In June 2023 Canada’s Foreign Minister, Mélanie Joly issued a discussion paper entitled Future of Diplomacy: Transforming Global Affairs Canada. This rare effort at departmental self-examination was prompted by a deteriorating international environment marked by “great power competition and challenges to the rules-based international order.” This negative geopolitical context is leading many of Canada’s allies and partners to “reinvest” in their diplomatic capacities. The discussion paper further asserted that “Canada must do so now, or risk losing ground to partners and competitors alike.”

Another factor that may have prompted the launch of this departmental assessment was the initiation by the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee of a similar study of Canada’s diplomatic capacity that was released in December 2023, and whose recommendations were broadly aligned with the reform aims set out in the discussion paper.

The June discussion paper provided a blue print for a “revitalized Global Affairs Canada” built around four priority areas: policy, presence, people, and processes. In the policy realm, the intent was to build policy capacity “in areas central to Canada’s future” covering a range of issues that transcend traditional diplomatic focus such as climate change, critical minerals, cyber and “whole-of-government” crisis management.

Recognizing that Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has been something of a closed shop when it comes to policy innovation, the paper suggested that the department would become “open by default.” An expanded Strategic Planning bureau, would contain a new “Open Policy Hub” that would be “responsible for high quality, evidence-based policy development and analysis as well as advance warning and foresight.” The envisaged hub would also interact with an extensive network of academics, think tanks, NGOs, and civil society to achieve these ends and demonstrate that GAC was open to ideas generated outside its own bureaucracy.

In enlarging GAC’s current network of 178 missions in 110 countries, the plan also called for a strengthened presence “in key G20 and other strategically important countries and an enhanced foot print at the Permanent Mission to the UN in New York.” Relevant to this aim........

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