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Recent surveys indicate that Canadians increasingly care about international matters and want our country to play a constructive role in world affairs.
But what role should that be?
To help consider the options, globeandmail.com has invited three foreign policy activists to give us their thoughts and lead us in debate and discussion.
Today, Lloyd Axworthy, president of the University of Winnipeg, and foreign minister of Canada from 1996-2000, argues we must throw out our slavish adherence to outdated U.S. policies and embrace truly international practices.
Lloyd Axworthy
Related Articles
Internet Links
- Globe-Environics poll: Canada and its relationships to the world
- Canada's World: A historic peacekeeper in a world that struggles to keep peace
- Canada's World: America's neighbour in a world where global power is shifting
The most important thing Canadians must do to respond to a changing world landscape is: Get a new map.
Our present international policy is guided by an outdated set of co-ordinates arising from a slavish adherence to the Bush administration's misguided efforts at empire building, military adventurism, continental border security and bilateral trade deals, while avoiding international collaboration on environmental and disarmament initiatives.
Ottawa has been so preoccupied with keeping in sync with these Washington missteps that we have lost sight of the global-sized tectonic changes that are altering power relationships. We have ignored the looming risks of nuclear proliferation and climate change, and abandoned the multilateral diplomacy that gave us a voice and influence on a wide range of significant issues.
Americans are eagerly anticipating the departure of their hapless President by engaging in a broad democratic debate on future directions. Emerging powers in Asia, Africa and Latin America are challenging Western-based notions of political hegemony and economic market practices. Europe is soon to change its political structures to provide more concerted and coherent leadership. Russia is flexing new muscles in security and energy arenas. Global-minded civil societies are mobilizing around new efforts to reduce poverty and contain violence against civilians, and multinationals are forming new practices to better fit the demand for corporate responsibility. As the charismatic Barack Obama says "change is on a roll." Everywhere it seems, except in the corridors of power that sit astride the Rideau Canal.
Well, the starting point for Canadians is right now. The place is Parliament. And the issue that serves as the catalyst is Afghanistan. Successive governments have allowed themselves to be pushed into making this faraway, disputatious land the centre point of our foreign, defence and development policy, chewing up vast resources ($7.8-billion and counting), endangering our Armed Forces, and constricting our abilities to play a useful role on any number of other global files. And, for what purpose? To support a government that is corrupt, run by warlords harbouring the world's largest heroin trade, and increasingly hostile to a mission that is seen as an occupying force.
Parliamentarians must use the debate on Afghanistan to liberate ourselves from a one-note, obsessive military combat role that is not working; to redefine our actions in the region in realistic ways that fit the security needs of the Afghan people, not the failed strategy of the generals.
Doing so would free up the precious resources we need to chart our new course.
And what might be some guideposts to place on that map? Let's begin by rejoining international efforts to rehabilitate UN peacekeeping efforts using the Responsibility to Protect principle endorsed by the world summit in 2005. This involves rewriting the rules of engagement for the protection of people, primarily by setting up international means of prevention to support fragile states before they fall into turmoil, equipping regional and UN peacekeepers with appropriate equipment to suffocate conflicts before they grow, and providing major aid quickly to post-conflict regions as recommended by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown just a few weeks ago.
Charting a new course means becoming a major participant in the initiative recently launched by a distinguished group of former American secretaries of state and defence to reinvigorate the search for complete nuclear disarmament.
It means searching for effective global governance to meet the challenge on climate change. The place we should show leadership is in the forging of treaties to govern the protective use of Arctic waters and to support the rights of indigenous people in the region, jettisoning the present pitiful and dangerous flag-waving sovereignty approach being followed by circumpolar countries, including our own.
It means shaking up the dormant debate on how to shrink the poverty gap. We will all be greatly embarrassed when the UN's Millennium Development Goals are soon shown to have been only partially met.
It means getting on board a new rights-based legal empowerment approach being developed by a UN commission.
Finally, it means revamping our own tools for delivering global policy, putting Parliament as the central forum through which Canadians can learn about what is going on in the world and what our options can be, giving CIDA the resources it needs and freeing it up from bureaucratic sclerosis, restoring the Department of Foreign Affairs to a central role in policy-making and making it the central hub of a Web-based interactive, information system for tuning into global public opinion and citizen-based public diplomacy.
And ultimately, and most obviously, a new map certainly requires new map-makers.
Monday: Jack Granatstein, political and military historian, and senior research fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, insists we must pursue our true national interests and they can never be divorced from those of the U.S. and other like-minded nations.
Tuesday: David Eaves, a public policy consultant, and the lead author of the 2004 Canada25 report From Middle to Model Power, concludes that we must unleash the great under-utilized power of our outward-looking citizenry in roles still to be determined.
Question and Answer: Join Mr. Axworthy, Mr. Granatstein and Mr. Eaves in a discussion Tuesday on the issues raised in their essays.
For additional reading and insight, you can also go to The Canada's World website
