Federal campaign reveals Canada’s dirty little secret
An election is no time to discuss serious issues.
So said Kim Campbell in the 1993 election that famously toppled her from the prime minister’s office into historical obscurity. Her musings might have seemed cynical at the time, but she had a point about our penchant for personality over policy — foreign policy in particular.
Yes, there are fleeting mentions — Afghanistan and China cropped up on the campaign trail thanks to the news cycle. But the debate tends to be more divisive than deliberative.
In 2015, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau quickly seized on images of Syrian refugees at sea to cast his Conservative opponents as heartless, just as the Tories are now capitalizing on the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan to blame his Liberal government. But serious foreign policy strategy — whether emanating from party leaders or thought leaders — gets diminishing returns in Canadian elections.
No longer do voters weigh the merits of Bomarc missiles or cruise missiles, as in campaigns past. The great debate over free trade is long forgotten, and the nostalgic clamour for more peacekeeping has given way to a recognition that most international conflicts defy (UN) resolution(s).
It’s not as if the candidates don’t care. Green party Leader Annamie Paul worked as a Canadian diplomat abroad, the NDP’s Jagmeet Singh campaigned for international human rights, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole served in the military and Trudeau roamed the world before and after becoming PM.
The question is how much Canadians care. Foreign affairs didn’t even make it onto the formal agenda in last week’s election debate, until rival candidates slipped in partisan potshots over Afghanistan and China — leaving little room for a serious reckoning over realpolitik.
For all the anguished laments from scholars about the lack of debate, foreign affairs are almost never a vote-determining issue at the ballot box, except at the margins. In this campaign, O’Toole has once again indulged his party’s perennial pandering to Jewish voters by repeating a pledge to relocate Canada’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (aping Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Israel’s disputed capital).
But the suicidal impulses that gripped the Greens this year, when party diehards turned the distant Gaza conflict into a litmus test for eco-politics — threatening Paul, the country’s first Black Jewish woman leader, with regicide — have not caught on with other parties.
Even climate change is treated as a domestic issue — with planetary implications but little consideration of the foreign policy permutations. For example, Canadians almost never weigh the consequences of ostracizing China in retaliation for its hostagetaking tactics, notwithstanding the reality that the West is utterly dependent on Chinese co-operation in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
There has been a tectonic shift in Canadian attitudes toward China since the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wenzhou in Vancouver and the retaliatory trials of the “two Michaels” — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in China. It is a deadly serious issue, yet you wouldn’t know it from all the political posturing.
The Conservatives have been trying to have it both ways on this issue of late, demanding that Canada act unilaterally to magically cut China down to size while in the same breath insisting that Ottawa engage multilaterally with allied countries to apply concerted pressure. The call to act alone always seemed self-defeating and short-sighted, while the clamour for joint action ignores the reality that Canada has been doing precisely that, most recently by recruiting dozens of countries to sign a declaration against hostagetaking.
All that said, any debate on how to deal with China is worth having. Left unsaid, however, is the question of why Canada is still punching below its weight on China in one particular area:
None of the other party leaders asked why Ottawa isn’t in the so-called Quad — a security counterweight in the IndoPacific consisting of Australia, India, Japan and the U.S., from which we are conspicuously absent given our multilateral ambitions.
Canada’s erratic foreign aid commitments came up in past campaigns, especially when O’Toole’s predecessor, Andrew Scheer, proposed major cutbacks, but not this time. Now that the Tories have dropped that plank, the issue has dropped from sight, as has any talk of helping other countries in mid-pandemic.
Perhaps it is in the nature of electoral politics that none of the party leaders wants to go out on a limb by demanding that Ottawa donate more COVID vaccines to other countries, lest they be seen as shortchanging their fellow Canadians. While early complaints that Canada was “hoarding” vaccines were hyperbolic — the government was merely hedging its bets by diversifying suppliers when deliveries were unreliable — there are legitimate questions now about how to help other countries in need as our surplus grows.
If foreign policy seems more fleeting than ever on the campaign trail, it’s a reminder that the electoral cycle is increasingly captive of the news cycle, just as it was for Campbell when she lost the PM’s job in 1993. The dirty little secret of foreign affairs is that for most Canadians, it remains a domestic affair.
Serious foreign policy strategy — whether emanating from party leaders or thought leaders — gets diminishing returns in Canadian elections