Vancouver Province
for April 16, 1999
If nothing else this Kosovo mess we’re in ought to make Canadians ask themselves just what the hell kind of a country are we anyway?
The wisdom of Nato’s undertaking is, of course, very important. It is, to say the least, a very debatable point. For if the conditions precedent to a "police action" are that the objective be clear, that it be achievable and that once achieved it gets the job done I would argue that we’re 0 for 3. Unless, of course, the objective was to bomb and kill a lot of people in order to put Kosovars in even more danger of their lives and homes than they were in the first place.
I disagree with Canada’s involvement but that’s only part of what I want to talk about. I think we Canadians should take a long hard look at our so-called democracy.
Canada is a charter member of both the United Nations and Nato. The former organization was set up in 1945 to act, amongst other things, as an international policeman especially through its Security Council of which Canada is presently a member. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up in 1949 as a defence mechanism against obvious aggression from the then Soviet Union.
As a member of the United Nations, Canada has an enviable record as a peacekeeper under the UN flag. There is the Somalia blot on the escutcheon, of course, but our contribution to peace as peacekeepers has been accepted internationally.
The United States, under a badly discredited President Bill Clinton, decided to intervene militarily in Kosovo. The proper place for this decision to be made was, of course, the United Nations Security Council. Yet because Mr Clinton knew that Russia and China would veto intervention he prevailed upon Nato, hitherto a defence organization, to suddenly become a militarily active one. Canada, with all the independence of a dog on a leash, went along and is now actively participating in the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo.
If nothing else, Canada has badly blotted its copybook and will have a difficult time indeed persuading any future troubled region that it is a legitimate peacekeeper.
What’s worse, Canada has displayed to the world and worse still to itself, that it isn’t even a reasonable caricature of a democracy.
Was there any debate in the House of Commons before the decision to support the Nato air strikes was taken? No there was not. But appalling though that was, the Liberals went one step further and held a "debate" long after the war had started and then refused to have the matter put to a vote. My God! Even the bad old Iron Curtain countries Nato was set up to protect us against at least held votes in their parliaments however obvious the outcome.
Moreover, even with the so-called debate, there was no real opposition. The duty of the opposition is to oppose. And there is good reason for this because out of the crucible of hard debate emerges, if not a solution, at least all the issues for a democratic society to consider. While it was laudable for Preston Manning to question the deplorable process and ask what was going to happen if ground troops were proposed, surely it was his greater duty to lay out the reasons why the government decision to meekly follow Bill Clinton was wrong headed in the first place.
But Preston Manning and the other opposition leaders have fallen into the Chretien trap. Instead of screaming blue bloody murder from the time we dropped the first bomb they have been supine ciphers rendering approval of the game by playing in it. Instead of using all the procedural devices at their disposal to bring to the attention of Canadians the serious downsides to the Nato exercise, they gave it legitimacy by participating in a phony baloney debate that didn’t even have the formality of a vote at the end of it.
We’ve reached the point in our development as a nation where the government can do whatever it damn well pleases but worse, where that government has become the will of one man and one man only. The Prime Minister is a tyrant while parliament is an enclave of eunuchs and cabinet but a covey of compliant cronies.
This is where Canada’s at, at the end of what was, according to Laurier, supposed to be our century.