From his perch on the op-ed pages of the Globe and Mail, or on the airwaves of the CBC, this most august of retired Canadian diplomats regularly casts thunderbolts at the Harper government, more in sadness than in anger. Worldly and world-weary, Heinbecker knows — simply knows, to his core — that the Harper government’s foreign policy, especially its frostiness towards the United Nations, is inept, harmful to Canada’s standing in the world, and, well, just plain stupid.
“To put it bluntly,” Heinbecker declared in the Globe last month, “it is a major mistake to simply write off the institutions our parents and grandparents created, as if the current or next generation would have the wit, wisdom and will to do better.”
But here’s a thought. What if Heinbecker & Co. are mostly mistaken about the sanctity, value and essential unimpeachability of the UN? And what if Baird, purveyor of crass moral absolutes in a diplomatic world more comfortable with nuance, is mostly correct? More to the point, politically: What if Baird’s view much more closely reflects popular sentiment, than does Heinbecker’s?
It is a staple of Liberal and New Democrat messaging that the Harper Conservatives have trashed Canada’s formerly stellar reputation in the world (which was never as stellar as the myth would have it) by, among other things, unequivocally supporting the state of Israel, as opposed to maintaining the fig leaf of honest brokerhood; cutting off diplomatic ties with Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, as opposed to pretending to engage with it; walking away from blue-helmeted peacekeeping, in favour of peacemaking; and denouncing international human rights violators, including the governments of Iran, North Korea and Sri Lanka, in stark terms.
Proof of this decline is found, triumphantly, in the growing trickle of UN “rapporteurs” making the long trek to Canada, here to report in icy, disappointed tones on this country’s egregious failings — compared with, say, Greece, or Zimbabwe. Last summer the UN’s Food Rapporteur from central casting, Olivier De Schutter, spent 11 days in-country, then declared that 800,000 Canadian households lack adequate food. His solution to the emergency, buried in the fine print of his report, was a massive increase in taxes.
And more rapporteurs are on the way. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights all are Canada-bound in the coming months. If history is any guide they too will unearth appalling abuses that lay bare the cruelty and inhumanity at the heart of the Canadian experience.
Taxpayers will rightly wonder, when these reports touch down in Ottawa from the other planet on which they are created, why the UN is spending precious resources in this way, when people are starving or being bombed or butchered in various places, such as Syria. For the record, Canada’s net contribution to the world body for 2013 is $76-million (US), according to UN documents. That compares with $131.2-million from China, $142.5-million from France, $276-million from Japan, and a whopping $618.5-million from the United States. Canada is the seventh-largest contributor globally.
Now here’s a question, which seems fair at a time when federal spending is under a microscope: What will Canadians receive for those millions? How will that money be spent? And why, come to think of it, has no individual, let alone the UN apparatus as a whole, ever been called to account for its failures, which are colossal — some would say criminal — in modern times?
There was the massacre at Srebrenica, when UN troops stood by. There was the Rwandan genocide, when UN troops stood by. More recently the UN Security Council has proved itself utterly useless in confronting Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, who has used heavy weapons and chemical weapons against his own people. If there is intervention in Syria, it will be at the behest of the same crew that always intervenes, if anyone does, to stop international barbarities: NATO, led by the Americans.
In response to such failings, among others, Baird had this to say to the UN General Assembly last October: “[Humanity] will judge our success by how well we further the ends of prosperity, security, and human dignity. You measure results by measuring the results. Not by weighing best efforts. Not by counting good intentions. Not by calculating inputs.” It was his way of saying, in language that left little room for misinterpretation: Just what are you accomplishing with our $76-million?
That may have been unusually blunt speech, for a diplomat. But destructive of Canada’s international reputation? A fundamental breach with Canadian tradition? Nonsense. Not anywhere outside the tiny bubble bordered by the Chateau Laurier on one side and Bank Street on the other. Baird was expressing what many Canadians think, but don’t often say. It’s part of what makes him an effective foreign minister.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: Michael Den Tandt
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