Program Profile and Funding History

Peacefully sheltered in Canada’s Rocky Mountain foothills, Kananaskis seemed far distant from the menace of terrorism or nuclear calamity. But the G-8 summit of 2002 marked a potentially important advance in cooperative threat reduction (CTR) in Russia—and signaled a dramatic expansion in the scale of Canada’s own CTR engagement. In truth, the setting was fitting. Canadian participation in CTR with Russia, Ukraine, and the other former Soviet states has been framed from the start in a succession of G-7/8 pronouncements and arrangements. Multilateralism has remained since 1992 the constant and prevailing characteristic of Canadian contributions to cooperative threat reduction. Taking Canada’s turn in the G-8 chair for 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was practicing customary Canadian brokerage diplomacy as he and his officials struggled to assemble a complex G-8 compromise on counterterrorism, nuclear nonproliferation, and the suppression of chemical weapons. After months of hard bargaining (and a last-hour meeting between Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin), the Kananaskis summit finally proclaimed agreement in the “G8 Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction.” It was an extraordinary accord, not least in the explicitly detailed conditions it placed on Russia’s new and full inclusion in the G-8 itself. And it carried threefold significance for Canadian CTR policy. First, it suggested future Canadian CTR priorities—namely, the four “priority concerns” specified by the G-8 leaders’ statement: destruction of chemical weapons; dismantlement of