Foreign policy
L. Ian MacDonald on the Harper vision,
In the House of Commons on Monday, the opposition parties spent most of question period on the Wright-Duffy affair, which came down to what the prime minister knew and when he knew it.
As it happened, Stephen Harper wasn’t in the House that day, and it was left to his parliamentary secretary, Paul Calandra, to stonewall and straight-arm about who was in the loop about the famous $90,000 cheque.
It wasn’t until about half an hour into QP that NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar rose to ask Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird if Canada would work with its allies to implement the interim nuclear agreement with Iran.
What should have been the lead question of the day was almost an afterthought.
“We will support any reasonable measure that actually sees Iran take concrete steps back from its nuclear program,” Baird replied. “Regrettably, we do not have a lot of confidence or a lot of trust in the regime in Tehran.”
When the deal was announced on Sunday, Baird said Canada was “deeply skeptical” of the six-month agreement negotiated by the P5 plus 1 (The United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany) of reduced economic sanctions in return modest concessions on uranium enrichment, delaying a new heavy water facility and allowing more international inspections.
“We think past actions best predict future actions,” Baird said. “And Iran has defied the United Nations Security Council, it has defied the International Atomic Energy Agency. Simply put, Iran has not earned the right to the benefit of the doubt.”
At the end of the day, it’s difficult to imagine that Canada wouldn’t support its allies in NATO and partners in the G8, notably the U.S., the U.K. and France. For the moment we appear to be aligned with only Israel and Saudi Arabia as “deeply skeptical.”
This is a major foreign policy story that has been virtually lost this week in the continuing noise about the Wright-Duffy affair, and now the apparent role of Sen. Irving Gerstein, the Conservative bagman, in attempting to influence Deloitte’s independent audit of Mike Duffy’s expenses on behalf of the Senate. It turns out that Deloitte also audits the Conservative Party’s books. To make matters even worse, the PM’s new communications director, Jason MacDonald, had gone on the Sunday talk shows and acknowledged a “cover-up” at the PMO that the prime minister knew nothing about. That went well.
In other under-reported news this week, the European Union, with which we’ve just concluded a big free trade deal, announced it was upholding its ban on Canadian seal pelts, a matter of some importance in Atlantic Canada.
Again, the Wright-Duffy story and the Senate expenses scandal continues to dominate the news cycle, because the PMO’s narrative keeps changing, and the cast of characters keeps growing. But at some point, this is distorting the news rather than making it, in that bigger stories like the nuclear deal with Iran have sunk practically without a trace.
Baird’s expressions of skepticism were mild compared to the comments of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who termed the deal a “historic mistake.” And he is by no means alone in opposing it. There’s plenty of opposition in Washington, among leading Democrats as well as Republicans, who want to impose tougher economic sanctions against Iran rather easing them. Barack Obama has told members of his own party that “new sanctions would derail this promising first step, alienate us from our allies and risk unravelling the coalition that enabled our sanctions to be enforced in the first place.”
As the Globe and Mail noted in an editorial: “The interim deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons program is just that: interim.” And President Obama has been among the first to say getting a comprehensive agreement with Iran will be much more difficult than the interim deal. The implications of a bigger deal for nuclear non-proliferation are obvious. How the West and Iran carry on the conversation is an interesting and important. It was Ronald Reagan, quoting a Russian proverb, who famously said to Mikhail Gorbachev: “Trust, but verify.”
And what is Canada’s role in all of this? Normally it would be to be supportive of our allies. There has never been a NATO operation that we haven’t supported. And every one of our G8 partners, excepting only Italy, was part of the P5 plus 1 negotiations with Iran.
But it’s possible that Canada is approaching another crossroads in foreign policy. The Conservative government has moved away from our honest broker traditions to what Baird has termed a “principled foreign policy” with “no more going along to get along.” No country, not even the U.S., has been as staunch a supporter of Israel as Canada under the present government. And Harper won editorial praise from the New York Times for boycotting the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka, and in the end he was not the only one to do so. And now the government is “highly skeptical” of the Iranian nuclear deal.
No more honest broker. To be continued.