McLeod Group blog by Hunter McGill and Lauchlan T. Munro, June 22, 2020
To no one’s great surprise, Canada did not win a seat on the United Nations Security Council for the 2021-2022 term, losing out to Norway and Ireland. A flurry of prime ministerial phone calls, visits from cabinet ministers, and even the announcement one week ahead of the vote of $16.5 million in new aid money for women affected by COVID-19 and food insecurity failed to seal the deal.
Our “rivals”, Norway and Ireland, received 130 and 128 votes each, with Canada trailing Ireland by 20 votes. Both Ireland and Norway have notable track records when it comes to development cooperation (i.e., aid) and support for UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding work. Both have displayed consistency in purpose over the long haul, while Canada’s constantly shifting priorities have undermined its credibility. Both Ireland and Norway started their respective campaigns years earlier than Canada and, insiders tell us, were simply better prepared.
In terms of their records of achievements that each candidate country could claim, Canada’s official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) was only 0.27% last year. By comparison, Norway hit 1.02%; even Ireland, a country barely recovered from a bone-crunching recession in 2008-2012, sat at 0.31%. As the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee said in 2018, “Canada’s overall aid volume has not increased significantly since the last peer review (in 2012). As its economy has grown, the share of its aid volume in the overall economy (ODA/GNI) has declined. Canada’s current announced increases in ODA will not see it return to the 2012 ODA/GNI level of 0.31%.”
For those still interested in aid, Canada is consistent mainly in the mediocre volumes of aid it provides. Over the last three decades, our aid program’s priorities, modalities and countries of focus have changed with great frequency. Our political and bureaucratic elites seem incapable of setting a course and sticking to it. Such inconsistency gets noticed by foreign governments, and they then discount Canadian pronouncements accordingly.
Alas, the Trudeau government’s much vaunted Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) is only the latest in a long parade of Canadian aid priorities, and is unlikely to survive a future Conservative victory. And, as the McLeod Group has noted before, the FIAP must be accompanied by a significant increase in resources if it is to achieve its goals. But there has been no evidence of that in the Liberal government’s budgets since 2015 and again the rest of the world took notice.
As important as the level of aid, Canada’s other contributions have often been small, while being trumpeted loudly.
Take Canada’s much vaunted “return” to peacekeeping, which the Trudeau government promised in the 2015 election. As of 31 March 2020, there were only 41 Canadians on UN peacekeeping operations, marking a “historic low”. Ireland, a country with one seventh our population, had 523. In fact, Canada has not had more than 200 UN peacekeepers in the field since 2005 and hasn’t hit 1,000 since 1997. The return to peacekeeping took Canada to a peak of only 181 UN peacekeepers in 2018, during the brief deployment of Canadian Forces personnel to Mali. The Mali mission was not the proverbial boots on the ground but six helicopters and associated air and ground crews. Other countries can see how gun-shy Canada is.
In other aspects of international peace and security, both Ireland and Norway have provided important intellectual and diplomatic leadership in mediating and advising on complex peace negotiations, for example in Sri Lanka and Palestine, often operating under the proverbial radar. Such quiet professionalism is appreciated, especially as it is rarely accompanied by the self-congratulatory rhetoric that official Ottawa is so adept at producing. While Canada thinks of itself as an honest broker, others do not see us that way anymore. Most notably, our reluctance to criticize Israel has been noted by the 55 member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation.
On climate change, a topic dear to the hearts of 38 small island developing states, among others, none of the three candidates was ideal. Canada, Ireland and Norway are important producers and consumers of fossil fuels, for instance. But the contradiction at the heart of the Trudeau government’s energy and environment policies – we want to be green and also to own and build pipelines – is common knowledge around the world. The Irish government, meanwhile, has announced the end to offshore oil drilling, with natural gas exploitation to follow. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar made the announcement at the UN General Assembly, presumably so that everyone would hear it.
Here, as elsewhere, Canada’s deeds have not measured up to its rhetoric, and the world has noticed. It seems the world does not believe it needs more Canada.
The question, now that the “prize” has eluded us, is how the government will proceed. Foreign Minister Champagne has dismissed Canada’s loss in the UN vote as unimportant, saying that a temporary seat on the Security Council was only a means to an end, as the prime minister insisted that Canada will pursue its foreign policy goals of peace, freedom, democracy and human rights by other means.
The fact remains, however, that Canada has not given much if any attention to a coherent, overarching foreign policy framework within which development cooperation, trade, diplomacy and defence are situated. There is a lack of political will and vision at the top, hampered by a sudden need to concentrate more on managing Canada-US relations and a failure to recognize how significantly Canada’s place in the world has changed in recent decades. Nostalgia seems to dominate foreign policy thinking in the Prime Minister’s Office, a nostalgia that the rest of the world clearly does not share.
If we are to be taken seriously, and judged on our achievements as a valued international partner, Canada must go beyond slogans and make significantly more important contributions in the global effort to eradicate poverty, control climate change, promote international peace and security, and achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Previously chief of peer reviews at the OECD Development Assistance Committee, Hunter McGill is Senior Fellow at the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. Lauchlan T. Munro is a proud citizen of Ireland. He teaches in the University of Ottawa’s School of International Development and Global Studies. Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP.