It was in a high school gymnasium in Missouri that Winston Churchill first warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. If peace were to prevail, he said, the Western alliance must be strong and the newly-founded United Nations must be “a force for action and not merely a frothing of words.”
Sitting in a well-appointed hotel ballroom in Halifax last weekend, chess grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov quoted Churchill’s prescient warning. Russia has prosecuted a nearly three-year-long war against its neighbour, he said, and the U.N. has only frothed words. “So,” Kasparov said. “Forget the United Nations.”
It was then that Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, interrupted. “We must never forget the United Nations,” she said. I cringed. “We need the United Nations,” Joly insisted.
An incredulous Kasparov replied: “To do what?”
Joly insisted that Canada, through the U.N., was fighting on “different diplomatic battlegrounds,” from Africa to Latin America, to protect and promote international norms. Her intervention earned a lone bit of applause from Norway’s foreign minister, but as Kasparov pointed out: “It was still Russia that violated probably every norm of the United Nations.”
After the panel, the reviews were much more blunt: The words “pollyanna” and “naive” came up more than once.
There is a simple fact about our foreign minister: She’s not cut out for the job. She has garnered poor reviews for her public appearances, and even worse reports for her closed-door meetings. Canada, rather than being “back” as the prime minister once claimed, has become irrelevant on the world stage.
Far from fighting on these diplomatic battlegrounds, our allies are tired of waiting for us to draft strategies that we seem unwilling or incapable of implementing.
When she was first tapped for the job, I called up a senior Liberal staffer to ask if they could give me the steel man case for her as Canada’s top diplomat. Joly knows how to make relationships, they told me, how to work a room, and how to take advantage of low expectations — even sexist assumptions — to get Canada back in the mix. It convinced me that the minister deserved the benefit of the doubt.
The Forum — one of just a few global summits designed to bring together political, military, and civil society leadership from across the liberal world — has become a key place where Canada asserts itself on the world stage. It’s exactly the kind of place where Joly ought to excel.
Speaking to people in Halifax last weekend, the plan has clearly backfired. From her checkers-and-chess match with Kasparov to her keynote address, Joly squandered the opportunity at every turn.
Consider the question of what to do about Ukraine. Incoming president Donald Trump has made clear that he wants a ceasefire deal ASAP. If that happens, it will fall on Ukraine’s other allies to make sure the peace holds. Joly insisted the “” signed between Ukraine and its allies, would do the job.
“What is this bilateral agreement?” Kasparov asked, disbelieving. “How will it provide support for Ukraine if — actually, not ‘if’ — when Putin decides to come back?”
Pressed for specifics, Joly could only reference “military aid, financial aid.” Sitting next to her was Hanna Hopko, a former Ukrainian politician who is helping to actually secure military and financial aid. “Security agreements mean this,” she said, waving a piece of paper around to illustrate how, in the face of Russian imperialism, Ottawa’s security guarantees were only worth that much.
Last weekend was really just a distillation of a broader problem: There are few, if any, fronts on which Canada can claim a bigger role in the world than it had a decade ago.
Joly frequently cites her Indo-Pacific Strategy, designed to open Canadian trade opportunities and get us involved in preventing war in Taiwan. Two years after adopting that strategy, Joly told me in Halifax, “our goal is being implemented.” She cited a few wins: A new trade agreement with Indonesia, our newfound status as “strategic partner” to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and the high number of passages we’ve sailed through the Taiwan strait.
But that’s where the wins stop. On fostering security and defence, experts have called Ottawa’s work “.” On our actual goals in the region, others say, “.” One diplomatic representative of a critical ally in the region asked me to breakfast to explain Ottawa’s thinking, because they could not get a straight answer from Joly.
Canada has also been running public consultations on an “approach for partnerships in Africa” for more than a year. Nothing has materialized. All the while, ethnic cleansing has returned to Sudan; militants are ransacking the Sahel; and hijackings continue in the Red Sea, fed by an ongoing war in Yemen.
Where is Canada? Our embassy in Khartoum remains shut — Ottawa reportedly in September to increase diplomatic presence in crisis-plagued Ethiopia, but it remains unimplemented. Our mission in Mali, always modest despite pleas from the U.N. that we do more, . Our absence has meant that Russia and China have become the dominant players in the region.
Civil society is growing increasingly frustrated with Ottawa’s rhetoric-laden approach. When one NGO representative met with Joly, they begged her to appoint an ambassador to a particular hotspot on the continent. Joly demurred, they told me, worrying that appointing an ambassador may appear “colonialist.” It is a damning illustration of how political perception has come to be more important than actually acting.
Canada’s attempts to stop the ongoing destruction and death in Gaza, meanwhile, have been pathetic. Canada hasn’t just been irrelevant in negotiations on reaching a ceasefire, it has been invisible. I tried, in vain, last year to get Joly to opine on a put forward by Lebanon in November of 2023. Despite pleas from Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati for Western partners to sign on to his peace formula, Joly never commented publicly on the specifics of the Mikati’s 2023 plan.
These problems are far afield. Yet even closer to home, as we face a thicket of security and diplomatic challenges posed by a thawing Arctic, Joly is in the midst of writing yet another strategy. It’s not clear when we might see a copy.
And then there is Donald Trump, who seems intent on punishing Canada for various slights, real and perceived. In response, Ottawa’s plan has been to reconstitute the same cabinet committee it operated eight years ago. We are set for a spanking.
It would be unfair to put all of this on Joly’s shoulders. There is universal recognition that the quality of work from our Mandarins at Global Affairs Canada is dismal. Plenty of blame also rests with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who often takes responsibility for our foreign policy to dismal effect. As one disgruntled Liberal told me years ago: Under Trudeau, Canada signs statements but it doesn’t write them.
But Halifax also served as a useful illustration of what can be achieved when our ministers actually decide to do things. Defence Minister Bill Blair has actually laid out a plan to finally build long-overdue naval infrastructure in the high Arctic, improve weapon shipments to Ukraine, and to get Canada in line with NATO’s spending targets. (And he has already signalled his intent to speed that timeline up.)
Staffers I talk to say Blair is effective because he is pushing against inertia in this government, rather than letting himself be defined by it.
It’s no secret that Joly is actively seeking to replace Trudeau when or if he opts to leave his leadership post. She clearly has the political chops to win that contest, and she may even succeed in the top job.
Both for the sake of her ambition and for our country at a time of incredible global risk, she should be given a new assignment. Anything other than foreign affairs.
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