Here, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s
Globe and Mail is a perceptive comment:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/for-harper-canadas-future-is-asian/article1390903/
For Harper, Canada's future is Asian
John Ibbitson
Monday, Dec. 07, 2009
We know that only Richard Nixon, a hard-line cold warrior, could convince conservative America that it needed to deal with Maoist China. What we don't know yet is whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper will be able to convince conservative Canada that its future - their future - lies across the Pacific.
Mr. Harper addressed the South Korean National Assembly today, after a visit to the demilitarized zone between North and South that remains one of the world's open wounds. And then he comes home from his extended Asian excursion, with a nascent foreign policy tentatively in place.
What will conservative Canadians--most of them white, some rural, many in the Prairies, others on the edges of central Canadian cities--think of Mr. Harper's two trips: first to Singapore and India, and then to China and South Korea?
Only Mr. Nixon, they said, could go to China. Perhaps only Stephen Harper can convince Old Canada that the times have changed.
The speech to the National Assembly was directed not so much to them as to leaders of the G20, which Canada will host next year and co-chair with South Korea. "The G20 will serve as the world's pre-eminent forum for economic co-operation. It is this group that has worked together to minimize the effects of global recession," Mr. Harper said in his speech.
The Prime Minister urged G20 leaders of the need for a measured approach to the recession's aftermath: neither entrenching debt-fuelled public funding beyond its time, nor turning off the taps too soon and risking another downturn. "The world is struggling to emerge from the worst recession in half a century. Economies are showing signs of stabilization, that this recovery is fragile. It is a recovery that wrong choices could quickly stall, or even reverse. The livelihoods of families all over the world hang in the balance."
Mr. Harper has publicly acknowledged that the G8 group of major developed economies has been supplanted by the G20 group of developed and developing nations. The G20 is as much Pacific as Atlantic, dominated by the United States, China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, Russia, Mexico and Indonesia--a sure signal of the shifting axis of economic power.
Mr. Harper had long resisted this shift, just as many of his supporters resist it now.
This is why Mr. Harper initially focused his efforts on renewing the strained Canada-U.S. relationship. He ultimately sought distance because his arrival as Prime Minister coincided with the unravelling of the Bush Doctrine and the beginning of America's descent into economic hell.
Who knows when the United States government will become sufficiently solvent and its economy sufficiently robust to once again drive global demand?
It will always be the dominant economy in our region, just as Canada will have a mostly European population for decades to come. But the growth at the margins is Asian. It is the source of our immigration, the engine of population growth, our richest resource.
After a dalliance with Latin America, Mr. Harper accepted that he must bring Canada closer to Asian markets. In recent weeks he has aggressively pursued civilian nuclear and other trade deals with India, and staked much on Canada's rapprochement with China, even as the Chinese leadership rapped his knuckles for taking so long.
As a result of all this effort, a door has opened. To keep it open, two things must happen. First, the Conservative government must exploit the momentum created by this successful trip by entrenching expertise in the foreign affairs and trade departments. Second, it must be pushing, always pushing, for more access into protected Asian markets.
Everywhere that struggles will struggle even more with the idea of looking west rather than south or east.
But everywhere that's growing, especially Canada's own bristling, cosmopolitan cities, will embrace Pacific Canada. They will know that the future is Asian, and the possibilities are endless.
Stephen Harper seems now to think so, too.
One can only hope that, finally, a Canadian leader – any Canadian leader – is getting ready to slough off the old, decrepit,
Eurocentric foreign policy that expressed a deep national yearning to return to the safety of
the a colonial womb (we recognized that the British colonial womb was out of the question so we tried to cuddle up and suck at the American teat but out knee-jerk, sophomoric,
institutionalized anti-Americanism always got in the way).
The Ruxted Group said:
Canada needs to “look South” again – towards our good friend and neighbour and our most important trading partner: the USA. By turning about Canada will, also, extend its strong right arm to the Pacific: towards major trading partners like China, India, Japan, and South Korea; towards old friends like Fiji, Malaysia, and Singapore, and towards traditional allies like Australia and New Zealand. Ruxted says 'again' because this proposal is neither radical nor new – Canada cooperated closely with the USA in the not too distant past – within the living memory of Ruxted members, and it created the Colombo Plan (akin to the US Marshal Plan) to help our Commonwealth friends in the Asia/Pacific region. Canada will be 'welcomed back' by trading partners, old friends and traditional allies alike.
Source: http://ruxted.ca/index.php?/archives/33-About-Turn!-Time-to-Revise-Canadas-Foreign-Policy-Part-2.html
That’s probably the sensible approach: there is no need to burn bridges but there is a need to rebuild some and to build some nice new ones.
The rebuilding involves both Europe and America. Our ‘bridges’ to Europe, to carry the analogy to its bitter end, are, arguably, carrying the wrong ‘traffic.’ Europe is a
potential economic superpower but it’s capacity is highly constrained because it is a strategic weakling. It is a weakling because, despite its deep regulatory and economic integration it has been unable to strike any sort of common
strategic policy goals. Our ties to Europe, therefore, should be heavy on economics and light on strategy – that’s hard to accomplish because Europe is trying, very hard, to build trade walls to protect its own producers by, explicitly, excluding foreigner competitors, like Canada and China, even as it is, simultaneously, trying to build its strategic credibility by trying – and failing - to “lead” missions like Afghanistan. In other words big, financially strong Europe wants less trade and more strategic cooperation while we want more trade and less strategic entanglement.
Our ties to America are strong, in fact they are overwhelming. No matter what American and Canadian politicians and the
commentariat[ think (to the extent that they do that at all) North America – from the Rio Grande to the North West Passage is one, single, nearly wholly integrated marketplace – and no amount of regulation will change that. The single North American people need their
internal trade and commerce and they will, eventually, overturn idiotic measures made by dimwits such as those in Homeland Security that try to manipulate markets to the disadvantage of sound economics. I often agree that
’security trumps trade’ but there are limits to that (and any) bromide. Americans are losing their fear of
some of their neighbours (us) even as they notice that they are not benefiting as much as they
know should from ‘open’ borders – because the borders are not as ‘open’ as they should be. We need to strengthen and
widen our bridges (and there are several of them) to the USA. We need to further integrate the
markets even as we work 9and spend) to maintain our sovereignty and political independence.
Our bridges to Asia (clutching desperately to that analogy) are long and rickety. We need to build new, strong, wide bridges. Asia, unlike Europe, is not monolithic. France and Belgium are
similar, China and Korea are not; the economics and politics in Oslo are
similar to those in Stockholm; the politics and economics in Sydney are far, far different from those in Kuala Lumpur, and so on.
First: We need to be aggressive in pursuing free trade agreements with China, India, Australia, South Korea and so on and so forth – despite Canadian’s well known fear of free trade. The government must bulldoze the naysayers or bamboozle them – either is acceptable; they are ignorant people who, unintentionally, weaken our country.
Second: We need to strengthen our
cultural ties with Asia – they should be almost as strong as those with Europe. Hong Kong is one of the 20 largest Canadian cities:
about 220,000 Canadians live in Hong Kong, rather more than live in Regina and just a few less than
live in Saskatoon. Too many Canadians regard these fellow citizens as
’Canadians of convenience’ when, in fact, they are our best trade commissioners and an important entrée into the whole East Asian marketplace because Hong Kong, with Singapore, is both an
entrepôt and banking centre for the entire region.
Third: We need to reinvent Trudeau’s
Third Option, but this time with some good economic sense. We do not need to lessen anything with the USA; we need to
grow our trade and commerce with Asia, especially, and with (highly protectionist) Europe in areas where that is possible. To some extent that means we must, indeed, be “hewers of wood and drawers of water” (Josh. 9:21) because it is our resources that the low cost, highly productive Asian manufacturers need.
All-in-all there is some small reason to hope that Harper has, at last, stumbled on to the right track.
. I worked in conjunction with CIDA while in Afghanistan. My impression was that they live in a self imposed utopian fantasy constantly clouded by rose coloured glasses.
