Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time.
Today, the House is debating a trade deal between Canada and Indonesia. It is a deal that Conservatives support advancing to the next stage of consideration.
In the context of this agreement, I would like to offer a few observations about the state of the world that have bearing on how and with whom we make international agreements. Over the course of my time following international affairs, we witnessed a dramatic shift in tone and expectations within certain parts of the democratic world. That shift has been from the unrealistic Liberal optimism of the past to the exaggerated Liberal pessimism of the present.
In an earlier era, Liberal optimism was evident in the attitudes and decisions of elite figures who proclaimed an inevitable march of history towards democracy, freedom, justice and an international rules-based order. Liberals thought it would happen, and they thought it would happen relatively easily. This optimism held, for instance, that engagement and increased trade with China and other authoritarian countries would gradually, inevitably transform their governments into progressive democracies. It is easy to see why Liberal optimism is no longer in vogue. It is no longer popular, because it clearly failed.
Authoritarian regimes that were once hiding their strengths and biding their time are now confidently asserting the supposed superiority of their political model and even winning converts in the free world. In some quarters, the transformation has been from this naive optimism to a new Liberal pessimism, vividly on display in the Prime Minister's recent remarks at Davos. No longer is the triumph of freedom, democracy, justice and an international rules-based order presented as history's inevitable endpoint. Instead, the idea of a free, open and liberal international order is dismissed as a mirage, as an allusion akin to the lies once propagated by communist apparatchiks.
The argument of the Prime Minister was this false equivalency that both the authoritarian system and the liberal rules-based system are based on lies. The Prime Minister is not merely arguing that a rules-based order is difficult to achieve, under strain or not guaranteed. Rather, he is arguing that the very idea of such an order is fundamentally necessarily an illusion.
I do want to point out that both of these dispositions, yesterday's Liberal optimism and today's Liberal pessimism, have ironically been used to justify the same policy agenda. The Liberal Party of Canada, at least since Pierre Trudeau, has always wanted to pivot away from a foreign policy of engagement primarily with democracies towards a foreign policy that seeks a kind of strategic balance between the United States and Communist China. The Liberals have always been interested in the idea of ever-deepening engagement with authoritarian powers, especially the CCP, though they have justified it in radically different ways.
In the past, Liberal optimism was used to justify engagement with authoritarian powers on the grounds that such engagement would speed us towards the inevitable triumph of democracy. Today, Liberal pessimism justifies the same engagement, but this time on the grounds that such engagement is necessary and pragmatic in a world where international rules were always a mirage anyway.
How curious that leaders with a range of personal ties and economic interests linked to the PRC have always wanted the same policy outcome regardless of the convenient justification. Regardless, today I call on the House to reject both of these flawed dispositions, the extremes of Liberal optimism and of Liberal pessimism. Instead, I propose that we embrace a view of international affairs that makes room for genuine ideals and for firmly grounded pragmatism.
On ideals, the vision of an international order rooted in fixed principles, foremost among them the dignity of the human person and the right of communities to govern their own affairs, is worth defending. It was never realistic to believe that these ideals would emerge into practice easily and through some natural historical process. Ideals are realized and preserved only through struggle. The rule of law did not come to our own system without sacrifice and struggle, and the realization of the ideal of an international rules-based order will not be advanced or preserved without the same. The Liberal optimism of the past did not pay sufficient attention to this reality.
However, while these ideals have never been fully realized, they continue to exist in a more profound sense. The ideals of democracy, freedom, justice and an international rules-based order, founded on a recognition of the created dignity of the human person and the rights of communities of persons to govern their own affairs, express the highest political aspirations of human persons and communities. The dream of a morally grounded, rules-based international order is not a mere sign in the window. While it remains unrealized, it is a concept well worth pursuing. We must not merely accept the world as it is. We must act to create a better world.
My grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, and the promise we made to her generation was the promise of “never again”. For her generation and for the Uyghur children of today, whose genocide remains unrecognized by a Canadian government that wants to make deals with their oppressors, for them and for so many others, we must and we will keep that ideal in mind. Canada must chase its ideals with clear-eyed pragmatism, seeking concrete, meaningful gains rather than symbolic or ephemeral ones, and moving constructively towards those ideals where possible, focusing on what we can actually change.
