At a recent University of Ottawa symposium,
upon which I commented, at length, the subject of the unbearably low quality of policy
advice being proffered to ministers was raised.
I discussed this with a couple of chaps who know, intimately, how it
was done for Trudeau, Mulroney and Chrétien. Both agreed that policy advice has been going downhill, steadily, since the
golden days of the ‘50s and ‘60s and both agreed that Harper has good reason to mistrust the
quality of the advice he is getting.
But: both were horrified at Harper’s idea that the advice was politically partisan. Trudeau had a very similar thought,* by the way, and that’s one of the reasons he gutted the External Affairs department. Mulroney had exactly the same thought – so he continued to gut the department – undoing some of Trudeau’s worst excesses but not making anything any better. Ditto Chrétien, who appeared to believe that the
Oxbridge crowd (which he hated as much as Trudeau did) had returned. The end result is that we appear to have managed to
transform one of the world’s best foreign services into one of the worst in one generation – that sort of policy vandalism ought to be recognized as the bipartisan effort it was, and is, still.
Anyway, I stand by my “NATO was the cornerstone of our foreign policy, but now it’s a stumbling block” thesis. But: NATO
IS the key player in Afghanistan and we have to find ways to make it effective – or else we will suffer a humiliating and quite unnecessary defeat – a 3D defeat, at that. If that happens you can rest 99.9% assured that DND will get most of the blame.
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* Trudeau’s problem was that
External was, in his view, a nest of
Anglophilic, pro-American
cold warriors who would try to sabotage the policy he planned to implement. He was right – at least he was within his (distorted) world view.
