INTERVIEW: Yves Engler on the Myth of Canada's role as global peacekeeper
By Sara AM Golling
Speaking in Castlegar and Nelson this coming weekend is a budding new critic of Canadian Foreign policy, Yves Engler, author of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, and Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid.
Engler is already receiving positive reviews from Naomi Klein, William Blum and Noam Chomsky, who says
“We bear responsibility for what governments do in the world, primarily our own, but secondarily those we can influence, our allies in particular. Yves Engler’s penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada’s role in the world, and poses a challenge for citizens who are willing to take their fundamental responsibilities seriously.”
Through case after case, Engler forces us to question the intent of Canada’s humanitarian gestures. He exposes how the mythology of Canada’s humanitarianism has, since the Pearson era, been deliberately fostered to help disguise the less noble actions of its allies, particularly the Americans. As Jean Chretien recounts having told Bill Clinton, “Keeping some distance will be good for both of us. If we look as though we’re the fifty-first state of the United Sates, there’s nothing we can do for you internationally. But if we look independent enough, we can do things for you that even the CIA cannot do.”
Following is the transcript of a conversation between David Livingstone and Yves Engler, also available in a player below.
DL: I’d like to start by having you introduce yourself.
YE: My name is Yves Enger, and I’m an activist/author based in Montreal. I have a handful of books on Canadian foreign policy. The two most recent, Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid, and The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy.
DL: When did your interest in this start? I can see you went to Concordia. What did you study at Concordia?
YE: I studied political science. But my interest really was in Canadian foreign policy. Again, with late 2003, in seeing that the Canadian government was getting involved in the overthrow of Haiti’s elected government, in February 2004, in seeing Canada’s involvement and then participating in Haiti’s solidarity movement, and being really taken aback by the extent to which the Liberal government of the time participated in this attack against Hatian democracy, and its support of its coup government that was responsible for thousands of people being killed. My sense of Canada’s role in the world was really challenged by learning about this stuff, and seeing what was taking place.
DL: I guess this leads into the subject of your first book,The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. It’s a real eye opener. I’ll tell you that personally, I always wondered about Canada’s role internationally. I think it’s from Chomsky that I bought into the idea that Canada kind of has an accidental role, which allowed it to disagree with American foreign policy decisions, and other policy decisions, from time to time. But from reading your book, I now recognize that that’s pretty much an illusion, and almost deliberately created. Would you agree with that?
YE: Yes. First of all, there’s the question of mythology. There’s no doubt that there’s a serious push towards policy decision-makers creating the idea that Canada is just a force for good in the world, that we are trying to be nice do-gooders. And that’s a way of turning Canadians off from being more critical and digging a little deeper. It’s very useful for foreign policy decision-makers to have that mythology out there.
And in terms of Canada being independent from US foreign policy, I think that the way to understand it is that the Canadian political and economic elite really see the world and profit from the world in a very similar way to the US economic and political elite. They usually go along with US military or other forms of imperial endeavours. And along side that, it’s about pushing Canadian corporate interests abroad, and that’s really often to the detriment of people in the global south and populations elsewhere.
DL: The concept of Canada’s humanitarian values is really at the core of Canadian patriotism, if we can call it such a thing. It’s very much at the core of how Canadians identify themselves, what they view as their ultimate value system, and how they assume that they are perceived abroad. So this brings us to the topic of your book, and I was hoping that you could introduce us to the idea in general that you discuss, and basically the relationship between Canadian foreign policy, and the concept of Canadian humanitarian values, and Canada’s role with the UN, and I guess we’ll have to say American foreign policy.
