Modeling Journey

In a few days, delegates will choose a leader for the Liberal Party. When they do that, they will be choosing a person who most likely will be the next Prime Minister. And they will be making a choice about the "voice" of Canada. The new leader will set the tone for the Party, and have an enormous impact on who is chosen to speak for the Party, and what policies will be adopted and implemented.

Bob Rae on August 10, 2006 spoke at the Munk Centre at the U of Toronto on the topic of Canada Needs to Find its Voice Again in Foreign Policy (Munk Speech). He made a number of important points, and delegates should consider what Rae said in the light of what Ignatieff has said over the past few months and in Ignatieff's writings. Rae said that "Our foreign policy will inevitably reflect who we are, our values as well as our interests." Note his use of the word "values" as well as just "interests".

There is a dramatic difference between Bob Rae's values and those of Ignatieff, with respect to what should drive Canada's foreign policy. This gulf has been illustrated many times during the campaign, and will be highlighted below.

Can Bob Rae give effect to Canadian values in the foreign policy he will pursue as prime minister?

Tom Armstrong, who was Ontario's Deputy Minister of Labour and of Industry during Rae's premiership, wrote an article in The Hamilton Spectator August 14, 2006 about Political Mythmaking: Ontario style. In it he said this about Rae's doggedness in trying to save jobs during that savage recession: "His personal efforts in achieving success exceeded, in dedication, intelligence and shrewd negotiating skills, anything I had previously experienced." Rae's efforts in many fields since losing the 1995 election bear out Armstrong's observation of Rae: he is a man who brings enormous practicality and gifts to bear on any problem he is involved with, a man with inclusive instincts rather than polarizing ones. This is a sharp contrast with Ignatieff, who to date in this campaign has succeeded in driving people apart more than uniting them.


The question facing Liberals is this: What is the Liberal voice in foreign affairs? What values should underpin any foreign policies of the Liberal Party?

There seems to be a clear choice between the values of the Liberal Party of the past (which Rae shares), and the pre-emptive war and American imperialism supporting underpinnings of Ignatieff.


Bob Rae in the Munk Speech was very clear: "We have no imperial ambitions, nor should we see ourselves as anyone else's foot soldiers in imperial adventures." Because Canada is not a neutral country but is "engaged in the world", Rae cautioned against the loss of our values as Canadians when fighting the terror onslaught: "We have also learned that in fighting that enemy we must not lose our way or our values." He went on to say that Canadians are a people of principle, but not a people of ideology: "We are pragmatic, not dogmatic."

We shall come back to how Ignatieff stacks up against these points.

Bob Rae clearly favours a "balanced, pragmatic, multilateral approach to global affairs." This is where the great divide between the new Ignatieff doctrine and the past Liberal values starts. Ignatieff was, and apparently still is, clearly on the other side of the use of a multilateral approach for dealing with certain major challenges, such as Iraq and the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rae approves of Jean Cretien's decision not to support the invasion of Iraq because it was taken as a result of the Government's "principled view that the invasion was illegal, and its pragmatic concern that an invasion can very quickly become an unpopular occupation." Rae comments that this decision was not taken as a result of a poll, but based on principle.

Rae then says that principles should guide our foreign policy in other areas, as well: "We should be clear advocates against torture and coercive interrogation, and for the promotion of human rights. There should be no confusion in what we think and say in these areas."

Are Ignatieff's thoughts in these areas clear or confused? Witness the many arguments about what he did or did not say about torture and coercive interrogation, and about his reasons for supporting the Iraq war, and you can only conclude that there is confusion, not clarity.


Ignatieff's views regarding multilateral approaches is very different from those of the Liberal Party. He seems to be against it, relegating it to a bit player once the mighty US war machine has come in and blasted a path for others to follow, cleaning up behind American armed forces.

Rae argues that "We need to find our voice again." Harper's approach to international issues is simplistic and out of step with Canada's traditional role in the world, and threatens to submerge the distinctive voice the world expects to hear from us. Rae's use of the word distinctive is obviously not and advocasy of a foreign policy approach which is a carbon copy of the American President's. Our policies should be founded on our values, and not on the values of our superpower neighbour, where our values differ from theirs.

By contrast, the "distinctive voice" which Ignatieff seems to be advocating for Canada is something drastically different from the values of the Party in the past few decades. Ignatieff seems to speak with an American voice. In his 2004 Whitman Commencement Address he said: "Being an American is not easy. It is hard. We are required to keep some serious promises." (Sounds a bit like George Bush saying that being President is "hard" and people should realize that.) Ignatieff later explained away the use of the word "we" in his speeches to Americans, saying that "Sometimes you want to increase your influence over your audience by appropriating their voice, but it was a mistake."


It is possible that Ignatieff has done more than just appropriating the voice of the American audiences he was addressing.

He seems also to have appropriated their values, as well as their voice, and some of those values are not consistent with Liberal Party values.


Bob Rae described the foreign policy of the Harper neocon government as the "Bushification" of Canadian foreign policy (U of Montreal speech on September 8, 2006). Ignatieff's support of the Bush doctrines with respect to Iraq, amount to the same Bushification of our foreign policy.

Ignatieff has been described as one of Bush's Useful Idiots by Tony Judt in his article with the same name (London Review of Books lrb.co.uk) 21 September 2006. Ludt spoke about the problems facing liberal writers in the US, faced with the Bush doctrines. He describes Ignatieff as one of the "intellectual supporters" of the Iraq war, and makes the point that the worldview of many of Bush's liberal supporters is that these supporters do not look on the War on Terror or the war in Iraq or the war in Lebanon "as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation ... Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and, as before, we must take our stand on the issue of the age." Judt also has this scathing commentary on Ignatieff's and other liberal supporters statements about their support for the Iraq war: they have "focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving 'preventive war' a bad name."

