Foreign Affairs Committee on March 2nd, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Good afternoon, everyone.

This is meeting number six of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development on Monday, March 2, 2009. Today we're going to continue with our study on key elements of Canadian foreign policy.

On behalf of the government, we want to welcome our two witnesses here this afternoon. I should say right now that we do not have other witnesses for the second hour, so we hope that possibly our two guests can stay a little longer than just the one hour.

In our first hour we have Mr. Peter Harder, senior policy adviser for Fraser Milner Casgrain; and appearing as an individual, we have James H. Taylor.

Our committee welcomes back Mr. Harder, who has appeared before our committee many times. We remember not that long ago he served as deputy minister in the Government of Canada, and he served as the most senior public servant in a number of federal departments, including Foreign Affairs and International Trade. I think in our conversation before the meeting began he said he served with five prime ministers in the deputy capacity--not to prime ministers, but to different ministers. He has also served as co-chair of the Canada-China Strategic Working Group. In 2000 the Governor General presented Mr. Harder with the Prime Minister's Outstanding Achievement Award for public service leadership. Currently he is a consultant and is serving on numerous boards of directors.

Mr. James Taylor is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and he has extensive experience in Canadian foreign service, including serving as Canadian ambassador to Japan from 1989 to 1993. He was chancellor of McMaster University from 1992 to 1998. He is currently retired, and we thank him for taking time today to come and appear before our committee.

Our committee will allow you approximately 10 minutes to open, and then we'll go into the first round of questions from members, with seven minutes each.

I should also say that it's my understanding from reading the bio that Mr. Taylor has also served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. So we appreciate the wealth of information and knowledge and wisdom that is represented at that end of the table, and we mean that seriously. We look forward to hearing your comments.

Mr. Taylor, please would you go first.

[James H. Taylor, As an Individual]

Mr. Chairman and members of the standing committee, I'm honoured to have been asked to appear before you.

Your present focus is on relations between Canada and the United States. I contributed a paper to the recent Carleton University project on this subject. The project's papers are available to you, I believe; therefore, I will not repeat what I wrote there. Instead, since the subject is vast and complex, I shall concentrate in these introductory remarks on two aspects only, and I will speak about them today as an extension of what appears in my contributions to the Carleton project.

The first matter is Afghanistan, to which is linked terrorism. Thanks to the Manley report, Parliament reached a relatively high degree of agreement about the nature and limits of Canada's engagement in Afghanistan. Consensus may not have been total, but it was sufficiently broad to assure our soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan that the country is firmly behind them, whatever policy differences remain.

As a citizen, I thought this was an important accomplishment. Surely one of the most serious responsibilities a government or a parliament can undertake on behalf of the nation is to ask its soldiers and others to risk their lives in a war. Everyone senses that such a decision must be taken only after the most conscientious examination and with the broadest possible political support.

For the present, the debate about Canada's participation in Afghanistan is in abeyance. However, in light of the new approach of the administration in Washington, we, along with our allies, shall be obliged to resume the discussion reasonably soon. When we do, we should try to avoid some of the intellectual confusion that has marked past discussions.

Before we decide what we should be doing in Afghanistan, we need to recall why the alliance went there in the first place. This was to seek out al-Qaeda, the authors of the 9/11 atrocity, to capture and punish those responsible, if they could be found, and to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base and sanctuary for further terrorist plotting.

In the process, NATO became involved with the Taliban, the local protector and ally of al-Qaeda. Extending the struggle to encompass the Taliban meant confronting a violent form of extremism that aimed at regaining power in Afghanistan and imposing its reactionary program of society. After years of fighting, original distinctions began to blur. The enemy became the Taliban as much as al-Qaeda, and the narrow aim of preventing Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist sanctuary merged into a broad program of political, social, economic, and cultural reform, involving not only Afghanistan but Pakistan.

It was interesting that when questioned about what can reasonably be accomplished in Afghanistan, President Obama said he believes the narrow aim can be realized, but by implication, the broad program cannot, at least not easily or soon. I understand this to mean that the new U.S. administration is coming to the conclusion that the concept of the war on terror espoused by its predecessor was a misconception. The United States now sees the possibility of a military victory in Afghanistan only in the sense that the sanctuary for terrorism can be contained and destroyed and that the task of political, social, and economic reform in one of the world's poorest countries is a task for the much longer term that cannot be pursued by committing the alliance to an unending war and that, in the last analysis, must be left to the Afghan people, however much other nations may be able to help.

Afghanistan then is one obvious field for further policy development, requiring close cooperation between Canada and the United States, and within NATO. Another is nuclear disarmament. This has received less attention. President Obama made only one brief reference to the subject in his inaugural address. He said: “With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat.” This is not much to go on, but the statement by Vice-President Biden on improving relations with Russia, made at the Munich security conference, was an indication that nuclear disarmament is indeed on the agenda of the new administration.

There is growing support in the United State for progress on this issue. On January 4, 2007, an op-ed article appeared in the The Wall Street Journal entitled, “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons”. This article was signed by four eminent Cold War stalwarts: two former Republican secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz; and two eminent Democrats, William Perry, former secretary of defence, and Sam Nunn, former chairman to the Senate Armed Services Committee. They called for “U.S. leadership...to take the world to the next stage: to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons globally as a vital contribution to preventing their proliferation into potentially dangerous hands.” They concluded that: “Reassertion of the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and practical measures towards achieving that goal would be, and would be perceived as, a bold initiative consistent with America's moral heritage.”

Since 2007 the authors have continued to campaign for this vision and have now enlisted the support of some 70% of living U.S. secretaries of state, secretaries of defence, and national security advisers. You can see why this initiative might appeal to the new administration; it is bipartisan, and it comes not from the left of American politics, but from the heart of the security establishment.

The nuclear issue has acquired new resonance because of the increased risk of proliferation--for example, in North Korea and Iran--and because of the increased risk of weapons falling into terrorists hands in unstable areas. Anxiety is focused, for example, on Pakistan, where Dr. A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's bomb and a notable patron of proliferation, was recently released after five years of house arrest. And there is widespread pressure to expand civil nuclear programs to meet energy needs, since the same technology required for civil programs can be abused to develop weapons. While the risks of proliferation grow, the Cold War rationale for nuclear weapons disappeared 20 years ago.

At the moment, there are supposed to be 25,000-odd nuclear weapons in existence. The largest stock is held by Russia, and the Russians and Americans between them are believed to hold at least 90% of the world's total. The five other avowed nuclear weapon states, Britain, France, China, India, and Pakistan, and the two unavowed states, North Korea and Israel, are believed to hold about 1,000 weapons altogether. In addition, there are about 3,000 tonnes of fissile material held in some 40 or 50 countries. Iran, according to the U.S. intelligence community, abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

What the authors of the U.S. initiative are calling for is the resumption of a process begun under Reagan and Gorbachev, which continued under George Bush Sr. but faltered under Clinton and George W. Bush, but which managed nonetheless to produce large reductions in U.S. and Russian stocks of nuclear weapons.

The difficulties of proceeding are considerable, to the point where some critics look on the whole project as utopian. The United States, by disarming itself to a much lower level, would have to persuade other weapon states to give up their weapons. This process would have to be managed in such a way that the non-weapon states relying on a U.S. security guarantee—Japan, for example—would have to consider themselves at least as secure as they were before, even as U.S. weapons disappear.

For this level of confidence to be reached, it would be necessary at the same time for the international community, building on what already exists under the IAEA, to create a much stronger, more intrusive, and more expensive system of international controls to ensure against cheating. And the world would have to decide what to do with a country if it ever were caught cheating. This is a formidable, but not impossible, undertaking; and if the United States were to go ahead with it, Canada should follow developments closely and be prepared, in my view, to give diplomatic and technical support.

