Towards a true Canadian foreign policy - Looking for Third Ways
Sean Scallon
April 18, 2007
Just as explorers looked for a northwest passage through Canada to the Orient, different from two main trade routes through the Middle East and around South America, so do are politicians and policy makers looking for new, “third ways” of foreign policy and politics through Canada.
Canada’s relationship with its large neighbor to the south inevitably has a pull within Canadian politics and the policies that come from such politics. The pendulum of pro-U.S./anti-U.S. feeling swings with the times and those in power on both sides of the border. Right now, with a pro-U.S. Canadian prime minister in Stephen Harper, who shares somewhat similar ideological leanings as U.S. President George Bush II, relations are cordial. The same was true with Bill Clinton when he was in the Oval Office and Jean Chrétien’s Liberals were in power on Parliament Hill and Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney were buddies during the 1980s as well. But the opposite has also been true. Pierre Trudeau was hardly a friend to the Nixon or Reagan Administrations and Vietnam opened a chasm between Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the lowest point of Canadian-U.S. relations came between Paul Martin’s government and Bush II’s.
Perhaps the biggest part of that relationship is in foreign policy and it’s in this area is where the relationship can be either very warm or very cold. Canada’s foreign policy seems to be based on how it sees itself within the world around it. Is it America’s partner and ally within NATO - which is certainly the way Mulroney and Harper views the relationship and why Canada dispatched its military forces to the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and to Afghanistan - or is it a country with the resources to carve out its own foreign policy niche which was certainly true during the Trudeau days and true during the Martin government.
Like all pendulums, such policies have extremes. Grow to close to the U.S. and you’re nothing more than their poodle, which is what Tony Blair has become. Blair may have thought he could provide some influence on the conduct U.S. policy during the Iraq War but Britain’s weaker standing compared to the U.S.’ simply does not allow for it. In any allied military operation since World War II, it’s the U.S. that calls the shots, period. This has been an illusion that has weakened Britain considerably. On the other hand, a too independent foreign policy away from the U.S. is somewhat silly considering Canada’s weak military and the fact that such a policy is often political posturing and indulging in cheap, leftist rhetoric in an effort to satisfy the coming and going waves of nationalism that sometimes sweep Canada (especially in the aftermath of the Cold War and in response to the Quebec secession crisis of the mid-1990s). Canadians do not perceive themselves to be so diametrically opposed to the U.S. to forge its own alliances outside the Atlantic community, especially with its membership in the Commonwealth.
Harper straddles this line between subservience and revanchism as well as anyone and perhaps he is building a third way in between the two poles that can satisfy most Canadians. One the one hand, Canadian troops are in Afghanistan, supporting the NATO effort there concurrent with Canada’s treaty obligations and Harper has worked with the Bush II Administration to resolve ongoing trade disputes that would still have lingered in suspended animation given the hostility between the Martin and Bush II governments. On the other hand, Canada has not joined the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq (which would destroy Harper’s government and break-up the Tories once again) and Harper has issued warnings to U.S. submarines operating in the Arctic Ocean not to come too close to Canadian waters. He has also asserted Canada’s sovereignty over Hans Island near Greenland, which Denmark claims as its own.
Harper instinctively knows that one of the strikes in Canadian voters’ minds against the Tories for years was their seemingly closeness to U.S. conservatives and Republicans stretching all the way back to the Reagan-Mulroney days and the perception they would erase the border and make Canada the 51st state. Now that the U.S. will require those traveling to Canada to have passports, the border crossings between the two countries will no longer be the speed bump to U.S. visitors that it once was. This may make trade and travel more difficult, but also reinforces the fact that the border does still exist, and that Canada and the U.S. are still two different places, which is a plus for Harper as he tries to make the Tories become legitimate as a party of government.
