While Canada Slept: How we lost our place in the world
By Andrew Cohen
I took a course titled Canada and the World taught by Prof. Cohen when I was a master’s student in Ottawa. While Canada Slept was one of the required course readings. There were about 25 of us in his class and only 5 copies in the library, so I made a dash for it. And I made it.
Cohen looks at Canada’s decline on the international stage four ways: military, foreign aid, trade, and diplomacy. He makes a compelling case that the country was respected in all four areas by the end of WWII, but has been complacent since the end of the Cold War. He argues that Canada is trading on a reputation built in the post-war era without making significant progress to further it.
Militarily, he wrote, Canada is no longer capable of protecting its interests at home and abroad, piggybacking off the American military umbrella instead. He criticizes Canada for demobilizing its massive army after every conflict due to a lack of political will to maintain one at peacetime. Canada had the third largest navy and fourth largest army in the world by 1945. After that, the military was strong enough to partake in frequent peacekeeping missions around the world, but it is no longer he case.
In terms of foreign aid and diplomacy, Cohen writes that Canada had a colonial disadvantage. Early foreign policy developments were hindered by its relationship to Britain and looked towards the Empire most of the time. Even so, Canada was able to contribute generously to international organizations and strike independent trade deals in the last half of the 20th century with a strong foreign service. However, the foreign service budget has decreased in recent decades, thinning out its ranks of qualified staff and threatening Canada’s ability to maintain its position in the world. More recently, Canada was denied a seat at the UN Security Council.
Personally, I don’t think I have too many thoughts on this topic. The book was written in the early 2000s, and if it’s true, Canada has been out of the limelight of the international stage for most of my life. I don’t often notice Canadian activity even though I’ve lived in Geneva and in Canada, kind of like the neighbourhood stray cat. You know it’s there, but it wouldn’t make a huge difference even if it wasn’t.
