The world is in turmoil and Canada is on the front lines of the upheaval. Even before the re-election of Donald Trump, the profound difficulties in our relationships with India and China highlighted a need to rebuild Canada’s understanding of a rapidly changing world and how we secure a place for ourselves in it. We can no longer rely on others to solve our problems, even if we ever really could.

Underpinning these deep challenges to our international engagement is a surprising parochialism across much of government, academia, media and the private sector in Canada. Our favourable geography and history, and peaceful, generally easy prosperity (for us) of the post–Second World War era, especially after the Berlin Wall came down, have left this country complacent.

As a result, and in contrast to earlier decades, international experience and foreign policy expertise are not particularly valued in the corridors of power in Ottawa. In Global Affairs Canada (GAC), the professional foreign service atrophied for decades, and large swaths of the senior executive for years have had little or no work experience outside of Canada. And at the political level, the focus is much more on how foreign policy decisions play to narrow but politically influential domestic audiences (such as influential diaspora groups or advocates of supply management in agriculture) rather than informed by experience and expertise, and they are often taken without any apparent concern as to how particular decisions might impact Canada’s national interests.

In the case of India, this disinterest is reflected in a 2023 Angus Reid Institute poll that found that nine in 10 Canadians have little or no knowledge of the 1985 bombing of Air India Flight 182, a crime perpetrated in Canada by Khalistani terrorists and that killed over 250 Canadians. This was the deadliest case in the world of aviation terrorism pre–September 11, 2001. This act of terror and the lack of accountability for it—given investigative and prosecutorial failure—still looms large in the way many Indians think about Canada. Yet Canadians largely shrug it off, if they know of it at all.

At the same time, with some notable exceptions, overseas experience is not sought in the Canadian corporate sector. Talented professionals have told me about coming back to Canada after years of working in the Indo-Pacific region to be told they need Canadian experience to be useful to an employer back home. Even Canadian universities are surprisingly limited when it comes to expertise related to the geopolitics of the region, particularly South Asia, including India. We need to cultivate a new generation of Canadians who have understanding of—and experience in—the Indo-Pacific, a part of the globe that is central to the world’s future and crucial to Canada’s economic and security interests. This expertise would serve them well in their careers while enriching policy debates and our economy.

Fuelling our complacency is Canada’s apparent success in building a modern, prosperous and pluralistic society. Canadians may think we have the answers to the world’s problems. Instead, we would do well to recognize we were dealt a pretty good hand and should focus on playing that hand well. As a result, rather than taking time to understand a changing world (which requires at the least curiosity and a willingness to listen to others), we regularly broadcast our virtue as something others should emulate, while not appreciating how rapidly the world beyond our borders is changing. And, not everyone wants to be like Canada, even if we may find common interests in unexpected places, beyond the usual “like-minded.” In my career, I have seen how countries very different from our own seek to build common cause with Canada while determinedly pursuing their own national interests, even as the tendency in Ottawa is to expect those countries to fit into how we think the world should operate.

We were also mistaken in thinking that our overall success in welcoming immigrants from around the world meant that we somehow understood the world. Or at least we could easily find others in Canada ready to explain that world to us without having in the corridors of power the knowledge and insight necessary to understand those voices—especially the loudest ones—within a broader discussion of Canada’s national interests.

What to do?

First, we should find a way to build knowledge of the modern reality of the Indo-Pacific region within Canada. Apart from a welcome but limited number of scholarships designed to support Canadian scholars pursuing studies in the region, the 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy focused largely on actions to convince the world’s most prosperous, and potentially dangerous region that Canada really is serious about engaging with it. But that part of a longer-term strategic approach should involve developing a wider pool of talent to increase our understanding of the rapidly evolving region, and, by extension, its importance to Canada’s prosperity and security.

Despite some recent setbacks, for decades we have been successful in attracting high-quality students and other migrants from the region to Canada. What has been missing, however, is a serious effort to convince talented young Canadians to experience the Indo-Pacific (and beyond) in a way that gives them the competencies to engage with the world and contribute meaningfully in the decades to come, whether in the private sector, government, academia or media.

This is not to discount the extraordinary people-to-people links that our vibrant multicultural society provides around the world, but those communities are a complement to rather than a substitute for developing a strong, broad-based understanding of the region (and wider world) and how Canada’s prosperity and security are linked to the region. If we do not extend our understanding and engagement beyond particular communities, almost by definition it will be difficult to develop broad-based support for effective policies reflecting the region’s importance to Canadian interests.

Canadian students have surprisingly little experience, at least in recent decades, studying abroad compared to the United States, Australia and the EU. In their 2017 report Global Education for Canadians, Roland Paris and Margaret Biggs laid out the need to balance our strong record in attracting talent to our educational institutions with enabling Canadian students to study abroad. It started off by highlighting how relatively few Canadian post-secondary students (11 per cent) have experience studying abroad (as of 2015) compared to some key benchmarks, including the United States (16 per cent), Australia (18 per cent), Germany (26 per cent) and France (33 per cent).