YE: Studies have shown that Canadians’ self-perception of their country’s role in the world is better than any other country. I think that actually changed over the past couple of years with the Harper government. And that’s actually part of what I’m going to be talking about on the weekend. But there is still this real deep sense, a lynchpin of Canadian national identity is the idea of peacekeepers, is the idea of Lester Pearson and the Nobel Peace Prize. In fact, if you look a little deeper, if you scratch the surface a bit, what Lester Pearson was doing, going back to 1956, with the creation of the UN peacekeeping force, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize for, was during the Suez Crisis in 1956, when France, Britain and Israel invaded Egypt, what he was doing was really helping the Americans out. The Americans opposed that invasion. And they opposed that invasion for two reasons. One, they were nervous it was going to add to Soviet prestige in the Middle East, at a time when the Americans were quite popular. And they were also trying to tell the colonial powers in the region, ie. France and Britain, that there was a new boss in the region, the US. So the peacekeeping mission wasn’t designed to help Egyptian civilians or to protect Egyptian sovereignty. It was really design to support American geo-political interests in the region.
And now that’s been spun to be this big benevolent Canadian endeavour, when the facts don’t add up. And that mythology has really continued on until today. And I think it’s a real obstacle to Canadians demanding a more just foreign policy from their government. The mythology blocks people from seeing the truth, and demanding change. So Harper loosing Canada’s seat on the UN Security Council back in October, in that sense, was a really positive development. Because I think it jolted a lot of Canadians out of their mythology as good people, and they said, “wow, the international community is not really happy with Canada.” So in that sense I think Harper losing his seat was a big victory for those who care about international equality and humanism.
DL: Of course the maintenance of the mythology is important to the whole mechanism. Could you lead that to how the same mythology was used in Haiti, and what Canada’s role was basically used to disguise?
YE: This is the world I came to paying attention to, and to be honest, I had the same mythology myself at the time. I read Noam Chomsky, his point of view of US foreign policy, and I thought that there was a big difference between what Canada does and what the US does. And it is. The US state is more powerful, so in that sense it is more intense. But on a per capita basis it’s actually much more similar, and comparable to what Canada has done around the world to what the US has done. So I had to change that sense myself even. And I found that one of the big obstacles in participating in Haiti’s solidarity movement, we would go to Canadians, and we would try to explain, “hey, the Canadian International and Development Agency (CIDA), an employee of the Canadian International Development Agency, is the second-in-charge of the justice ministry of the coup government that’s responsible for having hundreds of political prisoners sitting in jail, and responsible for the Haitian police that are going and killing the opponents of the coup government.” And people wouldn’t believe us. It just seemed too far-fetched. Right? This is not what Canada does?
So that’s really the point of The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, to take on that mythology from a historic sense to today, and say the reality is that Canadian foreign policy is largely – overwhelmingly actually – designed to serve two main functions: support of empire, historically British, today American, and support for Canadian corporate interests abroad. And when looking at future foreign policy endeavours of the Canadian government, we should assume the worst. Because that’s what the history suggests. We should assume they are trying to support corporate interests, they are trying to support Empire. If they can prove that what they are doing is actually about helping local populations then ok we’ll be supportive. But the burden of proof is on them.
And so I think in the case of Haiti, I was confronted with that, and other people in the solidarity movement were confronted with that mythology, and the fact that it was done under the guise of a UN force that was supposedly peacekeepers in Haiti, and how that fit in to the mythology of Canada’s role in the world as well. So, if you look at the facts in Haiti, the facts are overwhelming that the Canadian government has – rather than helped out the population – has in fact contributed significantly to the further impoverishment and immiseration of the majority poor of Haiti.
DL: What struck me from your book is that I never realized that Canada has a hidden colonialist policy, and that the economic basis of it is largely mining. So it seems to be that in a lot of these cases, it’s an arrangement usually with CIDA, who provide so-called loans for development, which are really there to subsidize the development of Canadian corporations in those countries. Do you agree with that?
YE: For sure. The most explicit case was in Columbia in the late 1990s, where CIDA began an $11 million aid project to rewrite Columbia’s mining code to improve the situation for foreign miners. And it drastically reduced the royalty rates to foreign miners paid. They extended the time-frame of the concession. And it’s been condemned. CIDAs role in the rewriting of Columbia’s mining code has been condemned by numerous labor leaders, and other officials within [Columbia], from the different social movements.
