Shamefully, Canada’s not back at all

Faced with the rise of autocrats in Russia, Turkey and elsewhere, the government of Canada appears content to leave democracy-promotiontoour allies — and to cede the initiative to our adversaries.

Exemplifying this policy is Canada’s disengagement from international election observation missions of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), whose 57 member states span the northern hemisphere and include Canada. In 1990, OSCE members committed to invite international observers to assess the freedom and fairness of their respective electoral processes. In response to those invitations, the OSCE decides on a caseby-case basis whether to deploy election-observation missions. Last year, for example, the OSCE sent election observers to Albania, Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Macedonia, Mongolia and Turkey.

The commitment to invite election-observation missions is meaningless, of course, if other OSCE member states do not contribute observers. Yet public OSCE records show that Canada funded just one of the 1,228 election observers deployed in 2017. That is fewer than were contributed by Estonia, Serbia or Uzbekistan. It is less than a 10th of a per cent of the total.

Canada left other OSCE members to pick up the slack:

First, the wealthy, reliably globalist states among which Canada likes to count itself: in 2017, Germany funded 192 OSCE election observers and France funded 79.

Secondly, and perhaps surprisingly, states that were perceived to have rejected multilateralism: in the first year of the Trump presidency, the U.S. contributed 179 OSCE election observers while the U.K., fresh off its “Brexit” referendum, contributed 51.

Thirdly, and most shamefully for Canada, small OSCE member states whose tax bases are a fraction of thesizeofours,suchasthe Czech Republic (51 observers), Poland (41 observers) and Romania (20 observers).

For its part, Russia funded 99 OSCE observers in 2017. That is a problematically large contingent if you believe, as some do, that Russia uses election observation to try to legitimize friendly incumbents who win votes by restricting the media, imprisoning opponents or otherwise abusing state resources.

As the OSCE explains, “the diversity of countries from which the observers come protects the observation mission from being dominated” by any one nationality, and member states are discouraged from contributing more than 15 percentoftheobserverson a given OSCE election mission.

In this context, where a range of nationalities is needed, Canada’s abandonment of international election observation has forced allies, including relatively poor ones, to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of democracy-promotion. It has opened the door for adversaries to subvert free and fair elections at the very moment when autocrats increasingly threaten international peace and security.

Global Affairs Canada should re-engage with what is arguably the simplest, most cost-effective means of democracy-promotion, through participation in OSCE election-observation missions. It should do so on a scale commensurate with Canada’s wealth and historical standing on the world stage.