Daniel Madar

Alone on Killers' Row: The Policy Analysis Group and the Department of External Affairs

In August 1969 Canadas Department of External Affairs then in its sixtieth year and moderately out of political favour established for the first time a bureaucratic unit charged specifically with the task of developing and analysing foreign-policy options and objectives over the long term. The Policy Analysis Group (or PAG, as cognoscenti have come inevitably to call it) has now been in operation for eight years, and a preliminary evaluation of its impact as an experiment in the making of Canadian foreign policy may therefore be warranted. To examine its origins, functions, performance, and current condition is thus the purpose of this article. 2