The very nature of pragmatism is that it implies that there is an objective being pursued. To be pragmatic is to be practical in the process of pursuing some goal. One cannot call oneself pragmatic if one has no goals or ideals at the end of the day, so in this troubled world, we can hold our ideals high while being smart and strategic in their pursuit.
The Prime Minister has also spoken at times about this, calling it “values-based realism”. This is a concept that I could get behind in theory, but it is clearly not informing the concrete actions of the government. In reality, the Liberal Party has consistently pursued closer ties with authoritarian regimes. By contrast, Conservatives will be consistent in defending the vision of a free, democratic world that stands together and collectively defends its shared democratic values.
I noted that in the Prime Minister's speech in Davos, he spoke only about “great powers” and “middle powers”, but the distinction between democratic powers and revisionist authoritarian powers remains the most central and defining distinction of our time.
The CCP, in addition to interfering in our affairs, continuing to jail our citizens, such as Huseyin Celil, and committing genocide against its own people, is trying to establish strategic control of the flow of resources that will be most critical as technology changes. The goal is for the CCP to be able to use strategic resource domination to direct world affairs. Deals made in the short term that reinforce that long-term strategic domination by our adversaries are neither values-based nor realist.
Obviously, it has become more difficult to speak today of an existing democratic world with a shared agenda and shared purpose. Forces within and without, intentionally or not, are undermining our unity, but even amid real and justified disappointments and frustrations among democracies, there is one central point we must remember: Every nation is more defined by the character of its constitutional order than by the character of its current leaders.
What makes democracies different from dictatorships is not the hope that democratic leaders are more personally virtuous; rather it is the fact that democratic leaders are constrained by a constitutional order. We should not be indifferent to the real risk that leaders in democracies can strain and even break constitutional safeguards, but as long as those safeguards hold, our friendships with democracies will be more well-founded than our relationships with authoritarian powers, where the will of the people at the top is implemented without question.
Rule-of-law nations are more likely to act in legal ways internationally, and might-makes-right nations are guided by that principle in domestic as well as international actions.
Our belief in democracy is not a belief in the inevitable virtuousness of democratic leaders; it is a belief in the virtuousness of democratic constitutions. The distribution of decision-making facilitated by those constitutions creates the possibility of durable friendship between nations that goes beyond individual leaders.
What happens when democracies disappoint us? Naturally, we should engage those nations at all levels to make our case, and we should also seek to diversify our engagements across a broad range of democracies, so that problems in one case do not have an overwhelming impact. We can do all this without embracing some false equivalency between fellow democracies and authoritarian powers. They are fundamentally different, and they remain so.
The trade deal before the House is, thankfully, a deal with a fellow democracy, Indonesia. Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation and the third-most populous democracy in the world. It is a country with a history of strong diversity and pluralism. It contends with a series of challenges, including challenges that threaten its pluralism, but it has strong civil society organizations that work hard to advance and defend its pluralistic identity. It is a good example of a nation where constructive engagement at multiple levels of society can pay economic and strategic dividends, so I look forward to seeing the further study that is going to happen on this trade deal as it goes forward.
Regarding our engagement with southeast Asia, I also want to underline that the fight for democracy requires urgent consideration of the situation in Burma. The people of Burma are successfully fighting for their freedom while facing brutal air strikes by the military junta. Burma now has the world's longest-running, ongoing civil war. The junta must face more severe sanctions, the people must be supported and institutions that represent the Burmese people must be recognized so that democracy can prevail.
In the days ahead, shared purpose and principled engagement among democratic nations could reasonably help deliver democracy in Burma, Venezuela and even Iran, and preserve security and advance the efforts of our democratic ally, Ukraine. This might be cause for a return to some kind of optimism, though an optimism more considered and more constrained by a recognition that struggle and sacrifice are always necessary for the maintenance and advancement of the international common good.
For Canada, the defence and advancement of democracy, freedom, justice and the rule of law must remain our North Star.
