Georgiy Mamedov, the dean of the diplomatic corps in Ottawa is returning to Moscow. After 11 years in Canada, the Russian Ambassador seems to have become less and less diplomatic. He is calling a spade a spade and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird a sham. On Tom Clark’s West Block on Global Television last week, he appeared to be quite happy to leave Ottawa and the Harper government behind.
Mamedov made no effort to hide his contempt for the posturing of the Harper Conservatives. He makes it very clear that under a person such as John Baird, Canada’s foreign affairs are being mismanaged. He claims that he would be called in to be lectured on what the Russian government was doing wrong in the eyes of the Canadian government. “And that was it. It was just posturing,” the Russian claimed. He explained that normally when there was a serious problem between countries and how they perceived things, it could be discussed. He found that Canada’s foreign affairs minister was not interested in further discussion.
In various media interviews in the past couple weeks, Mamedov has made it very clear that the Harper government strategy in foreign affairs reminded him of how the former Communist Central Committee in Moscow used to handle foreign affairs. Posturing is not productive, the diplomat claims.
While the Putin regime in Russia is proving to be difficult in relation to the situation with Ukraine, Canada seems to be the only country that is not willing to discuss the issues. France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States are undertaking continual talks with the Russians in hopes of keeping the situation from getting out of hand.
Mind you countries such as France and Germany are reliant on the natural gas piped across Ukraine from Russia and they have a lot more at stake than the votes of Canadian-Ukrainians. Pandering for votes at home is not the usual way to fashion foreign affairs but then then Harper and the Conservatives have little subtlety. Mamedov is concerned that the Canadian stance is helping to escalate the problems instead of easing them.
The height of this Conservative foolishness was the very expensive trip to for the Hair and a couple hundred ‘friends’ to Israel earlier this year. What the Hair and his holidayers lacked in tact, they made up for in chutzpah.
Of course, Mamedov would be too diplomatic to mention that. It will just be another great story to entertain his friends with over vodka after retirement in his dacha outside of Moscow.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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