Also helping the Tories this past week was the recent elections to the Quebec National Assembly. The Action Democratique du Quebec (ADQ) is a conservative party, or at least conservative by Quebec standards, and is led by 35-year old political wunderkind Mario Dumont. Yesterday the ADQ shattered Quebec’s current two-party system between the federalist and centrist Liberals and left-wing sovereigntist Parti Quebecois as they won 31% of the vote (up from 18% in 2003) and gained 41 seats (up from five). The Liberals were reduced to 48 seats from 72 and the PQ was utterly routed, being reduced to 36 seats from 45 and dropping to 28 percent of the vote. It’s Quebec’s first minority government since 1878. More than that, the Liberals have basically been reduced to Anglo-speaking Montreal and its surrounding suburbs, the PQ basically to its strongholds while the ADQ won across the breadth of Quebec, both rural, urban and suburban.
Dumont won because he asked the question that hasn’t been asked since Maurice Dupless’ old Union Nationale party asked it and one that needs to be asked all over the globe: What good is sovereignty when there is no culture to go with it? What good is independence when there are no people to enjoy liberty? As immigration within the province has increased, the PQ basically sold out its Québécois by trying to compete with the Liberals for the Montreal immigrant vote along with becoming left-wing, cultural Marxists. Well rural Quebec and Quebec City got its revenge with ADQ. Indeed, one of the big issues during the campaign, dealt with the cultural impact of immigration. Men banned from prenatal classes to avoid offending Muslim women. The windows at the YMCA frosted over to shield the eyes of pubescent Hasidic Jewish boys from the girls in step class. An isolated village council bans burkas, except on Halloween. This goes on in Quebec and it goes on in the U.S. as well: Muslim cab drivers refusing to take passengers who have dogs or alcohol, Muslim check-out cashiers at grocery stores refusing to check-out items containing pork in them are just some of the examples. Who is supposed to conform to whom here? Why must the dominant culture have to adjust itself to newcomers? Indeed Dumont himself asked this on the campaign trail in an article from the Globe and Mail:
“We can’t defend the Québécois identity with mushy words that no one understands. We can’t defend the Québécois identity with one knee on the ground.”
If only American politicians were so bold (well, at least Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan are), but yet as skillful as Dumont. Several of his candidates got in trouble for controversial statements in the press many called racist and xenophobic but ADQ won nonetheless because Dumont kept the conversation focused instead of being bogged down in recriminations.
Dumont talked about culture and won because the debate over sovereignty in Quebec had lost its meaning and its relevance when it became a struggle over money and who got what from the taxpayer. If Tom Tancredo wishes to make an impact on this year’s campaign instead of being an afterthought, he has to go deeper than just talk about immigration enforcement. He has to ask questions about immigration’s impact on the culture at large and upon the way we live our lives. Maybe that’s easier to do in a more homogenous society like Quebec, but it’s not racist to ask should the marketplace or school house or our public facilities be forced to accommodate all the world’s religions and customs? How can one do business that way, how can one live that way or worship in such a Tower of Babel? You can’t, which what Dumont is saying. For years the struggle of Quebec’s identity had to do with language but that’s pretty much decided in favor of French. But French-speaking Muslim immigrants or any kind of immigrants would still change the province’s culture in ways as were discussed in the election. As Conrad Yakabuski so well put it in his Globe and Mail article on the election:
“Mr. Dumont is no Jean-Marie Le Pen, despite being smeared as a xenophobe by his Liberal adversaries. Still, he told Quebeckers again and again during this campaign that they need not ask anyone’s permission to show what it means to be Québécois. That they could assert their identity “without being afraid of passing for racists.” That’s the way it was in the old Quebec; that’s the way it will be in the new Quebec. It’s been a long time since any sovereigntist leader sounded as bold. Or as clear. It’s not some arcane fiscal advantage that Mr. Dumont is talking about when he says he wants to entrench “our values, our identity” in a Quebec constitution. No Quebec election campaign has focused so viscerally on identity — on what it means to be Québécois — since the watershed 1976 vote that first brought René Lévesque and the sovereigntists to office. Like Mr. Lévesque, Mr. Dumont has shown he knows what Quebeckers are feeling in their guts. That is to a politician what the magic potion is to Astérix.”
