In 1993, External Affairs had become Foreign Affairs and its new minister, Andre Ouel-let, insisted that his priority was to create jobs for Canadians. Quebec concerns helped shift the agenda. The fta had been popular in Quebec; talk of its abandonment ended. Instead, Quebecers must be shown what a strong Canada could do for them in the world.
High-profile trade promotion justified a series of “Team Canada” excursions in which the Prime Minister led provincial premiers and business executives on tours of Asia and Latin America, where Foreign Affairs officials mustered potential local business opportunities. Canadian diplomats also tried to train their masters to pay more attention to Congress and less to the White House. It was at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue where lobbyists and the politicians they financed made the decision that most affected Canada.
Meanwhile, American sympathy for Ottawa in the Quebec-Canada debate must not be jeopardized by any needless national assertiveness. When they found Americans planning bilateral trade deals with other Western Hemisphere countries, the Liberals promptly embraced a three-nation North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) with Mexico. At Marrakech on April 15,1994, Canada helped replace the post-war gatt treaty with a 131-member World Trade Organization (wTo), with expanded powers to end dumping and subsidies and enhance “fair trade.” Canada promptly joined the United States in challenging a European Union ban on cattle raised with growth hormones. Better known were WTO rulings against Canada’s protection of its domestic magazines and a 1999 decision condemning the 1965 Canada-U. S. Auto Pact.
Not all disputes went to formal tribunals. Faced with evidence of Spanish overfishing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, Fisheries Minister Brian Tobin had the trawler Estai seized and hauled into St. John’s. Spain threatened gunboats; the European Union, sweeping sanctions. Tobin shipped the Estai’s nets to New York and displayed their illegal features to the assembled media. A Canadian submarine went out to wait, discreetly, for Spain’s armed intervention. However embarrassing to diplomats, Tobin’s war “to save the last lonely turbot, clinging to the Grand Banks by its finger nails” gave unholy joy to Canada’s Peaceable Kingdom.
But many Canadians envisioned a more idealistic role in the world. Canada, they insisted, had to be a moral leader—promoting human rights, gender equality, and social justice. Was this agenda compatible with sweatshop labour in China or Indonesia? In 1997, when Chretian welcomed a cluster of dictators and democrats to the Asia Pacific Summit in Vancouver, protesters gathered. When the rcmp used pepper spray to disperse the crowd, Jean Chretien felt the outrage. Had he ordered police violence to protect President Suharto, Indonesia’s brutal leader?
Canada’s most conspicuous role on the world stage was played by its U. N. peacekeeping contingents. The post-Cold War “peace” was more violent and conflict-ridden than the long armed truce that preceded it. Not since the 1940s had more civilians died in a decade, or fled their homes—many to find refuge in Canada. The Gulf War had Been a harbinger of things to come. In 1992, the Yugoslav federation dissolved into murderous nationalism and “ethnic cleansing.” Canadian troops arrived from German NATO bases to serve as United Nations peacekeepers and remained long after their bases were closed in 1993. Civil wars continued in South-East Asia and spread across Africa from Somalia to Liberia. Washington asked Canada for help in Somalia. It became a disaster for the Americans and for the Canadian peacekeepers. No one had dared admit that Canada no longer had suitably disciplined troops to send. On a hot January night in 1994, a few violent and frustrated Canadian soldiers beat a young Somali thief to death. Over the next three years, the episode tarnished the Canadian brass, wiped out the Airborne Regiment, and reduced Canadian Forces morale to tatters. When a Canadian general, Romeo Dallaire, warned the United Nations of the imminent massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda, no help came. Dallaire’s U. N. supervisor in New York, General Maurice BarU, became Chief of the Defence Staff in 1997. His own “mission impossible” was to ensure that by 2000, women would fill a quarter of the combat postings in the Canadian Forces. Not even ardent feminists felt attuned to the so-called “kUl trades.”
After 1993, defence spending dropped from $13 billion to $9.6 billion, and the number of regulars from 83,000 to 59,000. Only the missions increased. Skills faded and equipment aged. Cancelling new helicopters left pilots flying worn-out aircraft, older than they were, often on rescue missions across oceans or the Arctic. When 1960s-vintage armoured carriers wore out, soldiers took training vehicles to Croatia and Bosnia. The armour really was make-believe; the roadside bombs were real. As service strength fell, more and more reservists were called up. Members spent months on difficult and sometimes dangerous peacekeeping assignments. After a few months at home, they were sent out again. The training experience needed to produce seasoned professionals became a luxury.
If senior commanders protested, it was up a chain of command that had become political. Since the 1970s, civilians matched military leaders in the Department of National Defence. Like admirals and generals, their promotion depended on telling superiors what they wanted to hear. A Reform backbencher finally shocked Parliament into action with a report that showed how low salaries sometimes forced junior ranks to deliver pizza or turn to food banks to feed their families. The government ordered a pay raise, but Paul Martin found only a fraction of the added cost. Defence officials were told to expect fresh budget cuts and purchasing delays.
Transferred from Human Resources to Foreign Affairs in 1997, Lloyd Axworthy broadened Andre Ouellet’s dour mandate. Recognizing a Canadian appetite for doing good in the world, Axworthy spearheaded a multinational protocol against the manufacture and use of landmines. China, Russia, the United States, and other major users did not sign, but who could criticize Canada for trying? Axworthy soon found other noble goals—the abolition of child soldiers and the release of political prisoners in Cuba. This served a more practical goal. When Cuba ignored the demand, relations cooled with the aging Castro, and Washington was pleased.
Axworthy’s human security agenda led Canada into more conflicts abroad. After U. N. peacekeepers failed to protect unarmed Bosnians from a Serb massacre at Srebrenica in 1993, they were replaced by NATO troops largely committed to protecting neighbours from Serbia. When civil war broke out in the Serb province of Kosovo at the end of 1998, Serb atrocities, publicized by Kosovar nationalists, once again encouraged NATO intervention. Canadian cf-18s were “interoperable” enough to join American and British jets in devastating Serb infrastructure. A month later, when Serbia pulled its forces out of Kosovo, eight hundred Canadians joined NATO’s occupying army. In September 1999, after Indonesia ended its occupation of East Timor with massacres and devastation, Ottawa sent aircraft, a supply ship, and a company of infantry to diversify a largely Australian occupation force.
Did human security agendas require more force in the support of righteousness than most Canadians wanted to pay for? It seemed so. Eighty-eight per cent of Canadians admired what their soldiers had done, but barely seven in ten wanted to pay for the necessary weapons and equipment.
World History
