Paul Heinbecker has a compelling vision for the future of Canadian foreign policy and argues that Canada still has a role to play in the rehabilitation of global governance.

Has Canada lost its place in the world? Are we destined for a future as a middle power, denied a seat at the "grown-ups table"? Some would argue yes, that decades of neglect and inattention have rendered Canadian foreign policy ineffective at best and non-existent at worst.

Paul Heinbecker disagrees. The golden days of Lester B. Pearson may be long gone, he contends (and perhaps they weren’t quite as "golden" as we’d all like to remember), but Canada still has a part to play.

In Getting Back in the Game, Heinbecker presents his compelling vision for the future of Canadian foreign policy, a future in which Canada can work both with the United Nations and apart from it; in which our government can take a stand and effect change on issues of the day from climate change to the Middle East; in which this country has a key role to play in the rehabilitation of global governance.

Paul Heinbecker, former Canadian ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations and former ambassador to Germany, is the director of the Laurier Centre for Global Relations, and Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). He is the co-editor of Irrelevant or Indispensable?: The United Nations in the 21st Century (WLUP and CIGI, 2005), and his writings appear frequently in magazines, journals, and newspapers.

An assistant professor at the University of Waterloo and Senior Fellow at CIGI, Bessma Momani specializes in Middle East economic liberalization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). She is the author of two books: Twentieth Century World History: A Canadian Perspective and IMF—Egyptian Negotiations. She has also written many scholarly articles in political and economic journals.

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