by Paul Martin
Of course, we don’t ever want our North to become as familiar as our Rocky Mountain parks. The Northern wilderness is too delicate to sustain that. For too long we have nurtured the North as part of our national mythology, but seldom have we given a thought to it as a place where people live and where exotic creatures and plants have long clung to life in an inhospitable environment. But the evidence grows more and more overwhelming that climatic and environmental changes mean that we cannot any longer indulge in this kind of benign neglect.
My minister of Indian and northern affairs, Andy Scott, and I were fortunate to have the direct input of three remarkable Northerners in shaping our northern policy. Ethel Blondin was minister of state for northern development and the MP for the Western Arctic. A Dene, she spent part of her childhood on a trapline and grew up in residential schools. Nancy Karetak Lindell represented Nunavut and is Canada’s first female Inuit MP. She was born in what is now Arviat — formerly called Eskimo Point. Both of these women overcame enormous challenges to establish distinguished careers at the highest levels of government. Larry Bagnall, the MP for the Yukon and parliamentary secretary for Natural Resources, led the fight against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Along with Andy, they helped develop an approach to Northern development that involved the co-operation of the peoples and the governments of the territories, rather than being imposed from the top down, as had been the case in the past. In this way, it foreshadowed our approach to the Kelowna Accord, which embraced all the First Nations, including those living in the North.
On December 14, 2004, in Ottawa, Andy, Ethel, and I announced our Northern strategy with Premiers Paul Okalik of Nunavut, Joe Handley of the Northwest Territories, and Dennis Fentie of the Yukon, almost exactly a year after I became prime minister. It aimed to bring the quality of life in the North up to the standard that Southerners enjoy. It addressed issues as various as housing, education, the environment, economic diversity, Aboriginal languages, sovereignty, and devolution of powers to the territories, acknowledging that each territory would need to seek its own path and address its own most pressing concerns. With $210 million on the table to get started, and the promise of more to come as the territories fleshed out their individual plans, we were on track to bring about lasting change for the better for our Northern citizens and a stronger foundation for Canada’s sovereign rights in the North.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Into Africa
You won’t be surprised to hear that I think my father was one of Canada’s great foreign ministers. His experience in the international arena began at the time of the League of Nations and was further shaped by the Second World War and its aftermath. Immediately after the war, Canada had the third largest navy in the world. It was in a position to develop nuclear weapons, though we chose to renounce that possibility. We played an important role in the formation of international institutions, such as the United Nations, and in some of its more muscular interventions in world events, including the “police action” in Korea and the peacekeeping mission after Suez. It was from this experience that the notion of a “middle power” emerged, and the related idea that Canada could find a role as an “honest broker” among the great powers of the world.
The problem is that world no longer exists. The Cold War ended with even more stunning speed than it began. New powers emerged, particularly in Asia, that have created a very different world than the one represented in today’s institutions such as the G8 or the United Nations Security Council. Even before all of this had begun to play itself out, the concept of Canada as a “middle power” had increasingly cast us in the role of handmaiden to the great power to our south, the little friend that could convince the behemoth to be reasonable.
By 1993, this idea had degenerated into Canada hosting a meeting between President Clinton and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in Vancouver. There we provided the hotel rooms and the scenic mountain backdrop but played no part in the discussions. Even if at one time there had been some truth in the idea of a middle power playing a brokerage role, it was looking increasingly dubious in an era where the Bush administration had adopted a “with us or against us” unilateralism. This attitude may have reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration, but it had precursors in the Clinton administration, notwithstanding its greater openness to multilateralism. Remember it was Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who coined the term indispensable nation in the context of the all-but-forgotten Desert Fox operation against Iraq in 1998. The full quotation is: “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”
It goes without saying that our relationship with the United States is fundamental to our well-being as a nation. The United States is our nearest neighbour, our largest trading partner, and our closest ally. However, the relationship has matured over 140 years. It is determined in part by our governments, of course, and waxes and wanes as any relationship does, but always within a fairly narrow band. This is because it is shaped to an even greater degree by the millions of business, educational, and cultural contacts that occur every day between people without any direction from governments. This is why the relationship is so strong. It is also why our role in the world need not be constrained by that relationship. To be sure, we will be far more effective if we have the support of the world’s superpower, but I believe that we will have the greatest impact on the direction of world events if we select an objective carefully and choose those opportunities where we can play a leadership role.
Our foreign policy should reflect our own interests and values. (I do not, by the way, subscribe to the view that there is much inherent conflict between them.) And in many cases, that will put us in concert with the United States. But where our foreign policy clout will be greatest will often be in places where the Americans are less, rather than more, active. We frequently have opportunities to show leadership in regions such as Africa and the Caribbean, for example, that are less central to American foreign policy. In order to show leadership, however, we have to back up our rhetoric with resources. The real problem with our foreign policy has not been, as some have had it, that we have cast ourselves in the role of the world’s stern grandmother but rather that we talk a good game but don’t deliver.
