May 27, 2013
Recently, Andrew Coyne wrote an article about the Conservatives, saying that their “Nasty Party” reputation was well deserved. The adjectives Coyne used were moronic, secretive, controlling, manipulative, crude, autocratic, vicious, untrustworthy, paranoid. “It’s quite a performance,” he said. And that was before the full Technicolor Duffygate
You can’t of course, separate the party from the government it runs. And that government has applied the same qualities it uses in Canada to its foreign policy, making Canada an outcast in some quarters, a laughing stock in others, and pretty much irrelevant elsewhere. Nasty Canada.
The “laughing stock” reputation is earned whenever Canada appears at an environmental conference or a climate change forum. Having demonized crusading environmental NGOs, silenced scientists and shut down important research centres, the Harper government expends vast amounts of time and money strutting, preening, lecturing and begging over pipelines for the Alberta tar sands, and wondering why it’s such a hard sell.
Having failed to get a coveted seat on the UN Security Council, The Harper government never misses a chance now to criticize the UN and its agencies as talk-shops full of dictators. We pulled out of the Desertification Convention like a spoiled child and last October John Baird hectored the UN General Assembly for its “sound and fury” over Syria and its inaction on the ground. Baird’s own sound and fury didn’t signify much, nor could it, because Canada has squandered its once balanced Middle East foreign policy by siding so carelessly with Israel. Canada has always been a friend to Israel, but the substance of that friendship is now disastrously weakened by our inability to communicate with others in the region.
UN Peacekeeping? Fuhgeddaboudit. Out of 78,000 UN peacekeeping troops, Canada currently provides 19. That’s nineteen. In 2010 we were kicked out of our own air base at Camp Mirage in Dubai, just when it was most important to our military effort in Afghanistan. The Harper government’s vitriolic stand against upgraded UN status for Palestine removed Canada from any serious role in the region’s peace process. And Qatar recently offered to put up a new headquarters for ICAO if the UN would move it out of Montreal. Amidst more sound and fury, John Baird yelled in Parliament that Canada’s “principled” foreign policy is not for sale, but he did offer to increase the $80 million subsidy that ICAO gets for being in Montreal. Qatar withdrew its offer.
Regrets? “I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” Well, maybe not too few to mention. The Harper government chopped foreign aid to eight African and two Asian countries – all very poor and all with longstanding Canadian partnerships. That decision, announced by then CIDA Minister Bev Oda in a media scrum, was said to be about greater “focus”. But then Canada opened big new CIDA programs in middle-income Peru and Colombia where, by chance, the Harper government was pushing free trade deals and mining contracts.
Bev Oda is gone, thank goodness, but so is CIDA, “folded” into DFAIT where Baird and his minions can use Canada’s dwindling aid budget with even less reference to the poverty mandate that taxpayers think it has. And dwindling it is. Next year, on a per capita basis, our aid budget will be the lowest it has ever been, and we’ll be down in the standings with pikers like Greece and Italy. Nasty Canada.