In the practical world, we should have different white papers. Foreign affairs white papers could be independent, to give us an idea of how the government is viewing the world, what the fundamentals are in international relations. I say this because there are different philosophies and approaches to it. As long as we don't know exactly what the fundamentals are--who is the threat, what are the threats, what is the most important challenge that the governments thinks will happen in the coming years--as long as we don't have that data, there's nothing we can do. So we need to at least have some reasonable mid-term assessment of the priorities for Canada, in both defence and foreign affairs.
On April 29th, 2014. See this statement in context.