"It is about being intentional"

Will the highly prepared Anita Anand be seventh-portfolio lucky?

Anita Anand in her office, Oct 1. Photo: PW

A speech to the United Nations General Assembly’s annual high-level week in September is the sort of honour that paradoxically seems destined to frustrate its recipient.

Senior government officials from every member state address their counterparts in the great hall next to the East River, and the watching world beyond. Each year the week sees more than 140 speeches. Sometimes this list includes Canadian prime ministers, sometimes not.

This year was in between: Mark Carney spoke briefly on recognizing a Palestinian state but did not address the general debate afterward, which after all is just a long procession of speeches on whatever leaders want to discuss. Delivering that speech for Canada fell this year, on short notice, to Anita Anand, Carney’s second foreign minister.

Speakers are asked to keep their remarks to 15 minutes, but there is no sanction for going long. Anand did well to keep her remarks to 18 minutes, which is to say she spoke about 100 sentences. Here’s a transcript, here’s video.

It’s hard to go deep in 100 sentences if you’re trying to discuss the history of multilateralism (“More than a billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty”); Canada’s Indigenous peoples (“…enrich our democracy at home and our diplomacy abroad”); Canada’s international role (“Canada does not retreat from duty”); the Arctic (“critical”), Ukraine (“unbowed”), Gaza (“catastrophic”), Haiti (“a new mission”), Europe (“deepening partnerships”), and Bob Rae (“I pay tribute”). Anand closed with a chiasmus I confess I don’t understand: “Canada will be defined not by the strength of our values but the value of our strength.”

My purpose today isn’t to claim it was a forgettable speech. It’s to illustrate that in these circumstances, it might be impossible to deliver a memorable one. (Quick, quote your favourite speech by a Canadian official at the UN General Assembly.) Being foreign minister sounds like it must be a glamorous role, but foreign ministers are forever being sent to the biggest canvas with the smallest brush. The reviews can be brutal — including the only column I read about Anand’s UN speech — but the lack of attention must sometimes be worse.

All of this is the prologue to my visit to Anand’s Parliament Hill office last Wednesday. This was my first interview with her since she became foreign minister in May. The meeting was thrown together on a few hours’ notice. We had a semi-permeable deadline hanging over us. She was assigned to House duty, as every MP is from time to time, and every minute she spoke to me was a minute some colleague would have to cover for her. I managed to stretch a scheduled 20-minute interview into 31 minutes. She didn’t know what I would ask, and if I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure myself. I mostly just wanted to see how she’s doing in what is, incredibly, her seventh cabinet post since she entered politics six years ago.

My transcript runs to 212 sentences, or a little more than two General Assembly speeches. But she was speaking urgently, rushing to get thoughts in, a very different Anand from the one who chose her words so carefully when I interviewed her a year ago about a policy file.

If a theme emerged, it’s that in some ways, often without even planning to, Anita Indira Anand has been preparing for this job all her life.

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