Another failed bid shows we need a new approach
The world needs more Canada — until it doesn’t.
Turns out the world wants more Norway and Ireland — two more worthy and worldly rivals who trounced us at a secret United Nations vote for Security Council seats this week. For the second time in a decade, Canada is unneeded and unloved.
Forget the melodramatic laments about Canada’s lost foreign policy glory. Never mind the myths and shibboleths from all those pundits and politicians lampooning the Liberal government of the day — just as the last Conservative government was lambasted the last time, when the partisan shoe was on the other foot in a perennial game of political footsie.
There are larger lessons in our losses, relating not just to foreign policy but national vanity. They go beyond the obvious finger-wagging about Justin Trudeau’s political play.
Like the prime minister, most Canadians love the idea of being loved by the world. That’s why politicians keep dreaming of hosting the summer Olympics, hoping to bask in the reflected glory from a grateful citizenry.
The recurring UN bid is similarly freighted. Our prime ministers boast about how “Canada punches above its weight,” despite being in the global featherweight class, forever adding feathers to our cap.
The rap against Trudeau is that he indulged in “virtue signalling” — implying that we weren’t all that veritably virtuous. Critics note that Norway and Ireland contribute more foreign aid and deploy more peacekeepers, leaving Canada wanting — though that doesn’t explain how Portugal, not quite an international rock star, humiliated us in our last attempt a decade ago under the Tories.
In fact, Canada is consigned to the “Western European and Others” grouping at the UN, whose members pledge votes reciprocally to their continental cousins. Why then do we care where we rank when the rules of the game are rigged?
Whether in Olympic bids or UN contests, nations cast their international votes based on national interest and political self-interest. Why do we delude ourselves into thinking we are so deserving of support when we are not such great do-gooders on foreign aid, and can’t cash in IOUs from past horse-trading and mutual back-scratching?
Canada wasn’t wrong to try yet again for a Security Council seat. But it was wrong to try so desperately, to the point of distorting our foreign policy priorities — siphoning off dollars and bandwidth from more pressing challenges.
Spending so much foreign policy capital on a quixotic Security Council slot with a two-year term was self-evidently dumb. Yet we keep trying, because we keep overestimating ourselves overseas.
It matters little that we were once a major player at the UN, because the world has changed. If we towered above other countries after the Second World War, it was because so many were destroyed in the fighting (Japan, Germany, Italy) or suppressed by ongoing political and economic colonialism (Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa).
Yes, we invented peacekeeping. But we also know more than most countries, from bitter experience (Afghanistan, the Balkans, on the African continent), about the latterday limitations of so-called peacemaking when ceasefires are unenforceable.
Before we try for another Security Council seat, we need to take stock of where we stand today, rather than reliving our yesterdays.
Canada’s foreign policy has traditionally been anchored in a recognition that we are a middle power caught between superpowers, for which the logical remedy is multilateralism. Hence our obsession with international groupings — from the UN to the G7, the G20 (a Canadian invention), the Commonwealth (a Canadian indulgence) and la francophonie (a Canadian fiction).
The problem with summitry is that you can have too much of a good thing, diluting our focus. Canada should ease itself out of the Commonwealth and la francophonie, which are legacies of colonial ties (British and French) under the guise of shared cultural and linguistic heritage (ask yourself what we really have in common with so many dictatorships).
The latter two irrelevancies are emblematic of our foreign ministry’s fetish for multilateralism ad absurdum. True multilateralism means forging mutually beneficial alliances with like-minded countries having shared sensibilities and outlooks.
We may not be a world leader, but we can be a model for the world. There is a difference.
Canada may not rank at the top of today’s UN, but our big cities are living microcosms of the United Nations. Thanks to our unique experiment in multiculturalism, and our experience with Quebec separatism, Canada is further along than most countries in finding the ties that bind amidst diversity and adversity.
That’s not a call for complacency but clarity, given our own history of official racism — whether against Indigenous peoples, Blacks, Jews, Chinese, Indians, Italians and Ukrainians. Racism, discrimination and intolerance are still with us, but it’s hard to find other countries at the UN — not least those on the mighty Security Council — with a better record of integrating newcomers while at least trying to reconcile with those already here.
Yet those are countries that sit in judgment of our bid for a seat at the Security Council. Why judge ourselves by their standards when we should be holding ourselves to far highest standards at home, as adjudged by our own people?
Turns out the world doesn’t need more Canada — at least not its feel-good talk at the UN. Time for Canada to do good — at home and abroad.