In Canada First, Not Canada Alone, Chapnick and McKercher make a renewed case for understanding Canada’s place in world politics as a principal power. This book explores Canada’s evolving role in global politics, highlighting the country’s efforts to balance leadership, independence, and alliance-building while navigating historical legacies and modern challenges

Does any country in the world obsess over its international standing as much as Canada? The anxiety of influence is not unique to our national context, but it has been honed to a distinct edge north of the 49th parallel. At first blush, the title “Canada First” appears controversial; a comment on the America First foreign policy doctrine that is degrading the liberal international order and an answer to recent books urging policymakers to courageously occupy a zone of insecurity between China and the United States.

Chapnick and McKercher make a renewed case for understanding Canada’s place in world politics as a principal power. When Dewitt and Kirton first wrote Canada as a Principal Power more than forty years ago, they were arguing for a way to think about Canadian foreign policy that moved beyond liberal internationalism and dependency theory. Today, Chapnick and McKercher argue that Canada has always had to triangulate our position with reference to a cautious form of independence, assertions of principle, and subordinate status.

In that context, the provocative title can be read in three ways. It is certainly a riff on the isolationism of America first. And it also quite clearly refers to the continuous process of determining the national interest. But it also signifies that on certain issues, such as on arctic environmental protection and the protection of fishing stocks, Canada has stepped out ahead of the curve. Through a combination of multilateral cooperation and unilateral policy entrepreneurialism, Canada has backed bold policy prescriptions, and taken principled positions even when it must stand alone.

Importantly, Chapnick and McKercher aren’t selling yet another approach to understanding Canada’s place in the world. The historical record suggests that political leadership has always been keenly aware of our structural position. “Canada first” indicates that Canada’s government has always recognised the necessity of using position, perspective, and power resources to protect and enhance vital interests. Therefore, it is not a statement of purpose but rather a form of depth sounding for navigating the power politics of dominion status, and later, statehood.

The authors ask, how has Canada exercised sovereignty amid larger partners and their conflicting interests? And secondly, when does Canada step out from the relative safety of middle power multilateralism to set its own course in world affairs? Of course, such questions require more precision than we can expect from the concept of “middle power,” which is conceptually muddy and increasingly unsuited to the emerging system of alliances. Wisely, they place the concept in its historical context and leave it there.

Instead, Chapnick and McKercher argue that the tension between leadership and followership is not a cross to bear so much as it is the liminal space in which Canadian policy must always exist. But so what, they ask? There is still plenty of room to pursue our interests, communicate our values, and start a war with Spain over our fisheries, if it comes to it.

The narrative continuously demonstrates the linkages between complex domestic political issues, foreign policy formation, and global politics. In so doing, the book improves on the stale foreign policy binary in which Canada exists in a state of suspended animation, endlessly hesitating between realist pragmatism and liberal internationalism. Must we always look over our shoulder to the golden age of Pearsonian peacekeeping, as if the Cold War offers clarity of purpose and moral vision?

Chapnick and McKercher would seem to suggest that such mythology is singularly unhelpful when the sweep of twentieth century history offers a more comprehensive set of lessons about self-help among the great powers. Designed as a teaching tool with case studies and projects that take students beyond the text, Canada First it is a first-rate resource for teaching of area studies and comparative foreign policy. Chapters are organised around prime ministers, from William Lyon Mackenzie King to Justin Trudeau. By focusing on governments rather than big eras, the authors demonstrate how institutional trajectories, and political leadership, shapes foreign policy formation.

Three important features separate this book from similar narratives. First, its focus on prime ministers shows that while history never repeats itself, it certainly rhymes. For example, the FLQ crisis faced by Pierre Trudeau and Justin Trudeau’s truckers’ convoy involved momentous decisions taken at tumultuous moments in world politics. In the 1960s Quebec separatism drew fuel from decolonisation, and in 2022 the Ottawa standoff was fuelled by a global surge in right-wing populism. Both cases demonstrate that even as institutions have developed, leadership is still very much a matter of personality and political will.

Second, the book has important insights about the historical place of trade in North American security arrangements, something that scholars and policymakers will be studying in detail in the next decade. Today many foreign policy scholars have not yet put aside the post-Cold War convention in which liberal trade is a prophylactic against war. But we ought also to consider the fact that trade ties are an essential component of a state’s security apparatus. This is the position that has bipartisan support in the United States today, and it was Canada’s position as far back as the 1940s.

Third, Chapnick and McKercher don’t shrink from the darker corners of Canadian history. They uncover a fascinating and deeply unsettling set of foreign policy drivers in the interwar period, that are again rising to prominence. Canada, like the United States, has a wide streak of white supremacist and isolationist sentiment that runs deep enough to influence the course of public affairs. We often wrongly assume Canadian bigotry to be a function of America’s larger and louder right-wing ecosystem. Certainly, extremists in both countries nourish each other. But Canada has more than enough xenophobia and hatred to damage our own democracy, if we let it.

Even so, this history is not a morality tale. And it refuses to indulge in handwringing about lack of vision or an unwillingness to succeed; nor is it about the traps of privilege and complacency. The central irony of Canadian foreign policy that the authors demonstrate over and over is that taking an independent foreign policy requires not enormous courage, but simply the political will to decide and stick by it. Even so, turning action into meaningful change in international relations requires powerful friends. It turns out that the need for reliable friends is something the great and the lesser powers have in common.

This is a review of Adam Chapnick and Asa McKercher’s Canada First, Not Canada Alone: A History of Canadian Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 2024). ISBN: 9780197653715.

Marc Froese is a Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program at Burman University.

This review is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.