A couple of weeks ago, an article in the National Post asked whether Governor General Julie Payette’s efforts to solicit support for Canada’s bid for election to the United Nations Security Council for 2021-22 crossed a political line. Not only was the Crown’s representative acting diplomatically on Canada’s behalf, she was doing so to advance an issue with partisan undertones.
 
The article raises two issues: (1) whether it’s appropriate for governors general to be political and (2) whether lobbying for a Security Council seat should be considered partisan.
 
I will leave it to constitutional experts like Philippe Lagassé to answer the first question. I am more concerned by implication that, through her actions, Payette was inserting herself into partisan politics.
 
A seat on the Security Council would belong to Canada - not to the Liberal Party. On paper, then, interventions to secure that seat seem to further the national interest, not one party’s partisan agenda.
 
Yet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has gone to great lengths to brand the Security Council campaign in his image. For the first time in Canada’s history, it was he – and not the minister of foreign affairs or a senior public servant – who officially announced Canada’s intent to bid. What’s more, the decision to pursue a seat was framed in the context of a distinctly Liberal message that Canada was “back” on the world stage after a ten-year hiatus under the Harper Conservatives.
 
The politicization of Canada’s Security Council aspirations is a relatively new phenomenon. In the last successful campaign of 1998, the opposition Reform Party offered the governing Liberals their full support.
 
Things changed at some point during the Harper government’s unsuccessful campaign for a seat for 2011-12.
 
Conservative supporters blame the Liberals, whose leader, Michael Ignatieff, publicly questioned whether Canada “deserved” a seat on the council in light of what he deemed to be the Harper government’s confrontational and ineffective foreign policy.
 
Conservative critics fault the Harper government for refusing to solicit or accept assistance from the opposition parties during the campaign and then blaming Ignatieff for the defeat.
 
Neither side is innocent.
 
More important, though, is what the current government can do differently over the five months that remain before the vote on June 17th. Here are three ideas:
 
First, offer opposition leaders a confidential briefing on the state of the campaign and the way ahead. Particularly in a minority Parliament, such outreach should be automatic.
 
Second, invite qualified members of the opposition to participate in the current bid. Conservative MP Peter Kent lobbied for council votes effectively on the Harper government’s behalf in Latin America in 2010. The NDP’s Heather McPherson is the former executive director of the Alberta Council on Global Co-operation and has previously served on a Canadian delegation to the UN.
 
Finally, form a non-partisan advisory council to feed into Global Affairs Canada’s thinking on all things Security Council-related. The group’s composition and mandate should mirror the NAFTA Council that served the Trudeau government well in 2017-18.
 
In short, it doesn’t matter whose fault it was for injecting politics into Canada’s Security Council aspirations. Partisanship hurts the bid, and the Trudeau government should do everything it can to eliminate it.
 
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To learn more about Canada’s history on the Security Council (and why pursuing a seat is consistent with the national interest), please check out my new book or the podcast that discusses it. The Canadian Global Affairs Institute also just released a shorter, policy brief that I wrote about the history of Ottawa’s nine efforts to pursue a council seat. My research draws extensively from the excellent scholarship of David Malone, currently the rector of United Nations University and a former director general in Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and David Bosco, whose own history of the UN Security Council, Five to Rule them All, is outstanding. If you are interested in the UN more generally, take a look at some of the scholarship by the University of Manitoba’s Andrea Charron or my RMC colleague, Jane Boulden.  
 
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It’s rare that columnists from the National Post and the Toronto Star agree, but last Friday John Ivison of the Post and Heather Scoffield of the Star wrote remarkably similar columns criticizing Justin Trudeau’s initial, measured response to the tragic plane crash in Iran.
 
To Ivison, the prime minister’s reaction did not “instil confidence that the families of the [57] Canadians who perished will see any kind of justice.”
 
“If Canadians were looking for their prime minister to express their fury and the anguish,” he added, “they were sorely disappointed.”
 
Scoffield described Trudeau’s response as “subdued.” She called his preference for quiet diplomacy a failure, and asked: “Would indignation work any better? Maybe not — but at least we’d be telling Trump that we see his recklessness for what it is. And this week, it would certainly have reflected the mood of an angry and grieving nation. Sometimes, that’s a leader’s job.”
 
Neither thought there was any chance that the Iranians would admit liability and open up the country to an international investigation.
 
No doubt both are now eating humble pie, and it is not my intent to humiliate them further. (Having eaten my share of humble pie in the past, I empathize with their position.)
 
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the Trudeau government’s diplomatic approach to dealing with the Iranian government has already achieved far more than any expressions of fury and indignation ever could.
 
Diplomacy is not, as these journalists (and countless politicians and activists from across the political spectrum) are inclined to suggest, a sign of weakness. In this case in particular, it was almost certainly more difficult for Trudeau not to lash out in anger than it was to remain calm and offer Teheran every opportunity to save face.
 
Having closed our embassy in Iran, Ottawa needed to be invited into the country to investigate and repatriate the remains of those who lost their lives. So long as there remained the slightest chance that Tehran would open its doors, it made no rational sense to be provocative. (And even now that Canadians are inside the country, it’s still worth treading cautiously, seeing as Iran does not recognize dual citizenship. To the regime, the majority of Canadians who perished are Iranian citizens.)
 
The last 20 years of Canadian foreign policy, under Liberals and Conservatives, have too often seen our leaders privilege feeling good about ourselves over achieving results. Regrettably, columns like Ivison’s and Scoffield’s encourage such shallowness.
 
Diplomacy is hard, and it’s ugly. It often fails. And even when it works, the results aren’t always ideal. Still, when it comes to a country like Canada – lacking in the population size and military strength necessary to impose its interests – diplomacy is what we have. Kudos to the government for continuing to exhibit patience and firmness in the face of such heart-breaking devastation.
 
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For commentary on this issue, I will always want to know what Thomas Juneau has to say. The indefatigable Bessma Momani is also consistently helpful. On Iran, please look up my colleague, Pierre Pahlavi. The Canadian who encapsulated the best of quiet diplomacy was the former assistant deputy minister of external affairs and president of the old Canadian Institute of International Affairs (now the Canadian International Council), John Holmes. I wrote a book about him a while back.
 
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