It was Commonwealth Day last week (I, too, didn’t know there was such a thing), and both the CBC and Open Canada published articles about it that got me thinking.
 
At the CBC, Janet Davison, noted the “longstanding debate and questions over the role and relevance of the organization” without coming to any strong conclusions.  
 
The article on Open Canada, by community advocate Spencer van Vloten, called for Ottawa to abandon the club altogether.
 
Van Vloten argues that even as the Commonwealth claims to be dedicated to promoting “equality, diversity, and shared values,” it includes as members a number of states well-known for their human rights abuses.
 
Canada gains little economically from the association, most of which is with Great Britain anyways.
 
As for our historical Commonwealth ties, Canadians are growing increasingly detached from the monarchy, and contemporary Canadian values are “at odds with a system of hereditary privilege” that forms its basis.
 
The article concludes as follows:
 
“When it comes to the Commonwealth, the tens of millions of dollars* Canada contributes each year to keep this ineffective, increasingly irrelevant club afloat could instead be spent improving the lives of Canadians in a time of great need.”
 
[*Canada actually contributes just over $10 million per year, hardly a negligible amount of money, but much less than “tens of millions.”]
 
It seems to me that there are at least three strong reasons to reject van Vloten’s argument, each of which speaks to the importance of understanding the role of diplomacy in contemporary Canadian statecraft.
 
First, and most important, the Commonwealth offers Ottawa a significant (54-country) venue for international negotiations that does not include the United States.
 
Put more practically, the Commonwealth’s biannual heads of government meeting provides Canadian prime ministers with a regularized opportunity to meet with their UK, Australia, and New Zealand counterparts (the other non-American Five Eyes members) without drawing potentially embarrassing attention to Washington’s exclusion.
 
Canadian prime ministers gain similarly privileged, unimpeded access to the heads of government of India, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, and Singapore, among others.
 
Second, at the operational level, Commonwealth membership provides Ottawa with regular access to nearly all of CARICOM, some of the fastest-growing countries in Africa, as well as a majority of the world’s small-island developing states.
 
In these latter cases, Canada’s status as the second-largest Commonwealth donor (along with its close relationship to the United States) makes it a country to which many of these smaller states will gravitate.
 
Such gravitation is what I suspect (and hope?) Foreign Minister Joly meant last week when she heralded Canada’s convening power: the depth and scope of our diplomatic network enables Canadian officials to assemble diverse groups of states with otherwise divergent interests on behalf of allies whose Rolodexes might be leaner.
 
Such convening power increases our international relevance, and occasionally allows Ottawa to shape the broader global diplomatic agenda in line with the national interest.
 
Finally, I wonder whether van Vloten has underestimated the strategic implications of a Canadian decision to unilaterally exit the Commonwealth.
 
Were the organization to lose its second largest donor, if it were to survive at all, it would be a shell of its former self, and Canada would be to blame.
 
Such negative international attention would be particularly harmful to a country whose interests are best promoted and protected in a multilateral system of rules and laws.
 
Once we make our own commitment to international organization conditional (and based solely on an overly rigid conception of 'what's in it for us'), we compromise our ability to criticize others for doing the same.
 
In sum, the practice of diplomacy in the modern era is significantly more complicated than a simple quantification of the measurable benefits and drawbacks of membership in an international organization.
 
For a country like Canada, that typically lacks the resources to effect drastic change in bilateral negotiations with the more powerful states, venues that allow for relationship-building with some of the international community’s smaller members – outside of the American shadow – should be welcomed, not nickel-and-dimed.
 
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On the history of Canadian multilateralism, see the third edition of Tom Keating’s, Canada and World Order: The Multilateralist Tradition in Canadian Foreign Policy.

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I read a lot of stories last week about whether the crisis in Ukraine will lead Ottawa to increase the defence budget to 2% of gross domestic product (GDP).
 
The arguments to do so typically include that:

• we committed to this NATO target a number of years ago but have never come close to meeting it;
• the world has gotten more dangerous and we can no longer afford to spend any less;
• among NATO’s 30 members, only Slovenia, Belgium, Spain, and Luxembourg spend a lower percentage of GDP on defence than we do;
• now that our fellow shirkers, Denmark and Germany, have pledged significant increases to their defence budgets, we really have no excuse.

 
Carleton University’s Steve Saideman has provided a compelling, straightforward explanation as to what the focus on 2% of GDP tends to miss:
 
“I mean, Canada was not criticized for being under two per cent when it had 3,000 troops in Kandahar and was engaged in difficult combat.”
 
I’d explain things even more crassly.
 
Canada could spend 2% of its gross domestic product on defence tomorrow if we doubled the salary of every member of the Canadian Armed Forces.
 
