Since when did talking become so bad?

The Canadian Senate signals a serious derailment of Canada's tried-and-true tradition of pouring water, not fuel, on fires. The American way, clearly disastrous, has captured the imagination of Senators nonetheless

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Incredibly, a Canadian Senate report on the state of our national security had not a single word to say on the role of government policy, particularly foreign, trade, and defence policies, in ensuring the safety of Canadians.

The Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence, in its Canadian Security Guide Book for 2005 , released earlier this month, had lots to say about increased surveillance, more spending on arms, and much more covert spying to ensure Canadians were safer. It also had much to say about the economic threat of American border closures should terrorists next time attack from Canada (instead of from Florida, the report didn't add).

The report utterly failed to acknowledge what Canadians and the world have learned: that traditional forms of security and defence protect no one from the threat of terrorism. The report ignored the fact that American spending on preparedness, surveillance, arms and spying to a degree 100 times more than ever envisioned by the Senate failed completely to protect Americans from a massive terrorist attack. On what grounds does the senate base its unqualified assertion that our own spending on these items will protect us any better than American spending on these items have protected Americans?

The truth is, as Canadians have insisted loud and clear to their government, that Canadian diplomatic behavior, trade policies—particularly with impoverished nations—defence deployments, and foreign policies—particularly to do with global hot spots—risk the security of Canadians, and changes to these items, much more than any spending on guns and surveillance, as recommended in the Senate report, is where to find enhanced security.

It is as though the Senate authors of this report have completely bought into the American government reaction to the attacks of September 11. That reaction was to characterize the perpetrators as hate-filled irrational and suicidal crazies whose motives cannot possibly be discerned, and nor should they ever be, lest even the attempt to understand the origins of terrorism in some way legitimates it.

On the contrary, it is woven into the fabric of Canadian identity that we find security in this world best by bringing together conflicting parties for discussions, by learning the source of grievances the better to defuse them, and by resolving the issues that lead to conflict. The present troubles confronting the world are no different: we can never minimize terrorism without first understanding its source.

But this is no longer how our Senate sees Canada's traditions. “When it comes to national security and defence,” the report says, “most of us tend to trust in luck. And luck is notoriously untrustworthy.”

Was Lester Pearson trusting in luck when he jetted off to London to learn firsthand what the dispute over the Suez Canal in 1956 was really about, and to find a way to resolve the dispute, an effort that earned him Canada's only Nobel Peace Prize? Was it luck Canadians trusted in whenever they dispatched soldiers under United Nations auspices to important peacekeeping missions around the world, missions that earned a Nobel Peace Prize also? By becoming a member in probably more international diplomatic forums than any other country on the planet, all the better to listen to and talk with grieving parties, is Canada trusting the security of its citizens to luck?

As Prime Minister Paul Martin insisted just recently, Canada has a long experience in talking conflicting parties down off their respective ledges, and has championed parliamentary democracy—a forum of words in place of violent conflict—around the world. But the Senate, influenced by American reactionaries, throws this proven tradition away, and dismisses the important role Canada has earned in the world with it. “When global problems need contributions from all significant players, too often all Canada has to offer are words,” the Senate grimly disparages, as though Canadians had suddenly come to believe that guns, not words, best resolve conflicts.

“Kind thoughts and diplomatic gestures,” the Senate report goes on cynically, “cannot replace a country's capacity to help out when the world needs help. Tyranny, turmoil and natural disasters demand an immediate response. We Canadians,” the Senate complains, “are quickly losing our capacity to respond.”

Note the confluence of natural disasters with tyranny and turmoil in that sentence, as though foreign tyranny is now something Canada, like America, feels free to arbitrarily appoint itself a fighter against, as though Canada has abandoned, without discussion, the cornerstone to the United Nations system that bars interference in internal matters of the other states.

And note how turmoil is now to be thought of as unpredictable, and as unaffected, by any human agents as natural disasters are, like so much more bad weather. But of course increased spending on guns isn't going to stop hurricanes, and nor will it prevent turmoil of the kind that could affect Canadians' security. Deployments of helpful people mitigate the negative effects of natural disasters, and talk, as well as the facilitating of it between conflicted parties, is what mitigates the turmoil that arises from those conflicts, as all Canadians know so well.

But the Senate no longer thinks so. “Putting national security in its appropriate place on the country's political agenda will not be easy,” it says, acknowledging that Canadians stubbornly fail to believe that more spending on guns will make them safer. “We regard the need to optimize the security of Canadians,” the Senate report says, “and the need for Canadians to play a useful role in world affairs, as two of the country's greatest needs.”

About this no one can argue. But as Americans who disguise themselves aboard as Canadians tacitly acknowledge, the security of Canadians is enhanced by better diplomacy, better trade policies, and better capacity to listen to the complaints and grievances of the world, than what the Americans have achieved.

As the Americans have plainly demonstrated the last four years, more guns and more military deployments have only proven to hand America a singularly useless role in world affairs. Why should Canada follow the Senate's recommendation now, and abandon what has obviously worked for an approach that has clearly not worked? Have no members of this Senate committee been reading any newspapers in the last four years?

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