Authors: Michael Harris
The prime minister’s official reason for breaking the treaty was financial. The Harper government claimed it would cost Canada $14 billion in penalties to remain in Kyoto because the country simply could not meet the binding emission targets imposed under the agreement. Rona Ambrose, the first Tory through
the revolving door of Harper environment ministers, warned of exactly that in 2006.
But Russia and Japan both showed that the financial penalty could be avoided without withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol by simply not renewing the treaty. The more likely reason Canada opted out of Kyoto was to avoid the requirement of filing annual reports. Such reports would show the country going the wrong way on greenhouse gas emissions—the inevitable outcome of aggressively expanding Alberta’s tar sands, arguably the raison d’être of the Harper government.
The world’s reaction was instant and unequivocal: Canada was pilloried by France, India, Japan, China, and South Africa for reneging on the only international agreement that had a hope of reducing carbon emissions. What made Canada’s retro-thinking even harder to stomach was that Stephen Harper was pushing tar sands oil onto all and sundry, including emerging economies. At the same time, the prime minister had zero interest in helping emerging economies pay for new, lower-emission technology, as Kyoto required.
Not only had Stephen Harper broken Canada’s word, he was adding to the problem of greenhouse gases and actively encouraging others to join this potentially catastrophic enterprise. The Harper government was pressuring European countries not to “discriminate” against measurably and undeniably dirtier tar sands oil in establishing their fuel quality standards. Harper’s strategy leaned heavily on Ezra Levant’s book
Ethical Oil,
in which Levant imputed an “ethical” component to tar sands oil. The spin played like divine revelation to the hundreds of fans of Sun TV. But it was an absurd proposition that was dead on arrival in any place where citizens still had a critical-thinking capacity and scientists were not under the government’s thumb.
But that didn’t stop the prime minister from relentlessly lobbying in the United States to force through the Keystone XL
Pipeline project, warning President Obama that Canada “would not take no for an answer.” From promises of security of supply to assurances of job creation, hyperbole and bullying were at the core of the Harper government’s sales pitch. As former prime minister Joe Clark observed, Canada had adopted an “almost adolescent tone” in dealing with others. Given what Harper had done to the Americans at Deauville, it was a very odd tactic to demand the “right” answer from President Obama.
The new facts on the ground made Harper’s tactless hard sell even more objectionable. Oil production was booming in the US, with new technologies such as shale fracking holding out the real possibility that Americans might soon achieve their own security of supply—without having to resort to Canada’s tar sands crude. The situation has changed so dramatically in the last few years that legislators such as Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska are lobbying the Obama administration to lift the forty-year ban on US exports of crude oil.
However boisterously the prime minister of Canada oversold his hand, US authorities dismissed his baseless claim that Keystone XL would create “hundreds of thousands of jobs.” The State Department set the actual number of jobs at forty-two thousand for the two-year construction period, if you included jobs for suppliers, lodging and food services, and other jobs related to construction. After that, the 2,700-kilometre (1,700-mile) pipeline would virtually run itself, a fact that left President Obama underwhelmed by the Harper hustle. During a jobs speech in Tennessee on July 30, 2013, the president said, “They keep on talking about this—an oil pipeline coming down from Canada that’s estimated to create 50 permanent jobs. That’s not a jobs plan.”
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In addition to fictionalizing the benefits of Keystone XL, Harper also played the political skinflint. He offered Obama no assurances on reducing the carbon footprint of the Alberta tar
sands. Without such a promise, the US president was left with nothing to mollify the Democratic Party’s environmental supporters, even if he were inclined to approve the pipeline. The Harper government has been promising emission controls on the oil and gas sectors for seven years. The regulations were due to be in place in 2013, but just before Christmas of that year, the prime minister made a present to energy industry lobbyists of a further delay in regulating the oil patch.
At every opportunity since it abandoned the Kyoto agreement, the Harper government has undermined any global effort to come up with a new climate accord. Even the alternative pledges on reducing carbon emissions made by Canada at Copenhagen were egregiously broken. In the words of former diplomat Daryl Copeland, the Harper government’s botching of the environment file had made Canada the “idiot boy” of the climate change crisis. In this year’s report by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, Canada ranked dead last among twenty-seven wealthy nations in protection of the environment.
