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Canada’s Bid for a Security Council Seat in 2011 and 2012 :
Stay the Course, Don’t Cut and Run, Prevail
Proposed Op-Ed for the Toronto “Globe and Mail”
Earlier this week, the Globe’s Campbell Clark reported that the Canadian Government was considering withdrawing our bid to seek election to the UN’s Security Council in the Fall of 2010; a startling state of affairs which has no parallel in my experience, and which suggests the Government has no confidence in its own foreign policy.
Canada has served six times at the UN’s ‘High Table’, and it was my privilege to conduct the campaign which secured us a seat in 1999 and 2000 and to represent Canadians on the Security Council for the first 20 months of that term, serving twice as Council president. It was a hard-fought campaign waged over three and a half years and until that vote in early October 1998 we never assumed that we would indeed prevail over our friends and rivals for those two seats, the Netherlands and Greece. In the end we received 131 votes out of x votes cast. The Dutch secured 123 and the Greeks were defeated having attracted but y. The campaign was long, sometimes bitter and exhausting, but the victory was exhilarating and over the two years Paul Heinbecker, my successor, and I represented our country on the Council, we were able to move the yard sticks a fair distance in efforts to improve the way the United Nations pursues its peace keeping vocation by insisting that the mandates of peacekeeping operations specifically protect the weak – the women and children caught up in the horrors which blue helmeted forces are sent to manage.
Not incidentally, using the platform of Chair of the Security Council’s Angola Sanctions Committee, we produced reports which named and shamed sanctions busters (including sitting Heads of Government) and stopped the supply of arms to the rebel movement, UNITA, which had been waging a vicious insurgency for 25 years, causing a million casualties, 4 million displaced people and Angola to be judged by UNICEF the worst place in the world to be a child. By bringing discipline to the diamond trade to ensure that blood diamonds would not endlessly fuel this devastating struggle, we cut off the supply of fuel, ammunition and weapons to the rebel movement which led quickly to its military defeat.
While some countries have considered election to the Security Council to be some kind of measure of national worth, Canada has seen it rather as a kind of international civic duty; a platform from which every 10 years or so we can help to improve the way world manages threats to international peace and security, which, of course, is the essential purpose of the United Nations. Since the Second World War, Canadians have believed that an effective, universally agreed, constantly improved rules-based system of global management is essential to the maintenance of world stability, and, not incidentally, our strongest bulwark against th hegemonistic tendencies of our powerful neighbour. Our reliance on multilateral solutions to emerging threats to the peace and challenges from trade wars to the ravages of new pandemics to climate change is founded in the harsh reality that there are no other ways to manage such issues, and as a result Canadians have invested heavily and wisely in keeping such institutions working more-or-less effectively.
How preposterous it would be to abandon such a fundamental and bi-partisan foundation to Canadian Foreign Policy. In the forthcoming election to the Security Council – still two and a half years away – we will be judged largely on what we, compared to our rivals (Germany and Portugal) will bring to the Security Council table. One of the three will not take a seat on the Council on January 1st 2011. The electors, our peers at the UN, will not be swayed by vapid slogans as “the world needs more Canada” and will decide whether indeed we are ‘punching above our weight” as many Canadians are so fond of believing. They will decide which of the candidates will bring the most balanced, fair and reasonable perspectives to that executive forum. Each national voter will consider how each of the candidates would likely react should their nation, region, friend or ally need the protection of the Security Council. They will judge which among the candidates is least likely to act independently and determine which candidates are most likely to be swayed in their actions on the Council by other more powerful nations and interests.
Since shortly after the Charter – largely a US inspired document – was signed 63 years ago, the United States has been at best ambivalent about the UN, and since, with the fall of the Wall, they became the undisputed No. 1 world power, successive Administrations have sought to diminish any institution which might constrain that power. The current Administration did not take kindly to Kofi Annan declaring the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to be illegal, and as a result it contrived to diminish him and the institution he led in every way possible. As in so many other instances, this constant un-bashing by Americans has had a significant impact on our side of the boarder.
