The School of Public Policy and Global Affairs is pleased to welcome Joshua Cader to our community as Practitioner Fellow from September 2026 through to April 2027, after eight years with Global Affairs Canada. He most recently served as Departmental Advisor in the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, covering Asia, Europe, and consular files.
From 2022 to 2025, Joshua was a Trade Commissioner at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, leading agriculture policy analysis and reporting on Chinese food security and trade measures affecting Canadian exporters. Before that, he worked on trade and export controls in Ottawa, administering steel safeguard quotas and later serving as geographic lead for Asia and Africa on export controls policy.
He holds degrees from McGill University and Waseda University, and pursued a doctoral research at the University of Tokyo on protest politics in China and Taiwan. Here at UBC, his research will examine Western Canadian agricultural producers’ perceptions of Asian export markets.
We learned more about Joshua’s work in our Q&A with him below:
What has been a meaningful moment in your career that underscores the need for good public policy?
Policy attracts plenty of attention at the level of what ought to be done. It attracts less at the level of implementation, and less still at the acute end of it: instruments drafted under pressure, then stress-tested and adjusted on the fly. I learned most of what I know about policy quality from being on the receiving end of that, in my first weeks at Global Affairs Canada.
In 2018, Canada imposed provisional safeguards on steel imports to prevent diversion into our market. I spent the next months administering the resulting tariff rate quotas – mainly fielding calls from importers and customs brokers, and working through unanticipated questions. Some of the longest and most emotional conversations I’ve had in government were over what counted as which kind of steel. We were often confused; sometimes when we weren’t, our technical systems were. The lesson stayed with me. Good policy means checking dependencies: the interpretations a clause will bear, potential unfairness hidden in a structure, and what your systems can handle. As I was told many times, sometimes by people close to tears, the gaps can bankrupt a business. Policy design has other consequences, of course; they just haven’t yet been seared into my memory the same way.
What are you most looking forward to engaging in as an SPPGA Practitioner Fellow?
I’ve seen how policy gets molded from different vantages: as a regulator administering trade controls, a reporting officer at our embassy in Beijing, and most recently from a minister’s office. Each made different things visible. None was what I would have imagined before being in the job, nor could I have understood by means of abstractions. So, I’m most looking forward to explaining public policy with examples, what the incentive structure and stresses look like, when it might make sense to lean into that, and when to push back. I hope to give a realistic picture, but also emphasize that I’ve had a lot of fun working with smart people on interesting problems.
If I could teach one thing to students in particular, it would be how to enjoy problems. Alongside that, I will be working on how agricultural producers in Western Canada perceive potential Asian export markets – what they know, what they care about. Perception is a fuzzier constraint than market access (and so – to me, anyway – more fun). I look forward to learning from students, faculty, and the community, and having their questions nudge the best out of that work.
