FAIT Committee Meeting

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37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Thursday, April 10, 2003

0910

The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.))

Professor Salim Mansur (Political Science, University of Western Ontario)

0915

0920

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden (President, Reid Morden and Associates, As Individual)

0925

0930

0935

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack (Director, Human Security Centre, University of British Columbia)

0940

0945

The Chair

0950

Mr. Stockwell Day (Okanagan—Coquihalla, Canadian Alliance)

0955

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Prof. Salim Mansur

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden

1000

The Chair

1010

The Chair

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ)

The Chair

Prof. Salim Mansur

1015

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden

The Chair

Mr. Murray Calder (Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, Lib.)

1020

Prof. Salim Mansur

Mr. Reid Morden

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

1025

The Chair

Mr. André Harvey (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Lib.)

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP)

1030

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden

1035

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Mrs. Karen Redman (Kitchener Centre, Lib.)

1040

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden

1045

The Chair

Prof. Salim Mansur

The Chair

Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Canadian Alliance)

The Chair

Mr. Reid Morden

1050

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Mr. Deepak Obhrai (Calgary East, Canadian Alliance)

1055

The Chair

Mr. Andrew Mack

The Chair

Prof. Salim Mansur

The Chair

CANADA

Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

NUMBER 031

2nd SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

EVIDENCE

Thursday, April 10, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¿ (0910)

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.)): The order of the day, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), is consideration of a dialogue on foreign policy of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

As witnesses this morning we have with us, from the University of Western Ontario, Mr. Salim Mansur, who is a professor of political science, as an individual, Mr. Reid Morden, president of Reid Morden and Associates, and from the University of British Columbia, Mr. Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Centre.

The first portion of our meeting this morning will be till about a quarter to eleven, and after that we'll go in camera with the members regarding the report.

Each of you has an introduction. It's a maximum of 10 minutes for each of you, and after that we'll pass to question and answer.

Mr. Mansur, you're the first one on the list, you're the first one to speak. The floor is yours.

Professor Salim Mansur (Political Science, University of Western Ontario): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning to the members.

I want to begin by thanking the members of this committee for inviting me as an expert witness. I understand my prepared statement has been distributed, so given the constraint of time, I will read from portions of it.

History provides perspective. Similarly, history will provide us with more insight than we possess at present, showing that the events of September 11, 2001, constituted a pivotal moment in global politics, as was the shot fired by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Occurrences since that fateful September morning, the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, belong to the chain of events unleashed by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and the debates that have taken place in various capitals on these matters will be seen by future historians as efforts of those caught in the flux of the events. But the tide of forces responsible for the attack on America will ebb and flow until exhausted of its own accord or drained of its debris.

I want to focus my remarks on the nature of the forces that attacked America, militant and fundamentalist Muslims with a worldwide network of supporters and sympathizers, and how we must address them. Let me first define the problem. Muslim fundamentalism is an ideology, like any other ideology, constructed for the purpose of acquiring and holding political power for its exponents and followers, and in the pursuit of power, Muslim fundamentalists have sought to appropriate Islam and monopolize its universal message of transcendent peace and purity exclusively for their own ends. The most important point here is to note that we speak about a people and not a faith, we make a sharp distinction between Islam and Muslim, as we would between Christianity and Christian, between Judaism and Jew. Failing to make such a distinction and to keep it always in view means confounding the faith with its practitioner, and thereby deriving our understanding of the faith, the richness of its meaning, and the complexity of its history through the limited and distorting lenses of a practitioner, in this case a fundamentalist, whose behaviour is suspect as a result of his politics.

Great harm has been done to understanding Islam by endlessly repeating the phrase “Islamic fundamentalism”. There is no such thing, and the analogy of Christian fundamentalism as a off-shoot of Protestant theology in North America has been misleading. Islam, as a universal faith belonging to the Abrahamic tradition, is a message that is insistent on the purity and oneness of the divine creator of the universe and the lord of mankind. Muslim fundamentalism, the sort of phenomenon we have of late become familiar with, is a recent development in Muslim history.

We may date the beginnings of Muslim fundamentalism in the middle years of the 20th century. As a political movement appropriating Islam for its purposes, it was relatively insignificant in the early years and an aberration from all other strains of Muslims taught for its exclusiveness, its militancy towards other Muslims, and its hostility towards the philosophical underpinnings of the modern world. In time its appeal grew in measure among Muslims relative to real and perceived failure of government in Muslim majority countries, such as Pakistan and Egypt, to meet the expectations of their populations in respect of modernization and economic development. This growing appeal became entrenched, hardened, and spread following military defeats suffered by Muslim states. Four decades and more of history are involved here. All this time the widening cultural, economic, and technological divide between the Muslim world, as part of what was known as the third world during the Cold War years, and the advanced post-industrial knowledge-based economies of the west was growing at an accelerating pace.

This is the context within which Muslim fundamentalism as a political theology and movement was incubated, nurtured, and spread. There is a striking similarity here between Muslim fundamentalism and the origin and spread of European fascism in the period after the First World War, with a Muslim fundamentalist as a neo-fascist variant seeking power by any means available. Consequently, the first victims of Muslim fundamentalists have been Muslims from Algeria to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

¿ (0915)

The argument that Saddam Hussein's secular nationalist ideology of the Ba'ath party of the Arab world is distinct and separate from the ideology of Muslim fundamentalism espoused by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden's network of al-Qaeda is only partially true. Ba'ath ideology in the Arab world has been a neo-fascist movement that fused the political methodology of European fascism and Stalinism with the perverted racialist reduction of Islam as a religion of the Arabs, and we have witnessed in the dying days of the Saddam regime his repeated appeals to Muslims to come to his defence in the name of an extremely distorted interpretation of Islam.

The west, including Canada, did not take seriously the threat of Muslim fundamentalists, even when they first bombed the World Trade Center in New York in 1993. We have to begin, even if it is belated, to make a serious effort to understand the problems of failed and stalled societies that incubated Muslim fundamentalism and exported it. We need to do this before we end up falsely and ignorantly making the entire Muslim world the enemy of the west and spend much of the 21st century combating a culture and civilization that needs our help and understanding to become modern, developed, and prosperous.

For reasons that will long be debated, the Government of Canada did not stand with the United States and Britain, our two most important traditional and historic allies, in the war to liberate Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath party, but we have to leave behind our mistakes and our acrimony and look ahead. Canada needs to offer its resources, political, diplomatic, economic, and military, to help build a free society in Iraq that will offer a democratic future and become a model for the rest of the Arab-Muslim world. This is within our reach and well within the realm of possibility. For Iraq has both trained human resources and income to provide for a speedy recovery from this war and a prosperous time ahead for all Iraqis.

Canada needs to take a much greater interest in the Muslim world. It is one-fifth of humanity, it has a tremendous potential, it has a great civilization from the past, and if it is properly assisted in meeting its shortcomings, the gains can be of benefit for all of us in our increasingly globalized village. But Canada must not remain distant and fearful of making right judgments about the problems the Muslim world faces, problems that can become transnational, as did Muslim fundamentalism. It means aggressively combatting the sort of politics Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden represent, and we need to do this without any apology to Muslims who might want to second-guess us, just as we did not allow Germans and Italians to second-guess us when it came to our fight against European fascism or east Europeans to second-guess us during a long struggle against Soviet communism. There are more Muslims around the world intimidated, abused, and silenced by the politics of Muslim fundamentalism, especially women and minorities within the Muslim world, who look to us for their reprieve, and we betray them when, for the wrong sorts of politics or political correctness, we stand aside without actively joining the fight against such tyranny and oppression carried out in the name of religion.

There is one issue that urgently needs to be addressed, and Canada has a very important role to play in addressing it. The animus that distances the Muslim world from the west flows from the situation in historic Palestine. The unsettled relations between Israelis and Palestinians, the continuing occupation of Palestinian lands by Israelis in violation of all agreed principles of international law, and the asymmetrical conflict between Palestinians, reduced to the barest minimum of humanly secure existence, and Israelis, with the most powerful force in the region, have contributed to deepening mistrust of the west, particularly America, uniformly among Arabs and Muslims. Now the United States has become directly involved in war against an Arab state, Iraq, the eventual success of this war in winning the peace and building a new and free Iraq may not be achieved entirely in isolation from the issue of Palestine. For Palestine is the mother of all issues in the Arab Muslim world, and once this issue is settled to the satisfaction of the Palestinians--and they have been forthcoming, but they cannot achieve the end of Israeli occupation of the land by themselves--the situation between the United States and the Arab-Muslim world will change rapidly for the better.

