Canada – Page 102 – a sibilant intake of breath

Happy Canada Day

Having read a great deal of twentieth century history, I am naturally aware of the dangers of patriotism. Regardless, I think that it can serve a good social purpose when the character is aspirational rather than affirmational. Having an understanding of Canada as a respectable global citizen creates an understanding of interests that furthers that project. I would never claim that Canada has been unfaltering in the application of its ideals – shameful cases relating to the treatment of the First Nations and immigrants exist in close memory – but I would claim that pride rooted in Canadian ideals and in Canada insofar as it achieves those ideals is a good thing.

Last Canada Day, I was in Ottawa with my brother Sasha, my father, and several of my cousins. I remember being fairly exhausted from having spent the previous night at a party thrown by my very good friend Alison Benjamin, who was living in Toronto at the time. While in Ottawa, we played frisbee on the lawn in front of the Parliament buildings. Several times, the disc flew over the four-foot fence, and one of the police officers on the other side would return it to us. At several other times, we were interrupted by an intermittant thunderstorm, which punctuated the day. Thankfully, it did not emerge during the aggressively bilingual Canadian concert, followed, for us, by poutine eaten on the road in front of Parliament, after the fireworks.

Canada Day 2004, I spent traveling back from Italy, where I spent several weeks with Meghan, her sister, and her friend Tish.

The previous Canada Day was my most Canadian ever: I was paddling northward across Dodd Lake, in the rain, with Meghan. In a nearby canoe – the only people nearby for many kilometres – were my father and my brother Mica. This was during the course of the Powell Forest Canoe Circuit, a shorter and much less crowded alternative to the Bowron Lakes Circuit. It is also better provided for with petites grenouilles, though less well stocked with moose.

In any case, to the 33 million Canadians back home and all my fellow Canadians abroad: Vive Le Canada!

To those in Oxford, remember about the party tonight. I already have large amounts of beer and Tegan & Sara recordings at the ready.

Another scholarship rejection

It was the J. Armand Bombardier Internationalist Fellowship this time. They lose points for sending out rejections by email. “Dear Applicant…” It was always a long shot, with 678 applicants for 25 fellowships and what I am told is a strong preference for people aiming at French language related programs.

Now, there are only two small ones left, plus the departmental bursary: for which all of these rejections (Commonwealth, Chevening, ORS, Bombardier, etc) are actually an advantage. I have never actually received any scholarship for which an application was necessary: only automatic faculty and departmental scholarships and UBC and funding offers from grad schools other than Oxford.

Any friends out there who applied for this and don’t get an email in the next few hours, take heart. A cool $10,000 might be coming your way.

[Unrelated] Someone left a link to this optical illusion as a comment. It’s well worth a look.

Gay marriage back in the news

I wrote previously on an almost identical issue, but that which needs to be said generally needs to be said again.

Apparently Conservatice Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants to re-open the debate about gay marriage. At present, it is legal for same-sex couples to get married in Canada. This is a good thing for precisely the same reasons that it is good that couples of different races can get married: it is a simple requirement within a just and equitable society. The fact that homosexuality makes some people uncomfortable is no excuse whatsoever for discrimination. Likewise, the existence of certain traditions about what marriage has meant to some people must not preclude a societal definition that is blind to arbitrary factors. Particular churches can decide for themselves what kind of unions they want to bless and what kind of ceremonies they want to host, but under the law there must be equality and the protection of minority rights.

I am entirely confident that we will look back upon this issue in fifty years time the same way we look back on racially segregated schools today. That is to say, we will see it as a matter where governments took an astonishingly long time to accept a policy that is obviously a moral imperative. Canada’s legal history with regards to homosexuality is certainly not a sterling one. As recently as 1967, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Everett Klippert could be jailed as a ‘dangerous sexual offender’ simply on the grounds that he was likely to engage in consensual homosexual sex with adults. He was still in prison until 1971: two years after the Trudeau government decriminalized homosexuality. (See the CBC Timeline)

As regards the Harper government, this is indirectly a positive development. His only hope of getting a majority government in the next election is to prove that the Conservatives can be trusted with one. People are rightly distrustful, because of exactly the kind of political currents that have led to this announcement. Now, we just need the Liberals to clean themselves up quite a bit, get a strong new leader, and turn themselves back into the best option Canadians can hope for at the federal level.

