Taking the low moral ground

Fielding questions Wednesday from Conservat i ve Jason Kenney, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion wanly insisted his government lacked the evidence to say the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is guilty of genocide. Thursday the minister flipflopped, in the face of a new UN report providing conclusive evidence thereof. The opposition, no surprise, renewed its call for Canada to re-join the U. S.-led bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria — a demand Dion rejected. How long this new line will hold remains to be seen.

Here are five ways the government has bungled this file.

Tactically: Since their victory last Oct. 19, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberals have struggled to justify their decision to pull Canadian CF-18 fighter jets out of the allied air campaign against ISIL. Facile sloganeering that “bombing can’t bring peace” is wilfully ignorant of the military reality, that targeted airstrikes against ISIL positions are in support of Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga ground troops.

Since becoming foreign minister, Dion has justified selling troop carriers to serial human- rights abuser Saudi Arabia; rejected a f reeze on assets of Russian human- rights violators; stood by meekly while China’s foreign minister berated a Canadian reporter for doing her job; and now this. Strategically: Even saddled with a leader who had worn out his welcome, the Conservatives captured nearly 30 per cent of the popular vote last year. The party’s total vote tally, more than 5.5 million, was only slightly below what it garnered in 2011. Strong Tory voter retention, it stands to reason, was connected to is major policy planks — specifically on the economy and security.

Not surprisingly, the Conservatives under interim leader Rona Ambrose have sought to ditch their weaknesses — hostility to the media and the whiff of xenophobia that underlay the niqab debate, to name two — and play to their strengths. The Tories want this Liberal government to appear soft on ISIL. In repeatedly stepping on his own message, Dion has placed his principal opponents precisely where they want to be.

Historically: Liberals actively championed the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect ( R2P), after the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Here’s what it says, among other things: “If a state is manifestly failing to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action to protect populations, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

Under f ederal l eaders Paul Martin, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, with added intellectual heft from party elders such as John Manley and Irwin Cotler, the Liberals pursued an activist foreign policy in defence of the innocent. It was a chief point of differentiation between them and the perennially isolationist New Democrats. Perhaps coincidentally ( or perhaps not) the most egregious period of Liberal partisan sniping over the Afghan mission they themselves had launched, coincided largely with Dion’s time as party leader in late 2006- 08.

Factually: The reason for the latest turn? Wednesday, even as Dion stood to explain why the federal Liberals could not bring themselves to say ISIL is committing genocide, the independent international UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, led by Paulo Pinheiro, said this: “Genocide has occurred and is ongoing. ( ISIL) has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities.”

Further :“( ISIL) has sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions that bring about a slow death; the imposition of measures to prevent Yazidi children from being born, including forced conversion of adults, the separation of Yazidi men and women, and mental trauma; and the transfer of Yazidi children from their own families and placing them with ISIS fighters, thereby cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community.”

As Kenney asked Thursday: What took the Liberals so long to figure this out?

Morally: You might assume formal recognition of the genocide would compel the government to re- engage militarily, except for this, which Dion seized on Thursday: Canada remains engaged militarily. The special- forces ground contingent has tripled since last year, and these soldiers are engaged in combat ( though their mission is not called combat, by government decree, lest the delicate be offended).

In sum, it boils down to this: A major campaign pledge was poorly conceived and stubbornly implemented despite all evidence, andi snow being rolled back in fits and starts, as it becomes untenable. And a small ground mission that was expanded largely to mollify the Pentagon, and is still acknowledged only sotto voce, now becomes the government’s best defence. The next step, presumably, will be to further boost that mission.

Confused? The word doesn’t quite do this justice.