Canadians and Foreign Policy: The Record of an Independent Investigation

Professor Fred Alexander, a distinguished historian and the first Australian to be awarded a Senior Research Fellowship of the Canada Council, makes in this book a frank and friendly attempt to examine the views on various aspects of Canada’s external relations expressed to him by an occupational and regional cross-section of Canadians (many of whom are named in the text) during the course of his recent coast-to-coast investigation. Canadian-American relations loom large in the resultant analysis, whether the subject matter is economic or strategic, cultural or political. Other important questions discussed cover the extent to which Canadian nationalism is restricted by surviving provincial regionalism; the significance of spiritual and idealist influences; current internal political trends; and the increasing significance of Asia and the Pacific in the overall attitude of Canadians to the Commonwealth and the world at large. This book, which is being published simultaneously in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, has the general quality of highlighting through the eyes of an independent observer the important problems of Canadian attitudes to foreign policy and that special quality which is derived from the author’s integrity and good-humoured detachment no less than the shrewdness and rare penetration of some of his judgments.