Party of One (31 page)

Along with a big piece of the tar sands, Asia’s largest refiner now had the right to veto whether Syncrude refined bitumen in Canada or shipped it abroad “like a good global coolie.” The then industry minister, Tony Clement, who took a rickshaw ride to tour the new $2.5 million Bethune Museum in Gravenhurst, applauded the deal as a “net benefit” to Canada, though just exactly what was in the net he never explained. None of it played well with the Conservative base, from the Chinese national anthem blaring from speakers to the minister’s choice of a rickshaw for transportation.
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The Sinopec deal paled beside what came next. In December 2012, the Harper government approved the mammoth $15.1-billion takeover of the Calgary-based Canadian resource company Nexen. The buyer was the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation Ltd. (CNOOC). It was easily the biggest overseas purchase ever by a Chinese government—and the most controversial sale approved by a Canadian government. The champions of unrestricted free enterprise had just sold a valuable Canadian asset to a state entity of a totalitarian regime.

Many argued that the Nexen deal was a grave risk to Canadian sovereignty against uncertain returns. It was done against the
backdrop of the Canada/China Foreign Investment Protection and Promotion Agreement (FIPPA) personally signed by Stephen Harper in September 2012. FIPPA gives China the right to sue Canada for unlimited damages if domestic laws by any level of government harm the value of Chinese investment.

This special “investor arbitration” provision is conducted in courts outside the country and behind closed doors. Its findings trump Canadian law and the provision is far from theoretical; the Chinese have already used investor arbitration against other “partners” such as Australia to the tune of millions in cash compensation.

The advantage to the Chinese of the Nexen deal was clear: ownership of a resource it would need to power its industrial machine. The advantage to Canada is another story. When the then industry minister, Christian Paradis, was asked about Nexen’s “net benefit” to this country, he told reporters it was a matter of corporate confidentiality. Canadians would have to have the benefits of their own government’s policies explained to them by the Chinese. Paradis’s words were at quite a distance from the Canadian values the prime minister once said he wouldn’t sell out.

As for the prime minister, he did what he always does when the facts are not flattering: he makes up new ones. Speaking in the House of Commons under withering cross-examination from Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair, Harper claimed that the “vast majority” of Canadians liked the Nexen deal. The polls told a different story. Just 16 percent of Canadians liked it, according to EKOS, 12 percent by Angus Reid’s numbers, and just 8 percent in an Abacus Data survey. Evidence never had much weight with the prime minister once he had made up his mind—one of the reasons few people argued with him.

Setting aside the economic implications of these secretive mega-deals, a fundamental rule of foreign policy had been
violated. Once policy is set, Canada’s strategy has been to follow the position until changes on the ground require an adjustment to the playbook. The Harper government changed the policy toward China when, if anything, it was plunging ever more deeply into totalitarian darkness. It was not a diplomatic move, rewarding the Chinese leadership for improving its human-rights record, but a nakedly political one ignoring Beijing’s transgressions in exchange for cash. And it was plainly laid out in the Foreign Affairs draft document leaked to the CBC. “To succeed,” its authors wrote, “we will need to pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align.”

For Conservative values, China poses the mother of all alignment problems. The authoritarian one-party state has sharp curbs on freedom of speech and association. There is no freedom of religion, no free press, and a blunt rejection of judicial independence. Extra-judicial persecution of anyone seen as “an enemy of the state” is commonplace, as is the brutal repression of ethnic minorities in places such as Inner Mongolia and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China. The language and cultural rights of Xinjiang’s ten million Uyghurs, who happen to be Muslim, are being stamped out with China’s push for cultural “standardization.” In other places, it goes by another name, something that NATO went to war over in Kosovo: ethnic cleansing.

