Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 5th, 2019

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Good morning to both of you. Thank you very much. It's been very informative today.

Mr. Twining, I'll start with you.

In 1944 part of the reason for the Bretton Woods conference was to maintain a stable world order. Fast-forward about 70 years and that's beginning to fray. You've written quite forcefully that there should be trilateral co-operation between Asia, Europe and America, and that now the compact would be useful in bringing back the liberal international order.

My question for you is simple in a way and complex in a way. You mentioned Russia and China. When you have two countries that are implicating themselves in the domestic affairs of other countries, either through force or economically....

I'll give you one example right now, and that's Venezuela. People may not realize that the biggest investor in Venezuela right now is China. The only three countries that are supporting the current regime are China, Russia and Turkey. I'm just pointing out one example, but if you look at Latin America, at Africa, or at parts of Asia, the economic implications of certain countries are so strong that half the economies are dependent on that one country or the investment of that one country.

If we go into those countries, the ones that need the most help, where there are no free and fair elections, where you have corruption, where you don't have freedom of the press, how do we change the nature of that country or promote democratic institutions when that same leadership is profiting from non-democratic institutions?

[Dr. Daniel Twining]

It's a hard question. I'll begin where you did, with North American co-operation with Europe and Asia. We talk about the west these days, but of course the west is actually global. It certainly includes Japan as part of the G7 and core rich democracies, but I would argue that over time, it increasingly should include India. India is the world's biggest democracy.

Frankly, they may have a lot more to offer developing societies as they come up in terms of their own level of development than obviously rich countries like Canada and the United States have. Thinking about the challenge, the Indian system is more acutely aware of the China challenge writ large, I would argue, than many of us are in the west. The Japanese have so much at stake because they are marooned in this region with these rising autocracies, powerful autocracies, in Russia and China. When we think about democratic co-operation in new ways, that should mean a core group of big democracies acting in concert together, because we are all dealing with the same challenges.

That's one. Two, the Venezuela thing is very interesting, because it is exposing Russia's interest in controlling oil prices by sustaining the Maduro regime in power. It's exposing China's enormous investments in this kleptocracy in the form of bonds and energy resources. Frankly, part of what we see in the IRI and NDI work around the world is resentment in countries—in Africa, in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean—of foreign countries' claims to their resources through corrupt political dealings with their leaders.

In the Maldives there was just a democratic transition a few months ago. You had an elected dictator who took power and abolished the Supreme Court and consolidated all control. He held an election because he thought he could win it, as these people often do, and 90% of voters turned out and deposed him. It turns out that they are now swimming in a sea of Chinese investment and infrastructure crooked dealings, just like the new Malaysian government is swimming in a sea of crooked dealings and trying to get out of it.

I think the more we collectively can expose some of these deals that often happen behind closed doors—behind, say, the Maduro regime and Beijing, or the Maduro regime and Russian oligarchic interests—the better, because citizens really resent that in those countries.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

In certain countries where you want to do democratic development, there might be some resistance because they don't want any foreign influence or any foreigners telling them how they should do this or do that. How do we maintain that fine line between being perceived as trying to revitalize or strengthen institutions as opposed to directly having an internal effect on the domestic politics of any country?

[Dr. Daniel Twining]

Perhaps I could just do 10 seconds on this and then I'll defer to Derek.

I went to Bosnia on one of my first IRI trips. It turned out that everybody was there in the Balkans doing all sorts of things. You had the Turks, the Saudis, the Iranians, the Chinese and the Russians. Every Bosnian political leader I met said, “Where is America? Where is the west? Where is Europe? All these other countries are here.”

So the situation we're in today, and so many, as you've seen in Venezuela, is that other actors are there, whether we are there or not.

Derek has more to say on this, I'm sure.

[Derek Mitchell]

Yes. Your question gets to the heart of how NDI does its work in essence. This is the challenge in every country we go to. We work in the most sensitive part of a country, its politics, where power and often money is in the balance. We have to prove ourselves, through our record in the past and through understanding context and very careful diplomacy with a full range of people in the country to say, “This is what we are. This is what we do. We are here because you have invited us in. We won't be there if you don't invite us in, but we seek your success. We don't seek an outcome to your policies. What we want to do is assist you in developing a process for you to determine your own futures, in fact, excluding external interference and allow you to have a say in your own futures.”

The theory behind this is that if they do that, they will be a more stable society, be a better market for our business, and it will not be a fount of insecurity in a region. It will be a good partner to the United States when it comes to us or any country that cares about democracy, because we tend to have similar values. It doesn't exclude anybody. It's not anti anybody. We don't come with an agenda. But in every country we go to—at least when I was working there 20 years ago; maybe it's easier now—we would have to prove ourselves and have to explain why we were not there to impose and that we are not America trying to impose an American system but we are trying to share experiences around the world and we come with a great deal of humility.

That's the best way to do it. I think it has demonstrated results in the past 35 years.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much.

MP Wrzesnewskyj, please.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Dr. Twining, I would like to thank you on a personal level, as the son and grandson of refugees, for referencing—it's not a perfect correlation—the correlation between what has been labelled as a retreat of democracy and the rising number of refugees globally. There is an important point here when you talk about having an opportunity to feed yourself as opposed to vote. On a very personal level, Canada was freedom's shore for my family. They had never experienced democracy but they had experienced how your right to eat very literally could be taken from you if you don't have democracy. Voting was sacrosanct in our family. I just wanted to thank you for referencing that.

