The writing, or rather the graffiti, is already on the wall; it’s all about Liberal credibility now. The Conservative Opposition has made it crystal clear — if the Trudeau government doesn’t change Harper’s decisions, it’s endorsing them. As an argument it’s morally craven, but effective in its own way.
While people voted for Justin Trudeau in large numbers because of the ‘positive’ things he promised to do, they also have a long list of things they expect him to undo. In the Westerns, it’s called ‘cleaning up Tombstone’. Trudeau is Wyatt Earp.
One of the true measures of success or failure for the new prime minister in his first year (not his first two months) will be how faithful he remains to the commitment to systematically reverse the worst of the Harper legacy. Steve was a bird who soiled the nest knee-deep. Justin must put on his rubber gloves and get scrubbing.
It will not be pleasant or easy work. Thanks to Harper’s schoolyard foreign policy, the Trudeau government is not in a good position to make the return to “constructive multilateralism” as promised during the campaign. The fact is, Harper left our international knickers in a knot.
His bomb-and-bombast policy in the Middle East has been an unmitigated disaster. It did nothing to bring peace to that part of the world, or to make this country safer. In fact, it put Canada on the map as a terror target.
Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of Great Britain’s MI5 domestic security service, just delivered that very message in the U.K. to the Chilcot Inquiry. Chilcot is examining why Britain really went to war in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It wasn’t to unearth weapons of mass destruction (the U.S.-led coalition supplied those). The reason was regime change — an illegal proposition under international law. In other words, the whole thing was a dark deception … which explains the chorus of lies sung on both sides of the Atlantic by the former political leaders who directed the invasion.
Lady Eliza’s testimony is turning the former British PM from Tony the Tiger into Tony Baloney. Not only did Hussein pose a “very limited” threat to Britain, she said, but invading Iraq under false pretenses “substantially” increased the risk of terror attacks.
According to the former counter-intelligence chief, the invasion was also a “significant” factor in the radicalization of Muslims living in the U.K. We see here the law of unintended consequences writ large: Tony Blair’s misbegotten war created “domestic” terror.
It’s worth remembering that Harper thought opting out of the 2003 Iraq war was a grave mistake. In fact, he and Stockwell Day apologized for their country’s policy in a letter to Americans printed in the Wall Street Journal. Once in power, there wasn’t a war Harper missed from Afghanistan to Libya. Then came Iraq and Syria.
Harper’s mess now rests uneasily in Trudeau’s hands. During the campaign, Trudeau promised to reverse the Harper policy and stop the bombing — a message that apparently resonated with a huge number of Canadians, given the results of the election.
But every day the question is asked with a slightly greater sense of unease: When will Trudeau bring the CF-18s home? And how deeply will Canada remain enmeshed in this inscrutable conflict when we do stop bombing? The answers so far have been mushy. Bringing Steve’s bombers back from the Middle East is a touchy business. But it’s a necessary step, if Trudeau is to keep faith with his supporters.
The sniping over Trudeau’s Syrian refugee policy, which originally was more generous on the numbers than Harper’s, may or may not become a genuine grievance. But there is no denying the fact that the promise has been substantially altered since the election — from 25,000 government-sponsored Syrian refugees by the end of 2015, to 25,000 total by the end of 2016, with only 15,000 sponsored by government.
It was not reassuring to hear Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship John McCallum say that the Liberals will have kept their promise by the end of 2016. With 10,000 of those refugees being privately sponsored, that’s a classic sample of Harper-speak.
No Harper policy has proven more feckless than the decision to close Canada’s embassy in Iran. When the rest of the world was trying to negotiate Iran out of turning its nuclear program into a bomb-making one, Harper was calling names, picking fights and walking away from the diplomatic table. Trudeau must rapidly get back in on the Middle East conversation — with all the parties.
Harper’s adolescent posturing is now a critical problem for Canada, since Saudi Arabia and Iran are close to coming to blows. Beheadings in Riyadh have led to an embassy sacking in Tehran. Now Iran claims its embassy in war-torn Yemen has been hit by Saudi fighter jets. It’s hard to be an honest broker in Tehran, as Trudeau would like to be, when you haven’t even got a consulate, let alone an embassy.
And it’s harder still when the previous government uses its diplomatic clout to broker a $15-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Some leaders think being a death merchant is good for business — and perhaps they’re right, in a screwy, corporate-morality way. After all, it’s 3,000 jobs for 14 years, right? What do mass executions have to do with it?
It is hard to imagine what good could come of arming a nation that beheads its critics, oppresses its female population and governs according to a feudal model. As for the genocidal war being led in Yemen by Saudi Arabia’s bloodthirsty Crown Prince Mohammad, if any current conflict is going to end up before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, it’s this one. Cities and civilians are being bombed with reckless abandon. It’s Guernica all over again. One more reminder that running a country, no matter how much oil it has, should never be a family business.
The young Trudeau government has declared that it will not cancel this dubious contract. Given Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record — which includes that country’s use of Canadian military hardware in Bahrain to quell public protests against the government in 2011 — Ottawa’s stance is flatly contradictory. It’s turning Canada into a Dictator’s Little Helper in the Kingdom.
Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion managed only to make himself look feeble when he made the claim that you can both denounce the mass execution of 47 people and do business with the regime that killed them. It didn’t, however, quite put him in bed with the unrepentant John Baird, the man who approved the original deal and who said he would sign it again, given the chance.
Dion did remind everyone of one important point in the new government’s defense. During the election campaign, Trudeau said that, as a general rule, he would not be cancelling contracts signed by the previous government. There might be exceptions, such as any contract for F-35 stealth fighter jets, but his basic approach comes down to this: What’s done is done.
But his refusal to cancel contracts doesn’t let Trudeau off the hook when it comes to Harper’s cuts to Veterans Affairs. Veterans will be watching to see if all nine VA centres closed by Harper are reopened in a timely fashion. The signs on that front look good. Veterans Affairs is on a hiring spree and the government insists that all nine centres will reopen.
Scientists are also watching closely to see if the muzzles will truly come off — the ones that the Harper government so firmly placed on them in the name of message control. They’re also waiting to see if the highly controversial decision to close the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario will be reversed by new federal funding, as the Liberal campaign suggested.
But far more important than any contract cancellation or program restoration is the question of what Trudeau will do with bad Harper laws — from the surveillance state overreach of Bill C-51 to punitive labour laws like Bill C-377, designed to make running a union more difficult and expensive.
As for the Fair Elections Act, it’s about as democratic as a frozen boot in the ass.
Wyatt Earp drew fast and shot straight. Nothing less is expected of the man who laid low the baddest man in Tombstone.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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