Thank you very much, Kevin.
It is a pleasure to appear before this parliamentary committee. I feel somewhat at home here.
I believe this is the right time to review the important and broad role that Canada plays internationally.
I would like to make nine brief observations. I will also be circulating some charts, but I hope they will not be distributed to the audience in such a way as to detract from the very serious nature of my remarks. They will, however, need to be circulated.
Firstly, Canada enjoys a very solid reputation among the world’s nations. Our reputation is a national asset comparable to our wealth of resources and it can be put to use to our mutual advantage.
Secondly, in a world marked by religious and economic differences, the most valuable skills today and for the foreseeable future are the ones that make it possible to transcend these differences, to forge alliances and to find common ground, to manage diversity and to spur confidence. These are traditional qualities that Canada has displayed in a tangible way on the world stage.
Third, using that asset is in our own national interest. One of the charts that is being circulated, or will be, reports a projection by Goldman Sachs—not economic advice, but projections of the future—which projects the changes in world economic standing of various countries by the year 2050. Canada then will be a respectable economy. We'll be a little smaller than Vietnam and a little larger than the Philippines.
In those circumstances, how long could Canada keep a place at the table of a G-8 summit? Would we even make the cut of a G-20 summit? Would we, in other words, keep our seat in the inner circle of countries that define international trade and military and diplomatic policy? Not if we focus narrowly on trade and economic policy or define our international profile by military presence alone. But the odds are that we could remain an influential country were we to renew our trusted activist, diplomatic, and development credentials.
Fourth, when Canada has been most effective internationally—and I say this as someone who served as Secretary of State during a period when we simultaneously said no to President Reagan on the strategic defence initiative and persuaded the Americans to enter into a free trade agreement and an acid rain treaty—it has been because we pursued two priorities at the same time. We worked hard on our friendship with the United States and we worked hard on an independent and innovative role in the wider world. Those, sir, are not opposite positions. They are the two sides of the Canadian coin.
Our access to Washington adds real clout to the standing we earn by our actions in other countries, because we are thought to be able to influence our powerful neighbour.
In the same line of thinking, our sound reputation in developing countries and our active role in the multilateral community are not negligible assets for Canada. The United States cannot say as much.
In the past 60 years at least, Canada has established partnerships and earned the trust and respect of regions where the United States sometimes creates envy or fear. This capability of Canada's is definitely understood by President Obama's administration.
Fifth, power in the world is changing. The new world that is taking shape holds out a twofold advantage for Canada. We are an industrialized and innovative economy and society. We are an independent and respected country, often a bridge between the industrialized and developing countries.
As Fareed Zakaria is careful to note in his book The Post-American World, this shift in power is not about anybody's decline. It is rather about the rise and assertion of new forces. We have more capacity in Canada than most of the developed world to build and enlarge relations with the cultures and societies whose influence in this world is growing. So many of those cultures are dynamic parts of our own Canadian identity, and our past actions have earned the respect of the developing world.
Sixth, Canada can have relatively more influence in politics and diplomacy than we do in trade and economics. Economic power reflects size. Diplomacy depends more on imagination, agility, and reputation. Canada's political and diplomatic strengths have more currency, again, if we choose to use them. Yet we are eroding those strengths when we should be building them up.
Seventh—and again, one of the charts circulated relates to these figures—there are three departments in the Government of Canada with explicit international vocations. They are ranked here according to the government's published spending reports for the year 2008-09. They are National Defence, which accounts for 8.29% of federal program spending; CIDA, which accounts for 1.39%; and Foreign Affairs and International Trade, which currently accounts for 1.0% of federal program spending. Compared with 2007-08, the Department of National Defence budget increased by close to 8.4%. CIDA's increased by 0.68%. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade dropped by 17.96%. DFAIT estimates that this decline will continue for at least the next two years and that by 2010-11, its budget will decrease by another 13.38%. In real terms, that would mean a loss of $700 million in just over three years from a budget that is now approximately $2.4 billion.
Eighth, to the Harper government's credit, Canada has now increased its defence spending to repair the damage that was done when we let other countries carry an increasing share of our defence burden. Yet our diplomatic resources and our development capacity are being run down now as steadily and as certainly as our defence resources were run down before. So why the double standard? Why are we more prepared to accept our share of the military burden than of the diplomatic and the development burden?
There are a number of issues I would like to address, but perhaps we will deal with those during the questions.
Finally, I just want to make a point about what modern foreign ministries can do, because I am more aware than others, perhaps, of the differences between the period when it was my privilege to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs and today. The world has changed profoundly, and it has had an impact upon what countries can do. But one dramatic change in the world has been the increased role and authority of NGOs and activists, individuals and organizations who range from the International Crisis Group, which gives perhaps the best briefings one can find on international affairs, to the Gates foundation, to the environmental movement.
Very often these new actors are more nimble and less constrained than governments, or large institutions like the UN, but while they complement the work of governments and international institutions—and this is a point I want to insist on—they don't replace them. This is still an institutional world. Sovereign states still make the critical decisions to cut or to increase budgets, to respect or to break treaties, to send or to withdraw troops, to pay or withhold their membership contributions, to confront or ignore crises.
So the challenge now, and the opportunity now for a country like Canada, is to marry mandate with imagination, combine the creativity of these independent forces with the capacity of institutions to act. In Canadian experience, that is what happened in the fight against apartheid, in the signing of the land mines treaty, in the Kimberley Process to stop the trade in blood diamonds, and in a wide range of less-publicized initiatives.
We could make that a Canadian practice if we gave priority again to development and diplomacy.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
