It seems I struck a raw nerve in examining the Liberals’ foreign and defence policies last week. Marc Garneau, the Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic, rebutted my column at length in Saturday’s National Post.
I greatly admire Garneau. He has a distinguished record of public service in the Royal Canadian Navy, as an astronaut, as leader of the Canadian Space Agency and now as a parliamentarian — a far more robust resumé than that of his leader. As a Canadian who spent 31 years overseas and in conflict zones, I welcome Canadian politicians speaking out on foreign and defence issues. They usually dodge or fudge on these subjects, fail to follow up, or talk nostalgic nonsense about Canada’s purported halcyon past in foreign and defence policy.
I am certain Capt. Garneau had no part in advising Justin Trudeau when the Liberal leader said he admired Communist China because “their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” Nor can I imagine that Garneau briefed Trudeau before the Liberal leader made a puerile joke about the Harper government’s intention to “whip out our CF-18s and show them how big they are.”
Garneau called me out for saying the Liberals had not spoken out against China’s aggressive policies in the South China Sea when, as he rightly pointed out, the Harper government had done “precisely nothing” about this. Perhaps he had not read columns I wrote only last month from Australia about the Harper government’s woeful inattention to security issues in the Pacific Rim.
On Iraq, Garneau questioned the efficacy of the coalition’s bombing campaign, of which Canada is a part, and suggested Ottawa should play to its strength by training Iraqi troops to defeat the Islamic State of Iraq & Al-Sham and by being involved in humanitarian aid.
The truth is that the bombing campaign opposed by the Liberals appears to have stopped ISIS’s rapid march across Iraq. It has made a crucial difference to besieged Yazidis in northern Iraq and seems to have been the key factor in liberating an important dam from what are arguably the most ruthless jihadists ever.
Moreover, a modest number of Canadians are already helping train Iraqi troops and, as UN officials have told me when I visited refugee camps in the region, Canada has been a model nation in supporting humanitarian efforts there.
I guess it is churlish to recall that the Liberals who support training Iraqi forces opposed Canada taking a lead role in training Afghan troops after the combat mission in Kandahar ended. The Liberals wrongly predicted at the time that this assignment would lead to more Canadian casualties there.
To support his contention that the Liberals are internationalists, Garneau cited a party proposal that Canada send a peacekeeping mission into the dangerous quagmire of the Central African Republic. Good luck selling that idea to voters after Canada’s peacekeeping experiences in Somalia and Rwanda.
Nevertheless, I guarantee you that a Trudeau government will send troops on a mission to Africa whether or not it makes sense — and likely will not — because they are desperate to resurrect “peacekeeping” and “multinational” initiatives as the foundation of Liberal foreign policy. Back to the future!
Mostly, though, Garneau criticized Conservative initiatives rather than flesh out his own party’s thinking on international matters. That thinking can be found on the Liberals’ official website. Under “What we Stand For”, they share their leader’s vision on “foreign affairs and defence.” There’s very little there. Go see for yourselves. Liberals say they would treat veterans better. They say Canada should be a world leader in multinational institutions, exporting expertise, providing development aid — things we already do. There is not a single word on defence, although the defence spending is the biggest departmental expenditure — nearly $19 billion this fiscal year.
There is also a confusing solitary photograph illustrating the foreign affairs part of the website that shows a Canadian general looking at a U.S. navy helicopter.
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The only web reference to foreign affairs or national defence at the Liberal’s biennial conference in Montreal last year is a resolution demanding undefined “tangible support” for Ukraine to assist its transition to democracy, and the admonition that the prime minister should “make clear to any foreign power not to interfere with nor undermine the will of the Ukrainian people.”
The conundrum for the Liberals is that to wrest power from the Conservatives they have to convert New Democrat voters, most of them neutralist/pacifist types. That goes double for Quebec, of course, where the Liberals must take dozens of NDP seats to have any chance of forming the next government.
In the tradition of John Manley, Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae, some Liberals are thoughtful about foreign affairs. Garneau is one. So is Chrystia Freeland, the Toronto MP who has been a foreign affairs columnist and editor for Reuters and the Financial Times. Another would be Harjit Singh Sajjan, if he can get elected for the Liberals in Vancouver South. A reservist lieutenant colonel, Sajjan saw combat during three tours in Afghanistan and is held in high regard by Canada’s top Afghan general, Jon Vance, and by American generals he served under.
Garneau would probably make a good prime minister, but he dropped out of the Liberal leadership race before voting day and threw his support behind Justin Trudeau — after earlier criticizing Trudeau’s lack of policy proposals. During this time of global tumult, it is Trudeau’s ideas, not Garneau’s, that voters will want to hear.
Next month’s gathering of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute brings together senior military officers, diplomats, bureaucrats, academics and industry heavyweights to discuss Canada’s place in the world. That conclave would provide an ideal opportunity for Trudeau to outline his international vision for Canada and to answer questions about his admiration for China’s dictatorship and why he used a juvenile sexual reference to dismiss the dispatch of CF-18 Hornets to help fight Islamic terrorists in Iraq.
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Source:: National Post