In February 2011, the Chinese Communist government began a crackdown on human-rights lawyers, internet activists, and public critics. Beijing rounded up thirty of China’s most prominent pro-democracy advocates and simply made them “disappear.” Chinese literary critic Liu Xiaobo became a political prisoner in Jinzhou for the high crime of calling for political reforms, including the end of one-party rule. Beijing placed world-renowned artist and pro-democracy activist Ai Weiwei under arrest for eighty-one days without charges.

China’s violations of human rights are widespread. It bans unions; women’s reproductive rights are trampled with forced abortions; and Chinese citizens (like Canadians under our own government) are under surveillance. Tibet remains under siege and the Falun Gong are brutally repressed. The Chinese government hosted Sudanese president Omar al Bashir, despite a warrant for his arrest by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. And at the UN, Beijing has used its veto three times to prevent Security Council action against Syrian president Bashar al Assad. This is Stephen Harper’s business partner, a country that has been called the largest criminal enterprise on the planet.

As for one of the world’s longest-running tragedies, there is no Canadian diplomatic position on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—just unconditional support for one side, implacable opposition to the other. It is a “moral” judgment with political benefits that ignores the real lives of millions of stateless people. If Canada were the judge in this case, it would have to recuse itself, so unquestioning is the Harper government’s support of Netanyahu and Likud. That position doesn’t reflect the traditional Canadian approach—two ears, two eyes, and a single goal—to reach a peace deal that will see a viable state for the Palestinians and recognition and security for Israel.
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During the Harper years, the honest broker has become the rabid partisan—one of the reasons that for the first time in sixty years the world chose a bankrupt Portugal over an economically strong Canada to sit on the UN Security Council in 2010. Former mentor and Reform Party leader Preston Manning explained to me part of Harper’s aversion to diplomacy and his preference for extreme partisanship—a short route to the wrong side of history in this momentous standoff: “I tried to keep a more even hand than Stephen has. I thought that somewhere down the road
Canada would play a broker’s role in gaining peace. I think he saw that as weakness or wishy-washy. He said that you can’t be friends with everybody and the other side didn’t respect us for our middle of the road position. I think Canada’s influence internationally has been diminished with Stephen’s approach.”

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greatest changes Stephen Harper has made to Canada’s foreign policy touches the United Nations. Since its creation, the UN has been at the heart of global diplomacy. Canada has been an ardent supporter and crafted its foreign policy around membership in the place it helped to create—until now. Stephen Harper sees the United Nations as the castle of weak nations that turned to multilateralism as a substitute for real national authority. After winning his majority government, Harper couldn’t have made his disdain for the UN more obvious.

Three times now he has passed up addressing new sessions of the UN General Assembly, once so that he could attend the return of Tim Hortons corporate headquarters to Canada. On the other occasions he was in New York, but busied himself with other official duties, making his disrespect for the UN perfectly clear. It was all part of the rebranding of the country, Harper-style.

“Stephen Harper doesn’t have a clue what the UN is about,” Paul Heinbecker told me. “His view tends to be the West is always right, and the UN should always do what the West wants. Harper doesn’t understand that this organization is run by its members. The secretary-general can’t do a thing when the members disagree.”

Prime Minister Harper’s bungling in the world of Big League diplomacy was on full display in the tentative yet still historic détente between the United States and Iran in 2013. The interim accord was signed not just by the United States and Iran, but also by Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China. Instead of joining the plan to draw Tehran back into the world’s mainstream
economy—in return for no less a prize than getting a verifiable pledge not to develop nuclear weapons—Canada was sidelined by its own policies. The year before, in September 2012, the Harper government had closed the Canadian embassy in Tehran, a move the Iranian government called “hostile, unwise, and unconventional.” Parroting the message that was coming out of Tel Aviv, the prime minister and his cabinet ministers were full of skepticism and poisonous portrayals of the Iranian leadership.

