Douglas Roche is a former senator. He was Canada's Ambassador for Disarmament from 1984-89.
One day in the 1980s, shortly after Brian Mulroney became Prime Minister of Canada, he and Joe Clark, the Foreign Minister, met with U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. Pointing to a giant map of the world on the wall, Mr. Shultz bluntly reminded Mr. Mulroney and Mr. Clark that U.S. security interests in the northern half of North America could not be interfered with by the Canadian government. The Canadian leaders, with plenty of political acumen, recognized they were in no position to counter Mr. Shultz's adamancy.
This little story has come to mind as I watch the most fascinating entanglement in modern-day Canadian politics. An 85-year-old Canadian woman who survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing, who will jointly accept this year's Nobel Peace Prize, is badgering a 45-year-old Prime Minister to sign a new UN treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons – even though he has said such work is "useless." Setsuko Thurlow vs. Justin Trudeau.
I have known Ms. Thurlow for a long time and I don't think she will back away from her charge that Mr. Trudeau suffers from "a lack of courage." She was 13 when the United States attacked her city, killing more than 140,000 people, and she grew up with a survivor's mentality. She has been a leading figure in the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and played a key role in the UN negotiations that led to the adoption of the landmark treaty on July 7 outlawing nuclear weapons categorically.
She's not afraid to chastise the Prime Minister: "Such callous language to describe the prohibition of the most horrific weapons humankind has ever known. The Prime Minister seems to willfully ignore the fact that the majority of Canadians want a world without nuclear weapons. … As a living witness to Hiroshima, I beseech Justin Trudeau to change course."
But Mr. Trudeau has another antagonist, one unfortunately many times more powerful than Ms. Thurlow. The U.S. government, even before the arrival of President Donald Trump, vigorously objected to the negotiations for the treaty and, since it opened for signature last month, has doubled down on its condemnation.
Some analysts believe that, were Mr. Trudeau to sign the treaty, he would open up a new front in the deepening antagonisms between the United States and Canada. Others, and I put myself in this camp, hold that Canada has a higher obligation to work to spare humanity the horrors of another Hiroshima. A majority of countries of the world, thwarted by the big powers' current modernization plans for nuclear weapons, see the treaty as a milestone on the way to comprehensive negotiations for the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The sight of Ms. Thurlow, the David in this scene, tackling the Goliath that Mr. Trudeau is defending, has biblical proportions. There's no doubt that Mr.Trudeau shows his courage in the boxing ring, but Ms. Thurlow has put him in a quandary.
The way out for Mr. Trudeau is to gather a number of his NATO colleagues (e.g., Norway, Germany and Belgium) to jointly demand that NATO back away from its policy that nuclear weapons are the "supreme guarantee" of security, a mantra that has been thoroughly debunked by military analysts themselves.
Canada once tried to get such a change in NATO, only to be rebuffed by the NATO hierarchy. But the new humanitarian movement that produced the controversial treaty is operating in a wholly new climate in the long quest to rid the world of these pernicious weapons.
Perhaps Mr. Trudeau can show Ms. Thurlow that he does indeed have some courage, the courage to rebuild NATO into an alliance supporting the humanitarian movement for a nuclear weapons-free world.