On sleeping with an elephant

Happy Birthday Anna Gillibrand

At various times, people have asked me why I write so much about the United States: about the foreign and domestic politics of the US, about official American stances on issues from torture to climate change. The answer, of course, is that the American position on these matters is of crucial importance. Indeed, I would assert that the decisions being made in Washington are more important for Canadians than the ones being made in Ottawa. We’re a rich, sovereign nation, of course, but we are forever bound to a nation that seems likely to forever surpass us in wealth, power, and global prominence. Canadians cling to what shreds of national determination we have – socialized health care (a very fine idea), peacekeeping (likewise), and the like – and yet, our ability to control our own destinies has everything to do with our great neighbour to the south remaining on the path of sanity. To my infinite dismay, the adherence of that state to that path has not been as good as might be hoped.

As such, we are probably better off spending our time talking to open-minded Americans before their elections than we are in voting in our own elections.

Of course, we can and must do both. Even so, you simply cannot be a small country, in every important sense, beside a big country and not become critically vulnerable to those whims. As Canadians, we need to understand those whims, and direct them along a path that is productive rather than destructive. One that will give us the chance to live good and decent lives in a world rife with threats and stupidity.

On Canada and peacekeeping

This month’s issue of The Walrus opens with a letter from Major General Lewis Mackenzie (ret.). He was the man in charge of the Canadian peacekeeping force in Sarajevo in 1992, remembered particularly for re-taking and maintaining control of the city’s airport. He’s also a man who I met several times at UBC and whose insight and candour I appreciated.

The letter argues that it is factually incorrect to say that Canada is a peacekeeping nation. Mackenzie doesn’t argue this for the familiar (and true) reason that our outlay on foreign relations of all kinds has been cut in order to maintain the budgetary surplus, but because the kind of operations the Canadian Forces are engaging in no longer have the character of classic inter-positional peacekeeping, as envisioned by Lester Pearson and used with such good effect to end the Suez Crisis. I’ve discussed the composition and present deployments of the Canadian Forces in a previous entry. While I am less sympathetic to his argument that Canada has never been a peacekeeping nation, I think the argument that we no longer play that role is convincing.

The reasons for this are mostly fairly obvious. A line of lightly armed personnel with blue helmets between two armies is no longer the model for military intervention in conflict zones. Given that most wars are now civil wars, the armies may be neither disciplined, organized, nor clearly defined. Chaotic and dangerous places do not lend themselves to soft blue berets, as Mackenzie identifies, but to the flak jackets and “camouflaged Kevlar helmets” that are the kit employed by almost all Canadian Forces members overseas: especially in our largest deployment, in Afghanistan.

Is Mackenzie right to challenge the peacekeeping myth? It’s something Canadians use as a heuristic device for understanding how Canada behaves in the world: out there solving problems and putting out fires where they erupt, as opposed to the more brash and world-changing strategies of our great southern neighbour. Obviously, it’s not an idea that should be perpetuated if it’s blatantly false. I would argue that it is not, but that the gritty details of contemporary peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peace enforcement must be recognized in the public arena.

One of the most regrettable developments in warfare recently has been the progression from a blue helmet or a red cross being a protective symbol to it being irrelevant or even grounds for being targeted. Partly, that has to do with the conflating of war fighting and reconstruction roles to which both the United States and Canada have contributed. When some jeeps have food aid in them and others have ammunition, there is little chance of retaining trust and credibility for those who distribute the first. Likewise, some planes dropping food packets while similar ones drop cluster bombs. When aid providing non-governmental organisations (NGOs) get integrated into war plans, similar problems arise. For that reason, I applaud the way in which Medicins Sans Frontiers, among other groups, have resisted the pressure to become subjugated to the military planning of western states.

The complex nature of modern peacekeeping operations may not be accurately reflected in the media and the opinions of the public at large. I think that Mackenzie is correct to raise the issue, but simply doing so doesn’t offer us a great deal of guidance. It is plausible that the Martin and Harper governments have actively managed the representation of Canadian operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere to heighten the sense that they are similar to the ‘traditional style’ of Canadian peacekeeping. If so, it’s understandable, given how much of an identity issue peacekeeping has become in Canada. To the extent that such idealization helps create support to take the initiative internationally, there is some value. To the extent that they confuse the issue and obscure the real character of our actions, the illusions should be dispelled.

