Don't believe me? Consider the Prime Minister's speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations two weeks ago. Billed as a "major foreign policy address" -- it was in fact a rehash of stale platitudes, expressed in the vapid sentence fragments ("Because ensuring the health of the largest trading relationship in the world is of fundamental importance. To our economies. And to our ways of life.") that are the PM's signature style -- it got huge play in the Canadian papers. Yet south of the border, it passed without notice: As Richard Gwyn has pointed out, it received not a word of coverage in the New York Times.
Actually, it wasn't written up anywhere else, either -- not the Washington Post, nor the L.A. Times, nor USA Today. Even the Chicago papers only ran a brief. That's how irrelevant we have become.
No, that's not quite right. The true measure of our irrelevance is not that no one outside our borders cares what our position is. It is that no one inside our borders cares, either. Irrelevance is the Canadian position, and it enjoys the overwhelming support of the Canadian people.
It is too simple to say that Mr. Chretien has no policy. He has a policy not to have a policy. He is not neutral, for even neutrality is a preference. His position is neither moral nor immoral. It is not even amoral. It is simply null.
He is not a pacifist, for he has not ruled out the the use of force. He is not a partisan of the UN, for he has not ruled out going to war without it. He does not support the French position, for he says that inspections cannot go on indefinitely. But neither does he support the Americans, for he says that inspections must be allowed to continue. He has neither committed Canada to support an invasion, nor has he pledged that we won't.
My friend Paul Wells claims to be able to detect a policy in all this. Mr.
Chretien, he writes, rejects the "false dichotomy" between American action and UN inaction, in favour of yet a third option: action through the UN. This is a little like rejecting the false dichotomy between swimming and drowning, in favour of walking on water. It isn't going to happen. To favour such an unavailable option is to favour nothing at all. Which brings us back to where we were.
I repeat: Canada is a country without a foreign policy, not as a matter of oversight or indecision but as a deliberate effort, sustained over many years, at self-abnegation. Critics, in consequence, beat their wings inside a vacuum. Canada has no influence in the world, they complain.
Its counsel is ignored, its military is a joke, its policy is as incoherent as it is indecipherable. And, Mr. Chretien replies? Your point is?
Canadians do not care. Mr. Chretien has educated us to think as he does; as is his way, he has adjusted our expectations to his level.
Citizens of other countries may wish their nation to stand for something in the world, to be the instrument of shared moral values, to join with others in the defence of common principle. But Canada long ago abjured such a role, neither contributing our fair share to the collective defence nor even lending our allies much in the way of moral support.
Instead we reinvented ourselves as honest brokers, not because there was any actual call for our services in this regard, but because it saved us from ever having to take a position on anything.
There is a certain irony in this. The conceit of the Chretien government has been that Canada, though bereft of the "hard power" of military might, could yet wield a kind of "soft power," through our own shining moral example. This sort of thing elicits snorts of derision on the right.
Yet there is nothing wrong with the idea in principle. The United States, though it possesses hard power in spades, is also the world's pre- eminent exponent of soft power. It believes in certain ideals of government, which it is prepared to defend and advance abroad -- to "pay any price, bear any burden" and all that. It is both an example and an advocate, and hugely influential on both counts.
But our soft power has no moral content. We have nothing to say to the world, other than that we have nothing to say. We have become not only soft but powerless: calculating, equivocal and, increasingly, mute.
And then we are surprised to find that, never having been encouraged to believe in much of anything, more than a few Canadians have stopped believing in Canada.
Well, that's enough venting. For homework, I leave you with the classic philosophical dilemma: If a Canadian speaks in Chicago, and no one gives a damn, does he make a sound?