“Think of what Canada could be in a century, if we don’t screw up.”
THERE DID SEEM, throughout 2006, to be a new and welcome sense of Canada and the world. Although he didn’t win the Liberal leadership race—coming second to Stéphane Dion and then serving as deputy leader of the party—Michael Ignatieff did manage to get Canadians discussing the country’s international role, even if it was to disagree with his various stands.
“We are a country of peacemakers,” he said during the leadership campaign, “especially because we are also a country of immigrants, many of whom have come to Canada to escape the horrors of conflict. As a nation of immigrants from the zones of war, we have a special vocation for peace, and it is by exercising this vocation that we maintain our unity as a people. We have a voice that other countries listen to. Let us use it.”
It was also a year in which Conrad Black experienced a change of heart toward the country of his birth. When he so dramatically renounced his citizenship in 2001 to take up a British title, Black dismissed Canada as an underachieving socialist nation perhaps suitable to “someone just arrived from Haiti or Romania.” Then, as his own world began shrinking in an American courtroom, Lord Black of Crossharbour returned to live in Toronto and prepared to challenge the fraud and racketeering charges laid by a federal court in Chicago. He also began his fight to be reinstated as a Canadian citizen.
Speaking to the Empire Club in downtown Toronto, Black followed the traditional toast to the Queen with a stunning reversal of his former position. He seemed remarkably changed by the “deliverance” of a Stephen Harper Conservative Canada. Canada, Black had now decided, “is geopolitically among the ten most important” members of the United Nations, largely due to its immense natural resources and future prospects. “Canada today,” he said to the surprised crowd,
is more important to the world than Italy. Europe is dyspeptic with collapsed birth rates and stagnant economies. The U.S. has little disposable influence in the world, the UN is a shambles, NATO is in disarray, and the coalition of the willing is a fraud. We must not let it go to our heads, but Canada is one of the world’s great powers. We shouldn’t let that go to our heads. We should get used to it.
But get used to what? Just what sort of power, if any power at all, does Canada represent in this first gulp of the twenty-first century? It had come out of the First World War—after the Canadian military’s proud performance at Vimy Ridge and at Passchendaele—sure it was a country of substance. It emerged from the Second World War considered a “middle power” by itself and others, a sense enhanced by Lester Pearson’s Nobel Prize–winning efforts in helping solve the Suez Crisis of 1956. If Canada wasn’t moving up or down the shifting list of military nations, it was seen as standing in the middle in a conciliatory and helpful way.
Its reputation as an international peacekeeper evolved under Pearson and has persisted to this day, even though the Nobel winner, on accepting his prize, rather accurately predicted that the only time the world might actually come together as one to confront an issue would be when “We discover Martian space ships hovering over Earth’s air space.” He also said, again with great prescience, that “The grim fact, however, is that we prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.”
Pearson’s legacy has been largely forgotten in today’s Canada. Schoolchildren seem little, if at all, aware of his story. He is not generally held to sit among the great prime ministers of the country, even though it was during his years in Ottawa that such matters as medicare and the Canada Pension Plan came into being. He gave the country its flag and bilingualism. As Richard Gwyn once wrote, “We are all Pearson’s children.”
And yet, a poll published when he left office in 1972 found that more than two-thirds of Canadians couldn’t name a single one of his government’s accomplishments. Thirty-five years later, a similar poll might find that two-thirds of Canadians couldn’t even name him as a prime minister.
I often drive from Ottawa to Toronto and back again. And because my brain tends to grind to a complete halt on the faster, four-lane highways, I usually skip the recommended route and head along Highway 7 before dropping down to the dreaded and dreary 401 heading into Toronto. About two hours along this rolling two-lane highway that cuts through the eastern Ontario bog and the southern reaches of the Canadian Shield, I pass by the turnoff to Tweed—where some people claim Elvis Presley is alive and well—and head east toward Madoc, passing by the Lester B. Pearson Peace Park.
Sometimes I stop. But even on a beautiful day with the smell of pine in the air it’s a sad stop, for the Lester B. Pearson Peace Park is one of the saddest sights in all of Canada. It was built in 1967, one of the thousands of Centennial Projects undertaken in Pearson’s last full year in office. The park is rundown; a bent gate blocks passage. A hand-painted “No Trespassing” sign hangs from the fence and another sign warns that “violators will be prosecuted.”
As a symbol for world peace, it is an embarrassment.
Pearson deserves better. He was, after all, the original Canadian Jiminy Cricket for the United States. When he died, New York Times columnist James Reston hailed him as “a wise and joyful man who told us the truth about America and made us swallow it.”