Of news and time management

When corresponding with friends back in Canada, I am frequently reminded about how out-of-touch with national news I have become while in the UK. For me, the Harper government is a distant and largely hypothetical possibility, still in the stasis of post-electoral uncertainty. I remembering wandering around surprised on the night of the election, finding it difficult to comprehend how a party that had been in power for all the time I had been aware of politics could suddenly be outed. It is still that general sense that dominates my intuitive perspective on the present Canadian political situation. That and the fervent hope that we don’t descend into the insanity of social crusading and fiscal and strategic recklessness that have taken hold so ominously and harmfully in the United States.

I don’t think there is much I can plausibly do to keep in touch beyond skimming the Globe and Mail website and Google News Canada every day or so. Between reading for the core seminar and thesis reading, I already have a great deal to do. I am frequently frustrated by the impossibility of doing as well as can be managed in all possible areas. It makes you constantly guilty when you aren’t doing something classed as productive (course reading, scholarship applications) or semi-productive (cycling, reading The Economist). Also, it is the conversations you have with friends about current events that are the ultimate spur to be knowledgeable about them. Without debate tournaments or pub and living room arguments about Canadian politics, my lack of knowledge is rarely revealed. While Emily seems to be powerfully in touch with Canadian news – perhaps her time at Goldman Sachs taught her how to do so when busy and abroad – nobody else is likely to bring up current Canadian events as a topic of conversation.

The solution is to work towards squeezing out all activities that are not at least semi-productive, eliminating the gaps that make you feel as though you’re not doing as much as you should be. Once you are doing more-or-less all you can be, you can be forgiven for some oversights. Everything I do should be part of some plan or project.

That said, I am going to get back to reading about AIDS.

NASCA and the BPG

As Fernando pointed out to me, the final report of the Bi-National Planning Group (PDF), with whom we met while on the NORAD trip, has specifically endorsed some recommendations from the report (PDF) that I wrote on behalf of our group.

[The fifth] BPG recommendation supports key recommendations identified by the North American Security Cooperation Assessment (NASCA): “The United States and Canada should increase the transparency of the process by which they engage in bi-lateral defence negotiations, policy development, and operations; This process should include a focus on public understanding and involvement; Projects undertaken by academic institutions, and other civilian research organizations should be supported, particularly as means of generating transparency in, and awareness about, the defence planning process.The NASCA report was prepared by members of the University of British Columbia (UBC) International Relations Students Association (IRSA) in 2005, and their observations were compiled by Milan Ilnyckyj-obtained from http://www.irsa.ca. (51)

It’s your classic self-interested academic appeal for more research to be done – especially by people like the person doing the suggesting – but it’s still good to be mentioned. I shall have to read the entirety of their report once we finish cleaning up the flat from the party last night.

Queen of the North sinking

I don’t know too many of the details of the Queen of the North sinking, in British Columbia, but it’s excellent to hear that all or nearly all of the passengers and crew have been rescued. To have effective emergency response procedures demonstrated is always a welcome thing, though you tend to hear a lot more about those that prove ineffective. While it may be pointless, my appreciation goes out to all those who assisted in the rescue operation. In particular, the residents of Hartley Bay seem deserving of praise.

Hopefully, we will learn relatively soon what went wrong in the first place.

Canada and Ballistic Missile Defence

Apparently, under the Harper government, there is new talk about Canada joining the American missile defence system. I believe that doing so would be unwise for a number of reasons, with the only real advantage of participation being the possibility of improved relations with the US.

Technically infeasible

The first reason to doubt the plan is that there is no reason to believe it will work. Past efforts at both theatre missile defence, the attempt to protect specific assets in a narrow geographical area, and umbrella missile defence have been failures. During the first Gulf War, the much lauded Patriot missile batteries never actually shot down a Scud – though they did shoot down two British planes by mistake. The Scud is essentially a modified V2: not exactly a modern missile.

