| Summary/Abstract |
Although foreign policy bipartisanship in Westminster systems is often heralded as a normative good, there is an emerging scholarship which suggests that a bipartisan approach to foreign and defence policy comes with considerable costs. This article seeks to join that debate. It does so by examining two contemporary foreign/defence policy issues in Canadian politics: the mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 and the efforts to replace the CF-18 Hornet flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force. These two cases do not offer clear conclusions about the normative argument about foreign policy bipartisanship. The embrace of a bipartisan approach to the Afghanistan mission confirms the criticism that bipartisanship can suppress public debate and did indeed distort a consideration of policy options. But the case of the CF-18 replacement suggests that there are significant costs if government and opposition replace a search for bipartisan consensus on key policy issues with an overt politicisation that seeks partisan advantage by ‘playing politics’ with foreign and defence policy issues, concluding that the quality of partisanship is a necessary condition to avoid the dysfunctions and costs of bipartisanship.
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