From the Editor / Lisa Van Dusen

Policy Editor L. Ian MacDonald has graciously vacated the editor’s chair for this special issue of Policy Dispatches.

We’re extraordinarily fortunate to work with a community of outstanding contributors — politicians and former politicians, diplomats and former diplomats, journalists and former journalists, academics and retired academics, defence and security specialists, and people on the front lines of all the major policy and political issues of our time, from CEOs to social workers — who generously provide their insight, experience and knowledge for Policy readers.

Last November, we launched Policy Dispatches, which combine political and travel writing in a way that reflects the way Policy contributors and readers see the world, literally and figuratively — combining work, history, personal observations, political background, local colour and human connection. The response so far has been fantastic, and you can see all the pieces filed over the past seven months at policymagazine.ca/policy-dispatches/.

First in this special Dispatches issue, from United Nations Ambassador Bob Rae, ‘Tell Them We’re Human’: With the Rohingya in Myanmar and Bangladesh, a riveting account of Rae’s experience as special envoy on Myanmar, and his encounters with both former human rights icon Aung San Suu Kyi and the Rohingya refugees of Cox’s Bazar.

From the indomitable Kathy Gannon, the former Associated Press Afghanistan and Pakistan news director whom I first met while editing her work from the AP head office in New York, the gripping account of a life reporting from Kabul, from the end of the Soviet occupation to the Taliban’s return in 2021.

From Canada’s Viceregal Consort Whit Fraser, we have a must-read dispatch on climate change and Governor-General Mary Simon’s visit to the Arctic with German President Frank Walter Steinmeier in April. It’s also a love letter to Tuktoyaktuk, or “Tuk” as the locals call it.

For three days in May, Canada’s Parliamentary Black Caucus held its first, historic bilateral meetings with the Congressional Black Caucus. From PBC Chair Senator Rosemary Moodie and her director of parliamentary affairs, Josh Dadjo, Making Black History in Washington: Founding the Overground Railroad.

Historica Canada President Anthony Wilson-Smith has the dream job of overseeing the iconic Heritage Minutes. Filed from the thriving Ogema, Saskatchewan — location for the upcoming Minute on Mary Bonnie Baker, the feisty baseball player portrayed by Geena Davis in A League of Their Own — A Small Saskatchewan Town’s Heritage Minute Close-Up will have you wishing you were there.

Dispatches include pieces about life-changing journeys from the past, and only the intrepid Robin Sears could have filed China In-Between: Ensconced in the Diaoyutai and Meeting an ‘Immortal’, about travelling to Beijing with former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1993.

From former US diplomat Sarah Goldfeder, the lyrical Travel as Life: Cultivating Roots and Wings, about going from life as an army brat to an equally peripatetic adulthood as a diplomat.

Policy senior foreign affairs writer Jeremy Kinsman has been holed up in the charming English market town of Marlborough, from whence he filed Bucolic and a Little Less Barmy: Seeking Respite in Post-Brexit Wiltshire.

Our Policy Online Emerging Voices section has been a great talent scouting space, including Max Bell School’s Aftab Ahmed, with a dispatch from his home town of Dhaka, Revisiting Bangladesh: The Political and Economic Transformations of Competitive Authoritarianism.

Longtime Maclean’s royal reporter and Write Royalty blogger Patricia Treble filed on London’s wild weekend in May with Pomp, Pubs and a Staggering Amount of Champagne: Covering the Coronation.

Massey College Public Policy Chair Tom Axworthy’s War, Peace and a Canadian Knight: With the InterAction Council on Malta, captures the mood of Europe in wartime.

In our Canada and the World section, Senator Peter Boehm provides a status report — between the Hiroshima G7 and the Delhi G20: Whither the Gs? Summitry in a Time of Disruption.

In his regular column, Don Newman has embraced the spirit of Dispatches with Stockholm Syndrome: An Epiphany About Canada at a Faraway Dinner.

In The Great Book Review Reunion, Bob Rae reviews Michael Ignatieff’s updated Isaiah Berlin biography, A Life, and Michael Ignatieff reviews Bob Rae’s 2020 Symons lecture in book form, Learning from the Past, Imagining the Future: Reflections on a Life in Politics.

And, finally, from sustainable power couple Elizabeth May and John Kidder, the double book review of Chris Turner’s How to be a Climate Optimist and John Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World.

Enjoy the issue!

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen was a senior writer at Maclean’s, Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.