This view led me to the conviction that Canada had to re-energize its military. Canadians have long treasured our distinguished service as peacekeepers, dating from the era of my father and Lester Pearson — and rightly so. During the recent decades, however, it became clear that the “classic” peacekeeping role we played for so many years in Cyprus, for example, patrolling a clearly demarcated ceasefire line between former military foes, was no longer what world events were demanding. We had moved into an era in the Balkans, for instance, in which peacekeepers were called upon to play a much more robust role, helping to create the peace rather than just preserving it, and even helping to rebuild failed or failing states. At the same time, through the course of many governments, including during my stint as finance minister, Canada’s defence capacity had been whittled away.
On the advice of the minister of defence, Bill Graham, in February 2005, I appointed General Rick Hillier as chief of the defence staff. I was impressed with the man, his leadership abilities, and his vision for our military. He advocated a concept called the “three-block war” to describe its mission. The notion was that in many of the turbulent regions in which it was expected to operate, Canada’s military might be called upon to manage humanitarian relief on one block, stabilize a ceasefire on a second, and fight a combat mission on the third. This was not a rejection of our peacekeeping tradition but a revision to suit tougher times, and I supported it. General Hillier had a vision for the Armed Forces and a plan — including a capability to deploy forces quickly when needed. I had given a lot of thought to the role and capabilities of our armed forces when I was out of office, and I found that General Hillier’s views
— admittedly based on a deeper understanding — were very similar to my own.
Soon after his appointment, I had an important meeting with General Hillier and some of his senior staff in a small meeting room near my office on Parliament Hill. Bill Graham and Pierre Pettigrew were there along with their deputies, as well as Alex Himelfarb and my foreign policy adviser, Jonathan Fried. I laid out my priorities. I knew that General Hillier was a strong proponent of Canada’s role in the NATO mission to Afghanistan, which had been triggered, of course, by the 9/11 attacks. They had been masterminded from al-Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan, which were under the protection of the Taliban government of the day. I, too, supported the mission, but I also wanted to make sure that it was set in the context of other priorities.
“Canada’s role in the world is not simply to support a great power,” I said at the outset. “Canada has its own perspective that it needs to articulate through its military and foreign policies.” First, I believed that the world community could not stand passively by in the face of the slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan. I was certain there would have to be a substantial increase in the number of international peacekeepers in the region, and although the African Union might not think it right for our troops to be on the front line, we would want to put in more military advisers and supply funding for the equipment and training of troops from Africa. In addition, as the hemisphere’s largest francophone nation, I said we should shoulder special responsibilities in Haiti. Finally, I advised him that I believed we might one day be called upon to play a military role as peacekeepers if there was ever an Israeli-Palestinian peace pact, and that I wanted us to be in a position to do so.
The burden of my message to General Hillier was that our commitment in Afghanistan had to be shaped in the context not only of other current commitments but potential new ones. He assured me that he understood, and that whatever the next stage might be in our Afghanistan mission, it would not preclude our capacity to deploy elsewhere.
Why, you may ask, was Darfur — part of a faraway country of which Canadians knew little — so high on my list of concerns? My particular interest in Africa goes back to my youth, when I first spoke to Maurice Strong about a career in Third World development. While life took me in a different direction, it was never far from my mind. As finance minister I did whatever I could to lead on the issue of Third World debt and I was proud of Jean Chrétien’s leadership in rallying the developed world around a coordinated approach to Africa at the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. As prime minister, I was lucky to have an energetic international development minister in Aileen Carroll, who shared my views and passions. She refocused the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to put more emphasis on Africa, and helped rescue the flagging international effort to get retroviral drugs to Africans living with HIV/AIDS. When our government was eventually defeated in 2006, we were in the process of doubling our aid to Africa even faster than the G8 had committed itself to doing.
To me, it made sense for Africa to be a Canadian priority. Nowhere on earth are there so many failed and fragile states whose populations need the support of the international community. As I will discuss later, Canada was a leader at the United Nations in developing the notion that the international community has a “responsibility to protect” people when their political structures fail to do so. And since we are a developed country that was never a colonial power, and no one suspects us of neo-colonial ambitions, we are able to come to this work with “clean hands.” We are ideally situated to play a role in Africa.