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, this concludes my initial presentation.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Taylor

We'll move to Mr. Harder.

[Peter Harder, Senior Policy Advisor, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and members of this committee. As my friend Cy Taylor has said, it is a pleasure and a privilege for us to be here.

In my discussion in preparation for today, it was suggested that I might spend a little time standing back and just doing a bit of an overall sketch of in what context the world is changing and what the implications are for Canada's foreign policy. I'd like to say that the world is going through a transformation that we haven't experienced in 100 years in terms of the tectonic plates of major issues that will have a huge impact in terms of global economic and political power.

I want to articulate a few points in that regard. If we were sitting here in 1950--and I know probably none of us were--and looked at the top 12 countries in terms of demographic size, six of those countries would have been in what we call the western democracies, the G8 countries of the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and France. Only the other six were in the emerging economies or the then-third world, as we called it, of India, China, Indonesia, the Soviet Union, East Pakistan, and the like.

If you went, then, to the year 2000, which is of course in our time of adult memory, and looked again at the top 12 countries, you would find only three of those original six western democracies still on that list. They would have been the United States, Japan...and twelfth, Germany. And the introduction of large populations on the list from countries that were not even on the list in 1950--Nigeria, Mexico, Bangladesh--would have emerged.

If you look ahead to the year 2050, when many of you will still be in Parliament, and ask yourself about that top 12 list, only the United States would still be on that list. The other 11 countries would be the developing countries of the 1950s, the emerging economies of today, and they would include India and China, as one and two; the United States, three; Pakistan; Indonesia; Nigeria; Bangladesh; Brazil; Congo; Ethiopia; Mexico; and the Philippines. I mention this, not that I'm a determinist in demography equals political or economic power, but that is a huge shift in where the population pressure is, the need for economic growth, and what globalization will shift in terms of this tectonic plate of demography as a component of economics.

Let's just look for a minute at the raw economic transformation. Within the next decade China and the United States will have an equal share of global GDP. By 2025 China will represent about a quarter of the global GDP and the United States about 18%. By 2045 the so-called BRIC countries--Brazil, Russia, India and China--will have a collective GDP that is greater than the G7. Economic power is shifting, and the global crisis that we're facing today may nudge that one year or two years one way or the other, depending upon how countries respond, but the reality is that there is a massive change in global demographic and economic power.

Obviously that again isn't just the sole determinant of influence, but it does tell you, and begs the question, what is Canada's place in this.

MIlitary power, of course, remains overwhelmingly that of the United States and collectively that of NATO, but we are seeing that the threats to global security are less from nation-states than from non-state actors, and the threat of failed states and fragile states is much stronger than we had perhaps recognized when the wall came down in 1989.

What are the implications for Canada? I believe that Canada's foreign policy requires a global, realist, and internationalist approach. Why global? We cannot as a country, in my view, retreat to a regional approach to our foreign policy influence. The region, of course, would be that of North America and perhaps even the Americas writ large, and that's an important dimension of our foreign policy—and I want to come back to the U.S.—but our influence even in Washington is assisted by being globally present.

By the way, our business sector is globally present too. It is important for this committee to recognize that in countries like Yemen, for example, Canadian businesses contribute over 20% of the GDP in terms of economic activity. In a country like Ecuador, there is a very large Canadian investment. Mongolia is another, where the Canadian mining sector has been very active.

My point is that we must remain globally engaged and globally present as a country and we must be internationalist; that is to say, we have a unique heritage of being members of many organizations globally. That has given us, I think, a privileged place that doesn't come as it does for the Europeans--from a European Union in which they are able to collectivize some of their foreign policy assets.

It is even more incumbent on us, not having an EU within which to exercise foreign policy influence, to be doubly engaged in a broader internationalist agenda, whether it be through NATO or OAS or through active engagement in Africa and in Asia itself through APEC and other bilateral mechanisms.

