Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Boy scout nation (click to view)
Date: October 14, 2010
For the first time in the nation's history, Canada was denied a seat at the United Nations Security Council this week, as members of the General Assembly instead chose to appoint Portugal as the committee's second elected member of the so-called "western bloc" (alongside Germany, another perennial favorite). The upset has been treated as quite an outrage in Canada, a country that traditionally draws a lot of patriotic pride from its history of multi-national cooperation and supposed positive reputation across the planet.
A number of critics on the left have pointed the finger of blame solely at Prime Minister Harper, whose right-wing government they accuse of abandoning Canada's traditional identity as a soft, friendly, inoffensive, liberal state. And indeed, by those standards Harper
has been a more offensive player on the world's stage than many of his predecessors. He displayed considerable disinterest in last December's big climate change summit in Denmark, for instance, and Canada has been widely criticized by environmental groups for not having a robust enough strategy for dealing with greenhouse gasses and global warming — to say nothing of an energy policy that remains heavily focused on Alberta's "dirty oil" tar sands. Harper has likewise remained a staunch supporter of Israel, always offering supportive words for the Jewish state, even in its most controversial moments. Though perhaps less so now that Mr. Bush is gone, the PM has also made much of his support for the foreign policy of the United States, and Canada remains a close military ally of the US in Afghanistan, where thousands of Canadian troops remain to this day. Then there's his persistant criticism of China's human-rights record, which critics say is incredibly tone-deaf at a time of rising Chinese power. Throw in his increasingly tough line against immigration and foreign aid, and you have a recipe for considerable displeasure among the left-wing internationalist set. Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff (a card-carrying member of the latter camp if there ever was one) was even moved to denounce his own country's bid for a seat on the Security Council, saying Harper's actions as prime minister had proven Canada no longer "deserved" the honor of membership.
Of course, conservative critics have their own list of rebuttals for all of the above charges, namely — who cares. Canada under Harper, they say, actually has a principled foreign policy for once, that puts Canadian values of democracy and economic self-interest above faddish internationalism-for-the-sake-of-internationalism. If Canada can only win favor from the General Assembly by bashing Israel and America, and sucking up to third-world dictators and Islamist sympathizers like the 57 nations of the "Organization of Islamic Conference," then maybe Groucho was right about not wanting to join any club that would want such members in the first place. Indeed, some right-wingers have suggested Harper's biggest failing in this whole episode was even bothering to
try and get back on the Security Council at all.
There is another, less politically scandalous potential explanation for Canada's defeat, however. The UN Security Council is structured in a rather odd and arbitrary way, with seats doled out to countries based on their membership in dubiously-defined geographic "groups." Each group gets to send two countries, for a total of 10 elected members in all. Now, normally these groups are vaguely continent-based, but since Canada is on a continent with only three countries, the nation is lumped in as a member of the "Western Europe and Others" group — with Canada obviously being one of the "others." This outnumbering makes it quite hard for Canada to win electoral support from within its own group, since the western Europeans will often (and did, in this case) support one of their own over one of the others. And if you can't get support from your own group, the logic goes, well then, how are you ever going get support from the General Assembly?
Either way, Canada is now officially part of the out-crowd at the UN for the next two years. Let's see if anyone notices.
CKA Super Elite 
CKA Super Elite 
