The Liberals voted against the initial mission to push back IS in Iraq back in October. But with polls still indicating broad support for the mission, many predicted Trudeau would reverse course and back the extension. Instead, Trudeau accused the prime minister of “failing to clearly (articulate) the mission’s objectives” and said the Liberal caucus could not support deepening Canadian involvement by expanding the bombing campaign to Syrian territory — where accused war criminal President Bashar al-Assad is fighting a bloody and interminable civil war.
“We cannot support a mission that could very well result in Assad consolidating his grip on power in Syria,” said Trudeau.
One expert in genocide and war said the government motion neatly manoeuvred Trudeau into repudiating his own party’s foreign policy legacy.
“I think now from a political perspective this is a bigger wedge issue because Liberals were the ones who helped bring about responsibility to protect (R2P), that said we must do more to protect human security. They are now basically turning their backs on that notion,” said Kyle Matthews, senior deputy director at the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies with Concordia University.
The mission has already exposed a split in the Liberal caucus. Veteran Liberal MP Irwin Cotler abstained from the first vote on the mission back in October — a decision Trudeau said at the time he respected.
Cotler himself described the decision as a “principled abstention” and, in a statement released at the time of the vote, reiterated his support for R2P while condemning any possible alliance with Assad.
“In particular – and this is reason enough for me not to support the motion – I am deeply disturbed by the Prime Minister’s statement that Canada would require the approval of the criminal Assad regime to carry out operations in Syria. To allow the perpetrator of war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, to green-light Canadian intervention is to turn R2P on its head. Assad should be a criminal defendant, not a coalition partner,” wrote Cotler.
Cotler has not issued any comments today on the mission extension.
The mission extension paints Trudeau into a corner. Only one Canadian soldier has died in the current mission so far, and polled support for the mission remains strong. But support is fading now in Quebec and Trudeau might have been alarmed at the prospect of Mulcair and the NDP making gains there at the Liberals’ expense.
“(The Liberals) could have sided with the government, which means that they would alienate the potential voters that they might have picked up in Quebec and elsewhere that (are) opposed to the effort. Or they shift left and lose possible conservative voters,” said Stephen Saideman, the Paterson Chair at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs.
“The strange thing is that if the Liberals were in power, they would be doing this. Maybe not Syria, but they’d certainly be doing Iraq. Because that’s what the Liberals have always done.”
The newly extended mission will hit the half-way mark when Canadians are heading to the polls. Right now, the odds of the mission influencing many votes appears low. Historically, Canadians haven’t voted based on foreign affairs; domestic issues like the economy, infrastructure, health care and the national debt tend to dominate federal election campaigns.
For Matthews, that’s part of the larger problem. He said that the opposition parties are being too narrow-minded when they frame the mission from a combat perspective alone, neglecting to acknowledge Canada’s international legal obligation to prevent genocide.
“The Vatican has come out saying there’s genocide against Christians. The UN came out last week and said that ISIS is trying to commit genocide against the Yazidis. U.S. air power has prevented ISIS from committing that genocide but the Liberals who helped bring about R2P aren’t even mentioning it, and the NDP won’t even mention that a genocide is taking place,” said Matthews.
“Harper is kind of right in that there is a humanitarian imperative here, and not just ‘Harper’s war’.”
Of course, the mission will be expanding into a direction that Harper himself ruled out months earlier. While in New Zealand last November, he said the mission cannot and will not be “interpreted as war against the government of Syria.”
“Because whatever objections the government of Canada has against the government of Syria, we are not interested in any war with any government in the region,” he said. “Our only military fight is with ISIS.”
Now, observers are asking what changed the prime minister’s mind about sending Canadian air power into Syria.
“I’ll be interested in seeing a more fulsome elaboration in what has changed so that the government’s no longer in need of explicit consent from the (Syrian) government. That still could measure what size of change they’ll be able to make,” said David Perry, senior security and defence analyst with the CDA Institute.
Perry said that, despite opposition accusations to the contrary, nothing Canadian Forces have done in Iraq to date qualified as ‘mission creep’ — but the mission could be creeping now.
“I would categorize the extension differently because the mission is changing, by expanding to Syria. If you wanted to use that terminology, this is much clearer evidence of mission creep than the return of fire from before,” said Perry.
“It’s striking because (Harper) could have decided we’re going to keep doing more of the same,” added Saideman.
“In some ways it is a harder road but it’s not necessarily as hard as some people describe it. We’ve seen the public opinion polls that show that people are pretty concerned with ISIS, particularly in the aftermath of Quebec and Ottawa in October.
“So what does he gain? He continues to put the Liberals in a very, very difficult position.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Kristie Smith
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