In his dealings with President Obama, the prime minister was playing his favourite game—having it all his way. It was an attitude that perfectly suited his world view. At best, the rest of the planet was a collection of potential customers, a grid for working out free-trade deals, and a pool of alliances of doubtful morality but undeniable political benefit. At worst, Harper was simply not interested in the wider world, as Preston Manning observed at an earlier stage of his career. If the PM were concerned about Canada’s increasing isolation on the international scene, a condition driven by his obsession with the interests of his corporate constituency, you would never know it from what happened in March 2013.
In the wake of a story from the Canadian Press, the Harper government grudgingly confirmed in Parliament that Canada was
also withdrawing from the United Nations convention established to fight drought, principally but not exclusively in Africa. As with many of his decisions, Harper made the move quietly if not surreptitiously, informing neither Parliament nor the UN of Canada’s decision to withdraw from the agreement until the story was broken by CP.
The rest of the world saw encroaching deserts as an urgent issue, touching as it did on the problems of famine and poverty. But Canada’s foreign minister, John Baird, characterized the global effort as a fruitless “talkfest” that spent too much taxpayers’ money on bureaucracy. (Baird was not so concerned about taxpayers’ money when he and six friends used Canada’s London embassy for a free, eight-day holiday in 2012,
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prompting the NDP’s Paul Dewar to call the foreign affairs minister a “freeloader.” The previous New Year’s Eve, Baird had holidayed without charge in the Canadian Consul in New York.) The amount in question, required to support the drought convention between 2010 and 2012 was $238,000. Meanwhile, the Harper government spent more than a hundred times that amount commemorating the War of 1812.
In classic Harper-government fashion, Baird refused to take any questions about quitting the drought convention, referring reporters to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). There was irony in his deflection. A week before, Canada’s foreign-aid agency had been swallowed up by the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. The loss of its independence conferred a new role on CIDA. It would not be dealing solely with development to alleviate poverty in underdeveloped nations. It would now play a supporting role in international trade deals—and not necessarily in poor countries. Foreign aid, it seemed, was now tied to doing business with your “benefactor.”
Another dubious novelty about the Harper government’s view of CIDA was that, according to critics such as University of
Ottawa professor Stephen Brown, the agency was being used, in effect, to pay for the social and environmental damage of mining abroad by highly profitable Canadian resource companies. Firms such as Barrick Gold and Rio Tinto Alcan created so-called “corporate social responsibility projects” in tandem with aid agencies, often establishing them near mining projects. Regardless of the spin, the aim was obvious: to have Canadian taxpayers underwrite some of the costs of private Canadian companies operating in foreign countries.
In an interview with the
Ottawa Citizen
, Professor Brown called it “scandalous” that foreign-aid dollars, getting scarcer by the year under Harper, were subsidizing poor Canadian corporate practice. (According to Daryl Copeland, under Harper $377 million in cuts had been made to CIDA and another $314.5 million to DFAIT.) Why shouldn’t the companies who were doing all the damage and making all the profits pay for their own misdeeds? It was yet another example of the Harper government allowing big business to socialize its costs and privatize its profits, this time at the expense of Canada’s foreign-aid program.
The country’s reputation was beginning to take a beating. Canada had been odd man out at the G8 meeting on Middle East peace talks and the first to withdraw from Kyoto. Ottawa had broken its pledge on emission reductions made in Copenhagen, and had become the only state out of 193 countries to quit the UN drought convention. Canada was now using foreign aid to subsidize the damaging consequences of mining
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abroad by Canadian resource giants. And these weren’t the only blemishes on the government’s often shabby foreign policy; the list was long and dumbfounding to Ambassador Heinbecker.
In 2009, Canada imposed visa restrictions on visitors from Mexico. “How could we have blundered into the Mexico visa fiasco?” Heinbecker asks. “These are our North American free
trade partners. How could we betray people who stood in the immigration line according to our law and then tell them their applications have been erased but they are welcome to start all over again?” He is also aghast at Harper’s tactics in the United Arab Emirates:
We showed tremendous incompetence with the United Arab Emirates. For nine years they allow us to use Camp Mirage as a staging area for our troops going back to Afghanistan. This was no small risk to them, affording a base to people who were going to fly out and go fight Muslims. They ask us for more commercial flights into Canada and we say no. The prime minister goes to Europe and lectures them on their financial crisis. He makes derogatory judgments on the Iranians. He sends the message that it is all right with Canada if those threatening Iran use military force. No other prime minister made those kinds of statements. In my books, that is just irresponsible. Their whole foreign policy comes down to the four ‘I’s’: inexperience, ignorance, incompetence, and ideology.
Even when the issue was literally motherhood, the Harper government dropped the ball with its international partners. Out of the G8 meeting in 2010, Canada spearheaded a worthy effort to improve maternal health and reduce early childhood death in poor countries. The government announced (and re-announced in 2013) a financial commitment of $3 billion over five years to support mothers and children in poor nations. Harper’s G8 colleagues liked the idea, until Harper’s then foreign affairs minister, Lawrence Cannon (now ambassador to France), told a House of Commons committee that the maternal health initiative “does not deal in any way, shape or form with family planning.” Both the United States and Britain rebuked the absurd restriction. In less than a week, Prime Minister Harper had to disavow statements
from two of his own cabinet ministers and declared a compromise position that he hoped would satisfy his political base: the maternal and child health initiative would fund contraception but not abortion. He was still not prepared to offer the full spectrum of reproductive health services that Canadian women have enjoyed since the 1988 Supreme Court of Canada decision that struck down the country’s abortion law as unconstitutional under Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Stephen Harper’s knack for upsetting his international colleagues has not gone unnoticed. Four former Canadian prime ministers have openly panned the Harper government’s foreign policy, including two Progressive Conservatives, Joe Clark and Kim Campbell. All of them saw more deeply into the consequences of poorly-thought-out foreign policy than Harper or his foreign ministers.
Walking away from the drought convention, for example, was only part of a profoundly more important story: the decision to shift the country’s diplomatic and development efforts from Africa to South America. Interestingly, the shift was made just at the time Ottawa was negotiating free-trade deals in South America. A lot of critics, including Paul Heinbecker, saw such a diplomatic realignment as both a short- and long-term disaster in the making. “Leaving Africa is a monumental mistake for Canada,” says Heinbecker. “It is no longer the basket case of the planet. Huge strides are being taken there, including education for women and girls on an unprecedented scale. This place is going to be a planetary powerhouse. It will become the world’s most populous place. And we will be dealt out.”
It was an analysis I had heard before. Former prime minister Paul Martin told me that he found it morally and economically irresponsible to pull back from engagement with Africa as the Harper government was doing. It was undeniably true that Africa
would have the largest agglomeration of people on the planet by 2050—a continental population estimated at two billion. Martin also believed that the world has a big stake in the outcomes of national experiments in North and Sub-Saharan Africa. If countries like Canada don’t engage in the battle to close the gap between great wealth and crushing poverty in places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the result will be heavily armed, failed states foisting junta-governance on their own peoples and presenting a threat to global peace. Martin was appalled.
“The Harper government’s African policy is incomprehensible,” he told me, “. . . they walked away from decades of Canadian governments building a bridgehead to Africa. . . . Throughout Canada’s history, governments of differing political stripes have succeeded each other. The tendency has been to build on the successes of previous governments.” Martin believes that in the case of Africa, the Harper government has abandoned the constructive policies of both the Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments before them. “The Canadian perspective has always believed it can be a player in fostering social justice and economic development. That has been Canadian policy since the time of my father, Paul Martin Senior,” said Martin. “Now Stephen Harper says we’ve paid enough attention to Africa and it’s time to shift Canada’s focus to South America. Why does he think the two are mutually exclusive? Canada has always been involved in both Africa and Latin America, and so we should be. Now the Conservatives have marginalized Canada’s reputation in both.”