The School of Public Policy and Global Affairs is pleased to welcome Anita Pan to our community as a Practitioner Fellow from September through to December, 2026.
Anita is a career foreign service officer with Global Affairs Canada, most recently having served at the Embassy of Canada to Japan, where she led on foreign policy, regional security, and Canada-Japan security and defence relations. She brings more than a decade of experience in Canadian foreign policy, international trade, and science and technology, with a particular focus on the intersection of technology and security and Canada’s engagement in the Indo-Pacific.
While at UBC, Anita is interested in examining how Canada can think about resilience in technology and security amidst a changing global environment, while exploring Taiwan’s place in the evolving Indo-Pacific landscape. Her practitioner fellowship is in association with the new Taiwan Studies Program at UBC.
Anita’s overseas assignments have taken her to Tokyo and Seattle, complemented by domestic assignments in Ottawa and Vancouver. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia and a Master in Public Policy from Princeton University, where she was also a fellow with the Center for International Security Studies.
We learned more about Anita’s work in our Q&A with her below:
What has been a meaningful moment in your career that underscores the need for good public policy?
A memorable and meaningful moment in my career was leading efforts to establish the North American headquarters of NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) in Canada. Today, DIANA’s North American headquarters is in Halifax, Nova Scotia (alongside its European headquarters in London), following a successful bid campaign by the Government of Canada in 2022.
From its beginnings, DIANA was an ambitious idea by NATO to bring together governments, allied militaries, researchers, innovators and start-up companies to accelerate the development and adoption of emerging and disruptive technologies that could address critical defence and security challenges.
What made the experience particularly meaningful was seeing how different parts of the government and private sectors came together across traditional silos to try and understand each other’s perspectives and collectively pursue a longer-term, strategic goal. When the idea of bidding for DIANA’s North American headquarters was first discussed, no one, including myself, had a complete picture of Canada’s innovation ecosystem, strengths, weaknesses, and gaps, or how these aligned with or influenced our evolving security and innovation needs. Through sustained engagement, however, we came to better understand how Canada’s existing strengths can contribute to allied security needs, while at the same time creating opportunities for Canadian innovators and strengthening our own capabilities. This ultimately allowed us to recommend a policy approach that advanced the interests of Canada while contributing to a broader NATO objective.
Policy development is rarely done in isolation – it requires bringing together people with different expertise, perspectives, and interests, creating the space for them to learn from one another, and building a shared understanding of the problem that policy needs to solve. This project exemplified the value of a team approach to policymaking, where the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, and was a particularly memorable experience for me.
What are you most looking forward to engaging in as an SPPGA Practitioner Fellow?
I am most looking forward to engaging the student community and engaging in policy debates through a practitioner’s lens. Theory is a necessary foundation, but I have found that practice often comes with unexpected restraints, competing interests, and unanticipated opportunities. I hope to be able to share my experiences while learning from the fresh perspectives of students and future policy thinkers.
I am also interested in sharing lessons from my experience analyzing Japanese foreign policy and Japan’s relationships with countries such as Taiwan and the United States. I believe it is important to situate policy questions within the strategic perspectives of the actors involved, rather than interpreting them primarily through Canadian assumptions and institutional frameworks. Taiwan is a particularly useful example; examining Taiwan through a Japanese lens can illuminate how questions of economic security, technological resilience, and regional stability are understood differently depending on an actor’s interests and circumstances.
For Japan, Taiwan’s role in global semiconductor supply chains has direct implications for its domestic industries and broader economic security, while its geographic proximity and the potential regional consequences of developments in the Taiwan Strait shape how Japan assesses its own security environment. This perspective can help explain the increasing prominence of Taiwan in Japanese strategic discourse, and why developments across the Taiwan Strait is increasingly viewed as connected to Japan’s own security interests. In this context, I hope to encourage students to approach policy questions with analytical flexibility and to challenge their own understandings, as well as consider how the same issue may be understood differently from another actor’s perspective.
Finally, I would also love to highlight the growing Canada-Japan relationship. We will celebrate the centennial of bilateral relations in 2028; Japan was also Canada’s first diplomatic outpost in Asia. The two countries have a longstanding and steady partnership which is increasingly strategic, but that can sometimes be overlooked amidst Canada’s other international relationships. I hope to offer my perspective on how this relationship is evolving across trade, innovation, and regional security, and perhaps inspire a new generation of practitioners and scholars to engage with and contribute to Canada-Japan relations.
