Good intentions aplenty

Tell the construction crew they can go home: the road to hell has just been completed.

If good intentions were all, the Liberal government’s new defence and foreign policy statement would be hard to fault. A more robust defence capability; a more focused aid program; a more ambitious trade policy; a more realistic view of the United Nations and a less antagonistic view of the United States: these are all to be welcomed. Or would be, had one any confidence they would be realized.

But if the past year and a half has taught us anything, it is not to place too much hope in fine words from Paul Martin. This is the man who railed against the “democratic deficit,” then balked at every practical proposal to reform it. This is the man who was going to put our relationship with the United States on a more mature footing, then booted a gimme putt on missile defence into a major foreign policy fiasco. This is the man who wanted to be measured by his success in addressing western alienation, then crafted an election campaign around attacks on the province of Alberta. And of course, this is the man who was going to “get to the bottom” of Adscam, then called a snap election before the Gomery inquiry had heard its first witness.

And were there reason to trust his sincerity, there would still be the man’s sterling record of inaccomplishment. I won’t recite all the many policy fronts on which the Martin government has failed to advance a yard since it was sworn in, or the many tales of indecision, infighting and ineptitude that are now the stuff of Ottawa lore. The foreign policy statement alone is illustration enough, six months behind schedule and into its umpteenth rewrite. Indeed, much of the language of the statement reads as if it were crib notes for a Martin government self-help meeting: on the need to “focus,” to “follow through” and so on.

But that should not be held against them. There is a kind of implied honesty in the statement’s identification of the many areas in which Canada’s foreign and defence policy has fallen down over the past years, or indeed decades. Successive Canadian governments, it acknowledges, have allowed the military to slide into the most appalling disrepair. More broadly, recent years have “witnessed a relative decline in the attention Canada paid to its international instruments.” Too often, it suggests, Canadian governments have relied on, in the Prime Minister’s phrase, “empty moralizing,” in place of concrete action. Gosh. If only we’d been told all this before. If only we knew which party was in power all those years.

So, too, when the subject turns to how to repair the damage, it is hard not to hear a note of self-reproach, even if the document itself does not supply it. The Prime Minister himself stresses, in a lengthy foreword, that we will have to “earn our way” in the world, if we wish to have influence; that we cannot simply assume that other nations are as entranced by our surpassing virtues as we are. That is progress. There is nothing wrong with the idea of Canada aspiring to do good in the world, or that it should adopt that goal as part of its self-definition. But it is a goal, not a trait; a challenge, not a clap on the back. It is a moral obligation to which we are called, not an excuse to congratulate ourselves, yet again, on our moral superiority.

It’s encouraging to see the statement’s support for reform of the United Nations, that is to say its acknowledgment of the UN’s many failings: its unrepresentativeness, whether of the populations of its member states or of the world as a whole (China has the same representation as Vanuatu in the General Assembly, while France has a veto on the Security Council); its inability to act in times of crisis; its oft-expressed sympathy for terrorists and hostility to human rights; and its truly breathtaking corruption, even by Canadian standards. The proposed L-20, a forum for the leaders of the world’s major powers, holds great potential as a place where real international decision-making can take place. Whether this counts as a “new multilateralism,” or simply a defetishization of it -- a recognition that multilateralism is a process, not a principle -- it is surely an improvement.

But I have to wonder, where was this clear-sightedness during the debate on Iraq, when the Liberals were dogmatically insisting on the Security Council as the locus of all legitimacy? The same goes for the Prime Minister’s cherished Responsibility to Protect, with its insistence on the primacy of alleviating suffering over respecting the sovereignty of dictators: Did the Iraqis not qualify for our concern? “We believe the best weapon against terrorist recruitment,” the document intones, straightfaced, “is the promotion of accountable, democratic governments that respect human rights.” Is that not the Bush doctrine, precisely? Yet all through the last election, the Prime Minister congratulated himself and his party for turning their backs on the Americans, and the Iraqis, and accused the Conservatives of wanting to send Canadians to die in the desert.

To read this document, you’d never know that Canada was one of the last democratic countries to ban Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. You’d never know, reading the section on trade, that the Liberals had fought strenuously against the free trade agreement, and promised to abrogate NAFTA if it could not be negotiated (it wasn’t; they didn’t). You’d never know it was the same government.