First, good evening, Mr. Bergeron. It's good to see you again, too.
As for whether thinking about defence before thinking about foreign affairs is putting the cart before the horse, in fact, I'd say the one influences the other. While it's true that defence policy is generally expected to flow from, or conform to, foreign policy, I would also respond that, in Canada's history, the two may have operated in a decoupled fashion, or that there has rarely been much effort to make them coherent.
That said, let me return to your first point, namely the consultations we held on foreign policy, in Canada, until the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.
This model leaves me a little ambivalent. Indeed, it had the advantage of allowing Canadian society to express itself, to set its priorities, but it sometimes left, too, an impression of co-optation; the government received a series of contradictory opinions from civil society, and it only had to choose those that suited its purposes.
On the other hand, there's another process I like, and that's a review every 10 years. This process is used in other states. I think Norway uses it. We set up a committee that could resemble a Canadian commission of inquiry. This committee makes recommendations to the government on how it should approach its foreign policy, as well as its defence policy, over the next few years.