Observers: Canada has been ‘sure footed’ on policy
OTTAWA — Back then, the world was a much easier place for a Canadian comeback.
When the Liberal government came to power in 2015, Canada’s decaying relations with the United Nations and the United States, left political space to rebuild. New trade prospects seemed bright in China and India. Canada’s most important foreign policy priority was humming happily along with the White House occupied by the friendly Barack Obama.
It was the dramatic shift in power in Washington, with Donald Trump winning the U.S. presidency, that many believe knocked the Trudeau government’s “sunny ways” and “Canada is back” foreign policy squarely off its axis.
The government will try to restore the equilibrium this week when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland give separate addresses at the United Nations General Assembly.
Their underlying message to the UN annual meeting will be to
affirm the importance of the world order created from the rubble of the Second World War’s aftermath — the one Canada pledged to get back to, and that Trump keeps taking a hammer to.
Canada’s campaign to win a two-year temporary seat on the Security Council will also be under scrutiny with many questioning whether it is even feasible given the energy being expended to save the North American Free
Trade Agreement.
New statistics tabled in Parliament this past week show Canada is behind the pace of campaign spending it set in the 1990s when it last won a seat.
Global Affairs Canada says in response to a written question that the government has spent $532,780 since 2016 on its campaign to land a Security Council seat — well behind the pace of the $1.9 million Canada spent over four years to win its last two-year term in 1999-2000.
Overall, the government’s foreign policy record is underwhelming, and Trudeau didn’t do himself any favours with his “Canada is back” pronouncements, says Thomas Juneau of the University of Ottawa.
“It’s disappointing especially because they set the bar so high for themselves with all the rhetoric before the election campaign and early on — 2015 and early 2016 — and all the attitude and swagger that went around that.”
Though the federal government is pushing to ratify the rebooted Trans-Pacific Partnership this fall, and has its comprehensive free trade deal with Europe up and running, its other trade ambitions in Asia — making inroads with economic giants China and India — have been stalled.
Trudeau’s trip to India was a failure not because of the muchridiculed photo ops of him in local garb, but because Canada’s trade interests with the country are going nowhere, said Juneau.
The same goes for China, which rebuffed Trudeau’s socalled progressive trade agenda when he visited there late last year, Juneau added.
Trudeau has had a tough hill to climb because of the herculean task of renegotiating NAFTA with an “erratic” Trump, said Fen Hampson, a foreign affairs expert with the Centre of International Governance and Innovation in Waterloo.
“NAFTA has really sucked the oxygen out of the government’s foreign policy agenda, not least because the foreign minister has been doing NAFTA 24/7 pretty much since she took office,” said Hampson.
Trudeau and his ministers are doing a credible job of engaging in other areas, “but in terms of political engagement and expending political capital, it’s very hard to do when you’re in a makeor-break negotiation with the Americans,” said Hampson.
At the UN, Freeland will give Canada’s General Assembly keynote, scheduled for next Saturday, marking the first time Trudeau has handed that role to a foreign minister.
Trudeau will address the assembly briefly as part of a peace summit celebrating the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth.