Opposition parties need to up their foreign policy game

OTTAWA—It is always easy to criticize the governing party. It controls all the political levers. One can even convince oneself that criticism of the ruling party is a form of civic duty, one’s moral responsibility for national citizenship, as it were. It is not so easy, however, to dump on the opposition parties. There are good reasons for this. The opposition parties don’t give you much to chew on. It is standard fare nowadays for opposition leaders to hold their policy cards close to the chest. The anxiety being that exposing their positions might end up blowing whatever winning chances they might have accumulated. Pushing the government with new ideas becomes risky. As a result, they get stuck in the frame of personal attacks and reactionary scapegoating, rather than providing alternatives for hard policy questions. This paradigm ultimately devalues politics. In a multicultural country like Canada, with its record-setting immigration numbers—431,645 in 2022 to be exact—the worst aspects of this paradigm play themselves out in international relations. Say something unpopular and you jeopardize losing the burgeoning bank of new Canadian voters. Silence becomes golden. The government gets a free pass. Bhagwant Sandhu is a retired as director general from the federal public service. Photograph courtesy of Bhagwant Sandhu New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh has issued only one against-the-grain type of foreign policy statement. On Aug. 26, 2022, presumably under pressure from his political base, Singh sent out an email listing 13 points he wanted the Trudeau government to pursue in order to compel Israel to improve its treatment of the Palestinians. Aside from that, he has simply tagged along with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s agenda, and in the case of Ukraine, he has even outdone Trudeau’s hardline positions. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has surpassed Singh. On Ukraine, he has been dead silent. Not counting his tweets about how he “will always stand with Ukraine,” Poilievre hasn’t offered any options to Trudeau’s policy to drag the war on forever. The Conservative Party’s official website has one “Slava Ukraini!” statement to mark Nov. 21, 2022, as the day of Ukrainian patriotism. Poilievre has also not said anything noteworthy on Haiti, Latin America, or the troubles in the Horn of Africa. It could be that Poilievre knows better. He did come out swinging with anti-China sentiments. But the Liberals took it away from him. On Jan. 30, Liberal MP Sameer Zuberi's motion M-62 to expedite the intake of 10,000 Uyghurs to Canada was debated; and Trudeau’s altercation with Premier Xi Jinping at the G20 boosted his anti-China credentials to match the Conservatives. Having lost the China issue, all that Poilievre is left with is to ask for parliamentary probes on “what the prime minister knew,” and repeating his claims about China’s alleged interference in Canadian politics. Could it be the apparent fear of opposition leaders to speak out as vigorously on foreign policy as they do on domestic issues is, in fact, misplaced? Polling data certainly seems to suggest so. On Jan. 2, The National Post reported on a Leger poll which found that a majority of Canadians (25.7 per cent), consider themselves to be in the centre of the spectrum; 23.6 per cent are on the left; and 17.9 per cent on the right. This holds true for income and age distribution. This means that the path to grab political power in Canada is paved around the political middle. Another poll released by Pollara on Jan. 23, shows that in ranking the greatest prime minister in our history, Canadians picked Liberal Pierre Trudeau (at 11 per cent) and Conservative Stephen Harper (at 10 per cent). That’s pretty darn close. These polls demonstrate that Canadians can cut through the noise and the image-building. They are not after right- or left-wing ideological dichotomies. In foreign policy, they want a centrist agenda that sees the Canada of their imagination reflected in the world—a quiet country of polite people, doing good. This ought to encourage the opposition leaders to take calculated risks. They can try it on for size with the government’s upcoming strategy on Africa, for instance. Singh could insist that the strategy not become a sales call for the defence industry or a cover for unfettered resource extraction. Instead, that it pursues diplomacy and helps bring political stability to places like Sudan, Somalia, and Cameroon. Poilievre can listen to his caucus members like Garnett Genuis, who recently co-authored an op-ed on Africa. “As a Western nation without a colonial history in Africa,” Genuis wrote, “Canada could have unique advantages on the continent.” He urged the government to “leverage our advantages to turn good feelings into concrete impacts, in both politics and commerce.” Genuis and Poilievre could go a step further and demand that the Canadian strategy not become a clone of the American version, which references Russia and China more than it does Africa. Both Singh and Poilievre want to increase their appeal to new Canadians voters. To do that, they will have to speak up and offer tangible foreign policy alternatives that reinforce the new-found Canadian identity of new crop of voters coming to Canada. Who knows? A few old Canadians might switch over in the process as well. Bhagwant Sandhu is a Canadian foreign policy commentator and author. He retired as director general from the federal public service. The Hill Times

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Opposition parties need to up their foreign policy game

Opposition parties get stuck in the frame of personal attacks and reactionary scapegoating, rather than providing alternatives for hard policy questions.

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