The ADQ’s success and the recent inroads made by the Tories in Quebec in the last federal election in largely the same places the ADQ did well in could very well sound the toll of the bell for the sovereigntists. The PQ did even worse this time than it did four years ago and this was in aftermath of the Sponsorship scandal. If using the Quebecois’ tax money to finance pro-Ottawa public relations campaigns and skimming some of that money into the pockets of political cronies isn’t enough to fire up the faithful for independence, which now has just 33% support in the province, then nothing will. Plus, the PQ has become nothing more than a party aging, leftist baby boomers, especially when they chose the openly gay and supposedly reformed coke-addict Andre Boisclair as its leader (although he’s 40 years old, chosen no doubt in response to the youthful Dumont). Like the Liberals, they too are becoming isolated in the electorate and with the sovereignty debate dying down, their leftism makes them repulsive to conservative sovereigntists who supported the PQ to support the cause. Dumont did very well among voters from 25-to-44 and the turnout, over 71 percent of the electorate, dwarfed that of 2003.
What Dumont may have found was a “third way” in between the sovereigntist and federalist poles: autonomist. Dumont and most Quebecois accept the fact they are a part of Canada and will not be an independent country but wish to be left alone and not led by the nose by Ottawa. Harper understands this because he and Tory base in Alberta want the same thing and with Quebec and Alberta joined together to check the power of Ontario and the Ottawa bureaucracy and the moneyed elite of Toronto, then the Canadian federation will stay together. Indeed, Harper may go down as the PM that put the sovereignty issue to rest from both the west and east and will force the Liberals to restrain their centralizing desires if they ever want to regain power again. For years the Grits were seen as the only party that could keep Canada together, but now it’s the Tories that can rightfully claim that mantel and stay in power for a long time.
Sean Scallon is a journalist and freelance writer living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.
Canada’s relationship with its large neighbor to the south inevitably has a pull within Canadian politics and the policies that come from such politics. The pendulum of pro-U.S./anti-U.S. feeling swings with the times and those in power on both sides of the border. Right now, with a pro-U.S. Canadian prime minister in Stephen Harper, who shares somewhat similar ideological leanings as U.S. President George Bush II, relations are cordial. The same was true with Bill Clinton when he was in the Oval Office and Jean Chrétien’s Liberals were in power on Parliament Hill and Ronald Reagan and Brian Mulroney were buddies during the 1980s as well. But the opposite has also been true. Pierre Trudeau was hardly a friend to the Nixon or Reagan Administrations and Vietnam opened a chasm between Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson. Perhaps the lowest point of Canadian-U.S. relations came between Paul Martin’s government and Bush II’s.
Perhaps the biggest part of that relationship is in foreign policy and it’s in this area is where the relationship can be either very warm or very cold. Canada’s foreign policy seems to be based on how it sees itself within the world around it. Is it America’s partner and ally within NATO - which is certainly the way Mulroney and Harper views the relationship and why Canada dispatched its military forces to the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and to Afghanistan - or is it a country with the resources to carve out its own foreign policy niche which was certainly true during the Trudeau days and true during the Martin government.
Like all pendulums, such policies have extremes. Grow to close to the U.S. and you’re nothing more than their poodle, which is what Tony Blair has become. Blair may have thought he could provide some influence on the conduct U.S. policy during the Iraq War but Britain’s weaker standing compared to the U.S.’ simply does not allow for it. In any allied military operation since World War II, it’s the U.S. that calls the shots, period. This has been an illusion that has weakened Britain considerably. On the other hand, a too independent foreign policy away from the U.S. is somewhat silly considering Canada’s weak military and the fact that such a policy is often political posturing and indulging in cheap, leftist rhetoric in an effort to satisfy the coming and going waves of nationalism that sometimes sweep Canada (especially in the aftermath of the Cold War and in response to the Quebec secession crisis of the mid-1990s). Canadians do not perceive themselves to be so diametrically opposed to the U.S. to forge its own alliances outside the Atlantic community, especially with its membership in the Commonwealth.
