Global clash of ideologies: Freeland
Minister of foreign affairs frames the fight between democracy and authoritarianism
— Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland sees the clash between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism as a defining conflict of our time, and she blames one country that she knows well — Russia.
That world view will form the frame for Freeland and her fellow G7 foreign ministers as they meet Sunday to tackle the security threats imperilling the planet, and she’s placing the disruptive Vladimir Putin at the centre of that picture.
The collapse of democracy in Venezuela, the possible war crimes being committed against Rohingya Muslims being driven out of Bangladesh, the ongoing Syrian civil war and Middle East crisis, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea will all be up for discussion during the day and a half of talks in Toronto.
But Freeland has made clear recently that Russia — a country she knows well from her previous career as a journalist, and one that has attempted to vilify her in her current political life — will be her main focus when she hosts G7 foreign ministers.
Freeland is convening the meeting as part of the slate of ministerial level gatherings in the run-up to the leaders’ summit Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will host in June in Charlevoix, Que.
Freeland is being paired with Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, who will also host his interior ministry counterparts in Toronto, and where they are expected to focus on combating the threat of terrorism.
“It’s an overlapping meeting and concerns about Russia are very much on the agenda,” Goodale said Friday, citing “their political interference, (and) their very problematic adventurism in certain specific theatres around the world, whether that’s the eastern part of Ukraine or in Syria.”
Ukraine Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin will also be in Toronto to brief the G7 ministers, officials said Friday.
In Freeland’s view, the road to building peace and security means confronting “one of the defining debates of our time … which is the debate between democracy and authoritarianism.”
“A lot of us thought that debate had been decided in 1989 or 1991,” Freeland told a recent student gathering at the University of Toronto, part of the summit’s youth outreach.
“But it’s not looking that way so much now. And I think that is very much an issue that is relevant and important for the G7 to take on.”
Freeland is drawing on the sweep of a generation’s worth of history, since the end of the Cold War to the current depths of Russian tensions with the West since it annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula four years ago.
A Ukrainian Canadian who also speaks several languages including Russian, Freeland described the formative influence of travelling to Russia as a freelance journalist in the early 1990s and witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union. It launched a journalism career that saw her report from Moscow and Kyiv.
“It’s part of what’s made me foreign minister,” she told the U of T student audience.
“Actually observing the collapse of the vastest Communist regime in the world and then observing the effort to build something in its place has profoundly shaped my thinking, including about this new challenge of democracy versus authoritarianism.”
Freeland is now absorbing the shocks of the West’s biggest clash with Russia since the Cold War. Canada joined its allies in recently expelling a handful of Russian diplomats, after blaming the Kremlin for the nerve gas attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British city of Salisbury.
Russia denies responsibility, but Freeland and others don’t believe it.