The WE controversy will likely be recalled as one of the Trudeau government’s greatest failures.
 
Just about everything about the Canada Student Service Grant Program (CSSG) – an effort to compensate students up to $5000 for up to 500 hours of volunteer service during the summer of 2020 – stunk.
 
From the very idea of paying students to volunteer, to paying them less than minimum wage, to outsourcing the administration of the program at all, to outsourcing it to a charity with close ties to senior members of the government, to the failure of said members to recuse themselves from Cabinet discussions of the program, to the failure of just about everyone in Ottawa to realize that the charity itself was a questionable enterprise, one cannot help but wonder how any of this could have possibly happened.
 
(For a timeline of the controversy, see here.)
 
It is therefore hardly surprising that in the aftermath of WE Charity's withdrawal from the administration of the program, the Liberals have lost popular support, the prime minister’s personal approval ratings have declined, and the minister of finance has been replaced.
 
What I find more interesting is that support for the opposition (pick a party – this post is not a criticism of anyone in particular) has hardly budged.
 
It seems to me that, in the rush to catalogue the government’s failures with the CSSG, not enough attention has been paid to the disappointing response of the rest of Canada’s political parties.
 
While we have certainly been told repeatedly that the scandal “reeks of corruption,” I suspect that the less partisan among us would have liked to hear someone recognize that, ultimately, the checks and balances of our liberal democracy preserved the integrity of our system of government.
 
Thanks to the combination of a free press that kept digging and a minority Parliament that refused to stop asking questions, a government program that was flawed in every which way was stopped in its tracks.
 
A constructive response from the opposition might still have reminded Canadians that they made the right choice by denying the government a majority.
 
But it might then have pivoted to what seems to me to be the most significant challenge that the controversy (or scandal, if you prefer) has revealed:
 
The consequences for elected officials who fail to declare a conflict of interest are failing to deter behaviour that risks undermining public faith in our liberal democratic process.
 
Once Canadians begin to question, collectively, the integrity of their elected representatives, our entire political system becomes vulnerable to exploitation not just from within, but by external rogue actors as well.
 
There is no easy solution here.
 
Issuing even significant fines to those found guilty by the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner would punish parliamentarians of lesser means relatively more severely than it would those who can easily afford to pay.
 
Any sort of automatic dismissal from office would run counter to basic democratic principles.
 
And waiting for the public to decide the fate of an individual member’s misconduct during the next election risks sending the message that, in the immediate aftermath of the violation, the perpetrator gets a free pass.
 
Part of the opposition’s job is undoubtedly to oppose, but I suspect that critiques of the government of the day are more likely to resonate when they leave Canadians hopeful of what new leadership might provide – not just cynical about the political process as a whole.
 
On this front, all four of the opposition parties have disappointed. It is no wonder that their polling numbers have hardly moved.
 
***
As soon as I learned of its publication date, I asked the Canadian Forces College's library to order Memorial University professor Alex Marland’s Whipped: Party Discipline in Canada. It will be released by UBC Press next month. Marland understands Parliament’s political culture in a way that few others do. Until Whipped arrives, the second edition of Susan Delacourt’s Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them is worth another look. For an academic examination of the role of the opposition in Canada, see David E. Smith, Across the Aisle: Opposition in Canadian Politics.
 
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On July 31st, Canada achieved a significant foreign policy victory. It wasn’t flashy; it had little to do with Ottawa’s commitment to a feminist approach to world affairs; and Canadians are unlikely to see or feel its results directly any time soon.
 
But that’s how diplomacy generally works.
 
Diplomats set the conditions for national success by building relationships, nibbling around the edges of conflict, and reaching obscure agreements with allies, associates, and sometimes even adversaries, to preserve a system of rules and laws that is consistent with Canadian national interests.
 
The July 31, 2020 supplement to Canada’s 2016 Statement on a Mechanism for Developing, Documenting and Sharing Practices and Procedures in the Conduct of WTO Disputes – now endorsed by Australia, Benin, Brazil, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the EU, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Iceland, Mexico, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Uruguay – has effectively prevented the World Trade Organization (WTO) from imploding, for the time being.
 
Let me explain.
 
According to its website, the World Trade Organization “is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade between nations… The goal is to ensure that trade flows as smoothly, predictably and freely as possible.”
 
When a member-state believes that international trade law has been violated by another country, it can appeal to a three-person WTO arbitration panel.
 
If either state-party is unsatisfied with the ruling, they can then appeal to the seven-member WTO Appellate Body, which makes a final, binding decision.
 
Appellate Body judges are appointed by WTO member-states for four years. They can be re-appointed once.
 
(For an accessible summary of all of this, take a look at this great article in the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage).
 
The WTO’s arbitration system began to break down in 2011 under the Obama administration. Washington’s disappointment with an American judge led it to block her re-appointment.
 
The move was disturbing, but not critical, as Washington appointed another judge in her place, and life at the WTO continued.
 
But when the Office of the US Trade Representative blocked a non-American judge in 2013-14, things got more complicated. For all intents and purposes, America had exercised a veto over a WTO Appellate Body appointment.
 
True, every member-state has always had such power, but the unwritten rules of diplomacy had dictated that no one would use it (based on the assumption that only qualified judges would be nominated through an apolitical process).
 
The Trump administration – which seems to believe that every international organization is unfair to the United States – has since used that same veto power to block every recent potential appointment to the Appellate Body in an effort to choke the WTO out of existence.
 
WTO rules indicate that the board cannot function with fewer than three active judges. In December 2019, Washington’s ongoing veto left it with just one.
 
Canadian governments have long understood that Canada benefits when its trade disputes are resolved through transparent legal processes. The alternative, “might is right,” will never be ideal for a country of less than 38 million in a world of almost 8 billion.
 
And while Ottawa has acknowledged the WTO’s many flaws, it has rightly privileged reform over annihilation.
 
In response to Washington’s actions, Global Affairs Canada established the Ottawa Group, a coalition of 12 countries plus the European Union that pledged to devise proposals for reform.
 
In the midst of these broader negotiations, in July 2019, Canada and the EU finalized their own, pre-emptive, interim bilateral solution.
 
Essentially, they set up a private appeals board to settle disputes between them in the case that the WTO Appellate Body could no longer function.
 
The success of the Canada-EU agreement appears to be linked to the Ottawa Group's recent break-through.
 
The 17 signatories to the July 31st supplement have established a Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement – comprised of a pool of 10 arbitrators – to replace the Appellate Body until its minimum membership is restored.
  
The solution is hardly perfect – for one, Japan has yet to sign on – but it does preserve a broad, international commitment to a rules-based order.
 
It is a prime example of Canadian diplomacy at its best:

Hard work, relationship-building, careful negotiation, and compromise have bought the WTO and the international community some time.
 
Hopefully, this interim measure will hold until Washington rediscovers that it, too, is best-served by the rules-based international order that it so carefully designed 75 years ago.
 
***
 
When I have questions about international trade, I contact the University of Lethbridge’s Christopher Kukucha. For the history of the WTO’s predecessor organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, check out Western University’s Francine McKenzie’s book, GATT and Global Order in the Postwar Era.
 
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