It goes really against perception… People really think of aid as being about helping the world’s poor, or getting improved schools, or sanitation or what not. But in fact if you look a little deeper, what Canadian aid has been about, Canadian aid has been about, one, historically, and I think it continues to today, is supporting Canada’s allies. So really a geopolitical tool, often associated with military occupations. So if you look in Afghanistan, there’s a huge increase in Canadian aid to Afghanistan, as a way to strengthen the Canadian occupation there. But two, it’s about advancing Canadian corporate interests, advancing investors’ situations, prospects if you like. And the actual aid component of helping people out is a secondary, or tertiary actual aim of aid policy.
DL: It seems like CIDA was created during the Pearson era, if I know my history correctly, and it’s first head turns out to be Maurice Strong, who many call the “indispensable man” at the UN. With strong ties of course… his entire career was spent mostly in the petroleum industry. He was the first head of PetroCanada. And since that time the leading figure in the UN’s push for environmental issues. I was wondering if you had any comments in that area?
YE: Well, I don’t know a whole lot of the specifics of Maurice Strong’s history, but I do know that he’s been a corporate executive, and that people have pointed out that he’s been more concerned with advancing corporate interests rather than the world’s poor. And there’s a long history about it, with CIDA officials coming from the corporate world, and obviously officials throughout the government. And I think Strong is emblematic of that history.
DL: I guess I was wondering what it means about the relationship, basically the dual relationship between Canada’s humanitarian image, and that connection to the UN, and Pearson’s involvement in the creation of that, and then CIDA. So basically that team. That partnership.
YE: Well for sure, there is the connection between the peacekeeping type mythology or idea of what Canada does and then the international aid as being part of that ideology of benevolent Canada. And again, to reiterate, sometimes there is examples where it’s about helping the world’s poor, but more often it’s about geopolitical interests, it’s about corporate interests. And the mythology doesn’t actually hold up when you scratch a little deeper than the surface.
DL: Do you think that Canada’s humanitarian image helps it to, under the guise of the UN, cover certain less than noble policies?
YE: Yes, for sure, there have often been instances where Canada has put a good-guy face to US policy. Today there’s an example with Iran. The Canadian government, according to one CanWest report back in 2007, when Canada’s in charge of demonizing Iran’s human rights record, it’s part of a division of labor with the US and European countries, where Canada takes on the part of demonizing Iran’s human rights record, while the Americans and Europeans focus more on the sanctions against Iran’s possible nuclear weapons program. So Canada has a positive reputation, so it plays off of it–that history–as a way to advance the US and Canadian government.
DL: Would you mind commenting, with regards to what you’ve written in your book, elucidate the current situation in Afghanistan?
YE: Well, there’s almost 3,000 Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Obviously there’s tens of thousands, there’s over 60,000 American troops, and tens of thousands of troops from other NATO countries. And the Canadian troops, in the news recently, one of the joint tasks force to Canadian Special forces commandos, it was released through access to information, that he’d been complaining about the fact that his commanders were pushing the JTFA (Joint Task Force Afghanistan) soldiers to commit war crimes, in his words. And there’s examples of them killing innocent Afghans in a cold-blooded sort of way. And we know that the JTFA have been involved in most night time assassination raids, busting down the door of a home and demanding to see the supposed Taliban operative. It’s obviously extremely scary for people to have their houses busted down by foreign troops in the middle of night. And we know that even Hamid Karzai, the puppet president that’s obviously very close to the US and Canada, has criticized these night time assassination raids for creating hostility to the occupation and the foreign forces.
It’s a military occupation. It’s about subjugating a population to the interests of primarily Washington decision-makers, and it’s not pretty. It’s increasingly bloody. It’s not as bloody maybe as the war in Iraq has been, but it’s still a fairly bloody endeavour. And it’s tied into the militarism, the growing strength of the military-industrial complex of Canada. And I think the Harper government really represents these military interests, different arms manufacturers, spending tens of billions of dollars on weapons, while spending little on the social programs that are much more valuable.
DL: And fighter jets.
YE: And fighter jets, exactly. That’s 35 and a minimum of $16 billion on some advanced fighter jets that even the Americans now appear to think are not really worth it. The American military is stepping away from some of its commitments to that 35.
DL: Thanks. So can you tell us a little bit about what you plan on talking about next Sunday in Castlegar?
YE: The talk will focus on the Harper government’s losing its bid for the seat of the UN Security Council back in October. The thesis is that the Harper government lost the bid because it pissed off too many countries around the world, and it pissed off too many countries around the world because it really used foreign policy as a way to please the most extreme sectors of the Conservative party base, right? The evangelical Christian-Zionists, right-wing Jews, the mining executives, the military-industrial complex types, the generals and the whole Cold Warriors. And ultimately the international community actually responded by saying “no, you’ve gone too far”. And the talk will go into a whole lot of detail about different examples of governments around the world being hostile to Canadian foreign policy. In Venezuela for the criticisms, Canada’s quiet support for a coup in Honduras eighteen months ago, obviously it’s support for Israel, and questioning of climate change negotiations, and many other instances where the Harper government has put Canada off-side with the international community.
DL: What do you think the implications of that are?
YE: I think the implications are for the mythology that a lot of Canadians have about Canada as a benevolent force in the world, the implications are a challenge to that. The actual consequence of Canada not having a seat on the UN Security Council – it was Portugal that won it instead – I think if Harper would have won that seat he would have been even more strident in its push for an attack against Iran. I think it would have been more likely that they’d turn to military solutions for any other future developments.
From a Canadian diplomacy standpoint, some people within foreign affairs, no not some people, many people within the foreign affairs bureaucracy, are troubled by not having a seat, that having a seat gives them some added clout in the world. But I think mostly from an internationalist or humanist standpoint, this is a really big victory, this is a really positive development. It’s a sign that as unjust as the international order is, and the whole structure of the UN and the international community, the Harper government went so far in the extreme direction that there was a backlash. And it’s a good sign that there was a backlash from countries around the world.
DL: So basically it’s not a desirable option for Canada to be included, because it’s a role that it would have exploited, in a way that it has continued to exploit its mythology, right?
YE: Yes, mostly… first of all, I think that I prefer the Portuguese government. I think the current Portuguese government is less likely to take most pro-military, pro-imperial policies on the UN. But I think mostly the real importance of this is that it’s opened a lot of Canadian’s eyes up to the fact that much of the world doesn’t see Canada as just a simple international do-gooder.
DL: What would be your opinion about… There’s been quite a bit of criticism that the Security Council is basically the means through which the UN can essentially be hijacked by certain more powerful interests. Do you have any comments on that?
YE: Yes, the Security Council is not a strictly democratic body. I mean on the Security Council obviously there’s the five powers that have overwhelming – the permanent members that have the veto – have overwhelming control over the body and the general assembly. So when the UN sends troops to Haiti, it’s not the UN general assembly that has endorsed that, but it’s the Security Council. And in the case of Haiti that’s an important point because fifteen members of the Caribbean community as well as the African Union, I think it’s 47 members, the African Union they actually criticized, they asked for an investigation into the removal of Haiti’s former president back in 2004. And so they weren’t the ones voting in support of a UN military mission to Haiti, but rather it was the Security Council. And again, the Security Council is dominated by small powers, it’s a body that is far from ideal and obviously heavily dominated by Washington.
DL: Well, you know, just to wrap up, I think people in the world in general need to recognize how much of the outside world is being damaged by imperialistic policies, and the degree to which Canada has had an integral role in that process, particularly by maintaining, as you say, its mythology about its humanitarian role. So that’s why I think your book is really important. And I do hope that people will come out and listen to you next week in Castlegar (and Nelson). So I just wanted to thank you, thank you for writing your book, and thank you for taking to the time to talk to me. Do you have any final comments that you’d like to make?
YE: No, I’ll just say, first of all, thanks for doing this, and you know, the point is really ultimately about getting Canadians engaged in determining that foreign policy, not in a way that just serves the interests of the big corporations and the imperial decision-makers, but serves the interests of Canadians and international community and the world’s poor.
On January 30th, Engler will also be speaking in Castlegar, B.C. at the Castlegar Public Library at 3 pm and then at 7 pm in Nelson, B.C. at the TNT Theatre. Both events have a $5 suggested donation.