Harper straddles this line between subservience and revanchism as well as anyone and perhaps he is building a third way in between the two poles that can satisfy most Canadians. One the one hand, Canadian troops are in Afghanistan, supporting the NATO effort there concurrent with Canada’s treaty obligations and Harper has worked with the Bush II Administration to resolve ongoing trade disputes that would still have lingered in suspended animation given the hostility between the Martin and Bush II governments. On the other hand, Canada has not joined the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq (which would destroy Harper’s government and break-up the Tories once again) and Harper has issued warnings to U.S. submarines operating in the Arctic Ocean not to come too close to Canadian waters. He has also asserted Canada’s sovereignty over Hans Island near Greenland, which Denmark claims as its own.
Harper instinctively knows that one of the strikes in Canadian voters’ minds against the Tories for years was their seemingly closeness to U.S. conservatives and Republicans stretching all the way back to the Reagan-Mulroney days and the perception they would erase the border and make Canada the 51st state. Now that the U.S. will require those traveling to Canada to have passports, the border crossings between the two countries will no longer be the speed bump to U.S. visitors that it once was. This may make trade and travel more difficult, but also reinforces the fact that the border does still exist, and that Canada and the U.S. are still two different places, which is a plus for Harper as he tries to make the Tories become legitimate as a party of government.
Also helping the Tories this past week was the recent elections to the Quebec National Assembly. The Action Democratique du Quebec (ADQ) is a conservative party, or at least conservative by Quebec standards, and is led by 35-year old political wunderkind Mario Dumont. Yesterday the ADQ shattered Quebec’s current two-party system between the federalist and centrist Liberals and left-wing sovereigntist Parti Quebecois as they won 31% of the vote (up from 18% in 2003) and gained 41 seats (up from five). The Liberals were reduced to 48 seats from 72 and the PQ was utterly routed, being reduced to 36 seats from 45 and dropping to 28 percent of the vote. It’s Quebec’s first minority government since 1878. More than that, the Liberals have basically been reduced to Anglo-speaking Montreal and its surrounding suburbs, the PQ basically to its strongholds while the ADQ won across the breadth of Quebec, both rural, urban and suburban.
Dumont won because he asked the question that hasn’t been asked since Maurice Dupless’ old Union Nationale party asked it and one that needs to be asked all over the globe: What good is sovereignty when there is no culture to go with it? What good is independence when there are no people to enjoy liberty? As immigration within the province has increased, the PQ basically sold out its Québécois by trying to compete with the Liberals for the Montreal immigrant vote along with becoming left-wing, cultural Marxists. Well rural Quebec and Quebec City got its revenge with ADQ. Indeed, one of the big issues during the campaign, dealt with the cultural impact of immigration. Men banned from prenatal classes to avoid offending Muslim women. The windows at the YMCA frosted over to shield the eyes of pubescent Hasidic Jewish boys from the girls in step class. An isolated village council bans burkas, except on Halloween. This goes on in Quebec and it goes on in the U.S. as well: Muslim cab drivers refusing to take passengers who have dogs or alcohol, Muslim check-out cashiers at grocery stores refusing to check-out items containing pork in them are just some of the examples. Who is supposed to conform to whom here? Why must the dominant culture have to adjust itself to newcomers? Indeed Dumont himself asked this on the campaign trail in an article from the Globe and Mail:
“We can’t defend the Québécois identity with mushy words that no one understands. We can’t defend the Québécois identity with one knee on the ground.”
