Is Canada serious about the Americas?

Is Canada serious about the Americas?
Ottawa Citizen March 29, 2013
Robert Muggah

For at least the past five years, Canada has quietly waged a half-hearted war on organized crime and drug cartels. Even before Canada’s prolonged engagement in Afghanistan started winding down, politicians and strategists were refocusing on real and perceived threats south of the border in Latin America and the Caribbean. After decades of non-engagement, Canada launched an Americas Strategy in 2007, announcing that it would step up its diplomatic, defence and development engagement in some of the most insecure countries on the planet. This was never going to be easy: six of the top 10 most violent countries in the world are in the Western Hemisphere and for some, the situation is worsening.

Although this was characterized as a war of choice, Canada was effectively drafted by the United States. The United States has long demanded that Canadians take a tougher stand against illegal drugs trafficking, gun smuggling and undocumented migrants. This is hardly surprising. The United States is the principle backer of massive anti-crime programs across the Western Hemisphere and has spent at least $14 billion since the late 1990s on the so-called Mérida Initiative in Mexico, the Central American Security Initiative, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, Plan Colombia and a host of counter-narcotics programs. The country is also one of the biggest suppliers of weapons and deportees to Latin America and the Caribbean. By way of comparison, Canada’s spending on security and justice promotion across the Americas is in the tens of millions.

Canada exhibits a modest capacity to project either hard or soft power in the Americas. It has traditionally pursued many of its security and development priorities through multilateral organs such as the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Development Bank. Canada is also an active participant in the Conferences of the Defense Ministers of the Americas, having hosted a regional security summit a few years ago. During the 1980s, Canadian troops were deployed across Central America and the Caribbean to support United Nations peace support operations. Yet Canada’s Conservative government has taken a hard unilateral turn in its posture toward the region. With the appointment of a minister of state for the Americas in 2008, the government signaled a concerted interest in promoting law, order and democratic governance in its backyard through a “whole-of-government” approach.

Of course, Canada had other pragmatic reasons besides common security and democracy priorities to launch an Americas Strategy. The government recognizes that solidarity on the defence front might also open new business opportunities among the region’s 33 countries and 590 million residents. Latin America’s impressive economic growth rates are enticing to Canada’s ordinarily cautious private sector. Just as successive Liberal governments made Africa a priority in the 1990s, the Harper government is today looking to the South and the Pacific, to what Jean Daudelin calls the “Liberal Americas.” The prime minister toured Latin America last year while Canada’s foreign minister attended the so-called Pacific Alliance whose members include Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and others.

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