Is Canada isolated on the international scene? Last week in Ottawa, a group of experts and politicians looked at Canada’s role in the world and tried to draw some lessons seen through the prism of the war in Ukraine and the deterioration of great power relations. The observation quickly emerged about Canada and confirms what many researchers have been observing for several years: it counts less and less.
Canada does not lack assets on the economic, human, military and natural wealth levels, said the former ambassador to Washington Franck McKenna, “but it seems incapable of mobilizing them”. The problem, noted former prime minister Joe Clark, is that Justin Trudeau leads “a remarkably inward-looking government. We are not committed enough. Some ministers are of high quality, but, he says, they do not impose themselves enough. They go to events to be in the picture, and then they leave the stage.”
This passivity made John Manley, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs under Jean Chrétien, say that “we are more isolated from the world than we have ever been”.
I asked Manley to elaborate on this observation, which was pessimistic to say the least. He took the relationship with the United States as an example. “The Trump years have demonstrated that there is no ‘special relationship’ so special that it trumps national interests,” he wrote in an email. In fact, the relationship with the United States is far from stabilized, with Biden defending the “Buy America” law tooth and nail. The height of absurdity, points out Manley, the United States is even thinking of buying oil from Venezuela rather than Canada in order to replace its Russian supply.
But what most shocks Manley is the government’s propensity to lecture the world without benefiting from it. “Our values-based foreign policy has turned into a litany of perpetual complaints and virtuous postures that have made us an irrelevant country that no one listens to anymore,” he writes.
The latest statements by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mélanie Joly, and the Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, tend to confirm John Manley’s worst apprehensions.
A diplomacy of postures
A few weeks ago, after being asked why Canada was demanding the expulsion of Russia from the G20, Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly replied: “my objective is to ensure that I am not not sitting at the same table as Lavrov, nor the Prime Minister [avec Poutine] “. This declaration is incompatible with diplomatic work, the effort of which consists in discussing with all the parties.
If Joly’s position had been established as doctrine by Westerners for decades, nothing concrete would have been accomplished on the international scene to warm relations between countries or settle conflicts. The behavior of the Americans in the Afghan file is a good example of this. For a long time, they considered the Taliban to be terrorists. Then suddenly they sat down at the table with these terrorists, signed a peace agreement with them and left Afghanistan.
Diplomacy often has to be exercised discreetly, particularly within large international organizations where backroom talks often yield results. Never mind, Bob Rae preferred to put on a show on a question that finds and will find no solution: the future of the right of veto granted to the five great powers permanent members of the Security Council. Last month, the General Assembly adopted a resolution asking them to justify their use of the veto.
Rae took the opportunity to broaden the debate and launch a full-scale attack on a right of veto “as anachronistic as it is undemocratic”, pretending to forget that the Security Council, whose powers are enshrined in the United Nations Charter UN, was not created to be democratic, but efficient and representative of the hierarchy of power in international society. The veto, writes the French jurist Serge Sur, has its uses: during a conflict, it calms things down within the Council and avoids an institutional crisis, it preserves peace by preventing the situation from worsening, and it removes the exit from the UN of one or more great powers whose interests would be harmed. All this has been obvious since 1945.
Something tells me that the representatives of the five great powers, for once all united on an issue, must have sneered while listening to the Canadian ambassador playing modern-day Don Quixote. The Security Council is a formidable machine for settling certain conflicts when the Member States and in particular the big five decide to do so. But when a state like Canada intends to deprive the five of their privileges, it can only provoke a reaction of rejection and disqualification. This resolution in the form of pious wishes, which Canadian diplomacy loves, will not change the behavior of the great powers.
The sweeping speeches and virtuous postures mask the powerlessness of Canadian diplomacy on the international scene. Can Ottawa change software? Still, Canadian leaders would have to proceed logically. We are promised a defense policy soon without even having defined the foreign policy framework in which it will fit. Understand who can.