I'd like to turn to a comment that was made that technology today is almost pernicious, I believe that's the wording that was used, to democracy. I was quite encouraged to hear from Mr. Mitchell that you are working with Silicon Valley. Could you comment on, or do we know, what is happening with organizations like Huawei which are going around the world and saying, “Look, we'll sell you this technology at a cheaper price, plus you can monitor your citizens in ways that you've never been able to in the past”?

[Derek Mitchell]

Yes, it's extremely dangerous. There's 5G and AI and all the different technologies that are developing now that will dominate our lives and shape what we hear, what we know, and in some ways how we think and our perspective on facts. The Chinese are quite strategic about this. They are pretty conscious about their desire to reach out to the world and shape things. In some ways it's defensive. They want to protect the Communist Party, but certainly there is an offensive component to it where it comes at the expense of others' sovereignty and others' well-being.

There is no company in China that is purely independent of the government. There is always going to be a Communist Party member in its leadership. The head of Huawei is a former PLA officer. I think countries are waking up to the challenge. The key, again, as in everything with democracy and international affairs, is transparency. The Chinese and others will work very well in the shadows. Huawei was a very easy way to get into the systems of other countries and undermine, I think, the sovereignty of others. But I think countries are alert to that now and are now thinking about ways to counter it.

[Borys Wrzesnewskyj, Liberal, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you.

I have one quick, last point. In the past, during the Cold War, we had Voice of America and Radio Canada International, which, by the way, has pretty much wrapped up all their work. They were quite effective in reaching into countries. We seem to have been leapfrogged by organizations like Russia Today. Do you have any comments on investments and that sort of reaching out to people in countries, and NGOs being closed up in Russia itself? It's an embattled democracy in so many ways. Do you have any commentary when it comes to that?

[Dr. Daniel Twining]

Just to be clear, this is not just about broadcasting but about the whole suite of tools.

During the Cold War, we created a suite of tools to project our message of the open society into this totalitarian space controlled by the Soviet empire. We let many of those tools wither after the end of the Cold War. Derek talked about that phase, phase two. We let them wither and we need to recreate them. I'm not sure we need exactly the same instruments. We probably need some different instruments, but when we think about broadcasting, when we think about democracy assistance, when we think about exchanges and scholarships and all of these human engagements, we need more of that. Frankly, we walked away from the tool kit. We let it get rusty.

[The Chair]

Thank you very much.

We're going to go for our final questions to MP O'Toole, please.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both very much. You were very informative. This is a study that all members, all sides politically, have a lot of interest in.

The big problem the Trudeau government has had on foreign policy has been where there are countries that don't share our values, but we may share interests. This is the balance we see in foreign policy. China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and the Philippines.... There are a number where we don't share values and we've had diplomatic rows. Those are the countries where we have to be promoting democratic reform, human rights and a range of things.

Mr. Mitchell, you talked about how building a culture of democracy is not easy. It's a slow-going process.

My question is for both of you. How is the challenge...? I'll use this as an example. In Canada, we didn't legalize same-sex marriage until 2005. I think we all agree that's a positive thing. The U.S., at the federal level, is still really having that debate. How can we best advance bare-bones democratic rights to liberty, freedom of association and expression, those sorts of things, when we also import a number of our progressive values, as we might say, to countries that are in the Stone Age, comparatively, on a democratic level? Sometimes I worry, with the Trudeau government, that a lot of their progressive agenda on trade and all these sorts of things are far more for their domestic political audience than they are for the countries for which they are intended.

I'd love to hear you both on this, because I'm wondering whether that will slow the process of democratic reform in some of these countries.

[Dr. Daniel Twining]

I would just say—Derek will probably have more thoughts—values are different in different societies, but our principle is that citizens should be free to decide whether women can drive or participate in a country like Saudi Arabia or Iran.

I was testifying on Capitol Hill with Derek's predecessor, and somebody asked us about the women's empowerment agenda on a set of specific issues, abortion, etc. Our response, collectively, was that those are for those countries, those people, to decide, but if we can empower women to be political deciders, that solves a whole lot of other problems. The main thing for us, I think, is making sure that politics in these countries is inclusive of the spectrum of that society, so that women, marginalized communities and other voices have an equal vote and an equal voice in those countries which, in all of the countries you mentioned, they currently do not.

[Derek Mitchell]

We have to explain to these countries or share the experience of our countries that we are stronger when we are inclusive to make it also in their interest. If you seek national development, if you truly care about your national power, then you must include women. Every study suggests that. You must include all. You must empower folks. Not every autocrat is going to listen to that. All of the elites are not going to listen to that, because power is the currency, and they may not want to loosen that power. You do want to encourage folks in the country, the broad swath of the citizenry, to recognize that keeping anybody down or leaving anybody behind is going to come at their expense, that if they leave anybody out, then they might be next.

I like to quote Martin Luther King, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Nobody is excluded from injustice if you start chipping away at it. In fact, the more inclusive you are, the more stable and secure you will be.

We try to share those experiences. It will take time, because cultures, as you say, are at different levels of development. They have different histories, but I don't think we walk away from that. I think we defend that and do it with confidence, but do it with, again, humility and understanding of local contexts, of how we do it in a way that might take root sooner rather than later.

[Erin O'Toole, Conservative, Durham, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair]

We'll have a very short, final engagement from MP Laverdière—

Oh, you didn't want another one. Sorry, I got the wires crossed there.

To those in Washington, D.C. and to Dr. Twining here, this was a tremendous way for us to start our engagement on this very important issue. I want to thank all of you for giving us so much food for thought as we start to dig deeper into this issue.

With that, we shall adjourn.