Canada's naked international ambition raises hacklesMarch 7, 2009
When Canada's ministers, diplomats, generals and aides head to London in three weeks for the G20 summit, then to Strasbourg for the 60th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, then to Trinidad for the Summit of the Americas, then to Washington for meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, then to Prague for Canada-European Union talks and finally to Maddalena, Italy, for the G8 summit,
they will be carrying a single, unified message, guided and directed by the Prime Minister.No, it is not about fixing the credit and banking crises, even if Canada can claim to be a leader here. Nor does it involve the Afghanistan war, or trade relations, or international justice, or foreign aid.
Sure, these subjects will be pressed by Canada, and will sometimes be the official topic of the meeting, but
the Canadians are under orders to have a top priority: the October, 2010, elections for the United Nations Security Council."We are under orders to make this the one thing we bring up in every meeting, the first priority at every summit," a ministerial official told me.
A foreign-affairs insider agreed: "We are running this like a campaign to get an Olympics. There will be 192 countries voting and Tuvalu's vote is as important as Russia's, so we need to spend the next two years working on every country, giving them what they want to win their vote."
In fact, there is a detailed plan to use the 2010 Winter Olympics in British Columbia as a central lobbying event for the UN vote, each country attending the Games being assigned a targeted strategy, an intelligence file and a platoon of fluffers.
How does it work? Look at what happened three weeks ago, when Peter Kent, the former TV news anchor who is now Canada's Minister of State for the Americas, made a quiet visit to Guyana. In a meeting with its Foreign Minister, Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Mr. Kent announced that Canada had voted for a Guyanese judge, Mohammed Shahabbuddeen, to become a member of the International Criminal Court. In exchange, Ms. Rodrigues-Birkett pledged to give Guyana's 2010 UN vote to Canada rather than Portugal.
Was Judge Shahabbuddeen the best person for the job? Maybe. He's well respected in international circles. But that was not the point. He was precisely good enough to win Canada another vote from a UN member.
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