¿ (0920)

Finally, for Canada to fully and successfully engage with the Muslim world, it also means engaging constructively and energetically with Canadians who are Muslims. This means being open to a diversity of opinion among Canadian Muslims, to recognize that since Islam is a universal faith, Muslims in Canada come from all points of the compass bringing different cultures and languages that contribute to the richness of the Canadian mosaic. But this should not mean the openness becomes a conduit of change in one direction, nor should Canadian tradition and history, which place Canada securely within the matrix of western civilization, with its dominate motif of liberal democracy, constitutional government, and a foreign policy, while being protective of Canadian national interests and treasuring Canada's relations with Britain and the United States, the two most trusted friends, be diluted in any way before the demands of any one segment of the multicultural Canadian family.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you, Professor Mansur.

Now we're going to pass to Mr. Reid Morden, who is also the chair of the board of governors of Trent University.

Mr. Reid Morden (President, Reid Morden and Associates, As Individual): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me. Some members of the committee may be wondering why an individual, as I'm described, would be here. I should tell you that at various times I've been Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and director of CSIS.

I've structured my remarks this morning more or less following the headings of DFAIT's dialogue paper, for symmetry, if nothing else, but I will deal mostly with issues concerning relationships, security, and terrorism.

Foreign policy and the diplomacy to put it into action, as you all know, cover a multitude of areas, political relations, economic trade policies, defence matters, cultural identity, immigration, just to name a few. But at the end of the day, it all comes back to being a tool for the preservation of Canada's national sovereignty, and sovereignty is a concept that you either use or lose. The problem we grapple with today is how we exercise our sovereignty within a realistic margin of manoeuvre. I'm reminded that Marshall McLuhan once put a quiz to a class of his in which he started a phrase saying “I'm as Canadian as”, and the students had to complete the phrase. The winner was, I'm as Canadian as possible under the circumstances.

Many things in our national life start with our domestic policies, and I think that's something, if you're going to ground a foreign policy, you should never forget. The people in Parliament have to define really what kind of a country we're trying to reflect through our foreign policy, and hence through our diplomacy. What we've seen in those areas is a long-term decline in resources, quality and quantity, all those resources devoted to aid, to diplomacy, and to defence that, frankly, are the prerequisites to any kind of influence we want to have in the world, and there's a driving need to define our interests independently of and in advance of demands we get south of the border.

In relationships we have to look at the traditional building blocks. My colleague Allan Gotlieb, former Under Secretary of State for External Affairs and long-time ambassador to Washington, frequently says the Americans are our best friends--whether we like it or not. I think the U.S.A. relationship, which encompasses most elements of policy, both domestic and foreign, has to be at the forefront of anything we do in constructing, reviewing, or revising our foreign policy.

We've always felt that multilateral institutions and rule-making are good things and serve Canadian interests, so we're in a lot of multilateral institutions, NATO, UN, the World Trade Organization, the OECD--I could go on and on. Even that great anachronism the Commonwealth and la Francophonie both have their uses, even though they are often are at the margin.

David Malone, who currently heads the International Peace Academy in New York, reminds us that in the post-Cold War period there really has been unprecedented cooperation among the permanent members of the Security Council, and they've addressed a number of security problems around the world, with, of course, three notable exceptions, Israel-Palestine, Kosovo, and Iraq, which has both divided and united the council. When we think about the dividing of it, we also have to remember the unanimous support there was for resolution 1441. It seems to me that if we're looking for something within our multilateral relationships to worry about, we should really turn our eyes to the very serious strains that now exist within NATO, which may well speed a singular event in post-World War II history with the run-down or wholesale removal of U.S. troops in Europe.

¿ (0925)

Aside from the dynamics of the attitude of the U.S. administration, an argument can be made that security issues are now global in scope and regional security arrangements are outmoded. I think of issues like proliferation, weapons of mass destruction, and human security. It's possible that you can make an argument that these problems demand new machinery to address them. In this particular context, we have the very dangerous situation on the Korean Peninsula. The government of the DPRK is a loose canon, in my humble view, while the 50-year defence agreement between the U.S. and the Republic of Korea is also fundamentally changing, as we visibly see the decision to reposition far south of the 39th parallel the 37,000 troops the Americans maintain in that country.

So within all these kinds of issues where do we fit? Do we fit in North America? Do we fit in the Western Hemisphere? Traditionally, we've looked to Europe, especially the U.K. and France. Do we look to Asia, which was the darling of our foreign policy in the eighties and maybe isn't any more?

Last, but not least, I have to look at a very important foreign policy issue, immigration and refugee determination. We are a nation of immigrants. We have welcomed and protected those abused elsewhere. However, the reality has become that a very small percentage of people who come to this country themselves abuse Canada's hospitality. Those and the shortcomings in dealing with them I think are trenchantly set out in the Auditor General's report of just a couple of days ago, and I'm not going to go into them this morning. My only point is that the perceived laxity of our system is all too visible to our friends and allies and attracts some of their most pointed criticisms.

On security issues, the state of our armed forces, I think, has been all too apparent for all too long. Our allies, especially, but not exclusively the U.S., look upon us increasingly as NATO and North American defence freeloaders. For 40 years Canadian defence reviews have always posited three objectives, the defence of Canada, with the U.S., the defence of the continent, and with allies, the projection of force abroad when necessary. It seems to me that those remain fairly solid objectives. The problem is that our performance doesn't come close to matching those goals.

In defending Canada, I think what we want to know is what's happening in or near our territory and our territorial waters. I think that means new equipment, a role for the Canadian Space Agency, hydrophones in the Arctic Archipelago, some ships that can actually get up into the ice, and frankly, some more coastal patrol vessels.

In defending North America, we have had a seat at the table in making decisions affecting the defence of this continent since before the creation of NORAD, and we stand to lose it while the U.S. moves on to a new uni-national command structure that will cover all of North America. To state the obvious, we're going through a difficult period in our relations with the U.S., and the next, very crucial test for that relationship is rapidly approaching in the shape of U.S. decisions with respect to their national missile defence policy. Now, probably driven in part by North Korean missile testing, there is pretty much a consensus that some version of national missile defence will be deployed in 2004. Given the gutting of NORAD and the present state of our strained relations, Canada's decision to contribute or not will have, I think, a very profound implication for the relationship with the U.S. and, frankly, any future voice we may wish to have in the defence of this continent.

Projecting force abroad, I think, is probably the most complicated area, if only because there's probably no real broad consensus among Canadians about what should be done or how much they're willing to pay. To the extent that there is a consensus, it surrounds peacekeeping, about which, frankly, a lot of nonsense has found its way into the media, about how far we've fallen in the peacekeeping statistics. In fact, according to Drew Fagan at the the Globe and Mail, we continue to have about 5,000 troops on various missions designated to keep the peace, not all of them under UN auspices, but I don't know that it really matters. In fact, for much of what we did under UN auspices in countless places we used what you might call low-intensity light forces to keep the opposing sides from killing each other. It's a very proud part of our history, but today the people who make up the majority of UN peacekeepers come from developing countries, and those forces can do the job. I'm sure we're not going to vacate this area, and probably we shouldn't, but in today's world the priority is much more likely to be in peacemaking, which is a much more complicated and violent process, and occasionally the kind of fighting we now see in Iraq. We need to be able to perform these latter roles as an equitable contribution to a tolerably peaceful world and to regain, I think, the respect of our allies and access to their councils.

¿ (0930)

I want to say a couple of words about terrorism and why we shouldn't become complacent. Dr. Mansur has talked about the background of Islam and the different influences that affect it, and I won't take you back through that. Suffice it to say that as the western European empires that had a hand in the Middle East all through the 19th century faded, Middle East anti-Americanism has become attributed more and more to another cause, American support for Israel. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only one of the many struggles between the Islamic and the non-Islamic worlds. It's a list that includes Nigeria, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Kashmir, and Mindanao, though of course, Israel-Palestine has attracted far more attention that most of the others. If al-Qaeda can persuade the world of Islam to accept its views and its leadership, we have a very long and bitter struggle ahead of us, and that's not only for the United States. In my own view, events in Iraq play directly into the hands of these extremists.

