Declining stature of foreign affairs minister underscores Canada’s waning influence on world stage

From the Fraser Institute

In the cabinet he unveiled in May, Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed Anita Anand to serve as this year’s foreign affairs minister.

Yes, that’s tongue in cheek. Anand may well serve longer than one year in that role. Her predecessor, Mélanie Joly, served three-and-a-half years, almost as long as John Baird who served from May 2011 to February 2015. But those two were exceptions to what has become a revolving door ministry. In this century, 15 people have served as minister of foreign affairs.

Some of this has to do with the six minority governments we’ve had in Ottawa over that time. But the bigger reason is that Global Affairs Canada, as it is currently known, no longer has the stature it once enjoyed, in part because foreign policy is directed more and more from the Prime Minister’s Office, and because “Canada’s standing in the world has slipped,” as Marc Garneau, who was foreign minister for nine months in 2021, wrote in his memoir. “We are losing credibility.”

The minister of foreign affairs was once seen almost as a Canadian equivalent of an American vice-president. Louis St. Laurent, Lester Pearson and Jean Chretien all served at foreign affairs before later becoming prime minister. Joe Clark served as foreign affairs minister after having been prime minister.

And Canadian foreign policy once mattered in world affairs. Pearson played a key role in the negotiations that led to the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. He was the only Canadian to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, after he helped broker a ceasefire during the 1956 Suez Crisis that led to the first peacekeeping mission.

During her brief tenure as foreign affairs minister in 1979, Flora MacDonald promoted the idea of bringing Vietnamese refugees to Canada through private sponsorships by citizens and groups. The United Nations awarded Canada the Nansen Refugee Award for accepting more than 60,000 boat people, as they were known, from Indochina.

Joe Clark, as External Affairs minister in the 1980s, put Canada in the forefront of opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

At the turn of this century, foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy led the movement that brought about the United Nations doctrine of Responsibility to Protect—a global commitment to prevent genocide and other atrocities.

And following the attacks on 9/11, Foreign affairs minister John Manley worked closely with Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge to secure the Canada-U.S. border, while continuing to promote free trade across it.

Since then, the stature of foreign affairs ministers has declined. Bill Graham was deeply disappointed when Paul Martin replaced him as minister with Pierre Pettigrew, whom Martin kept on a very short leash.

Stephen Harper cycled through a plethora of foreign affairs ministers—Peter MacKay, Maxime Bernier, David Emerson, Lawrence Cannon, Baird and, in the final months, Rob Nicholson.

Justin Trudeau did the same, replacing Stéphane Dion with Chrystia Freeland, then François-Philippe Champagne, then Garneau and finally Joly.

Part of this is the way of the world. In foreign affairs ministries everywhere, from Foggy Bottom to Whitehall to the Quai d’Orsay, diplomats lament that the office of the head of government effectively runs foreign affairs, shunting them aside.

But the declining stature of the Canada’s minister of foreign affairs coincides with the declining stature of Canada within the Western alliance and beyond, which itself is the result of the decline in Canda’s defence capability.

In the 1950s, during the Korean War, Canada’s defence spending reached 7.4 per cent of GDP. On John Diefenbaker’s watch it sat above 4 per cent; on Pearson’s, around 3 per cent.

Pierre Trudeau reduced the size and role of Canada’s military, while seeking to make Canada less closely aligned with the United States. He took defence spending down to 2 per cent of GDP, where Brian Mulroney kept it.

With the end of the Cold War, and with the need to balance the federal budget, defence spending under Jean Chretien and Paul Martin fell to about 1 per cent of GDP, where it largely remained under Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

Other members of NATO are investing heavily in their military in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But Canada continues to lag behind.

Prime Minister Carney promises to increase Canada’s defence commitments while pursuing a more robust foreign and trade policy. We shall see. In any case, Anand should not get too comfortable in her office at the Pearson building. If past is precedent, she may not be there long.

John Ibbitson

Up Next

Ottawa must listen to the West

Don't Miss

Oil producers brace for market share battle

Todayville

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Mexican Cartels Expanding Operations in Canada, Using Indigenous Reserves as Factory Hubs

Brownstone Institute / 1 hour ago

Anthony Fauci Gets Demolished by White House in New Covid Update

Business / 2 hours ago

Patriotic Millionaires concept of tax ‘fairness’ ignores tax facts in Canada

Business

Patriotic Millionaires concept of tax ‘fairness’ ignores tax facts in Canada

Published on June 3, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Tegan Hill

A group of wealthy Canadians called the “Patriotic Millionaires” recently asked governments in Canada to increase the amount of taxes they pay to “ensure greater fairness” in the system. In particular, the group is calling for a wealth tax and higher taxes on capital gains.

Unfortunately, the Patriotic Millionaires (whose motto is “Tax the rich!”) seem to misunderstand the current distribution of taxes paid by different income groups in Canada and the economic consequences of raising taxes.

The fixation on tax “fairness” (which the Patriotic Millionaires never actually define) is not new in Canada. It was a constant focus of the Trudeau government, which decided to increase “fairness” by increasing the top federal personal income tax rate from 29 per cent to 33 per cent in 2016 and proposing to raise taxes on capital gains in 2024.

