The following is the text of a speech delivered by Canadian Ambassador to the United Nations Bob Rae at Dominion Chalmers Church in Ottawa on October 6, 2022 marking the tenth anniversary of the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship.
You can donate to the Travers Fellowship here.
I am very grateful to the family of Jim Travers and the supporters of the Travers Fellowship for organizing this celebration tonight.
I was lucky enough to have known and worked with Jim Travers. In an age where journalists and politicians are always portrayed as antagonists, this might seem like a strange way of describing our relationship.
Jim Travers was not my adversary. He was my friend. We had different jobs – I was a member of Parliament and then the leader of a provincial political party, and he was a working journalist for the Toronto Star – but we both believed the integrity of the political process, in the value of democracy, in the meaning of getting at the truth.
We were also interested in politics beyond our borders and our time and cared about what we could learn from the past and how to make a better the future. My last interview with Jim was a public discussion about a book I wrote about the risks and rewards of promoting democracy around the world. He was taken from us too early in life. I am so happy we were able to pay tribute to Jim by debating each other in a spirit of good humour and raising money for a good cause – the Travers Fellowship.
Long may it live and provide support for the curious and the courageous.
We are meeting at a time of great turmoil.
It is not a time when one or two things have gone wrong.
It is a time when disruption is the norm and not the exception.
Piers Brandon called his masterful survey of global affairs in the 1930’s, “The Dark Valley”. I commend it to you.
He described a world where economic depression, the unleashing of the deepest hatreds and the harshest dictatorships took the world down a terrible path of destruction.
When Churchill and Roosevelt met off the coast of Newfoundland in 1941, in the summer before the attack on Pearl Harbour, they signed a document we now know as the Atlantic Charter. The Charter was a statement of war aims that was later signed by a number of countries at the White House in January of 1942.
A new order based on democracy, the rule of law, self government, and freedom these were later the principles embedded in San Francisco and Nuremberg, the path we have been on ever since.
But is the path upon which we are now stumbling. The point of my talk tonight is simply this: however often we stumble, and even fall down, we must always get back up again. Cynicism and pessimism are ways of thinking and being that prevent us from seeing the possibilities of change, and of hope. Churchill was a lifelong supporter of Empire, Roosevelt presided over a country struggling to emerge from the legacy of slavery and isolationism. Yet they both embraced the language of democracy.
The events of their time forced them to rise to the occasion in defence of values that they believed to be universal. Their careers were marked by great achievements and also great defeats. In their own lives they knew personal defeat and despair, and yet managed to lead, and inspire.
The turmoil that we are now facing comes at us from many different directions. We are not in a world war, but we are facing challenges that should cause us all to reflect on what it is we are striving to do.
My analysis is somber but not hopeless. In challenge lies opportunity.
Roosevelt and Churchill argued about the end of empire and the need for self government. Roosevelt’s vision of a world of self governed nations won out over Churchill’s. But that world of 193 self governing nations is still a vastly unequal world. Over a billion people in deep poverty, and now tens of millions on the brink of survival. The deepest humanitarian challenges are in a part of the world, Africa, that Jim Travers loved and cared about deeply. But it is not confined to one continent or one part of the world.
When Lester Pearson retired from being Prime Minister of Canada, he was asked by the World Bank to chair a review of global development.
He concluded that much more needed to be done. Above all, the wealthier countries needed to embrace their mutual obligation to build global prosperity as a clear objective. He was right. We have fallen short of the targets Mr Pearson set for us, but at the same time, the dramatic growth in countries like China, India, Indonesia and Brazil was not something he could clearly foresee. Still, the gaps between countries is something that divides the human experience and even permeates the halls of the United Nations.
If the only challenge we faced was how to build global prosperity and fight poverty, that in itself would be enough, it would both unite and divide us, but it would above all be a worthy focus for our undivided attention.
But life is not that simple. Over the past 50 years we have had to come to terms with the difficult truth that the pollution that has accompanied industrial growth since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has created layers in the atmosphere that are dramatically affecting the global climate, causing rising seas, catastrophic weather events, floods and droughts. The global community came together in Rio and Kyoto in the 1990’s to try and deal with this enormous challenge, but global carbon emissions are still rising, despite many agreements since then. We know how to negotiate treaties. We have more difficulty living up to them.
Climate change is not a future threat. It is a real and present danger, creating conditions of life that force people to leave their homes, to lose their livelihoods, and to become refugees. Its effects will become even more severe in the future. No continent, no country, no city and no village can avoid its realities.
To climate change we must now add the impact of a global pandemic, about which we were warned, but for which we were unprepared. While it is right that we marvel at the speed with which vaccines and treatments were discovered, we also have to recognize that in the production and distribution of vaccines nationalism, and not global solidarity, was the predominant political reality.
We often say “we are in the same boat”. But the harsher truth is that we while we face the same weather and the same pandemic, we are actually still in different boats, some much bigger and safer than others, and others ready at any moment to capsize.
To this cascade of crises that fall into each other in succeeding waves, we must add others – more refugees and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War, deeper and sharper conflicts, and divides and divisions that are made more severe because of the pace of technological change. It is indeed a time of turmoil.
And yet, there is in our own history and our own understanding the basis for hope. “The world is in us and we are in the world”. Canada is by virtue of its history, geography, demography, social makeup and economy, directly implicated in the world. We are an indigenous country, an Arctic country, a country of the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Americas, and by virtue of our dramatically shifting demography because of immigration, a country that is tied to literally every country, language, and history, in the world. We are a trading nation, a country whose GDP is directly tied to economic ties with the rest of th world. We are members of a multitude of alliances, agreements, and associations. There is no part of the world that is far away or remote from us.
This is who we are. Any attempt to ignore our global situation is bound to fail. The UN and multilateral agencies around the world are a critical place for us to share our values, fight for our beliefs, advance our interests, and yes, do our business.
“Our business” is not simply about commerce, it is about our ideas and our practices. From deep within our shared experience Canada has learned about democracy, about being a country of the truth of the injustice of settlement, the need for reconciliation, coming to terms with racism and discrimination, celebrating equality and diversity, the value of federalism, pluralism, the rule of law, and both the power of unity and the dignity of difference. Canada has learned that democracy is actually a balance between majority rule and respecting minorities and their rights. An inevitable part of joining the world and being at home in it is the ability to say “Here we are. This is our identity. We believe in it and share it with you but we are in no position to impose it upon you or anyone else by force. But we insist on our right to try and persuade you of its merits, because we have learned something of its meaning and its worth”.
The current fight for democracy, and against the misinformation, disinformation, and lies that are the currency of modern tyrannies, is fought out in many places, of which one of the most important is the United Nations. Those who say this doesn’t matter, that the UN should be better named “dictators on parade” are missing the point that we abandon these institutions at our peril. Evil and mischief prevail when good people sit on their hands. At our best we have not let that happen.
The first Prime Minister who deeply felt and understood this was Sir Robert Borden. His biographers describe how he rarely slept during the First World War, the conflict that brought home to him how Canada and Canadians were irrevocably connected to the global conflict in which young Canadians were losing their lives
It was Borden who insisted that Canada sign the Versailles Treaty and join the League of Nations as an independent country. And it was a diplomat not often remembered, Walter Riddell, who argued strongly for sanctions against the Fascist government of Italy for its unprovoked attack on Ethiopia, before being told by Prime Minister King that he was speaking for himself and not for the government of Canada, an incident that for some reason sticks in my mind.
The world’s turmoil is not only marked by deep inequalities, climate change, pandemics and competing values. The Charter of the United Nations begins with these famous words “We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save future generations from the scourge of war…” Yet it is the scourge of war and aggression that has brought us to an even deeper turmoil that threatens to bring the world to both a wider conflict and economic depression.
Russia’s illegal war has created havoc in Ukraine, but the effects are felt globally. In addition to the thousands who have been killed, millions have been physically displaced, both inside and outside Ukraine. Thousands of children have been illegally kidnapped. The war crimes and crimes against humanity accumulate. The annexation of eastern Ukraine is just the latest crime.
Canada made an immediate decision to attack the criminality of the invasion, and to support Ukraine militarily (invoking Article 51 of the Charter, Ukraine’s sovereign right to resist invasion and to request international assistance) and to pursue accountability in international courts. We have also provided billions in financial assistance to Ukraine and UN agencies helping the humanitarian situation.
Russia’s aggression has also had major economic consequences for its neighbours, and because of inflation, energy disruption, and food shortages, has contributed to risks of famine, hunger and hardship around the world.
It is readily apparent that President Putin cares as little about human life, human dignity, personal freedom, the rights of other peoples, as his spiritual and political ancestor Josef Stalin. The sheer brutality of what he says and what he does reflects that clearly.
