As Canada turns 141 years old tomorrow, few beliefs and values are held more strongly in common by Canadians than their thoughts of their country on the international stage.
They have been seduced by mythology. The reality of Canada's foreign policy – the country's official face to the world – for the most part is starkly different from the altruistic image of Canada with which its citizens are in love.
Yet it's a myth still with the power to drive Canadian non-governmental organizations: the Stephen Lewis Foundation working with HIV/AIDS victims in Africa; physician James Orbinski's Dignitas International working with communities in AIDS-overwhelmed areas; Maude Barlow's international public access-to-water project; retired Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire's global campaign against child soldiers, and many others.
They see themselves as torch-bearers of what their country should be about.
The Strategic Counsel poll that The Globe and Mail is publishing over the national holiday shows a people robustly distinct from their southern neighbours, viewing themselves as significantly more open toward the global Other.
An Environics poll in January revealed Canadians' conviction that their country stands out as a positive force in the world. Nearly two-thirds of respondents thought our global role had grown over the past 20 years, with peacekeeping and foreign aid being identified as our greatest contributions.
An even earlier Compas poll produced similar outcomes. “Our biggest finding,” Compas president Conrad Winn told the Ottawa Citizen, “was the powerful streak of democratic moralism that pervades almost all of Canadians' thinking about international affairs.”
Those beliefs mask reality and the crabby eye-rolling of foreign policy scholars infuriated by Canadians' persistence in holding onto a mythology that has lost authenticity: We really don't do peacekeeping any more (our combat mission in Afghanistan's civil war is something else); our foreign aid remains well below the 0.7 per cent of gross national product we committed ourselves to more than 25 years ago, and our world influence has become a pale, flaccid thing.
Mythology, or meaning-endowed narrative, is one of two ways of looking at the past. The other is the science of history, the scholarly interpretation of records, events and artifacts. Sometimes they're on the same track; often not.
What is testament to myth's power, however, is the tenacity of Canadians' belief in their country as moral peacemaker and good helper.
Where does it come from? British scholar George Steiner says every mythology begins with what he calls “a moment of crucial revelation.”
We know precisely in history when that began: when a brilliant group of a dozen or so young Canadians were recruited into the foreign service between the two world wars. Lester Pearson, future Nobel Peace Prize winner and prime minister, was among them.
A common thread runs through their backgrounds that has never been thoroughly analyzed: Almost all were the sons of pastors, priests, missionaries and deeply religious families. They were steeped in Protestant social gospel, that major intellectual force in Canadian political and social life of the early 20th century.
Social gospel gave them their moral idealism. Their moral idealism led them to create Canada's first real foreign policy, based on the “functional principle” that Canada's influence in the councils of the postwar world would be commensurate with its material contributions. Give a lot and get listened to.
They were outstanding leaders in the formation of the United Nations and the multiracial Commonwealth. They created the first real UN peacekeeping force, for which Mr. Pearson won the Nobel Prize, although his hope that it would become an exercise in peace-making never materialized.
Theirs was diplomacy by missionary impulse. And it began its decline in the 1960s as successive Canadian prime ministers lost interest (albeit with periodic arousals: John Diefenbaker pushed racist South Africa out of the Commonwealth; Pierre Trudeau went on a peace mission; Brian Mulroney admirably supported Africa's front-line states against the apartheid South African regime).
One of Canada's most brilliant diplomats, Allan Gotlieb, hardly a wild-eyed romantic about his craft, lamented in a private memorandum 40 years ago: “What makes the decline of this role particularly serious for Canada is that it played an important part in forging our unity in the post-war era. Like the Danes who made good furniture, the French who made good wine, the Russians who made sputnik, Canada, as a specially endowed middle power, as the reasonable man's country, as the broker or the skilled intermediary, made peace.”
What a catechism to teach to the young.
The missionary impulse had its last hurrah with Lloyd Axworthy, foreign minister from 1996 to 2000, who consulted with his United Church pastor on his initiatives on the International Criminal Court, the international gun trade, the doctrine of responsibility to protect and the treaty to ban land mines.
They were worthy endeavours, hamstrung by Mr. Axworthy's inability to elicit support from the big powers; hamstrung by our governments' willful neglect of the “functional principle's” equation that said our influence depended on the contributions we made.
Yet the mythology lives on, powerfully.