Shooting down an ICBM is even more difficult. Lasers are infeasible given the difficulty of tracking the missile with such precision and the potential of reflective coatings and accelerated missile rotation mitigating their destructive effects. This reality is reflected in the new focus on kinetic kill systems, where a missile is meant to be used to knock the first missile apart. Of course, this risks showering the area below with radioactive fallout. Better than having a city hit, perhaps, but certainly not a good option.

There are three major stages in the flight of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) or its submarine launched equivalent (SLBM). There is a boost phase, where the missile is launched from its silo or missile tube. It is the infrared emission from the launch, as well as the appearance on radar screens, that would first alert the United States to the fact that the missile is in the air. Barring the extensive deployment of space-based weapons, it is impossible to destroy the missile at this stage. The current missile defence plans do not attempt to do so.

The midcourse stage of the missile flight is suborbital, and takes place at an altitude of 1200km. During this phase, the missile can employ a large number of possible countermeasures: electronic signal jamming; the use of decoy warheads, chaff, and flares; and the deployment of metallic balloons that interfere with radar. It would either be at this stage or during the re-entry phase – when the warhead is travelling about 4km per second or about Mach 12 – that the kinetic kill would need to take place.

Even rigged tests that have taken place so far, where the missile trajectory is known in advance, no countermeasures are used, and a beacon is actually fitted in the warhead, have not resulted in success.

Strategic error I

The supposed contemporary enemies of the United States are not ICBM type entities. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are highly sophisticated pieces of hardware. Expensive and technically demanding to produce, they also require an extensive launch infrastructure. While they seem to be increasingly within the reach of states like North Korea and Pakistan, they are definitely not available to any terrorist group.

Moreover, if the United States went to the extreme expense of building an effective missile defence system, it would remain possible to deliver a small number of nuclear weapons by other means. They could be smuggled onto fishing boats or into storage containers. Maintaining a strategic focus on stopping potential missiles with a hypothetical system only tangentially addresses the problem of nuclear proliferation.

Strategic error II

The two hostile states that do have large numbers of ICBMs are Russia and China. Russia has so many, along with SLBMs, that it needn’t be concerned about the kind of missile defence system that is being proposed. That said, it could be used as an excuse to upgrade and modernize existing nuclear forces – especially if the United States resumes the development of its own nuclear weapons, as has been proposed by this administration.

The bigger concern is China. While the exact numbers are secret, it’s probable that China has about 20 missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the United States. The CIA apparently thinks that North Korea could have around five nuclear weapons. It’s hard to imagine a system that would be likely to stop five missiles, but that wouldn’t concern another state with only a small multiple of that number. Deploying missile defence might encourage China to build more missiles, begin putting missiles on submarines, begin fitting multiple independently-guided warheads upon missiles, or developing and deploying more effective countermeasures. It may, in any case, send entirely the wrong message to a state that is emerging as a larger military and industrial power.

Reasons for deployment

From the American position, there are two major reasons to deploy missile defence.

Firstly, it makes it look as though you are doing something to combat a threat almost universally regarded as very serious. This needn’t be an entirely cynical calculation. Given the incredible faith in technological progress within both the American public and the government and military, there is a belief that with enough brains and dollars, the thing can be made to work. It’s a mindset that goes along well with the notions of transformation that keep coming out of Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

Secondly, developing and building such a system will put billions of dollars into the hands of military contractors. Boeing, Lockheed-Matin, Raytheon, and the rest of them all stand to gain enormously. That has political relevance for the representatives of states where they employ a large section of the population – think of Colorado. It also has importance in a political system largely driven by multi-million dollar campaign contributions. Also, increasingly extensive direct connections exist between the military and military contractors. As such, disentangling their agendas is becoming increasingly difficult.

Potentially, some of the above could apply to Canada. If we were to join on, some contracts would doubtless flow to Canadian firms. I do not, however, think this would be a net benefit to Canada. Spending on defence industries – even if largely paid for by the United States – really doesn’t boost national welfare, at the same time as it would increase national insecurity.

