It’s time for more Canada — again
In 2003, the singer-songwriter and U2 star, Bono, excited Canadians, although also imposing a burden on them, by declaring: “The world needs more Canada.”
Afterwards, we did precious little to deserve such praise. The succeeding prime minister, Stephen Harper, limited his interest in foreign affairs to specifically chosen countries, such as Ukraine and Israel. He also shrank the size of our embassies abroad.
With astounding speed, everything has changed. U.S. President Barack Obama, while in Ottawa for a meeting of “The Three Amigos,” or the leaders of the U.S., Mexico and Canada, showed he understood this by using the same phrase: “The world needs more Canada.”
One of the principle reasons for this change is self-evident. It’s because our prime minister is now Justin Trudeau.
His father, Pierre Trudeau, was the most international-minded of all our prime ministers, even more so than Lester Pearson who, while prime minister, was distracted by major economic and political challenges.
Two other factors can be identified as responsible for the change in our attitudes. The first is expressed by the phrase “Canada is back,” which became so popular after Trudeau’s election victory.
Canadians thus seized the chance to become again what so many felt innately was the responsibility of a country such as ours — one pretty well off and pretty well protected from global violence.
More telling is 25,000 Syrians should be coming here (a scale exceeded only by Germany, if only for a year) and so many of these newcomers are being turned into Canadians not by the government but by individual sponsors, a policy matched in no other country.
It may sound boastful, yet is a fact that Canada these days is showing most other countries how to make the world a better place.
The other reason we are now so interested in our role in international affairs is, largely, the consequence of circumstance. Most of the other countries like us — the industrial democracies, that is — are making a mess of themselves these days, and of others.
Britain’s botched “Brexit” referendum is the obvious example. Most likely, Britain is going to have to endure a recession and the loss of some of its financial corporations to places such as Frankfurt and Luxembourg.
Britain’s objective — more exactly, that of the Leave voters — was to liberate itself from the European Union. But while Britain will pay a price for this act, so will the EU itself.
The stunning fact about today’s EU is that almost as many of its own citizens feel the same way as do the Britons.
In France, dissatisfaction with the bureaucrat-bound EU is actually higher — at 61 per cent — than in Britain.
Other EU member-states as critical of their own creation stretch from Spain and Italy to the Scandinavians to the Netherlands and to most of those in the east. As Gideon Rachman, the Financial Times’ highly regarded chief commentator, has put it: “The full-scale disintegration of the EU is now a real possibility.”
Eventually, most of the EU’s member-states will likely sort out their collective blunders, from finance to immigration.
Europe’s peak, though, has passed. Canada’s peak, despite setbacks such as the collapse of oil prices, is still ahead. That’s the difference.
Which of these conditions applies to the United States is the great question of our time. No one, though, is now saying, “The world needs more America.”
Between these two nations, one difference is almost self-evident. It’s that in Trudeau, Canada has gained for itself, maybe only by a fluke, exactly the right leader at the right time.
The U.S.’s next leader, it’s all but certain, will be Hillary Clinton. She’s outstandingly competent. But as Clinton herself admits, she’s no politician. She cannot connect, that is, with her own people. That’s Trudeau’s gift; and Canada’s.
To assume that we are now near to the top among all industrial democracies would be the height of vanity.
Never before, though, have we had so clear a chance to be what we want to be.