UN Security Council needs Canada post-pandemic: PM
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defended Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council Tuesday by linking the rebuilding of the world after COVID-19 to the aftermath of the Second World War.
The prime minister drew a direct link between the pandemic and the post-war reconstruction, when Canada played a role in founding the UN, the Bretton Woods global financial institutions and other multilateral organizations such as NATO.
Trudeau said on Tuesday the pandemic recovery makes Canada’s bid for a seat on the council more relevant.
He drew the historical parallel to rebut criticism by a group of people who issued an open letter saying Canada is unfit to serve on the UN’s most powerful body, citing what they said is a series of foreign-policy failures.
Environmentalist David Suzuki, American scholar Noam Chomsky and Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters, among others, said Canada is not worthy of a council seat because of its positions on a variety of issues such as climate change, the Middle East and Venezuela.
Trudeau gave a sweeping justification for why he believes Canada deserves a temporary two-year seat on the council starting next year — a bid that has been characterized in some quarters as a waste of time, or a global vanity project.
“In the years following World War Two, we created a range of multilateral and multinational institutions like the IMF, the World Bank — the Bretton Woods institutions — that helped the world over the following decades develop tremendous prosperity and opportunity for people right around the world,” he said.
Some 75 years later, he said the current crisis is on the “scale” of the Second World War. “I think there need to be real reflections on how we move forward as a world, how we update and adjust our various multilateral institutions to better respond to the world we’re becoming part of, right now, in a post-COVID era.”
Canada is well-positioned because it is managing its economy well during the pandemic while holding true to its values and principles, he said.
Canada’s voice was needed in the 1940s and it will be needed in the future “as we create a better, more prosperous, fairer world for everyone. And Canada having a voice at the UN Security Council will allow us to continue to be at the heart of those discussions as we move forward as a planet.”
In the 1940s, Canada sent representatives to the major international meetings and conferences that gave rise to global institutions such as the UN. Canada lost its first campaign for the Security Council in 1946 but was successful the next six times, sitting on the council once a decade until 1999-2000.
Canada lost its 2010 bid for a seat, withdrawing after tiny Portugal — a country then wracked by the Great Recession — was able to win more support.
In June, Canada is competing against Norway and Ireland for two available seats on the council. Both countries are considered far stronger opponents than Portugal was a decade ago.
Trudeau tied the Security Council bid to his 2015 pronouncement that Canada was “back” on the world stage.
But the coalition of letter writers opposing the current bid is far less enthusiastic. It includes more than 80 individuals, including a broad swath of activists, academics and writers and more than a dozen organizations including Mining Watch, the Council of Canadians, and various pro-Palestinian groups.