December 12, 2010
Moving to the centre in order to get elected is a time-honoured tradition in Canadian politics. That’s basically what Stephen Harper did recently when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in October in an attempt to shore up Canada’s bid for a seat on the Security Council.
His speech was, well, almost Pearsonian, replete with references to “the sovereign equality of countries,” justice and human rights, and its affirmation of Canada’s role in UN peacekeeping and aid efforts. The most commonly used words in Harper’s address were “UN”, “Canadian”, “development”, and, interestingly, “also.” Even Bob Rae liked it.
As the public record painfully shows, Canada lost the vote and Portugal won the seat.
Still, Canada must continue to work with and through the United Nations and other multilateral bodies on a host of complex files. Haiti, Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Burma are but five hot spots; there are dozens more.
So what are the chances that the Harper government will maintain the moderate and cooperative multilateralist stance we saw at the General Assembly?
The odds don’t seem good. On the contrary, Mr. Harper will face strong pressure to move to the right. With a federal election in the offing, the Prime Minister cannot ignore the demands of his domestic base. Broadly speaking, Canadian conservatives—both the economic (the neo-cons) and social (the theo-cons) streams of the movement—don’t like the United Nations. In their view, it is too statist, too liberal, too anti-Israel, too anti-American and too committed to a broad definition of human rights. Many on the right see it as a troublesome, bloated bureaucracy that should really be dismantled and tossed into the Hudson River.
One of the mother-ships of North American conservative thinking is the Heritage Foundation in the United States. Its website contains repeated, trenchant condemnations of the UN. The Foundation’s experts recommend radically reducing American government funding of the institution, bypassing the international aid apparatus altogether, and relying essentially on “economic freedom” and foreign direct investment to lift developing countries out of poverty.
Conservative think tanks in Canada have also been carving out their positions on foreign aid. They provided cover for International Cooperation Minister Bev Oda when she cut funding for feminist and progressive NGOs earlier this year, arguing that taxpayers shouldn’t pay for what they termed left-wing activism. And when Ms. Oda unveiled Canada’s maternal and child health initiative, right-wing commentators praised the government’s refusal to include abortion services in the program, arguing that an anti-abortion stance is consistent with the laws of many sovereign states.
But the UN doesn’t see it that way. At the recent summit on the Millennium Development Goals, member states, including Canada, not only rededicated themselves to achieving what’s known as MDG 3, the gender-equality goal, they also reaffirmed the importance of “full reproductive rights” for women around the world. Moreover, member states declared once again their full support for the new UN agency for women, which will take the kind of robust, rights-based approach for women’s equality that conservatives love to oppose.
There will be other contradictions between Canadian conservatives and UN policies and practices. However, the Harper government will find that its room for manoeuvre will be limited in resolving the views of its political base with those of the UN system.
While it is true that the UN is often ponderous and bureaucratic, it nevertheless provides a crucial worldwide system for addressing global risks, such as, importantly, fighting pandemics. The United Nations convenes parties for the creation of norms for food safety and nutrition. And it works hard to broker and maintain peace agreements in conflict regions. A world without the UN would be much more dangerous and volatile than it is now.
And the UN’s budget is far from bloated. The UN Secretariat’s annual budget is just over $2 billion, a little less than the budget of the City of Ottawa —a modest sum to handle the whole world, hundreds of issues and dozens of specialized agencies. Indeed, several UN agencies—the World Food Programme is one—are much better run than our own foreign-aid program.
Without a seat on the Security Council, Canada remains a small player among many larger and more powerful nations, especially the permanent members of the Council. Under these circumstances, we can gain leverage only through cooperation, reciprocity and pluralism—not through unilateral action driven by a single ideology.
The bottom line, therefore, is that it will be difficult for Stephen Harper to use his government’s multilateral activities to satisfy his domestic political base. He will have to find other ways to do that.
In the meantime, there is important work to be done through the UN. Strengthening global systems to fight the drug trade and human trafficking, for example, could attract support from both conservative and progressive Canadians. So could enhancing humanitarian efforts in response to new natural disasters and civil strife. On these and other issues, even from outside the Security Council, Canada could play a leading, animating role that would enable the United Nations to achieve important results.
Maybe staying in the centre is the best course for Stephen Harper after all.