A Liberal myth on its last legs
Leslie may herald realistic foreign policy
Chris Selley
National Post
15 Sep 2014
Retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie was last seen making Conservative and Sun News heads explode with criticisms of Israel's "indiscriminate" and "dumb" bombing of civilians in Gaza. But on Saturday at the general meeting of the Liberals' Ontario wing in Markham, during a foreign policy session for delegates, Mr. Leslie did not talk like a man on a leash.
He did cede a question on Gaza to co-panelist Kirsty Duncan, the Liberals' international development critic. But on Canada's shuttered embassy in Tehran, he suggested the Conservatives aren't just uninterested in diplomacy, but hope to "exacerbate [the] situation ... as a way to either anger, or get excited, their base." And on radicalized young men shipping out to fight for ISIS, he called it "a tragedy for [the] families that have lost their young men." He even dared mention the need to "deal with some of the root causes - disaffection, disenfranchisement, whatever it might be."
He said nothing remotely outrageous, don't get me wrong. He sounded intelligent, experienced and reasoned. But now that he's in politics, he's gunpowder for the Conservatives' dumb-dumb fundraising blasts: "Can you believe what [INSERT NAME] said? Send $5 to help us save Canada from [INSERT NAME]!"
Unfortunately for the Conservatives, Mr. Leslie is not an airhead sociology major who thinks Israel is evil and terrorists need hugs, but a highly decorated soldier. Smart, confident, eloquent people needn't worry so much about contrived freakouts from panicked opponents. The panicky opponents tend to wind up look silly. Mr. Leslie calmly stood by his comments on Israel. Maybe the Tories raised a few bucks, but they're still in no position to win an election.
If we could measure the gaps between reality and partisan rhetoric in Canadian politics, the widest might be found on foreign policy. To Conservatives, the Chrétien-Martin Liberals were ineffectual, anti-Israel milquetoasts; to Liberals, Stephen Harper's Conservatives are ineffectual, stridently pro-Israel chest-thumpers who've been dragging Canada's good name through the mud.
"We have lost our place in the world," Ms. Duncan intoned at the Saturday session. "Multilateralism mattered to Canada, and Canada mattered to the world." After an awkward pause, she came up with some examples: the anti-land mines treaty, opposition to apartheid, support for Africa (which she said the Conservatives have "abandoned") and ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.
It's not a terrible list, I suppose. But OECD figures do not support the common refrain that the Tories abandoned Africa - quite the opposite. The 32 non-signatories to the land mines treaty include Russia, China and the United States. And in a rational universe, no Liberal would ever boast about Kyoto. In 1998, Jean Chrétien committed Canada to reducing carbon emissions to 6% below 1990 levels. In the last year of Liberal government, emissions were 23% higher.
The Liberals assembled in Markham were in an ebullient mood. Elizabeth Wood McDonald, who is seeking the Liberal nomination in Sarnia-Lambton, told me she had been to these meetings since John Turner's time, and had never seen such enthusiasm. You can understand why: After two failed experiments with bookishness, they have a telegenic leader who bats away Conservative smears with a roll of his eyes.
But underneath, is it a new party? Has it come to terms with its past failures? Is it willing to confront sacred myths? On the foreign file, will Liberals keep banging on about peacekeeping, honest-brokering, Kyoto and not going to Iraq, or are they ready to turn the page?
Ms. Duncan's comments might make you wonder. But Mr. Leslie is clearly not cut from that cloth, and neither, it seemed, were most in the room.
The Liberals aren't the only party that traffics in myth, needless to say. Conservatives probably exaggerate the effects of their "strong, principled" foreign policy even more than Liberals exaggerate their great feats of multilateralism. But the latter may have enabled the former, one astute delegate argued - because "to be honest," he said, "Canadians did use to want to have their cake and eat it when it came to the military."
"They wanted to have a military that they were sort of proud of, but they wanted to think of it as only doing the nicest kind of peacekeeping," he continued. While the party should avoid "the jingoism that Harper sometimes goes in for," he argued it needs "a more frank and realistic view" of the military's role.
"I could not have said that better myself," Mr. Leslie responded, and asked if anyone disagreed.
Ms. Wood McDonald's was the only hand I saw. "I wish Justin were like his father," she told me later, sounding wistful. She'd like to see him questioning "why we're still in NATO," for example. She thinks it has needlessly antagonized Russia.
There's nothing even half that dramatic to differentiate Liberal and Conservative foreign policy nowadays. But as Andrew Leslie knows, there is an awful lot of screeching over small differences. If the Liberals can leave the Suez crisis and Kyoto in the past and come up with a foreign policy that mostly does what it says and mostly says what it does, it would be a remarkable and welcome chapter in the party's reinvention.