Pearson had a world vision. It came naturally from his long tenure in External Affairs before moving into elected politics. And he knew that, no matter how much wishful thinking might have it otherwise, there was no real separation between Canada’s relations with the United States and with the rest of the world. They were one and the same. Always had been. Always would be. And it would be Canada’s relationship with the superpower next door, more than anything else, that would define its role in the world at large.
When Pierre Trudeau took over the leadership of the Liberal Party from Pearson in 1968, he tried to bring some needed realism to Canada’s self-concept of its place in international relations. “Personally,” he said, “I tend to discount the weight of our influence in the world … I think we should be modest, much more modest than we were, I think, in the postwar years when we were an important power because of the disruption of Europe and so on. But right now we’re going back to our normal size … we must use modesty.… We shouldn’t be trying to run the world.”
It was a message he repeated in March of that year when he spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. “I hope,” he told the gathered media, “that we Canadians do not have an exaggerated view of our own importance.” A year later, in Calgary, he said “You only review your foreign policy once in a generation.”
A generation has now passed. The clock calling for review has been ringing its alarm for some time. Allan Gotlieb, Canadian ambassador to Washington during the Mulroney–Reagan years, once accused Canada of demonstrating “bipolar behaviour” in its foreign policy. The country makes visionary pronouncements, endlessly moralizes, and boasts of superior values, but doesn’t really do or accomplish much. Gotlieb said Canadians seemed forever “attracted to opposite poles in our thinking about the world.” I think he has it right—especially in how Canadians deal with the United States in times of international stress. Then the bipolar behaviour can be extreme.
Back in June 1973, with anti-American sentiment running at least as high over Richard Nixon and the fallout from Vietnam and Watergate as it does today over George W. Bush and Iraq, Canadian radio broadcaster Gordon Sinclair took to the airwaves with a stirring defence of American generosity and abilities. “Our neighbours have faced it alone,” Sinclair ranted in a broadcast that became a bestselling recording in the United States, “and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.”
Now, more than three decades later, such dramatic polarization largely remains. When CBC radio described the rapport between new Prime Minister Harper and President Bush as
“the strongest relationship in history,” Canadian Dimension magazine editorialized, “Really? What about Hitler and Quisling?”
There are those determined nationalists, like publisher and author Mel Hurtig and Maude Barlow, founder of the Council of Canadians, who would have Canada put as much distance as possible between it and whatever lies on the other side of that border, especially the American missile defence plan. Hurtig and Barlow are highly intelligent and deeply concerned about the loss of Canadian resources, particularly future pressures on Canadian water. “Now,” says Hurtig, author of The Vanishing Country, “not later, now is the time for Canadians to take a firm stand to ensure the survival of the country that we love as a proud, independent, sovereign country.” Barlow’s concern, as expressed in Too Close for Comfort, is that the Canadian government, falling increasingly under control of big business, is committed to a “North American fortress with a common economic, security resource and regulatory and foreign policy framework.”
At the moment, Jiminy Cricket has so many different voices to choose from that it’s hard to determine the smarter thing to say and the better route to take. There are those who would have Canada involve itself only in United Nations peacekeeping, which began in 1948 and took more permanent form in the Pearson and Trudeau years. And there are those who say the day of the Pearsonian peacekeeper has fallen sadly out of synch with the realities of today’s world.
Historian Jack Granatstein is one who believes a rethink is long past due. In Who Killed the Canadian Military? he details the long decline of what was once a proud and powerful force, lamenting that such obvious military weakness undermines any reputation Canada might naively think it enjoys around the world. Power, to Granatstein—as well as to a great many others—is hard power. Soft power, whatever it means, is to invite ridicule.
“Does this weakness serve Canada’s national interest?” he asks. “Do we even know what these interests are? Or, is Canada such a do-gooder that its interests are irrelevant and the projection abroad of its values—multiculturalism, good governance, respect for human rights and so on—are all that matters?”
Instead, Granatstein says, Canada should pursue its own vigorous policy based on the country’s own security and independence, and then, with a rebuilt military, work when required with allies on the more global issues. “Keeping the Yanks happy, or at least not angry,” he concludes, “must be a national interest.”
ONE FRESH VOICE heard in recent years has been that of Jennifer Welsh, a professor of international relations at Oxford University. She’s also a Canadian of Métis heritage who left Saskatchewan with a Rhodes Scholarship and has since become a recognized expert in world affairs.
Welsh has decidedly different views on Canada. She has suggested, for example, that the country could do without provinces—something federal politicians and big-city mayors might rejoice over. But it’s in her writings on Canada’s place in the world that she’s generated the most interest. Her 2004 book, At Home in the World: Canada’s Global Vision for the 21st Century, is a slim, readable study of where Canada has been and where it should be going. She’s been accused of being anti-American in pushing Canada to go its own way, but she counters that “Canadians are, by and large, confident about the unique experiment they have built north of the 49th parallel, and that they no longer have to be anti-American to be Canadian.”
