Canadian International Council

• 1. Introduction

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  The Canadian International Council began as a quiet ambition expressed in 1950: to give Canada a clearer voice "as a member of the international community of nations and as a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations." That phrase, modest on its surface, pointed toward a much older institutional story. The roots of this think tank stretch back to 1928, when a former prime minister founded a predecessor body determined to shape how Canada understood the world. What does it take to turn a nation's foreign policy instincts into something rigorous and lasting? How does a country that once deferred to the British Empire eventually start encouraging independence movements on the other side of the globe? And why did a co-chief executive of a smartphone company decide, in October 2007, to rebuild that original institution from the ground up? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Robert Borden's Seed

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  Robert Borden, the former prime minister who had led Canada through the First World War, founded the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in 1928. It was, from the start, a cautious organization. Its posture was neutral and apolitical, focused on research rather than advocacy. Four years later, in 1932, a young man named Escott Reid was appointed as the institute's first full-time national secretary, and he set about giving the organization its first real infrastructure, building a system of annual study conferences built around round-table discussions that drew members from branch study groups across the country.

  The institute's most striking early event was the first Commonwealth Relations Conference, held at Hart House at the University of Toronto. Borden himself chaired it, and the recorder was Arnold Toynbee, one of the era's most prominent historians. Seventy-seven international delegates attended. Among them were Vincent Massey, who would later serve as Canada's Governor General; Walter Nash, who would become prime minister of New Zealand; and Zafrullah Khan, who attended as an invited observer and later became foreign minister of Pakistan.

  That gathering placed a still-cautious Canadian institution at the center of an imperial conversation whose terms were already beginning to shift. The delegates in Hart House were debating relationships that, within a generation, would be transformed beyond recognition.

• 3. Breaking From Empire

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  Under insurance executive Edgar Tarr, who led the organization from 1938 to 1950, the Canadian Institute of International Affairs stopped being neutral. Tarr pushed the body toward a clear position: Canada should assert its own autonomy, expand its global influence, and reject the assumptions of British imperialism. This was not a minor rhetorical shift. It represented a fundamental reorientation of what the organization believed its country should stand for.

  CIIA leaders and Canadian government officials began actively working to encourage nationalist movements in India, China, and Southeast Asia, urging those movements to reject colonial rule and Western dominance. Canada's foreign policy, influenced by this thinking, migrated away from imperialism and toward the kind of anti-colonialism that the United States was promoting at the time. A research organization that had started as a careful, apolitical study group had become a participant in one of the great geopolitical arguments of the mid-twentieth century.

  Tarr's tenure ended in 1950, the same year the first formal mention of a "Canadian International Council" appeared in the organization's records. The name would take more than half a century to become fully realized.

• 4. Jim Balsillie's Redesign

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  Jim Balsillie had been co-chief executive of Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry. In October 2007, he stepped in to initiate a major reconstruction of the old institute, bringing together the Canadian Institute of International Affairs and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, a think tank based in Waterloo, Ontario, to create something with far greater ambition and reach. The model Balsillie had in mind was explicit: the American Council on Foreign Relations and the United Kingdom's Royal Institute of International Affairs.

  Balsillie's announcement set out a clear philosophy. "CIC will be a research-based, non-partisan vehicle," he wrote. "Applying expert and fact-based research to complex issues is the essential foundation for creating effective policy." Within weeks, in November 2007, members of the old CIIA voted to formally become the Canadian International Council.

  The following years brought a series of absorptions. In May 2008, the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies folded its operations into the CIC, continuing as the Strategic Studies Working Group. In 2019, the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs merged into the organization and kept going as an annual event. In 2020, the online publication OpenCanada returned to CIC management after five years under the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

• 5. Publications and Prizes

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  International Journal, established in 1946 and known as IJ, is the CIC's scholarly publication and its main vehicle for global policy analysis. It draws together history, political science, economics, anthropology, and other social sciences in a deliberately cross-disciplinary format. In 2013, the CIC partnered with the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History and SAGE Publications to share publishing responsibilities for the journal.

  Behind the Headlines has a different lineage. It first appeared in 1940 as a pamphlet series focused on contemporary Canadian foreign policy. Over the decades it moved through two distinct transformations, becoming first a quarterly current affairs magazine and eventually a policy paper series.

  OpenCanada, the CIC's online publication, earned its own recognition. In 2013, at the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, it won the Content of the Year award along with two gold medals: one for best overall online-only publication, another for best online-only article or series in the academic and nonprofit media category. Those prizes arrived in the same year the CIC was restructuring the International Journal's publishing partnership, a period when the organization was actively rebuilding and extending what it put in front of readers.

• 6. Democratic Networks

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  In 2021, supported by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Canada, the CIC launched a multi-year research project called "Renewing Our Democratic Alliance." Its focus was on articulating a new form of mutual democracy promotion between Canada and Germany, specifically aimed at countries where citizens' rights were facing active challenges.

  In 2022, a conference on democratic backsliding was held at McGill University, jointly hosted by the CIC and Toronto Metropolitan University. At that conference, the CIC announced the creation of a Network for Democratic Solidarity, a coalition of nations designed to help one another strengthen democratic institutions. The network grew quickly enough to become its own independent organization in May 2023.

  From 2018 to 2022, Ben Rowswell, a former Canadian ambassador to Venezuela, served as president and research director of the CIC. The "Foreign Policy by Canadians" initiative, a joint project with CanWaCH and Global Canada, ran a deliberative poll in partnership with James S. Fishkin's Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy. That exercise selected a representative sample of the Canadian population, briefed participants on the issues Canada faces abroad, and then used their deliberations to generate policy proposals for the federal government. The board overseeing all of this work is chaired by Nicolas Rouleau and John English.