Happy Belated Pearson Day
Oct. 15th, 2010 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tartysuzTuesday was the anniversary of what's commonly known as "Canada's Nobel Peace Prize": the one awarded to Lester B. Pearson for his work as a diplomat in the negotiations to resolve the Suez Crisis in 1957. Pearson went on to lead two minority governments as Prime Minister of Canada.
So how did the present day government of Canada mark the occasion? By embarassingly withdrawing from a UN vote that would otherwise have led to an even more embarrassing certain defeat in our bid for one of the temporary seats at the Security Council.
Since Pearson's Nobel Prize, Canada has prided itself as being an international "honest broker," who often took up the cause of smaller countries, punched above our weight in peacekeeping missions and forged the way on human rights issues. But the Harper government has pulled that all back. Now, we tie foreign aid to ideological objectives (and cut funding to countries without warning. A decade ago, we had over 3,000 peacekeeping troops out on over a dozen missions. Now there are a total of 62 Canadian peacekeeping souls on a handful of missions. Our "maternal health initiative" is a fancy word for "anti-abortion."
As Kenneth Roth from Human Rights Watch puts it: "Harper's foreign policy team is still acting as if 9/11 happened yesterday and George Bush is still in the White House."
The Harper government is blaming everyone else for the loss of the UN Security Council seat, while sniffing that we didn't want it anyway. But the fact is, globally, it looks like we've been de-friended by Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Europe South America, Central America and the United States.
How did this happen? Let Roth in the Ottawa Citizen and Chantal Hebert in the Toronto Star count the ways.
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ETA 16 Oct 2010
The Toronto Star lists 10 reasons for Canada's UN!fail. Includes doughnuts.
I also remembered that a couple of years ago, the Harperites held a press conference on Parliament Hill that had them set up a stage in front of Lester B. Pearson's portrait and physically putting drapes all over to cover it up. (I haven't been able to find a link yet.) At the time, I took it as a sign of things to come.
So how did the present day government of Canada mark the occasion? By embarassingly withdrawing from a UN vote that would otherwise have led to an even more embarrassing certain defeat in our bid for one of the temporary seats at the Security Council.
Since Pearson's Nobel Prize, Canada has prided itself as being an international "honest broker," who often took up the cause of smaller countries, punched above our weight in peacekeeping missions and forged the way on human rights issues. But the Harper government has pulled that all back. Now, we tie foreign aid to ideological objectives (and cut funding to countries without warning. A decade ago, we had over 3,000 peacekeeping troops out on over a dozen missions. Now there are a total of 62 Canadian peacekeeping souls on a handful of missions. Our "maternal health initiative" is a fancy word for "anti-abortion."
As Kenneth Roth from Human Rights Watch puts it: "Harper's foreign policy team is still acting as if 9/11 happened yesterday and George Bush is still in the White House."
The Harper government is blaming everyone else for the loss of the UN Security Council seat, while sniffing that we didn't want it anyway. But the fact is, globally, it looks like we've been de-friended by Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Eastern Europe South America, Central America and the United States.
How did this happen? Let Roth in the Ottawa Citizen and Chantal Hebert in the Toronto Star count the ways.
==
ETA 16 Oct 2010
The Toronto Star lists 10 reasons for Canada's UN!fail. Includes doughnuts.
I also remembered that a couple of years ago, the Harperites held a press conference on Parliament Hill that had them set up a stage in front of Lester B. Pearson's portrait and physically putting drapes all over to cover it up. (I haven't been able to find a link yet.) At the time, I took it as a sign of things to come.
