Trudeau renews interest in UN
Government eager to commit to larger role
Nobody in the Canadian delegation is boasting “Canada is back” anymore, mainly because it’s a vacuous, selfcongratulatory and misleading phrase that suggests the country was “away” in the first place.
Yet there is no doubt there is more enthusiasm about the United Nations than the Harper government ever mustered.
Justin Trudeau, who will address the General Assembly Tuesday, spent his debut as prime minister making funding pledges and commitments about ever-greater Canadian involvement in resolving the refugee and migration crisis. Canada will increase its humanitarian assistance budget by 10 per cent next year, from $684 million, and spend $64.5 million in new funding to improve learning opportunities for displaced children in Iraq and Syria.
The warmth is being reciprocated. At a breakfast meeting with Jordan’s Queen Rania, there was applause, and even whooping, when Trudeau talked of the 31,000 Syrian refugees who have arrived in Canada.
The government has gone out of its way to show Canadians that it will play a leading role in international institutions like the UN.
“It’s very much part of the effort to distinguish this government’s foreign policy from Harper and the Conservatives,” said Kim Richard Nossal at Queen’s University’s Centre for International and Defence Policy.
Odds are that Trudeau’s first General Assembly speech will not repeat the airing of grievances that characterized Harper’s coming out here. Harper pointed out that Canada was committed to the UN mission in Afghanistan, but was less than impressed with the UN’s performance in Darfur and on nuclear proliferation. He took exception to the human rights council, which he accused of political manoeuvring, and called on the UN to reform its oversight mechanisms.
“This organization must become more accountable and more effective,” he said.
Many of those criticisms remain valid. Canada has just re-joined the human rights committee for the first time since 2004. Other members include Tunisia, Uganda and Egypt, recently described by Human Rights Watch as being a country in the midst of a “human rights crisis,” where protests and opposition groups are banned.
Only 89 of the 193 member states qualify as democracies, says Freedom House, leading to criticism that the UN is more tolerant of petty despotism than it should be.
It has a lengthy list of peacekeeping failures — from Somalia to Darfur, Sri Lanka to Syria. Delegates rarely miss the opportunity to bash Israel. Even in the midst of the humanitarian crisis in Syria, speakers from Kuwait and Jordan used their presentations Monday to push for the right of return for Palestinians.
The Israeli-Palestinian divide is “the crux of the conflict in the region and the cause of proliferation of extremism and conflict,” said Nasser Judeh, Jordan’s deputy prime minister.
There is no greater cure for admiring the United Nations than watching it in action.
It is a rabbit-hole in the middle of New York, which instantly destabilizes its multicultural denizens when they fall in. They talk an acronym-laden nonsense language and the value of money becomes decoupled from the world where people pay their own expenses.
“You need a MALO,” a diminutive security guard screamed at me. “A MALO,” she said even louder when that failed to register.
Who, other than the nonsense-speakers who wander these endless corridors would know that I required a media accreditation liaison officer to accompany me to a near-empty chamber to hear a politician from an emergent nation making a self-aggrandizing nonsense speech that concluded, inevitably, with a solicitation for the international community to give his country more money?
Anthony Banbury, a former senior bureaucrat with the UN, wrote in The New York Times this year that the organization is a “Remington typewriter in a smartphone world.” The next secretary general (Ban Ki-moon’s second term ends Dec. 31) must be committed to reform, capping expenses as a percentage of operating costs and conducting performance audits on all parts of the organization, he says.
For all the UN’s faults, Harper was never able to convince Canadians that they should abandon their
THIS ORGANIZATION MUST BECOME MORE ACCOUNTABLE.
decades-long love affair with the idea of a multilateral body designed to improve international co-operation. In truth, even Harper came around to the idea of its utility in certain circumstances, embracing its ability to improve maternal and newborn health.
The UN may never have lived up to the symbolism of the art that greets visitors to its compound — a giant statue of St. George slaying a dragon or the sculpture of the worker beating swords into ploughshares.
But that takes too lofty a view of what the UN can really accomplish. Winston Churchill was much more realistic. “The United Nations was set up not to get us to heaven but only to save us from hell,” he said.
If the Trudeau government remains conscious of those limitations, its renewed enthusiasm can be welcomed — cautiously.