Here in Canada about a year ago the Toronto Star published a very long article surveying the attitude of the 50-plus mosques we have in the Greater Toronto Area, and it reached the sobering conclusion that while a vast majority of those mosques promoted a moderate and inclusive message, a very substantial minority preached a much more radical and violent message. We shouldn't be surprised. Terrorism and the violence associated with it are not new to Canada. We've seen Armenian extremists at work in the murder of a Turkish military attaché and an embassy security guard here in Ottawa. We've seen supporters of the Provisional IRA smuggle detonators into Canada for use in the indiscriminate bombing that has racked Northern Ireland for years. And of course, we've seen Canada-based terrorism in the deaths of close to 300 Canadians on Air India.

In the time-worn statistics 40% of our GNP comes from exports, and over 85% of these go to or pass through the U.S. Trade sustains our prosperity and our standard of living. We've been among the most active, successful, and respected nations in building a rules-based international system to govern world trade. We have also for more than 30 years been drawn toward an increasingly integrated North American economy. As that economy has begun to encompass Mexico, we've also begun to look seriously at the markets opening and evolving in the hemisphere. Our trade interests, therefore, confront us at the three essential levels of foreign policy decision-making, bilaterally with the U.S., regionally with NAFTA and conceivably the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, and globally and multilaterally through the World Trade Organization. There's an awful lot that can be said about this topic, but this is one section where I think the DFAIT paper lays out very well the conditions, the changes, and the challenges that have to be met over the next few years, and I would simply commend that section of the paper to the committee's attention.

Values and culture I think, make up the weakest section of DFAIT's paper. To start with, I don't understand the juxtaposition of values and culture. Values, it seems to me, are something that should permeate every bit of our policy-making. Culture is a certain attribute of our Canadian being. Enough said on that.

Managing the U.S. relationship is a constant. We need the best and the brightest not just in government, but in other sectors that need to be engaged in what is, will be, and has been a 24/7 365 days a year task. That's why the borders initiative by institutes like the C.D. Howe and, even more recently, the security and prosperity initiative of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives are important. Not that one has to agree with what they say, but they've opened the door to a very badly needed reasoned--and I stress the word reasoned--debate on this vital topic.

I think it's also time to take a hard look at the underlying assumption that we have global, rather than regional, interests. Australia has a regional foreign policy. Do we want to be like Australia? Have we got the resources and the will to maintain a global presence? The Europeans don't care much about us, they've got their own preoccupations, and frankly, we've cooled on Asia since they ran into some thunderstorms. Do we belong in this hemisphere? Maybe. If we do, there's an awful lot that has to be done to help foster economic development throughout the region and to keep track of the political renewal, which, with some stutters, seems to be on the right road. And then there is hemispheric free trade, which I think is certainly desirable, but needs a lot of work.

¿ (0935)

As to security policy, we're in a number of alliances, NATO and NORAD, and we'll probably stay in them. Will they stay alive? We don't know. Whether we should be in the forefront of building new institutions I think is a question we should rightly ask.

It's fatuous to talk the talk if you're not ready to put up the cash to walk the walk. Diplomats and others can go out and project a vibrantly creative society, but I don't think Canadians are well served if it's always done on a shoestring and sometimes as an afterthought.

Finally, you can review and rewrite foreign policy to the extent of our margin of manoeuvre, but we're not going to regain the respect I believe this country has earned in its international relations without engagement, constancy of purpose, and above all, leadership, and I mean by that political leadership.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Morden.

Now we're going to pass to Mr. Andrew Mack. Mr. Mack joined UBC in January 2002 as director of the newly created Human Security Centre after a year in Harvard. Until January 2001 he was director of strategic planning in the office of the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan.

Mr. Mack, welcome.

Mr. Andrew Mack (Director, Human Security Centre, University of British Columbia): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's a great pleasure and privilege to be here.

I speak with some diffidence. As you pointed out, I've only been in Canada for just over a year. I don't know very much about Canadian foreign policy, but while I was at the UN, I was working primarily on human security issues, which Canada played such an important role in promoting.

We've been looking at the foreign policy dialogue with a great deal of interest, and there and elsewhere foreign minister Graham has argued that Canada's traditional multilateralist and human security-centred foreign policy is more relevant than ever in the wake of 9/11. Our research at UBC strongly supports the foreign minister's claim, even though the pursuit of some human security initiatives, such as the landmines ban and support for the International Criminal Court, sometimes irritates Canada's major ally to the south. We say this because the evidence very strongly suggests that the sorts of human security-oriented policies Canada and like-minded countries have been pursuing, peace brokering, post-conflict reconstruction, support for democratization, good governance, security sector reform, transitional justice mechanisms, really do make a difference.

Notwithstanding Rwanda--and this is something many people, I think, don't realize--notwithstanding Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Iraq, the number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than a quarter since 1992, while their total cost, whether you measure it in lives or treasure, has declined even more dramatically. There's been an even more remarkable decline in the number of dictatorships around the world. Since 1988 the number of authoritarian regimes has more than halved. That is an extraordinary figure. It's significant for global security, because democracies almost never to go war against each other and they have much lower levels of internal violence than do authoritarian states. Almost all of these authoritarian regimes, many of them as bad as or worse than Saddam's, succumbed not to sanctions, not to external intervention, but to what, for want of a better word, one might call people power. The reality is that authoritarian regimes ultimately fail because as societies become more developed, more complex, and more interdependent, they also become increasingly difficult to govern by brute coercion.

DFAIT's security agenda has focused on preventing wars and the weapons that kill most people today. Today's wars take place almost exclusively within states, although many spill over into neighbouring countries, and they take place mostly in very poor countries. The most intractable of the armed conflicts we see in the world today, Afghanistan until recently, Somalia, Sudan, Liberia, the DRC, Sierra Leone, have also created what are now called failed states, lawless, anarchic havens for criminal drug syndicates, human traffickers, and terrorists. In the U.S. national security strategy report President Bush argued, “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing states.” And what's true for the United States is also true for Canada.

Failed states, I don't think it's necessary to emphasize, cannot be resuscitated by economic sanctions or warfare. These wars generate most of the world's refugees and kill, on average, one-third to half of a million people a year. Civilians, of course, are the major victims. International terrorism, by contrast, kills fewer than 1,000 people a year, on average. So if our major concern is death around the world, we should be putting at least as much, if not more, emphasis on stopping civil wars as on stopping international terrorism.

Can the international community claim any real credit for the decline in armed conflicts and dictatorships around the world? The answer is yes, but we could also do a great deal better. The single most important reason for the decline both in dictatorships and in armed conflicts is the end of the Cold War. This essentially did two things. First, it stopped support flowing to two sides in proxy wars in the third world and to authoritarian regimes, whether of left or right, in the third world. Second, and this is perhaps less understood, it liberated the United Nations to play an unprecedentedly important role, both in stopping wars--peace-making in UN speak--and in post-conflict reconstruction.

¿ (0940)

If you look at the 1990s, you'll see that's a decade of extraordinary UN activity, preventive diplomacy missions and peace operations of all types. Many of the peace operations, as we all know, suffered from inappropriate mandates, and they were often grossly underfunded. Nevertheless, both the diplomatic missions and the peace operations made a real difference. Wars that might otherwise have started didn't. Countries that could have slid back into war were helped back from the brink. Canada, of course, played a critical role in many of these missions.

Let me just digress for a moment to say a few words about DFAIT's human security program, which until very recently was threatened with the axe by its opponents, both in the bureaucracy and in politics. This relatively modest $10 million a year program has funded such groundbreaking projects as the Kimberley process on blood diamonds, the influential small arms survey, which tracks efforts to control the weapons that kill most people in most wars, and the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which has drafted guiding principles for military intervention to prevent genocide and other gross violations of human rights. The program has also funded the campaign to support the creation of the International Criminal Court and helped spearhead moves at the UN and elsewhere to safeguard civilians, particularly children in armed conflicts. Some of these initiatives, as I've said, particularly landmines and the ICC, have irritated the United States, which, of course, is one reason the program's critics, both in government and in the bureaucracies, have opposed it.

DFAIT has also, along with the Swiss government, the British government, and the Norwegian government, provided a great deal of support for the human security report at UBC. I have at the back of the room put out some folders that explain this and look at some of the graphic material that relates to some of the points I'm going to be making in just a moment. Our rationale for creating this report, which has its genesis in the days I was working at the United Nations, takes us back to my earlier point, that notwithstanding the real progress in the last decade on the issue of global security, we can do a great deal better.

As legislators, I think you would all agree that effective policy should be based on sound analysis, and sound analysis depends on accurate and reliable data. Yet although the international community has excellent, and sometimes not so excellent, but at least official, data on health, education, and economic development, there are no official statistics on armed conflicts in existence, and member states in the UN, particularly in the G-77, don't like these issues being raised. While I worked as Kofi Annan's strategic planning director, I was stunned to discover that most of my UN colleagues had no idea that armed conflicts had actually declined in the 1990s and had little idea how steep the decline had been in the number of authoritarian regimes in the world. The reason was that there were simply no accessible sources for that sort of information. So I decided when I was at the UN that what the international community needed was the equivalent of the United Nations Human Development Program's human development report, but it would be called a human security report. The purpose of this would be to map global violence, its intensity, its incidence, its consequences, its causes, and policy responses to it.

Today, if you look around the international community, whether you're talking about the UN, the G-8, the World Bank, the OECD/DAC, or donor states like Canada, there is widespread consensus that we need to get into the business of preventing conflicts before they start. “Prevention is better than cure” has now become a mantra repeated everywhere. Yet the extraordinary thing is that there is almost no consensus among these institutions on what it is that constitutes the causes of armed conflicts. What this essentially means is that prevention policies being pursued by government are a bit like physicians going out there and prescribing treatment without any diagnosis. It's extremely worrying. The information is there in the research institutes around the world, but as many of you know, academics are not terribly good communicators, in fact, sometimes they're totally hopeless communicators, and it's particularly true if they happen to be econometricians, who do some of the most important and interesting work, but it is almost totally incomprehensible to people in the policy community. So what we decided we had to do with the human security report was take this material and translate it in such a way that it became accessible to policy-makers, to legislators, to the media, to educators, because most academics and political scientists don't understand econometrics, and yet there is this extraordinarily important information out there.

¿ (0945)

Let me just give you a few examples of the sorts of information we'll be publishing. First, on the relationship between armed conflicts and economic development, it is an extraordinary finding that when your GDP goes up from $250 to $600 per capita, a very poor country becoming a somewhat less poor one, the risk of violence, the risk of being involved in a civil war in the next five years halves. When you go from $600 to $1,200, it halves again. By the time you've reached $5,000, the risk has been reduced by 32 times. The implication of this is that development is the best form of conflict prevention, but we know that the two are intimately linked. You can't have development without security, and you can't have security without development.

The second point is again a fairly simple one. One of the graphs in the folder there shows the extraordinary relationship between the increase in the incidence of malaria world-wide and the increase in the number of refugees. Refugees are the primary driver of malaria. What is it that causes refugees? War. Here we have a situation in which war and refugees are intimately related, but the way bureaucracy works, the way academia works is that the people who study and deal with malaria don't deal with war, and the people who deal with war don't deal with malaria. So if you look at the World Health Organization and the Gates Foundation, many of these institutions that deal with malaria, none of them deals with the war linkage. If you look at the security people, they don't understand that there's a relationship there with malaria.

What is it we need to do in a situation like this? We need to have a great deal more collaboration and communication between these vertical pillars--they call them stovepipes in the UN--the bureaucracies, and academia, because the academics don't talk to each other either. What all of the evidence I think suggests is that the human security agenda that's being pursued by the government is an extremely important one, but there is a fundamental problem that exists in Canada, the UN, and the World Bank, that the communication that is absolutely necessary between the development people and the security people just doesn't exist. DFAIT, CIDA, and Defence do not collaborate really well across these sorts of issues.

I think I'd better stop my remarks there. I thank the committee very much for the opportunity to make them.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Mack.

Now we're going to pass to the questions and answers, five-minute periods.

Mr. Day.

¿ (0950)

Mr. Stockwell Day (Okanagan—Coquihalla, Canadian Alliance): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to each of the presenters.

Mr. Mansur, you talked about the development of problems with fundamentalism and Muslim problems relative to the 20th century. I don't necessarily ascribe to Huntington's view that we're looking at a clash of civilizations. Rather, there is a clash within the Muslim community, Islam, world-wide that has to be resolved among the peace-believing majority and a narrow segment. Would you comment on that narrow segment? In the research I have seen, in fact, it was not developed in the 20th century, but with the self-proclaimed cleric and prophet al-Wahab in the 1700s announcing his view of pure Islam and rebelling against the Ottoman caliphate of that time, then forging a crude confederacy in the early 1800s based on marriage, crude politics, with a certain warlord who was the enforcer of a certain Mohamad ibn Saud, the Sauds later developing a relationship with the British, of course, coming into Saudi Arabia. That narrow stream is the toxic element that is so violent that it causes others in the Muslim community to fear, causes imams, even internationally, to be fearful of speaking out against those who embrace that narrow stream. That's one question.

On the refugee question, any of you might help me with something I've been struggling with. The Israeli-Palestinian question obviously has to be settled. Our view is that there needs to be a peacefully negotiated settlement where one day the Palestinian Arab population can live in their own homeland in peace and the Israelis also live without being threatened. When it comes to refugees, there's a unique situation. When you look at refugee situations historically, in whatever dispute, until the dispute was resolved, there was always a tremendous ability for surrounding nations to absorb those refugees who were fleeing or wanted to just get out of there. Certainly, the population of five million Jews in Israel has absorbed almost 900,000 refugees from around the world, but with this population of Palestinian Arab refugees, in extreme need, there's either a reluctance or a refusal from the quarter of a billion Arab population around them to absorb them. Even Canada was rapidly absorbing and reaching out to refugees in Romania in the Ceausescu days. In China still today we're reaching out, whether it's adopting children or whatever. Is there anything to which you can attribute this apparent refusal to help with the Palestinian refugee problem, at least until that situation is resolved?

Finally, for Mr. Mack or others, is it not time to look at this view of multilateralism at the United Nations where the liberal view in Canada now is, we do nothing unless there's absolute unanimity? This is a unique approach to governance. In fact, it does not happen in our country. The Liberal regime does not wait until they have an absolute consensus of the minority parties, and quite rightly, they're there to govern. They consult with us from time to time and they listen from time to time, and then they move ahead. Where do we get this notion with the United Nations that we should be stymied because we do not have 100% unanimity?

As you comment on that, I would suggest, Mr. Mack, that decline in dictatorships after the end of the Cold War was a result of Ronald Reagan's stand at that time, putting a situation before the Soviet communists that was untenable for them. They collapsed, and then you saw a corresponding collapse of dictatorships. It had nothing to do with the United Nations whatsoever. Since 1991 it has been the U.S.-led coalition in Kuwait that sent a message to would-be invaders of what might be their fate. In fact, another message has now been sent 10 or 12 years later, which is being joyfully received by the Iraqi people. Could you comment on that aspect of this particular decline, and maybe a new definition of “soft power”, which is being defined as the awesome concentration of surgically delivered power that will be hard on vicious dictators, but soft on civilian populations? In fact, the United Nations, which has a bona fide role to play in the world--and I hope it does not become irrelevant--cannot, nor should they, take the credit for this decline in dictatorships and wars we've seen.

¿ (0955)

The Chair: Mr. Day, you took all your five minutes, even a little bit more. It's quite difficult for the chair, because they're good questions. I'll allow one minute to each of you to try to answer any one of the questions, but not all, because we'll be here until 11 just for Mr. Day.

Mr. Mack first.

Mr. Andrew Mack: On the question of multilateralism, looking back to Kosovo, Canada did choose to act outside the UN. On this occasion it has chosen not to. So I don't think you can make a general rule as far as that's concerned.

On the other point, which is a very interesting one on the decline of dictatorships, I agree with you. I think the most important reason for the decline in dictatorships is the end of the Cold War, which I suggested. However, I think that process has been sustained and helped by the United Nations, not just the United Nations acting on its own, of course, as others have supported countries in transition. Countries in transition, moving from dictatorship to democracy or back the other way, are the countries that are most prone to violence. North Korea doesn't have a great deal of internal war, Sweden doesn't have a great deal of internal war, it's the transition countries in the middle. That's where the international community, whether it's the UN, the OECD, the World Bank, or whatever, can really make a difference. To be perfectly frank, the UN does not have the resources to make a huge difference. Compared with the World Bank, it is a relatively small player. Politically it's important, economically it's not.

The Chair: Mr. Mansur.

Prof. Salim Mansur: I agree completely with you. This is not an issue of clash of civilizations, it is an issue in which the Muslim world has to tackle a problem that is internal. It is between and among Muslims. As I was trying to point out to the committee, this problem is of recent origin. You have picked up a strain of thinking, a construction that goes back to the 18th century. That problem was dealt with by the Ottoman Empire. The Wahabi movement was such an aberration and such a minor issue that it would have had no role but for the situation of the 20th century, with the rise of the oil power dynasty, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in which we in the west are also complicit. I will refer you to a brilliant essay in the current issue of Atlantic Monthly that goes into great detail on how we in the west, the United States of America, with us not far behind, helped incubate what I was talking about, Muslim fundamentalism, which is a variant of fascism.

The problem is that the Muslim world is almost entirely located in what was once the third world and now is maybe the fourth and the fifth world. Many parts of the Muslim world are stalled societies or failed societies. Unlike the Ottoman Empire of the 17th and 18th century dealing with a minor aberration, Muslim societies today are incapable of dealing with those problems. That is why I find it so interesting that a country like mine, Canada, has been so reluctant to deal with the problem and face up to the reality and the responsibility. These situations do not simply remain located on some margin in dark spots of the world, they have a tendency to grow and spread. That's what we saw with what I have been calling a variant of facism.

We can go on and talk in detail. As Professor Mack would point out, academics have a way of trying to communicate these things, but we go off on many tangents. But we must understand that the very first victims have been Muslims ourselves, from Algeria to Afghanistan.

The Chair: Mr. Morden.

Mr. Reid Morden: I just want to talk for a minute about the role the multilateral institutions should play in how we shape our own foreign policy. I come back to my comment at the outset of my remarks. It has to do with a tool to exercise our sovereignty. It isn't the be all and end all of our foreign policy, and I don't think it should be. With the exception of things like Kosovo, where it seemed the right thing, we have sought to strengthen institutions like the United Nations in the security area. It goes back to the Korean war. It certainly goes to one of the things we can take immense pride in, resolving the initial Suez issue in 1956.

Mr. Mack has said a lot of things about the role it's played in the post-Cold War period, but I think we really shouldn't forget that the UN is far more than its security branch. That was the central role people thought about when the UN was created just after the last World War, but it has done so many other things, which I think were to the benefit of countries like ours that don't, by themselves, necessarily have the capacity to restrain other people who may be more predatory and certainly more powerful than we are. We like to have rule-based things, and the UN helps provide that. Canada has shaped what remain the international norms on the law of the sea. We're the driving force behind the creation of the International Criminal Court. We've dealt with things as diverse as transnational corporations and other things that have to do with trade and development.

So it's a tool, and it's the most universal tool we have at the moment. Should it evolve? Should it change to meet the demands? Of course. Is it dysfunctional? Certainly, from time to time. For 40 years the Security Council, frankly, didn't work very well. That's why people had to go to the General Assembly for the uniting for peace resolution in the Korean War. Nevertheless, in some ways I'm agreeing with you. I don't think it's ever conceived that it should be the veto on what we do as a nation in developing our foreign policy. If we choose to do things with it from time to time, fine; at other times, circumstances dictate we should do something else.

À (1000)

The Chair: Thank you.

Before we pass to Madam Lalonde, I need to suspend for two minutes because we have difficulty with the mic system. Thank you.

À (1001)

À (1007)

À (1010)

The Chair: Okay. We're going to resume.

Madame Lalonde.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I thank you for your three presentations which were extremely interesting.

My question implies many other questions, but I will try to make it short for the sake of time.

In Afghanistan, the battle was won fairly quickly. However, reconstruction is disappointing by all counts.

We, as members of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, had the good fortune to have lunch, a few months ago, with a member of the International Crisis Group who came back from Afghanistan and told us that only Kabul was safe, and indeed not even the entire city, as there were districts where policemen and soldiers raped women and stole from people. In the rest of Afghanistan, everything is under the control of war lords, that is the people who were there before the Taliban moved in and were welcomed by the people who had badly suffered from those war lords.

All the goals of democracy, and at least of freedom, human rights and justice, are extremely elusive. The icing on the cake is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who is a former wahhabi imam who has surrounded himself with similar judges. They have been given the responsibility of setting up a justice system all over Afghanistan.

Fundamentalism could be defeated, but its influence appears to be growing. I would like to have your views on all this. What are the causes of that progression of Islamic fundamentalism, including in Palestine? Thank you.

[English]

The Chair: Mr. Mansur.

Prof. Salim Mansur: Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have? I could write a book on this matter. The problem is that Afghanistan has been a part of the world we used to call a buffer state, where the great game was played. This society is not going to change according the expectation we in the west have, in a matter of a few months or a few years, into a Jeffersonian democracy. We need to have a sense of patient expectation, given how history evolves. I have no illusion that it will take time and commitment. The question is whether we have the time and the commitment.

But the problem is even larger. The issue is that the neighbouring country of Afghanistan, Pakistan, with a population of over 150 million people, has become entirely a Talibanized society, and this Talibanized society, which emerged from interaction with Afghanistan over a period of 20-25 years in a war against the Soviet Union and subsequently in the internal war, is now feeding into the process. Are we going to be willing to open up the discussion and talk about Pakistan? Are we willing to talk about all the various ways this process has been incubated and has spread its tentacles? Are we willing to consider how dangerous the situation is, when a Talibanized society like Pakistan is now being seen as a front-line state of the United States to deal with the problem of fundamentalism, when the country itself is the incubator of fundamentalism? And this is now a nuclearized country, which is going to divert its attention towards Kashmir, as it has been doing, to spark, possibly, a regional war that could be totally catastrophic.

These are tremendously difficult questions, and I don't know whether we have the time here to discuss them. I will say that we really have to be seriously focused on this issue, think about it in detail, get away from this partisan argument, and look at the problem not with the blinkers of political correctness, but in the light of reality. As Mr. Day said, this is a problem within the Muslim world. I keep making the distinction between Islam and Muslim. Islam is the faith, a transcendent faith that stands apart. It is what the Muslims have done. It is the collapse of the Muslims in trying to deal with the complex problems of modernity and civilization. There is nothing inhibiting Muslims from being modern, but to engage with an understanding of where this problem has arisen, we have to dig deeper into the cultures. Are we prepared to do that? Are we prepared to unfold the problematic and see that this internal collapse that has taken place over decades--that's why I was talking about the middle years of the 20th century--has led to politics of resentment, denial, and grievance?

À (1015)

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: There is absolutely no doubt, as I know from having worked in the UN and with a lot of people there, that there is a lot of commitment to reconstruction in Afghanistan, but that commitment is not shared to anything like the same degree by the United States. The reason for that is relatively simply. The United States had two critical aims there. One was to get rid of the Taliban, the other was to get rid of al-Qaeda. There was not the same interest in reconstructing Afghanistan that I think there will be in the case of Iraq, as the Bush team perceive a need to reduce America's reliance on Saudi Arabia, and a rebuilt Iraq is seen as critical to that design. That's why I think there will actually be more resources flying into Iraq and reconstruction will be taken more seriously than was the case in Afghanistan, and in addition, it's going to be a much easier task.

The Chair: Mr. Morden.

Mr. Reid Morden: It seems to me that the decision of the government, whatever its many motivations for doing so, to redeploy a very substantial number of Canadian troops in Afghanistan is a commitment of some substance to try to maintain security in certain parts of Afghanistan while they try to rebuild a society. They certainly are, as you point out, concerned about the re-establishment of fundamental law. It's a long haul. You need to have the competence and the commitment to stick with it, because you won't see the results for a generation or more.

The Chair: Thank you.

Now we're going to pass to Mr.Calder, who will share his time with Mr.Harvey.

Mr. Murray Calder (Dufferin—Peel—Wellington—Grey, Lib.): Thanks very much, Mr.Chairman.

The United States' philosophy is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Canada's is trade, stability, and good governance. One's sexy, the other's very pragmatic. When we look south of the border, we analyse them, when they look north, they see a mirror image, and any time we do something that's contrary to that, they're confused. Wilson's 14 points after the First World War they weren't strong enough to enact, but after 1945 they were, and they rebuilt Europe and Japan based on U.S. industry, and they made a heck of a lot of money. They're now looking at an emerging economy in China, and I think that's causing them a lot of concern.

Mr.Mansur, what will be the perception within the Muslim world of a continued U.S. presence in Iraq?

Mr. Morden, how can Canada best exert influence on the United States when we believe they're acting in a way that might be detrimental to our interests, and perhaps even their own interests?

Mr. Mack, how can Canada influence a reform of the United Nations that might make it a more credible organization, especially given the current climate, when it is being bypassed and undermined? I think the Security Council and Rwanda is an example.

À (1020)

Prof. Salim Mansur: Success has a thousand fathers, that's what they say. If Iraq is a successful venture on the part of the Americans, if they can get it going and make a success out of it, and if they can establish even a representative form of government, it will become contagious and the Muslim world will then look to the west in a way that is different from the way it has so far.

Mr. Reid Morden: The way you get to have influence with the United States is to be in their face in things that matter to you, but also not to stand back from those things where we do share values and they want support, and you have to do that all the time. It is not a question of episodically talking to them where there is an issue. Within the bureaucracy, throughout virtually every department of government in this town, they talk directly with their American colleagues. From time to time ministers do that as well. But it is the formation of a relationship that goes far beyond, gee, I've got a problem, so I'll phone the Americans. They get a little tired of that, because it's usually our going down there and preaching about something. There is something to be said for not gratuitously poking the eagle in the eye, because you kind of forget that down south there are some talons that can do you some damage. So you deal with the things that are there.

I think you could argue our government's decision to support or not support the Americans on Iraq either way, I think you can make intellectual arguments either way and you could come down on either side, but if you take the more difficult decision, which is what the government has done, you have to do a number of things to set that up, to provide the balance, to make it clear that we're doing lots of other things to support the Americans, and you do that very strongly. I'm not sure we've been very good at that in this particular instance. I think I'm being polite here. It's a commitment, constancy, and you have to be there all the time, every day. It's not hard. Just don't do something dumb.

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: I think the first thing to say about UN reform is the fairly obvious one, that the UN is a reflection of world politics. You need to reform world politics, ultimately, to be able to reform the UN. However, the Secretary General in 1997 put forward his reform package. There were a lot of useful things in that. A lot of it was sabotaged, sometimes by the bureaucracy within, but also by member states.

You have three extraordinary Canadians working at the UN at the moment. One is Louise Fréchette, whose power and influence within the organization is quite extraordinary. I worked directly with her, and she terrifies a lot of people, but she terrifies them in a very good cause. The second one is your ambassador, Paul Heinbecker, who is extraordinarily effective. The third one is outside the UN, but intimately connected with it, David Malone. The pressure that's come from those people on reform within the system is extraordinary. A second reform report came out a few months ago, pushed by Louise Fréchette. It's going to make a difference, but you have to remember that UN reform is always going to be an extraordinarily slow process. The institution and, above all, member states are extremely suspicious about reform. One reason for this is that the United States has been pushing very hard for reform, and many members states, particularly in the G-77, see anything the U.S. is trying to do under the name of reform as essentially a way of undermining the power and influence of the institution. Therefore, perfectly sensible reform measures are rejected and resisted simply because they come from the Americans, which is unfortunate.

À (1025)

The Chair: Thank you.

Monsieur Harvey.

[Translation]

Mr. André Harvey (Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, Lib.): Mr. Chairman, allow me to thank our witnesses.

I remember that in the hours following the 9-11 attacks, the Prime minister said that poverty was a breeding ground for terrorism and, as Mr. Mansur pointed out, that poverty was a springboard for any form of extreme behaviour. In the following days, the Prime Minister was told that the terrorists who had seized those planes to crash them into the twin towers were not poor people. I thought nevertheless at the time that poverty was a perfect breeding ground. But poor people are not necessarily the ones who foster and develop fundamentalism throughout the world. I would like to hear your comments on that issue.

If you think that fighting global poverty is an absolute necessity to deal with the problem of terrorism, we will have to find the right means. I for one believe that it is an easy and transparent solution to this major problem. We are told that terrorists are present everywhere and that tens of thousands of young people are willing to die to destabilize the Western world. What should we do? I'am interested in solutions to fight poverty. I would like to hear your views on things like embargoes, for instance. How can we order an embargo? Has the embargo on Cuba achieved any positive results in the past 30 years? By depriving the countries of the bare minimum that they require to meet the basic needs of their populations, are we doing the right thing to develop democracy at a time when means of communications allow people to compare themselves with others?

I would therefore like to have your views on the challenge of trying to control world poverty.

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

[English]

Mr. Andrew Mack: This is an extraordinarily important issue. The criticism of those people who say we ought to address the root causes of terrorism is precisely to say, wait a minute, these terrorists were in fact middle-class engineers, they were funded by multimillionaires--what has this got to do with poverty? I think the answer is that the support base for this sort of organization very often comes from very poor, dispossessed people, but the people that run the organizations are almost invariably from the middle classes, and sometimes from the upper classes. For terrorism to succeed, you need three things, ideology, organization, and a support base. If you look, for example, at sub-Saharan Africa, where you have huge amounts of poverty, huge amounts of oppression, there's no international terrorism. In Europe in the 1970s and the early 1980s you had what I would call middle-class terrorists, the Red Brigades, the Angry Brigade, Baader-Meinhof. There you had organization, you had ideology, you had no support base, so it could be stopped relatively easily. Where it becomes very tough is where you have money, organization, ideology, and the support base.

With respect to the support base, attacking the root causes of terrorism, it's different from civil war, but there is some overlap. The thing that appears to be critical, from most of the literature, is education systems. If it's the case that kids do not have state schools to go to, the only schools they can go to happen to be Islamic schools, and some, a small percentage, of those Islamic schools push an ideology of hatred, then you have a fundamental problem. The solution to that problem is to make sure children in societies like Pakistan have an alternative, so their parents don't have to send them to those sorts of schools. It's not just poverty per se, but poverty is part of the problem.

The Chair: Thank you.

Now we'll pass to Ms. McDonough.

Ms. Alexa McDonough (Halifax, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to all three of our witnesses for very interesting and challenging presentations that we could spend many hours pursuing. It's very frustrating to reduce it to a couple of moments.

I'd like to pursue further issues both Mr. Morden and Mr. Mack have addressed, based on the importance of both reform and resourcing of the United Nations. When you put it all into perspective and recognize that at least 50 times as much money is spent on the acquisition of arms every year than is spent on the entire range of UN roles and responsibilities, it's not surprising that we get more war than we get peace and lots of poverty, which generates war. I'd just be interested, somewhat more specifically, in your comments on the issues of UN reform and resourcing.

Second, Mr. Mansur, I noted that you stated quite specifically that “the animus that distances the Muslim world from the west flows from the situation in historic Palestine”, and you speak about Canada having a very important role to play. I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about what you think that is, what you see as the solution. I found your presentation very interesting as giving some added insight into Muslim fundamentalism, but frustrating in there being no real addressing of the question of multilateralism, as it relates to both Canada's participation in multilateralism and the role for the UN or whatever you see as the international architecture for the addressing of issues in general. But in particular--and it would be very interesting to hear what all the witnesses have to say--there is the role of the UN and what needs to happen in addressing the ongoing horror of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

À (1030)

The Chair: Mr. Morden.

Mr. Reid Morden: Mr. Mack reminds us that there's just been a new reform package issued by the UN, and it is, one has to say, the latest in a series of them. To the extent that it has the support of major countries of influence, it will probably make some progress. I don't think it's realistic to look at any quantum change in the kinds of resources that will be made available to the UN as an institution, as opposed to contributions that may be made to one or other of its special funds. There may be one for the reconstruction of Iraq, and that may be something quite different. I think the UN has to look to itself. It's grown from something that was quite focused and very small in the late 1940s to something that probes into virtually every aspect of life, from the regulation of trade to human rights to international law. It may be that there are some things it could stop doing in order to focus the resources it has. I have to repeat, I really don't think there's going to be a quantum change in the resources made available to it as an institution. It's just got too many points of view on that.

As to Israel-Palestine, I guess you get into a nasty bit of Realpolitik. Whenever there has been some chance of getting the Israelis and the Palestinians to come close to saying yes, it's been done outside the UN aegis, and it's been done because one or other--or both--of what used to be the superpowers either was prepared to let it happen or was positively encouraging it. We now have one superpower. The Americans have chosen to make Iraq a priority, for whatever reasons Mr. Bush adduces. One could say, whatever intellectual capacity and resources his administration has, why haven't they been directed at bringing the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the table? I really don't quite understand why they have ducked that. The Clinton people ducked it as well, as they did in Yugoslavia until they were absolutely forced to it, because the Europeans couldn't handle the situation there. I don't think there's a big role for the UN, unless at some point somebody says this is a good cover, as they did with UNRRA in the 1950s.

À (1035)

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: With Israel and Palestine, I think anybody who follows this closely--I used to follow it very closely, I do less so now--knows the American role is absolutely critical. It may be the case now that the U.S. is prepared to do things it wasn't prepared to do previously, because I suspect that Tony Blair extracted a promise from the Americans: if you want our wholehearted support all the way down the line on Iraq, you have to get serious about the road map. The Americans are now talking the talk. Whether they'll walk the walk we just don't know. The predisposition of this administration is very favourable to Ariel Sharon, and if Sharon has his own way, there will never be an agreement. It is also very difficult to have an agreement, I think, with Arafat in position, because Arafat has too much baggage as well. So I think we just have to wait and see on that issue.

On the broader question of UN reform, it is extraordinarily difficult. I think the point you make about resources is a critical one. UN peace operations around the world cost less than $3 billion a year, and every cent there is vitally needed, because you're operating in areas of extraordinary need. By contrast, the international community is spending $800 billion a year on defence, and most of that money goes to prepare for wars that aren't fought any more, interstate wars. Most of the money is actually spent by rich countries, and rich countries don't go to war any more, not against each other anyway.

The UN is a really interesting institution. It's the one institution that doesn't get demonstrated against. With WTO, you had huge demonstrations, the World Bank, the IMF. The UN doesn't. It has credibility, for some peculiar reason. And it is a peculiar reason, because the UN does all sorts of terrible things. But the reality is that in the development area, which is the thing the UN cares about next to security, it's actually a very ineffectual actor. In many ways the UN would actually be better off not dealing with that issue and rather focusing its attention on the security issue, and then looking at that security-development link, but not trying to do development. The United Nations Development Program does a lot of quite good things, but it's spread so thin. It's a bit like the Canadian foreign service, it really can't make a lot of difference in a lot of places. Its budget is less than $1 billion. The World Bank spends $17 billion on aid, NGOs disperse more than the World Bank, and then you have all the other donor states. The UN, in comparison to this, is an extremely small actor. It's committed to staying in that, but it shouldn't really.

The World Bank and the United States are now saying, our aid policies must be to reward good performance; we'll only give money to good performers, that will encourage them, and other countries, seeing that they won't get any money unless they're good performers, will change. If we were to follow that through, Afghanistan wouldn't get a cent, no one in sub-Saharan Africa would get a cent either, because they're not good performers. So now you find the World Bank saying, okay, we must have a special category called low-income countries under stress, and they're going to get money anyway. So actually, nothing has changed. One of the sad things about the international system is that some issues people just don't know what to do with. With the Democratic Republic of the Congo, nobody knows what to do. It's just too hard. It's very depressing.

The Chair: Thank you.

Now we'll pass to Madam Redman.

Mrs. Karen Redman (Kitchener Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I really enjoyed all three of your presentations. I'm going to take, I think, this discussion in a bit of a different direction. I really commend the dialogue on foreign policy, and I thank you all again for your input.

Mr. Mack and Mr. Morden, you talked a little about how we, as a government, project our policy. I'm going to acknowledge that being a member of the government, I probably have privileged access. I would agree with Mr. Morden that we could definitely come down on either side of what Canada should or might have done faced with the current Iraqi situation. I think this government and the Prime Minister have been very consistent, but I could not argue substantively that we've got that out very well. I'm looking at today's Globe and Mail, and Shawn McCarthy's talking about a speech Ambassador Cellucci gave last night and has chosen to highlight comments, followed by an unnamed MP from our party making a value statement on it. I would be interested to hear from Mr. Martin, as we were at the same table, but I thought Mr. Cellucci was very conciliatory. I found his comments very diplomatic and very appropriate.

Mr. Mack, you talked about it at the UN, and it's a fact that we do have silos. How do we get our message out? How do we engage Canadians? Canadian young people are far more likely to joint a non-government organization than they are to look with credibility at our foreign service or a public role in political life. How do we deal with our foreign policy when the media have another agenda? Clearly, we can't depend on them to get our message out. How do we substantively engage Canadians and make it clear, both domestically and internationally, that we do have a policy that is principle-based? How do we move forward?

À (1040)

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: Let me just respond to your last point. I know we don't have a great deal of time.

We have the Canadian consortium on human security, funded by DFAIT's human security program. I'm one of the co-directors of that, with David Dewitt of York University. The whole purpose of that is to enhance communication between the NGO community and with government, then later with outside organizations. We meet very regularly, and a few months ago we had an ad hoc workshop that brought together foreign ministry people, lawyers, NGOs, academics, talking particularly about the role of rogue corporations in conflict zones and what can you do about them, major drivers of conflict.

I think there are a lot of things that can be done, but on the issue you address, which is the question of the media, I think that's very tough. The problem with a lot of my colleagues is they can't write for the media. There's a particular way of writing. It's not that you won't get stuff in the media--sometimes you won't get stuff in the media if it's too extreme--but it's usually the case that you won't get it in, because it's not written the way it should be written. One of the things we encourage our students to do is actually write op eds as part of their course, 800 words. Initially, they say, boy, that's so easy, and then they find out it's actually so hard. If we encourage people to do more of that, and they're exactly the same skills you need to make a point in a government department, 800 words, clear, straightforward, hard-hitting argument, I think it can make a difference.

I'd be more than happy to put people here on the mailing list for our human security bulletin, which maps everything that's going on in the world on these issues. It has resources, notices of conferences, etc.

The Chair: Thank you, we'd be very pleased.

Mr. Morden.

Mr. Reid Morden: Getting the message out is, of course, a problem that afflicts every government I've known of in the time I was in public service. Since 9/11 I think there's probably been more debate in more conference rooms with knowledgeable people talking about aspects of things that have to do with our response. Those have encompassed, particularly in the legal industry, a number of conferences on the appropriateness or otherwise of some of the new legislation that was passed. There have been changes now in our aid policy. We've seen all sorts of things. DFAIT now has, of course, a division. One should always remember Professor Parkinson in this: once you begin to institutionalize stuff, it means you're into ossification. DFAIT has this division on public diplomacy, which recognizes, I think, that it's not just the doing, it's letting people know what you're doing.

On a slightly more positive note, I want you to know that last weekend the Canadian Institute of International Affairs celebrated its 75th year with a foreign policy conference. I was really quite encouraged at the number of young people and students who came to this, because the membership of the CIIA, on the whole, is reflective of Canada's demographic. Also, more than half the people asking questions of the presenters were young people. So I think there is a wellspring of interest out there to be tapped. I think it's incumbent not just on the government, but on members of Parliament to address some of these things, because we don't live alone in this world. It really is a world that affects us more than we can affect it. Whether you agree with the government's position or not, people should get out and talk about it.