These policies, like the Patriotic Millionaires, ignored basic facts about taxes. According to a recent study, the top 20 per cent of income-earning families in Canada paid 54.2 per cent of all federal, provincial and local taxes while earning less than half of the country’s total income (46.4 per cent). These families are the only income group in Canada that pay a larger share of taxes than their share of income.

In contrast, the remaining 80 per cent of Canadian families pay less in taxes than their share of total income. For example, the bottom 20 per cent of income-earning families pay 2.0 per cent of total taxes while earning 5.0 per cent of total income.

Why? Because Canada, like most advanced economies, has a progressive income tax system where government taxes individuals at increasingly higher rates as their income rises. For example, the marginal federal tax rate is 15 per cent on individual incomes up to $57,375 but more than double that rate (33 per cent) on income that exceeds $253,414.

According to the Patriotic Millionaires, Canada needs a “wealth tax,” which taxes a person’s net wealth. But time and time again, wealth taxes have failed to deliver the promised results of proponents. Eight European countries that experimented with wealth taxes have since abandoned them because they were expensive to administer, raised little revenue and imposed enormous costs on their economies. In particular, wealth taxes discourage investment, which is needed to broadly raise living standards and improve prosperity, by prompting people to move their assets away from productive investments (e.g. new businesses) to investments that may be exempt from the tax.

So, if Ottawa implemented a wealth tax, we’d likely see a reallocation of investment away from startups and towards housing (assuming housing remains exempt from the tax). Consequently, companies and investors would have less resources to invest in the technology, machinery and equipment that improve productivity, create jobs and drive higher living standards, particularly for average workers.

The Patriotic Millionaires also want to raise taxes on capital gains, which would have similar negative effects by making it more expensive for individuals and businesses to invest in Canada, leading to stagnant wages and living standards for Canadians.

The Patriotic Millionaires are misguided in their claims about “fairness” in the tax system. High-income earners already pay the majority of all taxes in Canada, and proportionality is one of the only objective measures of fairness with respect to the tax burden. Their policy proposals, if enacted by government, would only harm the economy rather than help it. That wouldn’t be fair to Canadian workers.

Jake Fuss

Director, Fiscal Studies, Fraser Institute

Tegan Hill

Director, Alberta Policy, Fraser Institute

Business

Federal government should cut red tape to spur economic growth

Published on June 3, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Julio Mejía and Elmira Aliakbari

As Parliament resumes, Prime Minister Mark Carney should recognize a simple fact—Canada has a regulation problem, which discourages business investment and stifles economic growth. And if we don’t solve the problem, we risk falling further behind the United States.

Since his re-election in November, President Donald Trump has vowed to cut “job-killing” red tape, promised to eliminate 10 regulations for each new regulation, and directed federal agencies to halt the enforcement of burdensome and potentially unlawful regulations. To amplify these efforts, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) launched a website tracking the regulatory complexity across government agencies in Washington.

Meanwhile in Canada, Canada’s regulatory burden is growing. CFIB estimates that in 2024 businesses spent 735 hours on regulatory compliance—58 hours more than in 2020. Meanwhile, the annual cost of dealing with regulations jumped from $45.4 billion in 2020 to $51.5 billion in 2024 (inflation-adjusted).

This growing regulatory burden isn’t just costly—it also creates uncertainty, erodes productivity by forcing business to spend time and resources navigating the bureaucracy, and ultimately deters investment.

Not surprisingly, business investment in Canada—measured on a per-worker basis—has plummeted by 33 per cent, from $18,600 in 2014 to about 14,000 in 2024 (inflation-adjusted). Moreover, according to renowned economist Jack Mintz, from “2016 through 2022 close to $225 billion in capital was lost as more direct investment left the country than came here.”

Even before Trump’s deregulatory campaign, the 2024 OECD Regulatory Restrictiveness Index ranked Canada as the most restrictive country for foreign investment in both the G7 and North America—behind the United States and Mexico—due to regulatory barriers in sectors such as telecommunications, agriculture, mining and finance.

Red tape is also hurting investment in Canada’s energy sector, our main source of exports. According to the latest survey of oil and gas investors, 68 per cent of respondents said uncertainty about environmental regulations deters investment in Canada’s oil and gas sector compared to 41 per cent in the U.S. And 54 per cent said Canada’s regulatory duplication and inconsistencies deter investment compared to only 34 per cent for the U.S. (This survey was also conducted before Trump’s regulatory rollbacks.) Investment is key to increasing incomes and improving living standards; it provides workers with the tools and technology to produce more and better goods and services. Less investment also means less money to develop new projects, infrastructure and technologies, and consequently fewer jobs and less economic opportunity for Canadians across the country.

While Parliament was off for months, the Trump administration was busy cutting red tape to create a more welcoming investment climate. Now, the new Carney government should adopt its own reform agenda to reduce regulations and spur economic growth, for the benefit of Canadian workers and their families.