My final point before I get to questions is that I'm afraid our infrastructure of foreign policy has atrophied and remains inadequate to the ambitions I would see in a world that I've painted for you, in terms of where power, economic and political, is shifting to. The infrastructure, the mechanism of engaging the foreign policy, is just as important as the policy itself. If you're not present, you don't understand the country. We have less of our foreign service abroad than the OECD average, certainly, and we're actually at the chintzy end of the OECD. We spend less on third-language training than New Zealand. We have 80% of our missions based on three Canadians or less.

My point here isn't to speak for my old department but to remind this committee that just as 10 years ago I would have urged the defence committee to reinvest in Canada's defence capacity, I'm asking this committee to reinvest in Canada's foreign policy and development capacity through our representation abroad. I'm asking this committee to reinvest not in the old places but in the new places, in the countries of the future, and not just in the capitals, and to have the language skills and the understanding necessary to bring Canada's interests both to government and to Canadian players, be they business or civil society. So when you take a look at foreign policy issues, I would ask that you ask yourselves: are we best equipped and best organized to deal with these?

Finally, one of the most important developments of the last 10 years is what has become a euphemism to talk about, and that is globalization, but truly, the domestic agenda of Canada's public policy has become international. Whether you're talking about health issues, environment issues, or security issues, almost any department's agenda has a dimension that is at least North American, if not global. We haven't adequately put in place the mechanisms to assure coherence and cohesion across the collective interests of the Government of Canada. I believe that it is urgent and necessary for us to maximize our influence globally.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Harder.

We'll move into the first round.

Mr. Rae, for seven minutes.

[Bob Rae, Liberal, Toronto Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Mr. Harder and Ambassador Taylor, it's great to have you both here representing such a great tradition and also pointing to the future.

Ambassador Taylor, I was very encouraged by your comments on nuclear disarmament in particular, but can you explain why we don't hear those two words spoken very much anymore in terms of our foreign policy? It was always a major feature of our foreign policy during the Cold War. Would you say the threat with respect to nuclear proliferation and the consequences of not having a strong approach to disarmament are as great today as they were at the time of the Cold War?

[James H. Taylor]

I think the reason we hear less, or have heard less, of the issue in recent years in Canada is because of the end of the Cold War and the fact that people concluded that particular nightmare could be put in the past and forgotten. Now the threat is looming again, not in the form we knew a generation ago but, as I suggested, because of these various contemporary pressures, like the pressure to build new civil power reactors in many places in the world, which increases the proliferation risk and the risk Peter Harder has alluded to, the risk that arises because there are a growing number of unstable states in the world. The combination of instability plus an increasing number of nuclear programs that can be abused for weapons purposes is a dangerous combination.

I think, for the United States, one of the appeals of resuming a policy of pursuing nuclear disarmament is obviously that it has the bipartisan appeal to which I referred, and that it would chime very much with the note of change the new President is striking. It requires, as I've suggested, a great deal of preliminary work, and I suppose that when the vice-president spoke as he did in Munich about opening a new dialogue with Russia, one of the things envisaged was that eventually—perhaps not immediately, but eventually—the question of further steps of nuclear disarmament by the Russian republic and the United States would be taken up.

Some of the advocates of nuclear disarmament believe, and argue, that this may not be the wise way of doing it, that Russia is one of the hardest nuts to crack, with the largest stock of nuclear weapons, and that it might be better if the United States were to pursue this objective by starting somewhere else. There are other places that could easily be a focus of efforts—Iran, obviously, where the effort to contain an incipient weapons program is already well launched and being pursued with great difficulty; North Korea, which remains a danger, but where there's already a long history of negotiation. In fact, there are so many risks here and there in the world that the United States could have its hands full approaching one or the other without ever getting around to touching the question of a further dialogue with the Russians for some time.

