Canada Has Fumbled and Fallen

"We need to take stock of why we didn't get it. It is embarrassing because it really is a bit of a wake-up call for many of us Canadians who kind of thought, 'Well, why wouldn't they want us?' We're really internationalized. We have this wonderful commitment to multilateralism, we feel like we embody the United Nations' spirit of diversity and inclusion in this country."

"I think there's merit in being there. We can absolutely talk about the question of whether or not we had the chops to be at the table, or whether or not we had the investment in organization and all the other things to go into consideration of our bids, such as our official development assistance, peacekeeping and all the rest."
"But the merit of being at the table to me is still very much there. And organizations are only as good as the people who get engaged in them."
"We have wonderful rhetoric, wonderful ideas … and at the end of the day we really hope that others just, you know, bask in the glory of our wonderful ideas with very little money. And that's not how the international system works."
University of Waterloo professor Bessma Momani, senior fellow, Centre for International Governance and Innovation

"It would force us, over and over, to take defined positions when the strategy often for Canada is to choose the areas where we want to weigh in. We have made significant contributions to multilateral institutions in focused ways."

"I really think we're making a big mistake here if we treat this as any kind of referendum on how Canada is viewed in the world. I don't think it tells us anything about the way we're regarded in the world."

"So really, the argument I'm making is we were focused on the wrong institution and the wrong part of the UN system."

Janice Stein, professor, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto

The Security Council meets on Oct. 24, 2019, at United Nations headquarters. Canada was beat out by Norway and Ireland this week in its bid for a temporary seat on the Security Council. Mary Altaffer/AP/The Canadian Press

"Canada lost for many reasons. One of them was because of our government’s timidity. It chose to say as little as possible on many of the most emotive issues of the day, lest it offend a country and lose its vote."
"Until a few weeks ago, it was taboo for ministers to even utter the word “Taiwan.” On importing 5G technologies from China, we have seemed paralyzed long after our security agencies and most of our allies have declared they want nothing to do with it."
"Such a craven approach was a hopeless strategy to justify why Canada should have a place in the Security Council chamber."
"The reality laid bare by this stark rebuke is that Canada is hamstrung by a preachy foreign policy that has latterly become heavily based on imposing our domestic cultural orthodoxies on others. This has made us a preening nag, a bore and — as the vote by the 190-odd countries that make up the United Nations General Assembly demonstrates — largely irrelevant, except to ourselves."
"The government’s pious sanctimony has become almost cult-like since Trudeau foolishly declared that 'Canada is back', without providing a road map to explain where we had been or where we’re going."
Matthew Fisher, Columnist, Global News



"To this country's friends all around the world, many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassionate and constructive voice in the world."
"Well, I have a simple message for you. On behalf of 35-million Canadians: we're back."
Justin Trudeau, November 2015

Most Canadians had no idea that Canada had ever gone away; they were under the impression that their Canada was hale and whole. But the Liberal Party of Canada under its leader Justin Trudeau insisted that Canada, governed by the Conservative Party under the leadership of Prime Minister Steven Harper had lost its way. Mind, Mr. Harper was not averse to informing Russia's Vladimir Putin at a then-G8 meeting that he needed to 'get out' of Ukraine's Crimea after Moscow under his direction had annexed it.

Senegal's President Macky Sall, left, walks alongside Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during an official visit in Dakar, Senegal, Feb. 12, 2020. The visit was part of the Trudeau's government's charm campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council. (Cheikh A.T/The Associated Press)

Whereas, in his zeal to gain votes for Canada's bid under the Liberal government to succeed in Justin Trudeau's vanity project to gain a temporary seat in the revolving UN Security Council, Mr. Trudeau managed to mislay his progressive stance on human rights as he stood smiling chummily beside Senegal's president as he spoke of his country's maximum penalty laws against its LGBTQ community. Not a word of objection passed the discreet lips of Canada's human rights champion on that occasion.

Canada's formal relationship with three of the most powerful members of the permanent Security Council nations is fraught with tension. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is persona-non-grata in Russia; so much for strained relations, while President Trump is somewhat disgruntled with Justin Trudeau's showmanship of disdain for the American president in a rather egregious dishevelment of nation-to-nation diplomacy, and caught in the net of a trade war between the U.S. and China; that nation of abusive human rights wouldn't help Canada to a lift on a rescue mission.

Canada has not stood very tall for human rights, justice and the rule of law in its relationship with Beijing, preferring to pursue genteel diplomacy and not rock the boat too strenuously, despite the effective state kidnapping of two Canadian citizens on trumped-up claims of national security in charging the two with espionage and clamping them in prison, denying them access to lawyers, keeping them incommunicado, subjecting them to unsubtle psychological torture techniques. 

Spending millions on bribing other UN member-countries to pledge a vote for Canada against the two other competitors for the two open seats, Norway and Ireland ... pledging millions in foreign aid, making common cause with dictators while throwing the human rights interests of collegial countries to the winds of chance, Canada did not do itself proud in abasing itself in unctuous servility to those nations whose record of abuses and anti-democratic values drew no credit on Canada. 

A security barrier that Israel erected to reduce the level of violence it had experienced for years became an unwieldy tool of recrimination on the part of Canada joining the usual anti-Israel crew in the United Nations to denounce a fellow democracy, along with the traditional Arab League and aligned critics to curry favour with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation nations in yet another condemnation of the Jewish state.

Trudeau and the Liberal government were happy to sell Canada's moral values out for a mess of pottage that they proffered in a grand sacrifice to be recognized by petty dictators and human rights abusers as being entitled to that elusive, vanity-project seat to satisfy glad-handing, back-slapping Justin Trudeau, happily smirking that 'Canada is back'. Only it failed to succeed. And Trudeau, flipping aside any embarrassment for Canada he has once again engendered on the world stage, carries on, business as usual.

The business at the present time being the continued erosion of parliamentary democracy in Canada under the guise of necessity because of the general threat of infection during the emergency response to SARS-CoV-2, making it unsafe for Parliament to assemble physically in the House of Commons' temporary quarters, recalling Members of Parliament back to Ottawa, in preference to holding Internet interfaces to conduct the nation's business and avoid inconvenient questions from the official opposition.

This, while Canada begins to open up, and children will be returning to the classroom, businesses will be re-opening, public arenas where people will gather will resume to a degree returning the country's public and private life to a version of normalcy, while it remains 'unsafe' for the governing Liberal Party to entertain thoughts of resuming Parliament as it is meant to be. And where Justin Trudeau saw fit to expose himself to potential infection, attending a crowded Black Lives Matter protest in his usual virtue-signalling style.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during the first hybrid parliament committee in the House of Commons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Electronic voting has been touted as a way resume normal operations in the Commons without all 338 MPs needing to travel to Ottawa. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)