Adam Chapnick and Christopher J. Kukucha, eds. The Harper Era in Canadian Foreign Policy: Parliament, Politics, and Canada’s Global Posture Vancouver

Reviewed by: Asa McKercher, McMaster University mckercha@mcmaster.caIn 2011, fresh off his majority election win, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave an interview to Maclean's in which he reflected on two things: the past five exhausting years of minority government and his newfound appreciation for foreign affairs. Indeed, on the latter topic, he admitted that what now clear to him not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but in fact that it's become almost everything. There's hardly anything today of any significance that doesn't have a huge international dimension to it, beginning first and foremost with the economy.[1] In The Harper Era in Canadian Foreign Policy: Parliament, Politics, and Canada's Global Posture , Adam Chapnick and Christopher J. Kukucha have gathered together leading scholars--plus a few figures from the real world--who ably analyze the nexus between minority/majority government and Canada's global engagement from 2006 to 2015. The result is an excellent collection of essays on recent Canadian foreign policy.Edited collections are often judged on what binds them together. In the case of The Harper Era , the overall theme is not simply Conservative foreign policy but rather whether that policy influenced by the Conservatives' standing in the House of Commons, or, as the editors ask, Did the shift from minority to majority government have a significant impact on the way that the Conservatives conceived of, developed, and implemented international policy on Canada's behalf? (5). At first blush, this might seem an odd framework for a collection on Harper. After all, both the Conservatives and their opponents portrayed the Harper era as a break from past Canadian foreign policy, what Chapnick elsewhere once termed a diplomatic counter-revolution.[2] Yet as the editors are keen to stress, their problematique is a worthwhile one because the impact of minority/majority governance has been little explored in the literature on Canadian foreign policy. The Harper Era fills this scholarly lacuna. Moreover, many of the contributors look past the parliamentary question to many of the broader issues surrounding the Conservative revolution in foreign policy, including the impact of conservative ideology, the role of other domestic political factors, and the influence of Prime Minister Harper himself.Each contribution focuses on a specific theme or issue and most of the chapters make clear that the Harper government's standing in the House of Commons had little specific influence on policymaking. Rather, the contributors point to a variety of other factors. So, looking at defence spending--a priority item for the Conservatives during their first years in power--David Perry posits that what counted most the government's commitment to austerity measures as well as what seems to be a perennial Canadian penchant to fumble procurement. Michael Manulak, meanwhile, notes that on environmental issues, especially tackling climate change, what mattered not minority standing but the Harper government's commitment to Canadian energy producers, a factor explored in depth by Monica Gattinger. Similarly downplaying the role of minority/majority government in his look at Canada's Israel policy, Chapnick points out that, on this file, Canadian policy was driven primarily by the personal views of Canada's prime minister (106). …

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