The optimists, on the other hand, would probably remember that when Gorbachev and President Reagan, who only a few years before had been talking about the evil empire, got together in Reykjavik in 1986 just by themselves, they almost succeeded in agreeing to do away with both Russian and American nuclear weapons stocks as they stood then. An astounding result, that would have been. Even what they achieved was really astounding, because at one time, at its worst, I think there were over 30,000 nuclear weapons in the world. That, at least, has been reduced by a considerable proportion, as has the balance of terror that we used to have nightmares about, which arose from having airborne weapons, seaborne weapons, land-based weapons, long-range weapons, short-range weapons, and medium-range weapons in the tens of thousands in existence in the world, and some of them, more or less, on hair trigger. That situation was defused pretty well, largely in the time of George Bush Sr. as president.

But the process has stalled since. It stalled basically under the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies, I think because the strategic reviews that the Americans conducted then led to the conclusion that, yes, they could indeed reduce their stocks much further, but that they would have to keep, they believed, thousands of weapons still in reserve. That was a kind of hedge against a return of Russian aggressiveness. And of course if you want to argue that case, the behaviour of Russia in the last few years provides certain evidence that would leave you uneasy and would give a certain justification to that thesis.

Nonetheless, there was very substantial progress before. And what is now being argued by these very impressive American witnesses is that the United States should take a lead to resume that process. If it did, I'm sure any such initiative would be warmly welcomed in Canada and we would see a return in our own public debate to a discussion that has been suspended, in effect, for the last twenty-odd years.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll move to the next question.

Mr. Crête.

[Peter Harder]

Could I just take 30 seconds on that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Okay. Go ahead very briefly.

[Peter Harder]

There is one program that we continue to contribute to, called Global Partnerships, which costs a hundred million dollars a year. Canada made a billion-dollar commitment at the G8 to fund the decommissioning of fissile material in Russia and Ukraine. I suspect most Canadians are unaware of that contribution. It's a very important program, one that could be the basis of further programming to deal with fissile material, and one that the Russians hold in high regard.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Harder.

Mr. Crête, you have seven minutes.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Harder, I think is very significant that you have come to speak to us about the need for a global, realistic and international approach for Canada, within a forum where we are dealing more specifically with our relationship to the U.S. It shows quite clearly to what extent this forum deals with other matters, of a global nature. What you said was, on the one hand, exciting. In real life, the exciting side is important, but there is also the part that scares us and moves us to act.

What will happen if Canada's foreign policy is not re-examined in depth and if we continue along on this track?

[Peter Harder]

Thank you for your question. Allow me to be quite direct.

For me, the common economic space of North America requires an economic policy of further integration and thinning the border so the automobile sector or other manufacturing sectors are able to move freely across that border. We have to work with the Americans, and my preference is bilaterally.

I have argued elsewhere that we trilateralize too much of our relationship with the United States. That economic relationship doesn't have much to do with foreign policy; it has a lot to do with the sharing of economic space in North America. I believe we should be more ambitious for that economic space beyond the FTA, in terms of seeking ambitions that would have us deal with rules of origin and perimeter issues with respect to border and security requirements. We can talk about that.

But it is absolutely imperative for our foreign policy well-being and our relevance in Washington that we have a deep and contributing role in international affairs outside of the North American economic space. When things have gone well, the Americans have wanted to talk to Canadians, because we had ideas and presence globally that helped inform American decision-makers about issues they were dealing with.

George Shultz was referenced by Mr. Taylor. When George Shultz was Secretary of State he met with the Canadian foreign minister on a quarterly basis. He called that tending the garden. Sure, the bilateral issues were undoubtedly raised, but they also talked about the hot spots in the world, where Canadian perspectives were not always the American perspectives, but they were informed; they could engage.

The issues are different today, but we have to bring to bear our capacity to engage, inform, and participate in the debate globally to have influence in Washington. My concern is that we not simply think of the U.S. relationship as an economic bilateral relationship, or we won't have mind-share or time-share in the administration. It will be detailed work for officials who are managing a commercial enterprise. We need to have the ideas, the articulated global perspectives, and the assets that make those judgments valuable to the Americans.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Harder.

Mr. Taylor.

