FAIT Committee Report

Bloc Québécois supplementary opinion

to the report of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade

The Committee held a few hearings to contribute to the Dialogue on Foreign Policy launched by the Department. Although those hearings allowed us to evaluate the challenges to foreign policy, their limited length and scope did not allow the presentation of a complete and coherent foreign policy.

In this supplementary opinion, the Bloc Québécois does not intend to propose a foreign policy but simply purposes to highlight a few challenges that confront Canada and to present a few reflections. If the hearings demonstrated anything, it is that the “dialogue” can only be considered as an introduction to the necessary full review of the Canadian foreign policy. The difficult choices that the international community will have to make in the coming months require a clear and adapted policy.

The international order is in turmoil. The most obvious illustrations of this turmoil are the September 11th attacks and the war in Iraq, which also accelerated the turmoil. The foundations on which that international order was based — collective security, multilateral institutions or international law — are in question.

Canada must take a clear stance in that debate, not only to be able to defend its interests in this changing world, as suggested by the three pillars approach adopted by the Department, but also to be a constructive global player.

At the end of World War II, still shocked by the destructions, the millions of deaths, not to mention the death camps, the international community abandoned its right to wage wars and made the United Nations the trustee of international law and the referee of international conflicts. Since then international law prohibits war unless openly authorized by the United Nations Security Council or in self-defence.

The Cold War often prevented the UN from efficiently exercising its role as the international community’s forum for the protection of each member’s security. In that polarized world everyone could live with that deficiency. However, the Cold War has come to an end and a “super-power” now emerges.

Last year the United States Government publicly announced its new defence strategy. If integrally implemented, this strategy would question the fundamentals of international order by asserting that the United States, because of their unchallenged power, has the right to directly challenge the threats it faces, unilaterally if needed. Thus, it puts forward the principle of pre-emptive strikes by which they authorize themselves to militarily intervene even before those dangers become reality.

A part from scarce declarations, the Canadian Government never officially took position on that strategy. Law be it domestic law or international law, is aimed at protecting the weak against the abuses of the strong. And strength does not create law.

That redefining of international order that some members of the American administration try to impose does not make the problems disappear: widespread poverty, lack of democracy, little respect for basic human rights, surge of arms race, rise of fundamentalism, to mention only those. Those problems to whish we are confronted require a global and coordinated response, which can only be elaborated in multilateral organisations. Only in that context can Canada, middle-range power, play a role.

Among the witnesses, few doubt that Canada has the manoeuvring space it needs to have an independent foreign policy. The extraordinary mobilization we have seen in Quebec with regards to war in Iraq shows that it is what the population expects. Furthermore, an increased cooperation with the United States can pressure other governmental policies, such as immigration of refugee laws.

The high lever of interdependence between Canada and the United States is not only a source of pressure. Because the United States also need to maintain good relations with Canada, namely for economic and security reasons, Canada may dispose of a bigger manoeuvring space that some pretend.

Calls are made for a massive increase of the Defence budget, including that of Paul Cellucci, US Ambassador in Canada. We estimate that it would be unwise to take actions with that regard before reviewing the Canadian foreign policy. Foreign policy must come before Defence policy. Whether Canada will chose to pursue its involvement in the United Nations peacekeeping missions or to participate as an ally to the US wars, the mission and needs or the army will be different.

In a recently published text, Mohammed El Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote that the only way of effectively curbing nuclear proliferation war to work on the sources of insecurity that push some governments to arm themselves. That logic does not only apply to nuclear weapons but also to all the threats we are confronted to. The recent government declarations in favour of missile defence go in the opposite direction.

Under-development and lack of democracy, because of the frustrations they bring and the motives of mobilization they create — and that extremists abundantly use — also cause security problems. The Committee report should have stated it more clearly that it did and insist more on the need and urgency that Canada, today one of the less generous country in terms of foreign aid, increase substantially an rapidly its funding for international development and tables a detailed agenda to attain the objective of 0.7% of its GDP determined by the United Nations.

Since the last review of the foreign policy, the world economic order also changed. Globalization brought undesired effects that we can today evaluate. Globalization alone does not diminish the gap between rich and poor countries. A change in direction is needed. We must accompany the opening of markets with other measures that could counter its perverse effects. The difficulty to obtain commercial deals in an multilateral context is an illustration of it. The tendency of the government to avoid that difficulty by multiplying bilateral agreements in which it is in a position of force shows that it did not understand the difficulties that the integration of markets pose when it is not accompanied by other measures.

With that trend of globalization, the issues discussed in the international front today concern every aspect of our social life. In a federation, many of those issues do not fall under the jurisdiction of the central government but under that of the provinces. The way Canada conducts its negotiations must change. Nothing today justifies that the provinces are systematically excluded of the discussions as soon as they involve a foreign country. That issue affects mainly Québec. Because its government is a national government, it has particular duties, namely in terms of culture. Québec was built under a different development model than what we find elsewhere in North America. Only the Quebec government can efficiently defend that model.

The world has changed a lot since the drafting of the Canadian foreign policy eight years ago. Thus, a complete review of that policy is needed. It is urgent. The way that policy is ran, the way the negotiations are conducted, the lack of transparency, the exclusion of the provinces, all that must also be changed. This is what the Bloc Quebecois understood of that too short dialogue on foreign policy.