The domestic fallout of Harper’s foreign policy
There’s broad consensus that Stephen Harper’s foreign policy has damaged Canada’s reputation and effectiveness abroad. What is less understood is its dangerous domestic fallout.
Harper’s botched relationship with our biggest trading partner has had a negative impact on the economy and jobs. Trade with the United States has not recovered in proportion to the rebounding American economy. Our exports elsewhere haven’t picked up, either, despite his threat to Barack Obama that if the president did not approve the Keystone oil pipeline, it would be “all the more reason why Canada should look at trade diversification.”
There’s no pipeline (and won’t be if Hillary Clinton is the next president), and overall Canadian exports continue to decline as a share of the GDP.
It was not surprising, then, that Harper drew derisive laughter from the audience during Monday’s televised leaders debate at Roy Thomson Hall when he claimed, “I have a great relationship with Barack Obama.”
Harper does have great relations with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu (who also does not get along with Obama). But, as Justin Trudeau noted in the debate, all political parties support Israel but it is only Harper who has turned that relationship into a “domestic political football.” He has used it to not only win votes among Jewish Canadians but also to polarize Canadians.
Those who criticized his blind approval of Israeli policies have been demonized as anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic. Others were vindictively penalized — federal funding was cut off to Kairos, a Christian ecumenical group that does development work worldwide, and also to the Canadian Arab Federation and Palestine House.
Harper’s minions on the board of the Montreal-based Rights and Democracy destroyed that unique centre dedicated to advancing human rights worldwide.
They hounded its administration for three paltry grants given to B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO critical of Israeli human rights violations, and two Palestinian ones. Rémy Beauregard, president of the centre, died of a heart attack hours after he was pilloried at a stormy board meeting. While his colleagues were at his funeral in Ottawa, the centre’s office was mysteriously broken into, its computers and file stolen. The centre was shut down.
The Harperites targeted Apartheid Week, which every year highlights the Israeli occupation and oppression of Palestinian lands. Started in Toronto in 2005, the student movement has spread to more than 100 cities worldwide.
Jason Kenney called it anti-Semitic and accused universities hosting it of being hostile to Jewish students, even though the peaceful protestors include Jewish activists.
In 2009, the government leaned on York University to cancel a three-day conference exploring Arab-Israeli peace. Ottawa ordered the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to rethink its modest $19,750 federal subsidy. Both institutions refused. The Canadian Association of University Teachers, representing 65,000 academics, said Ottawa’s political interference was “not something we have seen in this country since the McCarthy period,” in the 1950s.
Following the Israeli 2014 military attack on Gaza, which Harper fully supported, he refused temporary visas for 100 injured and traumatized children to be treated in Canada. The idea came from Izzeldin Abuelaish, a physician, who lost three daughters and a niece to Israeli bombing of his home in Gaza in 2009 and subsequently moved to Canada and now teaches at the University of Toronto. He had the support of the premier and health minister of Ontario, the Canadian Medical Association, the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario and Toronto’s major hospitals. But no Harper minister would even meet him.
Harper fans fear of terrorism — “he wants us to be afraid that there is a terrorist hiding behind every leaf and rock, for he can say he is there to protect us,” Trudeau said Monday. Harper does so “at the expense of Canadian Muslims,” writes Faisal Bhabha, professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, on the blog The Harper Decade. Both NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and Trudeau have accused Harper of pandering to and fanning Islamophobia, especially using his much ballyhooed ban on the niqab during citizenship ceremony.
“We all know what is going on here,” Trudeau has said. “It is nothing less than an attempt to play on people’s fears and foster prejudice directly toward the Muslim faith.”
Harper has used his foreign policy and its cousin, the war on terror, as cudgels to divide Canadians along religious and ideological lines. This legacy of his demagoguery will be harder to undo.
Those who criticized Harper’s blind approval of Israeli policies have been demonized as anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic