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WINNIPEG FREE PRESS per Joe Hueglin
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Date Posted: 10:43:05 02/21/03 Fri
Author Host/IP: d150-99-156.home.cgocable.net/24.150.99.156
Chretien may be right, more or less
There is substantial anti-war sentiment in Canada
Friday, February 21st, 2003
William Neville
THOUGH one might be tempted to call Prime Minister Jean Chrétien a master of ambiguity, it can hardly be claimed that his frequent imprecision or confusion or skirting of issues was always conscious and deliberate. Indeed, some of the time his unfortunate command of the language or his shaky grasp of the implications of issues made him simply an object of mockery, something not usually helpful for any politician.
Nonetheless, there have been times when he used these same deficiencies to advantage by laying down a smokescreen behind which he was able, for his own tactical or strategic purposes, to conceal his real opinions or intentions. For citizens wishing to be informed and engaged, this leadership style was and is frustrating and infuriating. Yet now, entering his 10th and final year as prime minister, it seems clear that whatever the source or nature of the apparent confusion, it has often been coupled with a c anny sense of what the country as a whole would tolerate. In this, despite an admiration for Wilfrid Laurier, he has demonstrated a greater natural affinity for Mackenzie King.
It was King, after all, who uttered the quintessential Canadian example of political equivocation: "Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription." And Chrétien, though less succinctly, has offered a contemporary variant: War under the UN if necessary but not necessarily war at all. King was -- and continues to be -- derided for his position, and in Parliament, in editorial offices and in pundits' columns, Chrétien is certainly being derided for his. Yet a case can be made that K ing then -- and Chrétien now -- got it more or less right.
To write something unequivocally positive about King would be largely outside my experience, yet he, who seemed so lacking in principles on so many things, may have had one here. The principle had little to do with the objective merits of conscription, or with its possible impact on the war effort: it had everything to do with finding the most expedient way of maintaining national unity and domestic tranquillity. What seemed to be spinelessness probably represented, nonetheless, the difference between what actually happened (foot-dragging over conscription until it was so late as to make little difference) and what might have happened (a fracturing of the country by re-enacting the conscription crisis of the First World War, the most divisive issue in Canada's history up to that time).
An analogous dilemma now faces Chrétien -- though the character of the Iraqi question could hardly be more different -- and the government's temporizing reflects this. The dilemma, it seems to me, rests on the difficult choice between what seems right and what seems expedient. One choice is to be guided by the merits of the case about which both the government and a large part of the public have serious doubts. The other is to be guided by some assessment of national self-interest and the consequence s, including possible retribution, of failing to follow where U.S. President George W. Bush would lead.
Though it is scarcely reflected in the editorial pages of most Canadian newspapers, there is a substantial anti-war sentiment in this country, spawned partly by anti-Bush feeling and other irrelevancies, but driven chiefly by a widespread view that the case for war has not been made and that a relatively weak case is more than offset by the terrible costs and probable consequences. Chrétien's Chicago speech last week, in which he pointed out that the overwhelming power of the U.S. does not automatica lly inspire trust in the rest of the world, may not have been entirely popular with his audience, but it was true nonetheless. The U.S. has often, in the last 60 years, displayed both great magnanimity and vision internationally but it also has a remarkable record of supporting dictators it liked (including Saddam) and toppling governments it disliked. There are, in short, intelligent and intelligible reasons for Canadians and their government doubting that this war is jus! tified.
On the other hand, while the United States has historically been one of Canada's closest friends, the U.S. has not hesitated to override Canadian interests when their own seemed at issue. This has been no less true in the heavenly era ushered in by free trade. The future may be even rougher than the past. Apart from issues like softwood lumber and agricultural subsidies, there are looming issues over water and oil reserves and countless pressure points on which the U.S. may lean to impose its views. Just a s British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made his peace with the new imperium, the Canadian government now has to calculate how far it may go in antagonizing the U.S. and what the consequences might be if Canada crosses the line of the permissible.
If the government encompasses a large swath of political opinion on this issue, the opposition parties tend to reflect different parts of that same spectrum. The NDP and the Bloc oppose the war on principle. The Tories, though more inclined to support the U.S., have not done so unreservedly. The Canadian Alliance has unreservedly emerged as the War Party. Alliance Leader Stephen Harper's simplicity has been as obvious as Chrétien's ambiguity, but this past week he seemed marginally more restrained. I t's unlikely that marchers have converted him but they may have made him realize that a knee-jerk, "ready-aye-ready" position towards the U.S. is not likely to make him prime minister of Canada -- until or unless Bush gets to make that appointment.
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© 2003 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
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