Harper wants to be a Player
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Halifax today, announcing a 20-year, $30 billion plan to beef up our military:
If a country wants to be taken seriously in the world, it must have the capacity to act. It’s that simple. Otherwise you forfeit your right to be a player. You’re the one chattering on the sideline that everyone smiles at, but no one listens to.
It sounds suspiciously like:
The only thing in this world that gives orders… is balls.
That was Al Pacino acting as our new foreign policy advisor, Tony Montana.
So, Harper wants to be a ‘player’, eh? Wants to be a hustler, a mack? Wants to puff out his chest in the school yard and be ‘the man’? Play Grand Theft Auto. You won’t hurt yourself that way, and you won’t hurt other people. Or your own people.
I think Steve needs to cut back on the movie rentals and rely on something else for policy direction.
couldn’t “capacity to act” mean “capacity to continue to deliver top notch peace keeping forces, plus have the forces trained and available in case we need to help storm another beach like Normandy”?
I don’t believe there will ever be beaches to storm like in WWII, but you get the idea.
and I’m clearly not up to date on the role of Canada in missions around the world, but maybe a more significant force would better position Canada to take more of a leadership role than a support role — and therefore get a bigger seat at the Strategy table. I’m just thinking out loud (and clearly I don’t have a horse in the Canadian political race).
It all depends on what you mean by ‘significant force.’ You see, I’m an advocate of Canada having a truly effective and capable military, which it hasn’t really had – ever. Some analysts equate our military efforts for the past 50 years as being akin to ‘coasting’, with which I agree despite my meagre knowledge of Canadian military history. I would be proud if Canada had an appropriately sized and trained military that focused on peace keeping, informed nation-building, and a measured role in allied missions. We were slowly getting there under the previous Liberal governments (Chretien and Martin), and even earlier with the creation of JTF2.
What I am not an advocate of is a ‘big’ military mired in inappropriate combat missions, ‘backed up’ by a swaggering international posture, all of which I understand Harper to mean when he says ‘capacity to act’ combined with the desire to be a ‘player’. His parliament has very quickly changed the direction of the Canadian military toward this model, in the explicit project of ‘undoing’ generations of Liberal Party dogma (not entirely unwarranted) both in the military and in the general public.
The problem, as I see it and reason I zeroed in on this quote of Harper’s, is that Harper’s government seems to equate humility and genuine good will with impotence, both perceived and real, and that’s outright false. Canada’s current posture on the international stage under Harper is hurting us, damaging international opinion (this has all been polled, I just don’t have the time to dig them up, sorry), as well as national public opinion. Prior to Harper’s changes, Canada enjoyed the respect of other nations simply because we seemed to be trying, quietly, without any expectation of recognition or reward, to do the ‘right thing’. No shame in that – in fact, it’s a pretty good strategy of ensuring a minimum of national security.
And let’s be honest – Canada really can’t expect to have anything more than a support role and a secondary seat at the strategy table. We’re a nation of 30 million left-leaning resource producers. Not much more. We can’t reasonably sustain the kind of role Harper thinks we can. And there’s no shame in that either. It just means our role is something else.
fair enough. I didn’t equate ‘significant force’ and ‘player’ with getting mired in inappropriate combat missions. (isn’t that America’s job?)
I had to laugh when you said “swaggering” — compared to our Executive branch, (I can’t even come up with an analogy). there is literally no comparison.
LOL – it’s all relative. Harper is a ten gallon, revolver-packin’ rustler (but dipped in vaseline (not my line but totally, weirdly appropriate)) relative to Martin, even more so relative to the current party leaders. So, yeah, it might not be swaggering to someone used to current American rhetoric, but it’s positively alarming for most Canadians, and also laughable – he’s trying so hard… but the guy is a career geek economist (or ‘geekonomist’). And a Canadian. He’s like Martin Price from The Simpsons pretending to be the all-star quarterback.
Or something like that.