There are limits to what you can do with policy, because all governments react to public opinion. They react to the spur of the moment, and so on and so forth. Also, I think academics tend to overplay policies, because academics think they can have a role in making policy, so obviously policy then becomes important to them.
I'm not sure that what we're looking for is policy. I think what we're looking for is a set of principles, for example. I mean, one of the sets of principles that I still think holds great value for Canadians was laid down by Louis St. Laurent in 1946. When he talked about what role Canada should be playing in the world, he talked about the importance of national unity as one the main goals of Canadian foreign policy; he wasn't talking about defence policy.
I think we can revise those principles that St. Laurent laid down so long ago, and we would probably find today that we're not going to arrive at principles that are very different from what he did at the time. For example, how important is it for us to intervene in a situation such as Libya? And if we're intervening in Libya, why aren't we intervening in Syria? Well, half of it has to do with capability, and half of it has to do with what other nations are doing, but how important is it for us? Why is the Caribbean an important place for Canada while the Mediterranean, let's say, is not so important for Canada?
I think these are things we can do. I think these are things we should be doing. I think the government should be taking the lead on it but also listening to Canadian people and Canadian business to see if there is a general consensus on certain issues. You won't find complete consensus, obviously, but I think it's important that Canadians have to basically agree on something in order to support any kind of an endeavour—either short- or long-range endeavours.
I think part of the lesson that we need to learn from Afghanistan is that people went off in all different directions for all kinds of reasons—some of which Jack Granatstein and I studied in a publication that we issued last fall—so we didn't get national unity on the question of Afghanistan. We didn't even get significant consensus on the question of Afghanistan over a period of time, so policy tended to go off the rails.
I think what we need to try to do is identify those things that most Canadians would agree on and say, “This is in our national interest, this meets our values, and it's part of who are to do this.” Then, when we have a set of principles together, I think we need to try to measure whenever international crises arise, whether or not we're prepared to follow through.
If you call that a policy, okay. I just call it basically a shopping list, more than anything else, but I think it needs to be there, because I think that right now there isn't anything out there that's very clear.