They wrote a speech the other day and ‘Chuckles’ Scheer, leader of Canada’s conservatives, read it. At the end of the day, Chuckles’ party had some foreign policy to show off and little was changed. The essentials of it were that Donald Trump and his friends were the good guys and the Chinese were inscrutable and the Russians over ‘bearing.’
But what is wrong with the conservative party’s stance on foreign affairs—whether mouthed by the party leader or other minion—is that it is more ideological than realistic. It is a quest for strong relations with like-minded right-wing governments. And Mr. Scheer has hardly considered the price tag of such alliances.
It is not just that the Trump administration, for example, is demanding that allies cough up more money in support of alliances such as NATO and NORAD, there is a very expensive missile shield in the works over continental North America that president Trump wants us to help fund. To-date, we have wisely said no to the system that probably puts us more at risk of being hurt by fallout from the system than anything aimed at us.
And do not forget that in the alliance the Americans want, we are supposed to buy their very expensive jet fighters that are designed for a close-in combat role in support of American objectives. Canada needs long-range defensive capability to assert our territorial claims up and into the Arctic Circle.
The madness of these close ties with Trump’s foreign policy is that we hardly need to add the growing number of countries that hate Trump to our list of countries who see us as lackies of the Americans. Canada once had the general respect of the United Nations and that is done by standing as a country that speaks and acts independently.
All in all, the conservative speech on foreign affairs had some fine words and a positive approach. It is too bad that there is nothing to back it up. It contained the words but not the vision. There was no intention nor conviction in it.
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Copyright 2019 © Peter Lowry
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