Canada is currently receiving a major dressing down in the international community. This small nation state is the subject of humiliation and ridicule in international forums.
Somewhere, somehow, other nation states got the idea that this small country had bigger britches. We are being held to account for our claims that we were leaders in doing what was right. We are being asked to ante up after making promises too big for us to keep.
This country of just over 33 million had set pretty lofty expectations that we have failed to deliver on.
Andrew Cohen, points out in his book While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World (2003), the various ways in which we have been losing ground in the international community, including the scaling back of international development aid and our meager offerings in peacekeeping forces around the world. In the 1950’s Canada had a robust peacekeeping force which provided missions to the UN and to NATO but that was 60 years ago. In fact today, we have an embarrassing reliance on the US military forces to provide airlift capability for our troops. Without the US, Canada could barely get a contingent out of the country.
Canada’s foreign missions total 164 compared to Germany’s 230. Ten years ago, our Foreign Service department was called “gravely ill”. Today Foreign Service officers are still the most poorly paid professionals in the federal government. It seems we haven’t produced a decent diplomat since the 1950’s, notwithstanding Gary Doer’s appointment to the US embassy. We have been riding quite a while on the coattails of our past international achievements. We have to admit we did get a lot of mileage out of them, but it seems that ride is long over. It just took a while for the citizens to realize how much ground we’ve lost.
Just recently the federal government announced it would end the 35-year history of cooperation between CIDA and KAIROS and its predecessor organizations and quit funding human rights work in the developing world. This follows on the heels of Canada’s refusal to sign the UN International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and is topped off with accusations of Canadians being knuckle draggers in the climate change negotiations. We can only hope these negative images don’t last as long as the idealist views that we and others had of us.
The way its citizens view Canada differs greatly from the international perspectives. Canadians hang on, to the Pearson-era vision of Canada and its role as human rights champion. That diplomatic intervention into the Suez crisis, today, seems like the stuff that created the legends of the Knights of the Round Table. We today are really a legend in our own mind.
Canada has lots to be embarrassed about. It was a land filled with promise. This was the place where people dreamed of peaceful co-existence. There is a history that we have forgotten. It is the history of the founding of Canada prior to the sovereignty assertions of the British Crown. But sadly, we have no nationalist or collective vision of our history because its been hived off into provincially run curriculum development. We are the owners of a collection of regional histories that we don’t understand.
John Ralston Saul writes in A Fair Country, that we all need to learn to imagine ourselves differently. Maybe that means seeing ourselves through the eyes of others for a change.
We lived in a land of hopes and dreams and somewhere we got off track. We were ready to be a model for the rest of the world and then we got busy with other things, but not one of us could say what they were. These things that we busied ourselves with were more important than demonstrating the concepts of peace between nations, yet we cannot name them.
Maybe he is right and we need to peel back the layers in order to find ourselves. The rest of the world has taken off its colonial covered glasses and had a real close look at us and we are naked. Our treaties between Canada and the original nations were trampled and ignored, while we pretended to hold the world’s promise at the United Nations. We practiced diplomacy externally but not internally. Samuel Champlain was a master of both.
Aboriginal people in Canada are moving further and further down the scale in the human development index raking at 63rd, compared to Canadian citizens who rank 4th. That is quite a gap. It’s so big that the international community can see the gaping holes. What moral authority could we ever hold in an international forum when we can’t seem to do the right things at home? Canada should be ashamed.
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