Article 23.1 of the UN Charter, which has the force of law in every UN member state, stipulates the basis on which nations should be judged worthy of Security Council Membership should be the contribution of candidates to the maintenance of international peace and security and to “the other purposes of the UN”. How do we do against such criteria ?
According to UN records, as of April this year, Germany was the 29th largest contributor of troops to UN Peacekeeping Operations. Portugal came in 41st, and Canada, tied with Mali, was 53rd.
Countries vote almost exclusively in their self interest. In the course of my campaigning from 95 to 98, I visited many of the UN’s member states and met many times with each of my colleagues who would cast the votes. Each was motivated by a complex of inputs, not unlike those that inform voters in national elections. Through our close friends in the Caribbean, I was introduced to the 37 members of the Alliance of Small Island States which are members of the UN. Even 12 years ago they had one over-arching concern : finding themselves underwater. This group is unlikely to find Canada’s performance at the Bali Climate Change Conference last December overly inspiring. We do, however, have time to change that.
There are 53 member states in the African Group at the United Nations were intrigued to learn from the Prime Minister last summer at the Heiligendamm G8 meeting that the Canadian Government was shifting its international aid priorities away from Africa. Over 70% of the Security Council’s business is African and, in its Peer Review of Canada’s aid performance published last October, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD noted that Canada’s 2006 Official Development Assistance performance was 9.2% less in real terms than in 2005, and that our assistance fell from 0.34% of gross national income in ’05 to 0.30% in ’06; ranking Canada 15th among 22 donors in terms of aid as a share of national income. This too could change.
The Middle East is also, of course, an area which generates a great deal of Security Council attention, and UN member states – particularly Israel, the USA and the 56 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) – measure individual nation’s bias very carefully on matters affecting this fraught region. Canada, of course, won a Nobel Peace prize for playing, in the UN context, a balanced, constructive and innovative role in the Middle East. Since then we have contributed enormously to stability through decades of work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and as the gavel holder in the Refugee Working Group of the Middle East Multilateral Peace Negotiations. Such a role requires patience, risk, measure, great diplomatic skill and a profound knowledge of the troubled history of the region, but above all it demands balance fairness and credibility. Few would argue, particularly in light of Canada’s voting pattern on Middle Eastern issues over the last few years, and given the Prime Minister’s remarks following the killing of Canadian Major and UNTSO observer, Hess-von Kruedener, and three other UN military observers on July 25, 2006, while manning a United Nations observation post, hit by a precision guided Israeli bomb, in Lebanon. Our balance on Middle Eastern issue needs a little work.
Finally, there’s the matter of ideas; of the willingness to challenge the UN’s and the Security Council’s extremely conservative and traditional way of approaching problems and issues. Such challenges must be carefully prepared and forcefully, fearlessly and skillfully put forward. Canada has had an enviable reputation for thinking and acting outside the box and leading at the UN. If indeed we are going to play our full part in helping the UN to work smarter, cheaper and more effectively, rather than blathering mindlessly about “reform”, let’s demonstrate that we still have such a capacity.
Of course Canada can still win a seat on the Security Council in 2010. To do so, however, will require a lot of focus and hard work. The ultimate calumny would be for a Canadian Government to choose the path taken by the Howard Government, a staunch Bush ally, in Australia. Having been ignominiously defeated in Security Council elections in 1996 (by Sweden and Portugal), the Aussies licked their wounds for a few years and then let it be known that they would likely be candidates for the 2004 elections. However, when soundings suggested that that too would be unsuccessful, Howard pulled out Australia’s bid, insisting he would not pander to the tyrannous UN majority. Few believe these reversals didn’t have a great deal to do with Mr. Rudd’s win last November, and, incidentally, Mr. Rudd announced only a month ago that a very different Australia would challenge Finland and Luxembourg (at least) for the 2013/14 seat. New Zealand has put in a bid for 2015/16, and there is a long-standing agreement among Australia, Canada and New Zealand that we will not compete against each other.
There are a variety of lessons to draw from the Australian experience; one of them being that should Canada in face slink away from the 2010 challenge, it would mean that we would be absent from that horseshoe table for a very long time.