Imagination is a vital asset in defining the role Canada might play in the world; as important in its own way as the size of the army, the strength of the economy or the capacity of our diplomatic corps.
Over the years, a distinctive brand of imagination led Canadians to challenge conventional wisdoms and seek out innovative solutions. Examples range from the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the Pearson peacekeeping initiative in Suez; from the land-mines treaty to the International Criminal Court. But we're now falling into a rut of reactionary realism. The promised foreign-policy review is being produced primarily by insiders and a few select academics who think it wimpish to include values in foreign-policy calculations. Several cabinet ministers speak of the need to appease Washington power brokers by signing on to an unnecessary missile-defence system and maintaining the 9/11 preoccupation with continental border protections, while retreating from efforts to establish international laws and institutions governing transnational global problems.
Any idea of fostering an activist foreign policy is undercut by demands for a 5 per-cent reduction in the budgets of our Foreign Affairs Department and in the Canadian International Development Agency. This, at a time when Canada needs new thinking and begins to map out a course relevant to the new century.
Many policy areas are crying out for the power of imagination. Prime Minister Paul Martin showed that he was personally prepared to be bold and innovative in his September speech to the UN General Assembly. He argued that it's time rewrite the basic global conduct code that endows nation states with the sovereign right to do what they will inside their own boundaries.
In its place, he called for an emerging sense of global citizenship, one that places international standards for the security and protection of individuals above the sovereign rights of states. Sovereignty should be redefined as "the responsibility to protect," he said. When nation states fail to protect, or are themselves the predators, the international community must assume that responsibility. This was very much in the tradition of imaginative Canadian initiatives, and Mr. Martin rightly advanced it in response to the massacres, rape and ethnic cleansing in places such as Western Sudan.
But I'd argue Mr. Martin should apply this forward-looking concept to a global issue that has major bearing on Canadian interests: the calamity of climate change and the disaster it brings to our northern regions. Here's an issue where the principle of responsibility to protect applies not only to conflicts in far-off countries -- it matters to Canadians because it is happening in our own back yard.
Yesterday, an international group of more that 250 scientists from eight Arctic-bordering nations (including the United States and Canada) reported that human-influenced changes in the Earth's climate are particularly intense in the Arctic. There, the annual average amount of Arctic sea ice has shrunk by an area bigger than Texas and Arizona combined. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment warned that the Arctic probably would warm twice as much as the Earth overall. The report's message of clear and present danger prompted Republican Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Joe Lieberman to warn of the "dire consequences" of global warming and to urge the U.S. to cut greenhouse gases (an approach so far rejected by the Bush administration). The findings follow an earlier report commissioned by the Pentagon, no less, which concluded that severe weather-related disasters attributable to greenhouse gases could cause conflict and widespread ecological damage leading to "constant battles" over diminishing resources.
Yet U.S. leadership perversely refuses to take this impeding threat to global security seriously. While the world's largest oil company spends millions to discredit the science of climate change, the government of the world's most powerful country (and most prolific polluter) rejects any form of treaty or agreement for collaborative international solutions -- and, in fact, changes rules and regulations to subsidize the purchase of SUVs that emit 40 per cent more carbon emissions. Meanwhile, the newly industrializing countries of Asia are steadily increasing their fossil-fuel consumption even as they experience more dust storms and weather-related disasters due to the variability in the climate.
Canada is at the forefront of this issue because our northern regions are already feeling the deleterious impacts. On a recent trip to the Arctic, I came to understand how the people there see climate change as a direct threat to their way of life, which is rooted in the landscape, animals and sea life that are endangered by the melting of the Arctic sea ice.
The consequences will be dire not only for Northerners; the North is the environmental early warning line for all of us.
The northern dimension of climate change presents Canadian diplomacy with its most challenging contemporary test. Even before yesterday's report was released, the United States was trying to forestall any attempts by the council to prescribe policies to address such dramatic findings. How prepared is Canada to counter such efforts, and to lead the way in using this report for global action?
In the Throne Speech, the government makes much of giving active attention to our North, but says little of the impending environmental security crisis that faces the circumpolar region. It would be an act of imaginative leadership for the Prime Minister to mobilize a full-court diplomatic effort to draw attention to this threat. It might also be a good issue on which to launch his pet project of forming a group of leaders from North and South to consider joint action on matters of global concern.
To be credible in taking on such a task, Canadians will have to become active in implementing our Kyoto commitments, which will require the federal government to confront entrenched industry and provincial interests. The signs are not encouraging. Reports from Parliament Hill reveal that the Natural Resources minister is resisting efforts to establish emission standards and other measures that would put us on the path towards our Kyoto commitments.
It will also take imagination to use the principles of asymmetrical federalism that were applied in the health agreement with the provinces, to give the North special powers to deal with environmental protection, along with the necessary financial resources to adapt to the immense changes taking place.
If we are to be true to the principle embodied in the "responsibility to protect" concept, then Canadians must exert utmost effort to give our own northern citizens and countless others around the world security against the impacts of severe climate change. The Martin government has no alternative: It must exercise its power of imagination.
Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign affairs minister and author of Navigating a New World: Canada's Global Future, is president of the University of Winnipeg.