Why Would the UN General Assembly Elect Canada to the Security Council?

Prime Minister Trudeau has been hustling around the world, attempting to round up votes for Canada when the UN General Assembly elects members of the Security Council in June. Two seats are available for the Western European and Others Group, and three countries are in the running: Norway, Ireland and Canada. We've been elected to the council six times but infamously lost our bid in 2010 to Germany and Portugal.

So will enough countries vote for us this time? I wouldn't. What exactly have we done to deserve it? Our record on the most important issue facing the international community is appalling. As I noted in a previous post, we are consistently among the top three per capita greenhouse gas emitters in the G-20 and among the three least likely to meet our targets. Our competitors' do much better, easy for Ireland because it has no oil industry but Norway has a thriving oil industry and still gets its emissions down to almost half of ours.

On foreign aid we are a slacker. The UN aid target for a developed country is a minimum of 0.70 percent of its GDP. We give a measly 0.28. Ireland does a little better at 0.36 while Norway is well over the target at 1.05, one of the world's most generous countries. We were at one time a leader in peacekeeping, a concept we practically invented, but now we seem to have largely abandoned the enterprise. In 1993 there were 3336 Canadian peacekeepers deployed on UN missions, in 2019 only 150.

After his impressive election win in 2015, Trudeau announced, "Many of you have worried that Canada has lost its compassionate and constructive voice in the world over the past 10 years. Well, I have a simple message for you: on behalf of 35 million Canadians, we’re back." Well, call me naive, but after a dreary decade on the international front with Stephen Harper, I believed him.

Yet here we are. A foreign aid budget of 0.28 percent of our GNP is not particularly compassionate and being a laggard on greenhouse gas emissions is hardly constructive. We seem to be idling along, failing our commitments to the international community, while hoping that same community will somehow recognize our inherent virtue and elevate us to the Security council, just  as we did with Harper. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.