It was reminiscent of Stephen Harper’s earlier remarks about Iran, in which he said the Iranian government was lying about its nuclear program and wouldn’t hesitate to use nuclear weapons if it had them. Mimicking Benjamin Netanyahu, he declared that Iran was the greatest threat to world peace, stopping just short of endorsing a pre-emptive strike on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Harper’s sabre-rattling earned him an oblique reproof from President Obama, who noted that “loose talk” about war was not helpful. In an interview with Peter Mansbridge, Harper even implied that investigators from the IAEA had proof that Iran was developing a bomb—it was just a matter of how long it would take to finish the job. The politician who had rushed to foolhardy misjudgment in the case for war against Iraq was doing it again—and again, the facts were not on the prime minister’s side.

The White House, the Pentagon, American and Israeli intelligence, and the IAEA had all come to the same conclusion based on the evidence: Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, is not building one, and has not decided to build one. What it does have is a civilian nuclear program that leaves that possibility open. While Stephen Harper inveighed against the dangerous theocrats running Iran, the chief of the Israeli military, General Benny Gantz, offered a more measured view in April 2012. “Iran is going step by step to the place where it will be able to decide whether to manufacture a nuclear bomb. It hasn’t gone that extra mile. I don’t think
Iran’s Supreme Leader will want to go that extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people.”

As the shadows get longer in Paul Heinbecker’s garden, the talk turns to Stephen Harper’s diplomatic legacy. It is a short conversation. “Pearson and Mulroney were giants on the international scene, Heinbecker says. “Trudeau got the world interested in Canada because he was so dynamic. So far there are no big achievements I can think of that the Harper government can claim unless you count war.”

These days the prime minister doesn’t talk much about his wars—the one he used to call “vital” in Afghanistan, and the other one in Libya. Soldiers who survived Kandahar—158 didn’t—are beginning to die by their own hand back home—enough of them to have former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier demand a public inquiry. In September 2012, less than a year after Peter MacKay defended spending nearly a million dollars flying combat jets over Parliament Hill to celebrate victory in the Libya mission, American ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three of his staff were murdered in Benghazi. Unknown warring factions who were supported by NATO’s bombing campaign against Muammar Gaddafi have since turned the country into something resembling a failed state. Canada led the mission.

Tradition is beginning to fray as the Conservatives “rebrand” Canada. In a country where one hundred thousand members of the armed forces have served in UN missions from Cyprus to the Golan Heights, Canada now has just thirty-two soldiers wearing the blue helmet of the peacekeeper. In 2011, the Harper government tripled the amount of weapons and ammunition licensed for export—$12 billion worth of brute force. In 2010, Canada sold Saudi Arabia $35 million worth of weapons and military equipment. In 2011, the year of the Harper majority, the number was a hundred times higher, at $4 billion.

As reported by Lee Berthiaume of Postmedia News, Canadian-made LAV-3 armoured vehicles showed up on videos of the Saudi/ Bahraini crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain, where thirty demonstrators were killed and three thousand others arrested. Canada also licensed $44 billion worth of “dual purpose” exports to China, items that can be used for either peaceful or military purposes—including uranium. The biggest customer for Canadian arms is the United States. But since arms companies don’t require licences to move their products across the border, no one knows how much weaponry or ammunition Canada sells to the Americans. Since dismantling the Long Gun Registry, the Harper government has four times delayed rules that would assign serial numbers to guns. Without implementing the new rule, Canada can’t be in compliance with international conventions on arms smuggling.

It is also an international convention not to spy on your guests. According to top-secret documents released by American whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the Harper government gave the green light for the National Security Agency to spy on heads of state and diplomats at the G8 and G20 Summits hosted by Canada in 2010. Snowden said the Americans were assisted in the surveillance they ran out of the US embassy by the Communications Security Establishment Canada.

Though it caused understandable consternation at the time, it wasn’t such a bad idea when foreign affairs minister John Baird demanded, in violation of Treasury Board rules, that the words “Lester B. Pearson Building” and “Canada” be removed from his official business cards—leaving the minister’s own name as the largest printed words.