Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy and Historic Foreign Policy Reviews Compared

• In Event: Longitudinal Assessments of Canadian Politics

Abstract

The Canadian federal government’s embrace of a feminist foreign policy has received no shortage of scholarly attention. Current research has tended to characterize the Trudeau government’s adoption of a feminist foreign policy as a “branding” play to construct a new image of Canada. How novel is the image of Canada upholding feminist values internationally? To answer this question, I conduct a discourse analysis of every foreign policy review conducted by a Canadian government since the 1940s, which primarily take the form of foreign policy white papers, to examine how novel this new brand is relative to previous re-branding efforts. Acting as opportunities to “re-brand”, these reviews have been used by incoming government’s to articulate new directions, goals, and images of Canada in the global environment each was produced within. Canadian foreign policy white papers have been issued by governments since the 1970s, with official speeches from the Secretary of State for External Affairs acting as an equivalent prior to the 1970s. In addition to the official documents related to Canada’s feminist foreign policy (including Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy) this study examines the following foreign policy reviews: Louis St. Laurent’s “The Foundations of Canadian Foreign Policy in World Affairs” speech at the University of Toronto (1947), Lester B. Pearson’s “Canadian Foreign Policy in a Two Power World” speech at the Empire Club of Canada in 1951, and the following three white papers: Foreign Policy for Canadians (1970), Competitiveness and Security (1985), and Canada in the World (1995). The findings of this analysis challenge previous research in two important ways. First, I consider the government’s current rhetoric surrounding a feminist foreign policy as a modern day continuation of a historical discourse of Canada as a protector of human rights. Far from a new “brand”, I argue that the government has a long history of articulating Canada as a nation devoted to defending humanitarian values around the world, with today’s feminist foreign policy a modern day twist on this historic discourse. Second, while some have found congruence between modern articulations of today’s image of Canadian foreign policy as feminist with that of the 1990s image of Canada as advancing a human security agenda, I find that this likeness is but a segment in a much longer history of familiar articulations.

Author

• Taylor R McDonald, University of Florida