Living in ignorant bliss

Editorial

Whatever other talents we have, Canadians seem to have 20-20 hindsight. In a recent Strategic Group poll for the Globe and Mail, Canadians were asked to cite a proud achievement of the country's foreign policy. The largest number – one in three – cited Canada's refusal to join the United States in invading Iraq. The next highest selection – at just 15 per cent – was Canada's global leadership on banning land mines.

The Iraq decision by the former Liberal government was popular at the time. Looking back, it seems even more prescient and wise. But the Iraq issue is a symptom of a broader trend evidenced in the poll, which saw 25 per cent of Canadians declare our relationship with the United States as the most significant influence on our foreign policy. A mere five per cent believed this ideological proximity to America was a positive thing.

The poll came out in part to mark the 50th anniversary of Lester Pearson's receipt of the Nobel peace prize. In contrast with that event, in 1957, today's Canada seems less independent on the diplomatic front. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Canada truly came into its own. Having been granted a longer constitutional leash by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, it would be almost two decades before the practical sense of our own independence took hold among the mass of Canadians. In the 1950s, with the economic engine of the country humming like never before or since, optimism abounded as Canada moved further from Britain's shadow and experienced a respite before American influence began to impose itself more noticeably on Canada's social, cultural and economic life.

Nothing defined Canada more distinctly on the international stage during that time than Pearson's conceptualization of "peacekeeping," through which even a small country, in terms of clout, like Canada could have an outsized influence on world affairs by donning blue berets and standing in the middle of erstwhile warring parties in Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean. In a time of emerging national independence, peacekeeping became the foreign policy of a proud and maturing people.

But the world has changed since then, not for the better. The United States has insinuated itself into the most dystopic conflict imaginable, a national nightmare comparable to Vietnam, or worse. And, while Canada's decision to stay out of it seems even smarter in retrospect, now that we know "mission accomplished" might still be decades away, the distancing of our country from American foreign objectives is a double-edged sword.

Canadians may carry anti-American attitudes in spite of ourselves. We may hate American policy as articulated by the Bush administration but, however flawed and unjust that policy and its implementation may be, the United States is still the natural place for our allegiance in a binary world where the enemy is medieval theocracy.

When asked the greatest threat facing the world, 36 per cent of Canadians said global warming. Just 11 per cent cited terrorism. Global warming, if it bears out as Al Gore and others predict, will indeed be our undoing. But, no less seriously, terrorism could also undo us – and possibly far more quickly. As the American experience in Iraq has shown – and Israel's decades-long struggle for peace demonstrates – terrorism kills innocents and undermines a society's values in ways that little else can. In Israel's case, a people who for millennia quested for peace has seen its dream of peaceful national self-determination gutted by incessant acts of Palestinian and other terror.

Probably because we have been blessedly overlooked so far by the major international terror movements, Canadians may not see the threat as ominously as Americans do. (The recently released interim report of the Air India inquiry made the point that Canadians did not view that as an act of terror against Canadians, which raises questions about who Canadians view as Canadian, and what role skin color plays in such a determination.)

But while global warming's impacts are moving at more than glacial speed, terrorism's impact can be immediate and massive. The economic and social impacts of 9/11 changed the course of American history in an instant. The bombing of a Spanish train, days before a national election, resulted in what can only be described as an election outcome determined by terrorists. We may be against what the Americans are for, but we would be foolish to imagine that Americans' identification of terrorism as the world's foremost threat is baseless.

Few Canadians now believe, as some iconoclasts maintain, that global warming is a myth, yet many of us cling to the charmed idea that terrorism is something of an irrational phobia; that it's all part of the American administration's attempt to manipulate their population with fear. May our ignorant bliss be unshattered.

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