The Canadian military does seem to broadly support missile defence. I can think of seven different reasons for which either the military specifically or the Canadian government generally might back the plan:

The American armed forces are putting pressure on them to support Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) plans. In some sense, this is almost certainly true. It’s worth remembering the extent to which things like a lack of strategic airlift capability make the Canadian Forces (CF) heavily dependent upon our allies, and especially the United States, in order to be able to deploy. We are also highly reliant upon their military intelligence capabilities.
They are concerned that a future terrorist attack could take place through Canada. If that happened, it was seriously sour relations between the two countries, or at least risk doing so. By participating in American initiatives like missile defence, Canada could stress how we have been doing everything possible to counter terrorist threats. Support for BMD could therefore be a kind of pre-emptive damage control.
The shared military culture of the United States and Canada means that both sets of armed forces are working from similar premises and using logic familiar to each. One issue here is that of non-proliferation. The Bush administration clearly doesn’t have much faith in treaty based mechanisms like the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) (a point made in the 5th report of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence). Do members of the CF see BMD as unlikely to undermine non-proliferation efforts?
The CF sees participation in BMD as a way of maintaining or enlarging the Canadian role in North American security cooperation decision making. Given how much the Americans want to do this, we could get a lot of capital out of it for little cost. It’s worth a lot to the US just to have things look non-unilateral (think of the Iraq coalition).
Strategic considerations are getting trumped by trade. Backing the Americans on missile defence is a way to keep trucks and containers flowing across the border with less trouble and suspicion. Also, Canadian defence firms with BMD related contracts in mind could have lobbied the CF to support the project.
The Americans are going to set up a BMD system anyways. By participating, we at least get the illusion of sovereignty. At best, we might be able to restrain them from doing things that we really don’t want to see happen.
The length of time this has been worked on has generated such a force of bureaucratic momentum that BMD was supported by default. Since the Second World War and, especially since the Cold War, military strategists have increasingly seen North America as a bloc to be defended all together. From that perspective, BMD might look obvious.

Admittedly, some of these are good reasons – at least potentially. Overall, however, I think the concept of dealing with the danger of proliferation by hiding behind a technical shield is profoundly misguided. It leaves the rest of NATO out in the cold, it encourages the development of further nuclear technology by states already so armed, and it contributes to a military-industrial complex that is already hugely expensive and influential.

On balance, I think Canada would be far better off for continuing to decline. While it might be a diplomatic faux pas, it may also be worth publicly pointing out why.

Conservatives and Canada: Gay Marriage Redux

Prime-minister-designate Stephen Harper has pledged to introduce a resolution asking MPs whether they want to reopen the controversial [same sex marraige] debate, and promised it would be a free vote in which MPs can choose a side according to their conscience rather than their party.

-The Globe and Mail

Parliament does not have the power to legislate minority rights on a case-by-case basis, as though laws pertaining to them are the same as any other kind of legislation. Minority rights are subject neither to the whims of public opinion nor the maneuvering of politicians: that’s the whole point of the Charter and a central tenet of tolerant liberal democracy. One of the most intelligent things Paul Martin did as Prime Minister was to stress this. MPs who say they will “vote according to the wishes of their constituents” should be ashamed of themselves for either misunderstanding or publicly misrepresenting the nature of minority rights.

The importance of a government choosing to overturn such a law extends beyond the same-sex marriage debate itself. It speaks to the possibility of a socially activist government of a kind that is neither well suited to Canada nor justified by the results of the election. In that way, I am especially glad for people who elected NDP members of Parliament, who I expect will be particularly effective at countering the Conservatives when they step too far.

I think that the complete failure of the Conservatives to win seats in Canada’s three biggest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver demonstrates the limitations of their perspectives on government. The same irony comes up in the United States, where you see people in places least likely to be directly affected by terrorism most concerned about it and those least exposed to matters like immigration or same-sex marriage most threatened by it. ‘Traditional values’ do not deserve an equal hearing when they are fundamentally oppressive, and tolerance for alternative viewpoints does not need to extend to the point where they can be allowed to form national policy.

I don’t think Stephen Harper will be stupid enough to shift policy too far to the right on social issues. Of particular importance is the fact that he must be hoping that if he can convince enough Canadians that he is a moderate and acceptable leader, he will be returned with a majority at some point in the future. The way to do that may be to placate your socially conservative supporters with a few token gestures, while actually working to stay close to the political centre.

That said, governmental change is unpredictable. We shall have to see what transpires.