When I came to office, the crisis in Darfur was about a year old. It was clear that there was an ethnic cleansing, which some have even characterized as genocide, of the black African tribes taking place at the hands of Arab militiamen, who were doing the killing with the connivance of the Sudanese government. Humanitarian groups working in the region were concerned that the flow of refugees was overwhelming their capacity to cope, as thousands of people arrived at the makeshift camps, starving and without possessions, every day. Still, the “CNN effect” — the attention drawn to any conflict once tele vision takes an interest — had not yet kicked in, and would not do so for some months. This was shaping up like the Rwanda massacres, of which the international community was forewarned, but somehow never galvanized into action, with ghastly results.
For all its agonies, Africa has never been a place to which the Americans have devoted much diplomatic capital. To me, Darfur presented a perfect opportunity for Canada to play a leadership role in keeping with my broader philosophy of our foreign policy. The world was sitting on its duff while a massacre was taking place. We set up a task force with representatives from Foreign Affairs, CIDA, and Defence to coordinate our response. General Roméo Dallaire, by this time a Senator, brought his experience in Rwanda to help us to understand the military issues and also helped us to raise the domestic profile of the crisis. General Dallaire has a profound, personal understanding of what it means to see people laid waste by massacre — and no one had a greater appreciation for the moral cost of standing by and doing nothing. Mobina Jaffer, who was Canada’s first African-born Senator, had already been Canada’s special envoy to Sudan for several years, and knew the ground down to the tribal and village level. Bob Fowler, a distinguished Canadian public servant and former UN ambassador, continued in his role as the prime minister’s African envoy — a position he had first held under Jean Chrétien. By the spring, Allan Rock, whom I had appointed as ambassador to the United Nations, organized what he termed a “posse” of countries at the United Nations that pressed the case for urgent action on Darfur to members of the Security Council.
Once it became clear during the summer of 2004 that the African Union was willing to take the lead, I decided that Canada would jump in with money and technical support. When Allan phoned me to say that $25 million was needed for helicopters, we made the announcement within four days. We also sent armoured personnel carriers to the region to equip the African Union troops for Darfur. Although the force mounted by the African Union was smaller and less capable than it might have been, Canada’s efforts helped launch it into the field, with others, including the European Union, following behind us. I spoke to George Bush about this during my visit to his Texas ranch, saying that Canada was going to take the early lead in Darfur, in terms of money, equipment, and training, and that I hoped the United States would quickly follow. He agreed. When we acted, the United States did swing in behind us massively, as President Bush had told me it would.
In November 2004, I travelled to Khartoum and met with Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir. It was a frustrating conversation. Bashir’s army had clearly been in cahoots with the Arab Janjaweed militia that was slaughtering people in Darfur. He feigned ignorance when it suited him and airily pledged compliance when that suited him better. At the time, his government was obstructing Canada’s efforts to get equipment such as the armed personnel carriers we had given the African Union into the area, and was even preventing our diplomats from getting visas. He said he would sort it out, which of course he did not.
In Sudan, I went to a displaced persons camp near Khartoum. The conditions were bad, but not as bad as some of the more distant refugee camps, I was told, in part because out there the Sudanese government was putting up obstacles to humanitarian aid. As we drove along the dusty road on our way out of the camp, one of the Sudanese security vehicles in our convoy hit a young girl from the crowd that had assembled to greet us. When Sheila and I heard what had happened, we went to the hospital where they had taken the injured girl — Widad Isa was her name — to bring her a teddy bear and a few toys. She was staying in a room that seemed to us quite comfortable, though we later learned she had been moved there after the Sudanese authorities learned we were coming to her bedside. At the time, it did not seem that her injuries were serious. When Canadian officials checked on her after I had left the country, however, her condition had become more serious. Eventually we saw to it that she
and her father were flown to London so that she could get better care, and they returned to Sudan after her complete recovery.
Canada’s leadership role in Darfur was recognized by the world community. In fact, by the spring of 2006, after I left office, the international negotiating team working for a solution to the Darfur crisis consisted of the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As ambassador to the United Nations, Allan Rock continued to play an important role. Yet ultimately international efforts have fallen short of what was needed. The truth is that the African Union force was never robust enough to do the job in the face of the Sudanese government’s stubborn opposition. Instead of an AU force of seven thousand troops, we needed a joint AU/UN mission of something more like twenty-five thousand. This has now been agreed to, but the deployment is proceeding at a snail’s pace.
There was ultimately an agreement among the G8 to assist in creating the capacity for the African Union to put together an action force of seventy-five thousand for use in such conflicts.
As I write this, however, nothing is happening. I had suggested that the G8 should provide the funding for equipment, training, and salaries in order to get the force into a state of readiness. If we were serious, we would have pursued this, but we ran out of time. The simple fact is, in Africa, we avert many murders, but our feeble efforts allow many more to occur. The African Union has its problems, but it is Africa’s best hope, and we have to make it work.