And while such a move might help a bit with recruitment and retention, it would do next to nothing for Ukraine, for NATO, or for North American defence.
 
What’s more, basing your defence budget on the size of your economy doesn’t make logical sense.
 
Major conflict often leads to an economic recession, which means a decline in a country’s GDP. So if you track your defence budget to GDP, you might end up cutting defence spending while at war.
 
All of this is not to suggest that Canada spends enough on defence, but rather that, instead of focusing on it as a percentage of GDP, Ottawa should be (1) determining what needs to be defended; (2) ensuring that we have the capacity to do so (we have some pretty serious recruitment, retention, and procurement problems right now that make me wonder what the Department of National Defence would do if too much new money arrived all at once); (3) costing the commitments; and then (4) figuring out how to pay for them.
 
Even more important, it seems to me that if the national conversation in response to the situation in Ukraine ends up emphasizing how much we spend, or don't spend, on defence, then many of the lessons that were supposed to have been learned from Afghanistan have already been forgotten.
 
Militaries do not fight 21st century wars alone. We need diplomats at relevant international fora; intelligence gatherers in the field; humanitarian aid workers on the ground; immigration officials administering the increasing numbers of refugees and displaced persons that wars create; settlement workers supporting those refugees once they arrive here; mental health professionals dealing with their trauma.
 
There is a tendency for people who study national security to talk a good game about these additional folks during peacetime, and then to forget about them when bullets start to fly.
 
Such was the case in Afghanistan, and it made a mess of the relationships between the Department of National Defence and the broader national security community; compromised Canada’s overall effectiveness; and left bureaucratic scars that have yet to fully heal.
 
So rather than having a conversation about the defence budget, let’s have one about national security writ large. And then let’s spend what it takes to keep Canadians, and the liberal democratic order upon which we depend, safe and prosperous.
 
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One of Canada’s leading historians of security and intelligence, the University of Toronto’s Tim Sayle, had a provocative piece in the National Post last week about how Canada might best contribute to NATO in the future. Sayle wrote the book on the history of NATO, and his argument deserves serious consideration.
 
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The ongoing tragedy in Ukraine has revived the climate debate here in Canada, and not for the better.
 
On one side seems to be just about everybody who wrote for the National Post last week. Consider, for example, this piece by Colin Craig, president of a think tank called SecondStreet.org.  
 
In “How we helped pay for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Craig claims that the Trudeau government’s failure to build oil and gas pipelines to Europe and Asia has compelled our overseas allies to rely on Russia for energy, hence fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine.
 
Setting aside the obvious partisanship (the Harper government didn’t build overseas pipelines either), the argument assumes that deriving energy from fossil fuels is the only way to grow an economy.
 
Surely, one could also use Craig’s premise – that oil and gas revenues are paying for Putin’s war – to conclude that if the West had fully weaned itself off fossil fuels by now, we could have so disrupted Russia’s economic centre of gravity that Putin would not have been able to attack Ukraine in the first place.
 
On the other side are people like environmental journalist Arno Kopeky, whose recent essay in the Globe and Mail comes with the headline: “Increasing fossil fuel production will not lead to peace.”
 
Kopeky argues that “From the moment they were discovered, fossil fuels have been intimately tied to the largest outbreaks of violence in our species’ history.”
 
To him, fossil fuels are basically evil.
 
Setting aside the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people who have been lifted out of poverty by the productivity increases achieved through fossil fuel energy, the argument seems to assume that all of these fuels are equally problematic.
 
It’s as if burning coal and burning natural gas cause the same environmental damage.
 
When such arguments form the framework of a debate, I wonder whether either side even wants to convince the other to change its mind.
 
It seems to me that a serious conversation would have to begin with an agreement on some basic ideas:
 
The discovery and successful exploitation of fossils fuels around the world has led to extraordinary growth, but that growth has come at a cost to the environment.
 
It has also enriched and empowered a number of brutal dictators along the way.
 
The long-term solution is a global economy that runs on renewable energy. But we won’t get there tomorrow, and there is a compelling logic – at least in the short term – to using natural gas to help wean us off coal, and then oil. (Nuclear power could also help.)
 
What does this mean for Ukraine? Next to nothing.
 
We aren’t going to build the infrastructure necessary to export liquid natural gas to Europe in time to make any difference to the current war.
 
But to expect Europeans to wean themselves off fossil fuels cold turkey is to disregard the extraordinary harm that would be inflicted upon the continent’s most vulnerable during the process.
 
In short, there is no easy solution here, and turning the crisis in Ukraine into a hyperbolic debate about fossil fuels and climate change doesn’t help anyone.
 
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On the environment and Canadian politics, I will be watching how Lisa Raitt, Jim Dinning, and Ken Boessenkool’s new organization, Conservatives for Clean Growth, affects the party’s leadership race.
 
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