For Welsh there is much to admire in United States society, much to be wary of. The message of her book, she has said, “is that we should get to know the U.S. more, not less.” More know thy friend than know thine enemy.
Welsh contends that Canada needs to expand its view of North America to include Mexico, and not only the fact of the country itself but the increasing electoral power and influence of Hispanics in the United States. In the name of simple realism she rejects the old canard that America is Canada’s best friend. Friendship must be a two-way street, she says, not just one road heading south. She quotes an official in the Clinton administration who dismissed Canada as “the boy who gets all spiffed up to win the heart of his dreamboat, while she doesn’t even know he exists.”
Given such an attitude, it’s hardly surprising that a game show on the MTV network features a category called “Dead or Canadian?” A name is given out and contestants try to guess which description fits. And when South Park became a movie in 1999 it featured a song that went on to garner an Oscar nomination. The song? “Blame Canada”:
It seems like everything went wrong
Since Canada came along.
Yet in some ways Welsh is much like Pierre Trudeau, who was often perceived as anti-American—his relationships with Nixon and Reagan were not good—but who knew there were times when the mouse had to get into bed with the elephant. She is, for example, in favour of Canada joining the United States in continental space defence. “It is hardly fair to rely on the Americans to protect the West,” Trudeau said in an open letter to Canadians near the end of his long run as prime minister, “but refuse to lend them a hand when the going gets rough. In that sense, the anti-Americanism of some Canadians verges on hypocrisy. They’re eager to take refuge under the American umbrella, but don’t want to help hold it.” Welsh would certainly agree.
Her provocative work did not pass unnoticed in Canadian government circles. Paul Martin, having promised a full review of defence and foreign policy, brought her in as a consultant on that review process before his government fell. Welsh herself was once a Young Liberal but has had no involvement with the party or Canadian politics over the last twenty years. Whether her thinking influences current or future Canadian governments is uncertain.
Yet it should not be lost. The Canada Jennifer Welsh sees is a newly confident, multicultural country that could have a significant effect on the world merely by serving as its “model citizen.” Not quite a “moral superpower,” but something perhaps within the realm of possibility. When he was prime minister, Paul Martin said several times that Canada should “set the standards by which other nations judge themselves.” A pretty high order—likely beyond the reach of even the purest—but something to shoot for.
Canada, Welsh believes, could demonstrate tolerance to the world; it could show how a pluralistic society not only gets along but cares for those citizens having trouble coming along. Such values, she feels, would create a “magnetic effect,” inducing other countries to draw closer to the Canadian model—and closer, by definition, to Canada itself. Canada would gain influence far beyond its economic or military clout.
In other words, as the large signs inside the bookstores read: “The World Needs More Canada.”
Welsh counters those who would dismiss her thinking as naive, her hopes more aligned with Pollyanna than reality. “Model citizens,” she says, “pull their weight.” Model citizens can use sanctions and even force when necessary. Even, if absolutely necessary, without the approval of the United Nations. She wants Canada to have “the best small army in the world,” even if it never fights or wins a battle on its own. “This,” she told the Ottawa Citizen, “is where I think there’s a relationship between soft and hard power. Hard power isn’t just military. But hard power gets at the idea that you can only achieve what you want to achieve through a bit of stick.”
It’s an interesting point. General Roméo Dallaire served as commander of the United Nations Military Assistance in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide that saw as many as 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus massacred. He was there as witness, serving as dutiful conscience to the world, but he had no power to intervene or prevent. He had no stick to stop what was happening before his own eyes.
Welsh’s vision for the country of her birth comes from a deep sense of what has worked in Canada and continues to work as the New Canada evolves. “Canadians, it has been said, take other countries as they find them, rather than seeking to transform them,” she writes. “Nor are we confident in our ability to transform other societies overnight. Perhaps this derives from our own very gradual experiences
of building Canada— a process that we see as ongoing. Part of the magic of being Canadian is the recognition that our country is still a work in progress.”
A work in progress. A work that needs work, both inside and out. Canada needs to think about its relations with those who live outside its borders as well as those who live within—in particular the Aboriginal situation that prevents Canada from being considered the tolerant, fair country it so desires to be on the world stage.
Tommy Douglas said that “a country’s greatness can be measured by what it does for its unfortunates” and that “by that criterion Canada certainly does not stand in the forefront of the nations of the world, although there are signs that we are becoming conscious of our deficiencies and are determined to atone for lost time.” He was speaking in 1946. That’s sixty more years of “lost time.”
Nothing underlines this better than a cartoon that appeared in the October 16, 2006, issue of The New Yorker. A man and a woman are picking through the morning paper. The woman, coffee cup in hand, turns to the man buried in the front page and says it all: “You can’t spend your political life hiding behind being Canadian.”
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