Canada loses its bid for seat on UN Security Council

"Scape" said
Canada is seen as too close to Israel to be an honest broker. That and Trudeau's big push of saying 'Canada is back' deflated fast when the response was we never left (Ireland/Norway). Our membership in the G7 and G20 was our only ace in the hole to counter that but with International agreements on the wane under Trump it was hard to make that case.

Good that this is done. Trudeau's vanity project is over.

The federal government has spent more than $2.3 million on its bid for a seat.

"bootlegga" said
to increase our limited political influence globally,

"Thanos" said
Apparently the last time Canada vied for a Security Council seat was in 2010, under Stephen Harper. We came in second with 114 votes, lost to Portugal. Today under Trudeau we came in third with 108 votes, and lost to Norway and Ireland. Harper hasn't been around for five years, so who gets the blame for today's humiliation? Jason Kenney? Rex Murphy? Don Cherry?

"Thanos" said
Apparently the last time Canada vied for a Security Council seat was in 2010, under Stephen Harper. We came in second with 114 votes, lost to Portugal. Today under Trudeau we came in third with 108 votes, and lost to Norway and Ireland. Harper hasn't been around for five years, so who gets the blame for today's humiliation? Jason Kenney? Rex Murphy? Don Cherry?

After four years of effort and huge sums of money and energy, Canada decisively lost its bid for a UN Security Council seat on Wednesday. It placed third, behind winners Ireland and Norway, and such a distant third that it was all over on the first ballot.

In other words, if Canada’s back, the world hasn’t noticed, or cared.

“Canada’s back,” of course, was the slogan much-loved by the Trudeau Liberals when they defeated Stephen Harper in 2015. It was always nonsensical. Canada remained engaged in the world during Harper’s tenure and continued to hold a high international reputation in surveys. The notion that the Harper years were some dark age in Canadian foreign policy might be true for a small section of Canada’s foreign policy establishment and no doubt is for Liberals, but no one else seemed to have noticed much. “Canada’s back” really meant, for Liberals, that they were back — back at the helm of the country they often seem to think it’s their birthright to rule. Getting the seat on the council would have been the symbolic confirmation of Canada’s (their) “return.”

And … that’s about it. There’s no other real advantage to a two-year term in one of the temporary, non-veto-wielding seats. No one outside of Canada much cares whether Canada has a seat at the table, and to be frank, the Norwegians and Irish have worked harder for it. Both are well ahead of Canada in foreign assistance spending, especially Norway, which is the world’s leader (per capita); Ireland has consistently contributed more than Canada to peacekeeping in recent years. Canada did contribute to the UN mission in Mali, but only after years of dithering, and that contribution was limited and brief. With no disrespect intended to the troops who took part, it was token, and ended as soon as the Liberals could arrange. A persuasion campaign by Canadian diplomats and the prime minister’s personal charm were clearly not enough to compensate for our manifest lack of interest in meaningfully contributing abroad. In fact, the Trudeau government got fewer votes for the seat than the Harper government did in 2010.

Not that it matters. Unless you count the millions of public dollars that Trudeau eagerly spent in campaigning for the seat. And the fact that he compromised Canadian principles, breaking a longtime pattern of not supporting anti-Israel resolutions at the UN while sweet-talking some pretty unsavoury world leaders in an attempt to win their votes. Not to mention the vast government resources he marshalled in pursuing his vanity project, even as Canada was dealing with a pandemic crisis of historic proportions.

No one outside of the Liberal party and Canada’s foreign service establishment is likely to be too heartbroken over this. That’s fair enough, as far as it goes — the UN is dysfunctional and, at least in its current form, obsolete. While some of its individual programs continue to do good work, as a whole, it’s best ignored until massively overhauled. Given its Cold War-era roots and design, such an overhaul might not even be possible. Indeed, Canada would have been better off investing its time and energy in campaigning for those reforms, rather than for a temporary place at the tippy-top of the current broken model.

But we didn’t, and now that our defeat is official, it’s time to ask some tough questions, starting with: Now what?

Seriously. Now what? Given the pandemic and the economic collapse and our minority Parliament, the prime minister could be forgiven an urge to turn inward and focus on domestic issues for the foreseeable future. There’s more than enough to keep him busy here at home.