Four hundred years ago Blaise Pascal wrote that “Justice without force is powerless, and force without justice is tyranny”. We cannot afford to be powerless in our response to aggression.
This is not about vengeance. It is about simple justice, and a justice that cannot reward bad conduct. We seek peace, but an enduring peace that deals with the causes of conflict and provides the basis for security.
To go back to the preamble to the Charter, it starts with the words “we the peoples of the United Nations.” Canada is among those countries that attach real meaning to that phrase. While international law suffers from the challenge of weak enforcement, it is nevertheless a reminder that the law applies to the strong as well as to the weak, that it governs the conduct of dictators and tyrants, and that no one, and no state, is above the law.
Conflict, as we have discovered, is not just about the wars between countries, but also about the violence that happens within the boundaries of the nation state. There are some who argue that national sovereignty trumps all other interests and considerations, but this misses the crucial point that 1945 was not just the year the UN was created, it was also the year that the trials at Nuremberg began, that evidence was led on the crime of aggression, and also on war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Canada played a leading role in both the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and fifty years later in the drafting of the Rome Treaty, which established the International Criminal Court. The defence of human rights, gender equality, indigenous rights, plays a critical role in our international engagement. We do this while accepting that these principles have to apply to ourselves as much as they do to others.
What Thomas Hobbes famously called the “war of all against all”, where life is “nasty, brutish and short” is what happens when states collapse, or when governments turn on their own populations. This has contributed to the current crisis of displacement, which is now more serious than at any point since the Second World War. There are more displaced people, internal migrants and refugees, than ever before. There are over one hundred million people who wander the face of the earth with nowhere to call home. They are the children of conflict, the children of hate and fear, the children of droughts and floods, the children of neglect and indifference. There are twice as many in camps and hovels as there were a decade ago. They are the fastest growing population in the world. If all the displaced people in the world lived in a single country, it would be the 12th largest nation in the world, and also the poorest. The majority of its population would be women and girls, and yet their needs, wants and rights would be threatened by the tyrannies of patriarchy
It is difficult not to feel overwhelmed by the turmoil surrounding us. But we cannot afford to be overwhelmed. At the end of Ken Burns’s moving documentary on the United States and the Holocaust he quotes Eleanor Roosevelt as saying that the trouble with our consciences is that they click in too late. “When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it”, she asked, and It is a good question.
My answer is to suggest that this moment is most likely to come when we realize that our interests and our consciences coincide. We are at precisely such a moment today. What we have to resist is the temptation to put up higher walls between us, to retreat into a search for a merely private affluence, to abandon engagement, responsibility, and the hard choices that life has now thrown us.
Secretary General Guterres has said on a number of occasions that “solidarity is necessity”, and I firmly believe those words are true. We make a mistake to think that pursuing peace, ending conflict, pursuing justice, creating sustainable economies and societies are all the product of wooly and well-meaning compassion. They are not, they are hard things to pursue, and unless we continue to engage effectively we shall face a world in which our choices will be limited, our prosperity will be more elusive, and our lives harsher, and, yes, shorter.
Canada’s leadership has to be about words bluntly spoken, and deeds pursued with consistency and substance. We are not just part of one alliance, but many, and to be true to them we cannot look the other way when the costs of shared responsibility go up, as they inevitably will. A robust commitment to development, diplomacy, and defence does not come cheaply, or easily.
The world we thought we were building in 1945 and the years after has become more complex, but we need to realize that this is not simply a task for one generation. The extent of global problems is not yet matched by enough global vision, and strong enough global architecture, to withstand our current challenges.
But that does not mean we throw up our hands in despair. We roll up our sleeves and keep building, knowing that our efforts will fall short, and that future generations will have to bear the burden of our failures. To borrow the words of Leonard Cohen, “there are no perfect offerings, there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in”.
Not far from this Church, Thomas D’Arcy McGee was shot dead in 1868, a political victim of a conflict that pursued him across the Atlantic. An Irish immigrant, he took no time to embrace his new country and its political challenges. He reminded his fellow countrymen that the reality of building a stronger union came from the simple fact that “we are in the rapids and must go on”. The spirit of freedom and compromise had entered his bones.
Canada itself was the project of his time. The project of our time is our engagement with the tumultuous world in which we now find ourselves. And just as surely, we are in the rapids and must go on.