Rae and Dion focused on this aspect of Ignatieff's support of Iraq during the debates, and we did not really receive a satisfactory answer (Ignatieff's answers kept sliding along, changing from WMDs to Kurds to who knows what).

In passing, Judt makes the comment that "American liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end." Judt also comments on the willingness of many American pundits and essayists to "roll over for Bush's doctrine of preventive war". This is certainly not consistent with Rae's support of a principled foreign policy, based on Canadian values.


How does this fit with Ignatieff's writings and statements on foreign policy, in particular, regarding the Iraq war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

Ignatieff said that he was mislead by the "evidence" at the time into believing that weapons of mass destruction were in the hands of Saddam. When the Bush administration was pushing all and sundry, in a mad rush, to vote in the Senate and at the UN, so support war on Iraq, there were many who thought the evidence presented was flimsy, and that the reasons for the use of force were unconvincing. Howard Dean for one thought that, and said so. Jean Chretien thought that, and governed Canada accordingly.

And Ignatieff? He was mislead. It is a bit ironic that in his Empire Lite article in the New York Times Magazine on January 5, 2003 (two months and fifteen days before the US invasion of Iraq), Ignatieff wrote that President Bush "appears to be maneuvering the country toward war with Iraq." Did Ignatieff have some concerns about such moves by Bush? If he did, they did not seem to change his support for the Iraq war.


Let's dig a bit deeper. What did Ignatieff say about the need for a multilateral approach towards this Iraqi invasion? Did he come down on the same side as Canada's Prime Minister, Jean Chretien?

No. At the same time that Canada's government was recommending support of the UN initiative to deal with Iraq, Ignatieff wrote in his Empire Lite article that "The United Nations lay dozing like a dog before the fire, happy to ignore Saddam, until an American president seized it by the scruff of the neck and made it bark."

Does Ignatieff's view of the UN as a dozing dog match the Canadian view of using multilateral approaches?

Well, Ignatieff has explained his approach to multilateral approaches to foreign affairs, for he goes on to say: "Multilateral solutions to the world's problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless American bares its fangs."

Here we see in stark contrast the differences between Ignatieff's so-called realistic appraisal of life in a world with one superpower, and the Canadian approach. Bob Rae in his Munk Speech had this to say about Canada's relationship with the USA superpower: "Some will say that this approach will put us at odds with the United States. The United States is Canada's most important bilateral partner, economically and otherwise, and we should not take that friendship for granted. At the same time, when we have principled disagreements with the Americans, Canada needs to clearly articulate its views." Earlier in his Munk Speech Rae spoke of Trudeau: "Nor did Pierre Trudeau have the enthusiastic support of either super-power when he launched his initiative to point out the folly of the so-called "balance of terror" in the early 1980's".


Ignatieff in his Imperial Lite article speaks of the manner in which, post 9/11, America is to run the world as an imperial power. "It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on climate change an the International Criminal Court) that go against its interest." He then went on to say: "Iraq lays bare the realities of America's new role." And: "... Iraq is an imperial operation that would commit a reluctant republic to become the guarantor of peace, stability, democratization and oil supplies in a combustible region of Islamic peoples stretching from Eqypt to Afghanistan."

Ignatieff then agreed with Bush's decision to invade Iraq by saying that the Iraq war was justified because "Containment rather than war would be the better course, but the Bush administration seems to have concluded that containment has reached its limits and the conclusion is not unreasonable."

He also remarks that "Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire's interest has a right to trump the sovereignity of a state." I doubt that most Canadian's would agree with any claim by any state (be it an empire-lite state or any other state) to have interests of that nature which trumped sovereignity....

Ignatieff develops the rights of the Empire Lite further when he comments on the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Ignatieff doctrine involves the use of American troops in a pre-emptive role, followed by the use of UN troops in Iraq and Israel to "keep the peace" under United Nations mandate. As he says, "If America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region." And: "Properly understood, then, the operation in Iraq entails a commitment, so far unstated, to enforce a peace on the Palestinians and Israelis." He is clear on the roles of Europe and the USA under this imperial power: "The Americans essentially dictate Europe's place in this new grand design.... America ... enforces a new division of labor in which American does the fighting, the French, British and Germans do the police patrols in the border zones and the Dutch, Swiss and Scandinavians provide the humanitarian aid."

What role would Canadian troops have under the Ignatieff doctrine? Unfortunately, Ignatieff did not say (perhaps Canada was not on his mind right then).

Contrast Ignatieff's views with Rae's assessment of Chretien's decision on Iraq: "It was a judgment call that was fundamentally sound, reflected our values, and offered our independent voice."

And contrast the Ignatieff doctrine with Rae's view about Canada's role: "Together with others, Canada needs to do what it takes to get the parties to the table. Conflict resolution should be at the heart of our foreign policy, not an afterthought, or an interesting sideline to other efforts. This will require much greater discipline and determination than we have been able to do so far."


Finally, Bob Rae also sees that the Canadian values of compassion and concern for those who are vulnerable should play a role in our foreign policy. He says Canadians have a right to ask where their government is, why isn't it in the lead, when it comes to famine throughout the world. "If thousands of children die each day in countries that are in the clutches of extreme poverty, what will it cost us as a country to reduce, and then end the slaughter?" A noble goal, for a noble country like Canada, and very consistent with the values which underly this great experiment in nation-building.