February 27, 2009 - The Beacon Herald
February 25, 2009 - Calgary Herald
February 25, 2009 - The Chronicle Herald
February 24, 2009 - The Guelph Mercury
By Colin Kenny
In international politics, you are what you do. If your country doesn’t do much, your country doesn’t matter.
The Democratic Republic of Congo, like Canada, is very big and has bountiful resources. The Congo doesn’t matter. If it did, world powers would be trying a lot harder to staunch all the bloodshed that plagues it.
Canada used to matter, but our country matters less and less these days because it’s doing less and less on the international front.
In the past couple of weeks two prominent political figures – former prime minister Joe Clark and former foreign affairs minister David Emerson – have lamented Canada’s fading international reputation.
Both of them cited reasons for our decline, and both of them may have got it partially right, but each missed a few important points.
Mr. Emerson said Canada has become increasingly “U.S.-centric.” possibly because of the 1994 signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. As a result, he said, Canada has ignored countries of growing importance on the international scene, such as China, Brazil and India.
NAFTA might play some small part in Canada’s growing parochialism, but I have my doubts. Twenty-two years before NAFTA was signed the Trudeau government invented something called “The Third Option’ – the Canadian government was going to do everything in its power to get our business community to look beyond Canada and the United States for trading opportunities. Nothing really came of the Third Option, and NAFTA simply formalized Canada’s love affair with U.S. markets.
Mr. Clark, in his Feb. 14 speech at an Ottawa think tank, said that the federal government is allowing both Canada’s diplomatic and international development capacities to deteriorate.
He is right. Canada’s foreign aid budget in 2007 was a pitiful .28 percent of GDP, compared to the .7 percent target set by former prime minister Lester B. Pearson 40 years ago. As for the diplomatic abilities that Canada used to be known for, Mr. Clark pointed out that the budget at the Department of Foreign Affairs plummeted by nearly 18 percent between 2007-2008 and 2008-2009: “Our diplomatic resources are being run down now as steadily and certainly as our defence resources were run down in earlier decades.”
Mr. Clark seems to believe that the current government is far more focused on building Canada’s military strength than its capacity to serve the world through diplomacy and development assistance. He clearly is not talking to people inside the Canadian Forces, who are keenly aware that Canada’s military capacity is also on the wane.
It is true that the Harper government inherited a military basket case from the Liberals. What is not true is that the current government has resuscitated the military. It has run the Canadian forces flat out in Afghanistan, and there has been no opportunity to train and rebuild an institution that has been burning out its personnel for decades.
The main problem is money: detailed analysis by the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence in two reports The Government’s No. 1 Job and Managing Turmoil both showed that Canadian Forces need 90,000 people to perform the tasks Canadian politicians keep assigning them. They have 64,000. Burnout city.
Moreover, many purchases of critical equipment that will be needed in the coming decades haven’t even been planned for. Canada’s defence budget was 2.01 percent of GDP under Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in 1970. It was 1.17 percent of GDP under Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008.
Everyone on Parliament Hill was feeling warm and fuzzy about the visit of U.S. President Barak Obama last Thursday. There were no obvious disagreements between Mr. Obama and Mr. Harper.
Mr. Obama was careful to state that he had not asked Canada to maintain it’s current military role in Afghanistan after our scheduled pullout in 2011, but he pointed out that there would be other important roles that Canada could play in the areas of development assistance and diplomacy.
There are at least three points to be kept in mind here. The first is that Canada couldn’t keep up its military role past 2011 even it wanted to. By then the last bit of juice will have been squeezed out of our army.
The second is that if Mr. Obama is counting on Canada for diplomacy and development assistance in Afghanistan, he had better take a look at how our capacities have been run down in these areas in recent years.
He had also better take into account that diplomats and aid workers cannot function in Afghanistan without military protection, and we’re coming up short in that area as well.
Mr. Obama says he loves Canada. Well, there are lots of things to love about Canada. But none of these things might be what Mr. Obama is going to need help with in a troubled world.
Love thrives on actions, not words. Right now our government is all words.
(Colin Kenny was chair of the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence in the last Parliament. kennyco@sen.parl.gc.ca)