The report provided an ambitious plan for scaling up opportunities for Canadians to study overseas, learning about and experiencing the world. While COVID-19 intervened and recommendations were not implemented, they remain relevant, including the importance of a higher percentage of Canadian students going abroad, particularly to emerging economies. The report also recommended focusing on:

• Canada’s enduring economic and foreign policy interests in the destination country or region
• Opportunities to strengthen innovation and research links benefiting Canada
  

Both of these would apply to the Indo-Pacific as a whole and India in particular. The plan envisioned longer-term full-time study and shorter experiences, including internships, similar to the New Colombo Plan (NCP) in Australia, which was launched in 2014 and succeeded in boosting to 23 per cent, at its peak, in 2019 the number of Australian undergraduate students having experience abroad. This is basically double the percentage before the NCP was launched. Importantly, a pan-Canadian approach is highlighted in the Global Education for Canadians report, paralleling the integrated thinking behind the NCP and its success.

The roles of the business community, universities and provinces in supporting action to boost the number of Canadian students are very important, but the business community could play a particularly constructive role in ramping up co-op and internship opportunities in India. There would be issues to be managed, but the commercial relationship with India has remained on an even keel even through the decline in official relations.

We can take inspiration from past and existing programs (not all run from Canada) that have delivered formative experiences in the Indo-Pacific, sometimes over decades. These include Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET), Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute, Queen Elizabeth Scholars, Mitacs Globalink and Capilano University’s Asia Pacific Management co-op program. Even the enduringly successful working holiday visa program to Australia, which has taken thousands of Canadians down under every year to work and travel, shows there is appetite among young Canadians to travel to the other side of the world. It’s a question of incentives and managing the risk. There is no one model to gain this exposure, but it is important that it happens early, given the potential to provide life-changing experience that can have benefits through a career.

Why am I so passionate about this issue? I was fortunate enough to find myself in 1989 at the age of 25 posted to our embassy to Thailand, then the fastest-growing economy in the world. Three years later I returned to Ottawa as an enthusiast for the transformative change going on in Southeast Asia (and Asia more generally) to find that the most common narrative in Canada, a country coming out of a brutal recession, was still that developing countries were poor and needed our charity to lift them up. I knew first-hand this was an unhelpful assumption to make, as did, to be clear, some senior ministers in the government and the officials advising them at the time. I (and others) also knew that the region held enormous potential for Canada if we took the time to understand it. This experience in my 20s shaped my thinking through my career.

And a young Canadian should not need to join the foreign service to get such experience. For example, in Thailand, I met many participants in the Capilano University Asia Pacific Management co-op program, which brought young Canadians to the region for work placements after a year of relevant study in Vancouver. These placements were in local companies (often with a Canadian connection), chambers of commerce or the Canadian missions. It gave the participants knowledge and experience no classroom in Canada could deliver. I think most of them would say such an experience was seminal for them. It has been fun to reconnect with them over the years as many of the grads have pursued careers in the Indo-Pacific (some even joined the foreign service). Beyond that, I have met so many Canadians with active and successful careers connected to the region whose first engagement and inspiration was through a scholarship, internship, work experience or language training early on.

While I think there would be major benefits to reviving most or all of the 20 recommendations of the Global Education for Canadians report, the estimated price tag of $75 million per year, in 2017, may be a hard sell given financial pressures and the coming election timetable (although it was a comparable figure to the NCP in Australia, and far less than the billions the United States and EU invest in getting students abroad). In any case, on the scholarship side, the Indo-Pacific Strategy is already allocating funds through the Indo-Pacific Scholarships and Fellowships for Canadians Program.

A gap that could be usefully filled, however, is a business-driven internship and/or co-op program. Ideally, GAC or another organization would collaborate with business associations in Canada and the region to create a program of paid placements up to one year in duration with the Indo-Pacific Strategy or another source covering some of the costs (airfare, relocation-related expenses, etc.) to min­imize the risks to the participants and provide them with an incentive to pursue opportunities that might be outside the usual comfort zone of young Canadians for working abroad. Canadian missions could look at taking on paid interns as we have done elsewhere with considerable success.

If circumstances allowed, effort with the business community could focus on India (and perhaps wider South Asia) at the outset, with the intention to widen and deepen contemporary understanding of the region and the opportunities (and challenges) it offers Canada and Canadian businesses. Even better would be for the Canadian business community to take a leading role in developing the parameters of such a program with a view to reinforcing confidence in our business engagement with India and the wider region. And there’s no time like the present to start this process.

We cannot predict what the future will bring, but we can take steps now to prepare younger Canadians for understanding and managing whatever the world brings our way.