If only American politicians were so bold (well, at least Tom Tancredo and Pat Buchanan are), but yet as skillful as Dumont. Several of his candidates got in trouble for controversial statements in the press many called racist and xenophobic but ADQ won nonetheless because Dumont kept the conversation focused instead of being bogged down in recriminations.
Dumont talked about culture and won because the debate over sovereignty in Quebec had lost its meaning and its relevance when it became a struggle over money and who got what from the taxpayer. If Tom Tancredo wishes to make an impact on this year’s campaign instead of being an afterthought, he has to go deeper than just talk about immigration enforcement. He has to ask questions about immigration’s impact on the culture at large and upon the way we live our lives. Maybe that’s easier to do in a more homogenous society like Quebec, but it’s not racist to ask should the marketplace or school house or our public facilities be forced to accommodate all the world’s religions and customs? How can one do business that way, how can one live that way or worship in such a Tower of Babel? You can’t, which what Dumont is saying. For years the struggle of Quebec’s identity had to do with language but that’s pretty much decided in favor of French. But French-speaking Muslim immigrants or any kind of immigrants would still change the province’s culture in ways as were discussed in the election. As Conrad Yakabuski so well put it in his Globe and Mail article on the election:
“Mr. Dumont is no Jean-Marie Le Pen, despite being smeared as a xenophobe by his Liberal adversaries. Still, he told Quebeckers again and again during this campaign that they need not ask anyone’s permission to show what it means to be Québécois. That they could assert their identity “without being afraid of passing for racists.” That’s the way it was in the old Quebec; that’s the way it will be in the new Quebec. It’s been a long time since any sovereigntist leader sounded as bold. Or as clear. It’s not some arcane fiscal advantage that Mr. Dumont is talking about when he says he wants to entrench “our values, our identity” in a Quebec constitution. No Quebec election campaign has focused so viscerally on identity — on what it means to be Québécois — since the watershed 1976 vote that first brought René Lévesque and the sovereigntists to office. Like Mr. Lévesque, Mr. Dumont has shown he knows what Quebeckers are feeling in their guts. That is to a politician what the magic potion is to Astérix.”
The ADQ’s success and the recent inroads made by the Tories in Quebec in the last federal election in largely the same places the ADQ did well in could very well sound the toll of the bell for the sovereigntists. The PQ did even worse this time than it did four years ago and this was in aftermath of the Sponsorship scandal. If using the Quebecois’ tax money to finance pro-Ottawa public relations campaigns and skimming some of that money into the pockets of political cronies isn’t enough to fire up the faithful for independence, which now has just 33% support in the province, then nothing will. Plus, the PQ has become nothing more than a party aging, leftist baby boomers, especially when they chose the openly gay and supposedly reformed coke-addict Andre Boisclair as its leader (although he’s 40 years old, chosen no doubt in response to the youthful Dumont). Like the Liberals, they too are becoming isolated in the electorate and with the sovereignty debate dying down, their leftism makes them repulsive to conservative sovereigntists who supported the PQ to support the cause. Dumont did very well among voters from 25-to-44 and the turnout, over 71 percent of the electorate, dwarfed that of 2003.
What Dumont may have found was a “third way” in between the sovereigntist and federalist poles: autonomist. Dumont and most Quebecois accept the fact they are a part of Canada and will not be an independent country but wish to be left alone and not led by the nose by Ottawa. Harper understands this because he and Tory base in Alberta want the same thing and with Quebec and Alberta joined together to check the power of Ontario and the Ottawa bureaucracy and the moneyed elite of Toronto, then the Canadian federation will stay together. Indeed, Harper may go down as the PM that put the sovereignty issue to rest from both the west and east and will force the Liberals to restrain their centralizing desires if they ever want to regain power again. For years the Grits were seen as the only party that could keep Canada together, but now it’s the Tories that can rightfully claim that mantel and stay in power for a long time.
Sean Scallon is a journalist and freelance writer living in Arkansaw, Wisconsin.