May I tell one anecdote? Back in, I think, 1922 a Liberal member got up in a foreign affairs debate, an unusual thing in the House, and said, I'm from P.E.I. I know this is a foreign affairs debate, I don't know a lot about foreign affairs, but I know an awful lot about growing potatoes, and that's what I'm going to talk about today.

À (1045)

The Chair: Mr. Mansur.

Prof. Salim Mansur: The media, and I can't blame them, are interested in dramatic stories, and they want to stay with a story that has a life of its own and a drama of its own. In the area of development work, I've been consulting with CIDA for quite some time, and there are not many dramatic success stories. Take a case from India as just one example. The most dramatic story in the Indian case has nothing to do with CIDA or with any other development organization around the world, it has to do with private enterprise and the development of information technology, south India becoming a silicon valley and now exporting manpower to Europe and to America. The success stories of third world economies that have taken off, Asian countries, parts of India, have little to do with CIDA or World Bank input going through.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Martin.

Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Canadian Alliance): Thank you all for being here. This has been absolutely fascinating and very helpful for us. I have two questions.

Since we're dealing with a dialogue, we have to deal with generalities. I want to get to the issue of reform. Professor Mack, you said reform coming from the U.S. would often be discarded and looked upon with suspicion. Doesn't Canada have a role in two particular areas, communication between Bretton Woods institutions and the other institutions that deal with human security internationally and the creation of an enforcement mechanism? I believe the UN has created a wonderful judicial framework, but it doesn't have the enforcement mechanism. Therefore, while we have on paper a responsibility to protect, that responsibility is not being exercised, whether it's Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, now Zimbabwe. The failure there is causing massive loss of life around the world.

Also along those lines, in many cases bullies, Charles Taylor, Robert Mugabe, or whoever, create conflict and corruption, which creates a lack of capacity, which destroys economies, which destroys the human security you work on. So how to deal with the bullies of the world might be a challenge in there.

My second question, Mr. Morden, deals with your expertise as the former head of CSIS. I believe we have a viper internationally we have not dealt with and are ignoring at our peril, the lack of tracking of fissionable materials, particularly from Russia, and a toxic mixture of a lack of control and identification of fissionable materials from Russia, mafiosi in Russia, CIS States, and eastern europe, and a lack of internal security controls in that region. That, combined with the desire of terrorist organizations to acquire weapons of mass destruction, is something I know the U.S. has been trying to deal with. I wonder what Canada's role could be in dealing with that issue, which I think poses a very serious international threat and we are not giving its due.

The Chair: Mr. Morden, for the second question.

Mr. Reid Morden: I think you identify a very serious problem in the tracking of fissionable material. I think, in trying to address the problem, one should try to put fences around it where one can. The vast majority of fissile material is indeed under lock and key, except, of course, when American marines break into the things without knowing they're there, and under IAEA safeguards. The best thing Canada can do, the most constructive thing, is continue and enhance, if possible, our support for the IAEA, because it has expertise and a track record of keeping these things safe. There is, however, a dangerous amount of this stuff, mostly coming out of the former Soviet Union, which any number of people would like to get their hands on.

I don't think abroad we are very likely to play a very significant role in that. There are lots of people in the intelligence business with whom we have very close links who are doing an awful lot in that direction, and I think we're in a subsidiary role. Because this is a matter of very great concern to the United States--and I think that's quite important, given the events of 9/11--the best thing we can do is make sure our ports of entry on this continent are properly secured and we do the things within our borders relating to security in a very responsible and very aggressive way. You talk about mafiosi in the FSU. I think we should really be talking about organized crime, which has made significant inroads in both our ports and our airports, and there's a contribution we can make that is very direct, very much on our own territory, and very possible.

À (1050)

The Chair: Thank you.

The first question, Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: On the question of collaboration between the UN and the IFIs, particularly the World Bank, there's been a huge change since Jim Wolfenson and Kofi Annan have been in office. They get on extraordinarily well together. There's now a huge amount of cooperation that simply wasn't there before. The World Bank has actually embraced most of the human development agenda pioneered by the UN, and in a sense, it's made the UN less relevant in that area. The Bank is now working on conflict prevention, which it wouldn't have dared to do even five years ago, and has managed to get that through. So there's quite a bit happening there, though there's still a long way to go, of course.

With respect to how you deal with bullies, enforcement mechanisms, sanctions, and so forth, there's the rapid deployment force. Canada's pushed this idea for a long time, it's a great idea, it isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future, for two reasons. The G-77 are implacably opposed to it, as they say, quite rightly, it'll only be used against us. The United States is implacably opposed to it, although Bush Senior wasn't, because it's seen as giving more power to the UN. So that isn't going to happen.

What else do you have? There's the whole idea of SHIRBRIG, which Canada's been involved with. The problem is that it's only for chapter 6 operations, it's not for peace enforcement, it can't be used there.

You're now beginning to have a lot of talk inside the UN itself about the possibility of using private military corporations. It's highly controversial, there's a lot of concern about it, but the evidence suggests that these are, in many cases, much more professional than a lot of the third world militaries that are involved in peace operations, because they simply don't have the training, they don't have the equipment, and very often they're there for the foreign exchange it earns, not because they have a commitment to it. So that's a possibility. Private military corporations could be used in a rapid deployment role, but more likely with respect to logistics. They're already being used, by the way, for a lot of the NGOs, which very few people know about.

The Chair: Thank you.

One question, Mr. Obhrai.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai (Calgary East, Canadian Alliance): Thank you--actually one and a half, if you don't mind, to Salim and to Andrew.

Andrew, you have talked about the UN, but you have not talked about the veto power the five Security Council members have. Is that a serious flaw in the United Nations or not?

Salim, I'm very glad you came. We need to hear voices like yours. I spent half my life living with neighbours who were Muslim. I grew up with them in the community, and we were friends. We are absolutely baffled by this latest Islamic fundamentalism. I think this is an Arab issue, not an Islamic issue. The Israel-Palestine issue and the Iraqi issue are Middle East issues, with Arabs only involved, yet in the rest of the world, where we grew up, everywhere, the Muslims who live there are totally detached from us. These people, in order to solve their political issues in the region--I'm not taking any sides--want to export the Muslim issue to other parts, so that they can get political support out of the other Muslim communities. I talk about Indonesia, Malaysia, Africa, all these countries. Would you not agree with me that this current issue of Islamic fundamentalism is an Arab issue being exported and that people like yourself and everybody else and the other Muslims who are not from that region are as baffled as I am at what has happened?

À (1055)

The Chair: Mr. Mack.

Mr. Andrew Mack: The problem with getting rid of the veto power is that any one of the P-5 states is going to veto any attempt to get rid of it. Second, there is a great deal of talk about P-5 states only using the veto in situations where their vital national interests are at stake and explaining their reasons for doing it. That would be a real improvement. Everybody agrees that the council ought to be more democratic, it ought to be larger, it ought to be more representative, but just one word of caution there. The most representative institution in the UN is the General Assembly, and it is precisely because it is so large, if you like, so democratic, that it's also almost completely useless. It's a talking shop, but it can't do anything.

The Chair: Mr. Mansur.

Prof. Salim Mansur: I completely agree with you, Mr. Obhrai, that it is an Arab issue, in the following sense. It's not that the Muslims are not concerned about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but it is an Arab issue in the sense of Muslim fundamentalism. In the last 25 to 30 years--and I would also point this out to Mr. Morden--the money that has come out of Saudi Arabia and has gone to the mosques has carried the bacillus of what I call the neo-fascist variant that has grown up in the Muslim world and has gone through the mosque system. The money has flowed right across the Muslim world, Saudi money. This is something at which we should be looking seriously, without being blinded by political correctness. Right across Canada the mosque imams are all funded by Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has taken an aberration within its land, as Mr. Day pointed out, that goes into the 18th century, which the Muslim world would have taken care of itself if the Muslim world had the resources, power, and civilization, but it doesn't. Now the Saudi variant has become an international problem. The fifteen people who flew those planes into the twin towers were Saudis, and we don't want to talk about them.

The Chair: Thank you.

I want to thank all three witnesses this morning, Mr. Mack, Mr. Mansur, and Mr. Morden. It was very interesting.

Now we will go in camera for a couple of things among members.

[Proceedings continue in camera]