[James H. Taylor]

I would add that personalities matters. Mr. Harder mentioned Mr. Shultz. Mr. Shultz was ready, from time to time, to come and discuss matters with us that were sometimes of a technical nature, complex, that generated little public interest. However, he was an expert, whereas Mr. Kissinger never wanted to discuss technical bilateral matters. He practically refused to take part in any discussion of that nature. As far as he was concerned, only major policy matters counted. Sometimes, what we can aspire to accomplish in our dialogue with the United States is based on the person we are dealing with.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

Aside from the contingencies of, say, everyday political life, if an American Secretary of State were to say that the Canada-U.S. border is essentially comparable to the southern U.S. border, as has been said recently, we would have to start from scratch. Aside from this, what will enable us to achieve this relationship and have an approach which really goes beyond everyday politics?

[Peter Harder]

I think it is important for Canadians to understand that in the American system, power is highly diffused. Even the President has to work with Congress to secure legislation.

I would applaud the efforts of various governments of Canada to bring us out of simply working with the White House in the relationship. But we've been less successful than some other countries--Australia, I would argue, has been very successful in Washington--in building on perhaps the early successes that we had 20 years ago in dealing with Congress, dealing with sub-national levels.

Premiers are very effective. You saw how effective they were in Chicago, then in Houston, a couple of weeks ago on the Buy America issue. In part that's because they've been around for a while, and they've met with and formed relationships with governors. And you see that governors often become cabinet ministers and senior party activists in the United States system.

So I think we have to be more deliberate about how we engage not just the President, and perhaps not even just certain committee chairs, but actually the broader political spectrum of national and sub-national actors, to restore in advance some of the connectors that used to be given.

That's been exacerbated in the American context by three factors. One is that population and political power have shifted south and west, so not along the border. Second, the pace of politics creates less time for parliamentarians and congressional people to get to know each other. Third, Canada has less currency in Washington's thinking on policy issues. We're not a problem, and that's a good thing, but at the same time, we need to find ways of having the ideas that will render engagement with us as something the Americans want to do.

[Paul Crête, Bloc, Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup, QC]

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the Canada-U.S. Interparliamentary Group. The Prime Minister of Canada was there, at the first meeting, 50 years ago and the U.S. President may also have been. I think that that is one possible tool at our disposal. You referred several times to being up to date in our actions, of having a presence.

Have you thought about an Internet presence, which we could really work on? In this day and age, to influence a young South African, it may be easier, for those who have access to it, to use the Internet than any other official channel. Have you considered this, or have others, when it comes to international relations?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very quickly.

[Peter Harder]

I know that the Washington embassy has engaged the Internet for developing a network of Canadians in the United States, putting out information about the relationship with Canada. I don't think a lot of Americans know that for 39 American states, I think it is, Canada is the number one export market. This is not just a border phenomenon.

In my view, we have to spend more money on public diplomacy to tell our stories to Americans so that we can then have the greater mind share when it comes to both our issues and issues on which we want to have influence.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Harder.

We'll go to the government side, to Madam Brown.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I'm sharing my time with Mr. Goldring.

I have a volley of questions I would like to ask, but perhaps afterwards I can--

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Actually, let me just say that if the guests are able to extend beyond the hour, there will be lots of time for questions for everyone.

Madam Brown.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

All right. I will ask these two, then. This comes out of things that both of you have said. I'm not sure quite how you want to answer this, but I'll leave it in your hands.

You were talking about nuclear proliferation. My sense is that the aura of the United States has somewhat been lost. Particularly during this economic downtown, people are not looking favourably on the United States: they're the perpetrators of this whole problem, they've lost some of their lustre.

Mr. Harder, you talked about Canada's multicultural population. We have people from all over the world. Is it possible that Canada can step up to the plate and become an honest broker in this discussion in the world now? Do you think we have the opportunity to take this on and to really plant our feet on the world stage? Is that possible?

Maybe I'll just ask my second question now as well. I've read, in the last little while, a book by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat .