole. Our Canadian security must be seen as succumbed within the "common security" of all earth's people. Ignoring the security of others has an uncanny way of coming round to threaten our own security.
The prosperity pillar also needs to be redesigned. First of all, we know that our former policy of "increasing prosperity in Canada and expanding global prosperity" is remarkable in its failure and we should not mask this truth with platitudes. For the bulk of the world's people, most astoundingly for African peoples, the era of this policy has been an era of dramatic economic and social decline. Then, for Canadians, we have to re-engineer how we think of prosperity. We have to abandon growth indicators like GDP or increased consumption measures. We have to phase out all uses of GDP and replace them with something like a measurement of well-being or quality of life. We should put enormous research and education into this task so we can learn to live with less without feeling deprived. And we need to begin this with the upper élites in our society. A former Governor General of Canada and premier of Manitoba once said that in his view the incomes of those persons receiving the highest incomes should not exceed seven times that of persons receiving the lowest incomes. At the time, maybe thirty years ago, that seemed excessive to me! Today, what an amazing equalizer that would be. If we can succeed in re-engineering our own understanding of what enhances our individual well-being and quality of life, then we should reach out to other nations with our profound new understanding. We should avoid exporting our current concept of what constitutes prosperity.
Discounting our materialist consumerist culture, many of our other values are indeed worth promoting abroad. We have to be careful though to be clear what values we're talking about. We experience many different values in Canada, within an over-arching value that tolerating their diversity and talking about them is good.
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