When President Joe Biden got off a video call with his Russian counterpart on Tuesday, he started working the phones: Paris, Berlin, Rome, and London were all on his call sheet. He was building a unified front of countries looking to send a strong signal to Russia that an incursion into Ukraine would come with dire consequences.

Ottawa was conspicuously not on his list.

It’s an awkward omission. Canada has been a significant donor to Kyiv, both in terms of humanitarian assistance, capacity-building, and military support. The Canadian Armed Forces has 200 personnel stationed in Western Ukraine, in Lviv, conducting training exercises with the Ukrainian military. And, geopolitically, few countries have been as boisterously supportive of an independent and sovereign Ukraine as Canada.

As a significant Russian build-up amasses along their shared border, U.S. intelligence says there is a strong possibility that Moscow could move upwards of 100,000 soldiers, with air support, into Ukraine—possibly as early as January. It will take significant diplomatic, economic, and political pressure to avert such an outcome: And Canada is taking a backseat.

In recent years, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s foreign policy posture has been a slouch. As experts, both in and out of government, have expressed to me recently: Canada signs statements, it doesn’t even write them. If Biden is on the hunt for states willing to make bold commitments to dissuade Russian aggression, it’s no great surprise Canada was forgotten.

Sources in the Trudeau government confirmed that there is no call scheduled between either Trudeau nor new Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly and their American counterparts to debrief following the conversation with Putin.

The Canadian Armed Forces have made clear that no additional troops would be heading to Lviv, in Western Ukraine, to step up training of the Ukrainian armed forces. Asked repeatedly what sanctions or economic penalties Canada could impose on Moscow, should it invade, no one in government could say—except that Ottawa would consider any package put forward by its NATO allies.

America has tried to lay out the consequences in plain terms, threatening to pull Russia’s access to the SWIFT payment system—when that move was previously bandied about, it was estimated the Russian economy could shrink by five GDP points as a result. America has additionally obtained assurances from Germany that it would shutter Gazprom’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the state-majority-owned gas company supplies roughly a third of Europe’s gas. Biden reportedly communicated additional economic measures that would be devastating to the Russian economy.

In a briefing with Senators on Tuesday, State Department official Victoria Nuland underscore that “we are also warning of severe costs and consequences, including deploying far harsher economic measures than we have used before, if Russia chooses the path of confrontation and military action.”

Ottawa’s attention seems to be elsewhere, even when the conversations are happening in its own living room.

During Tuesday’s U.S. senate foreign relations committee hearing, Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen raised an interesting—and disconcerting—issue at play: After a rocky couple of years, Belarus has come back into the Russian fold. Belarus has even conducted joint military drills with Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in recent weeks. That “presents another front for the potential for Russia to invade Ukraine,” Shaheen explained. “I know the Ukrainians view it that way, because we heard that when we were in Halifax for the [Halifax] International Security Forum and met with some Ukrainian officials.”

I saw Senator Shaheen at the Forum in late November. I didn’t, however, see Foreign Affairs Minister Joly. Our new defense minister, Anita Anand, was there for just a few hours before jetting off. A read-out of her presence at the Forum doesn’t list any meetings with Ukrainian officials.

If one of those ministers had been there all weekend, they would have heard a conversation between Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza — whom Putin tried to kill, twice — and former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.

Poroshenko outlined three things that the West needs to do immediately: Signal support for Ukraine’s membership in NATO, provide defensive weaponry to the Ukrainian military, and sanctions. “If you attack Ukraine — this, this, this and this will happen in your energy sector, in your financial sector, in your security sector,” Poroshenko explained.

Canada has been mum in recent weeks on Kyiv’s possible NATO membership, to the chagrin of Ukrainian officials. The Department of Defence, meanwhile, confirmed to me that Canada hasn’t shipped lethal aid to Ukraine since 2015, when the Liberals took power.

Trudeau’s office, of course, bristles at the notion that their posture is meek. His office points to strong language in a recent read-out of a call with President Zelensky: “Prime Minister Trudeau expressed the imperative for Russia to de-escalate the situation, and reaffirmed Canada’s steadfast support for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine,” it reads. “He emphasized the coordination underway between Ukraine’s partners in order to stand united in the face of Russian provocation.”

It’s certainly tough talk, and a clear symbol of Ottawa’s backing of the president. It is not, however, any kind of commitment. The only hint at Canada’s future engagement came in reference to Canada’s deployment in Lviv: “The two leaders discussed the future of Canadian support,” it reads. No one in government would confirm what that means.

Trudeau’s office further pointed out that Canada has been aggressive in slapping sanctions on Belarus. (True, I replied, but it was also the Trudeau government that lifted those sanctions on Belarus in the first place.)

Canada’s continued deployment in Lviv is certainly significant — 120 trainers from the Canadian Armed Forces and 80 support staff. Daniel Le Bouthillier, head of media relations for National Defence, wrote in a statement that the Russian military build-up “is not impacting the mission nor the Canadian Armed Forces members currently deployed in Ukraine, and that no change in posture has been made in Op UNIFIER.” (The mission has not been without problems: While Ottawa’s support was initially limited to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, it was expanded to include the more nebulous “Security Forces of Ukraine,” which may include members of far-right militias.)

The military confirmed that “the Canadian Armed Forces has noticed an increase in misinformation and disinformation as it relates to the Canadian Armed Forces missions in Latvia and Ukraine.” While it is not exceptional for the mission to date, Le Bouthillier wrote that the majority of that “state-sponsored cyber threat activity and information confrontation attributed to Russia has targeted the US, Ukraine, and other European countries.”

Figuring out how to counter and short-circuit that hybrid warfare campaign could be a useful role for Canada to play, but that does not seem to be on the agenda either.

There is undoubtedly a particularly Canadian modesty at play here: We’re just one little country? How could we avert war in eastern Europe?

Certainly, there may be some truth to it — but it is a self-defeating notion. If we truly believe we, both a member of NATO and the G7, are as meek and powerless as that idea would suggest, let’s just close our embassies and convert the Lester B. Pearson building into a hotel.

Sending American and Canadian troops to fight in Ukraine is almost unimaginable. So, if we’re not prepared to engage militarily, we had better double-down on a diversity of other tactics. To do that, all of NATO will need to get involved — both operating independently and together — that we make clear the consequences of breaking the international order to steamroll a democratically-elected government in Europe. America, hamstrung by domestic politics, cannot do this alone. We need to help America up the ante.

There is certainly a school of thought that says Moscow’s brazen incursion into Ukraine in 2014 — its annexation of Crimea, and its shadow war in the Donbass region — came as a direct result of weakened leadership from Washington. Some have gone so far as to suggest that then-President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce a ‘red line’ over chemical weapons in Syria emboldened Putin to act. (It’s a notion that Obama rejected out of hand, noting that Putin invaded Georgia in an era of intense American overseas expeditions in the Middle East.)

To try and get at the heart of why Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, Atlantic journalist Julia Ioffe did something bold: She asked a bunch of Russians.

What came from her conversations was not a sense that Putin was analyzing Obama’s psyche for how his administration would react — a kind of reverse Kremlinology — but rather that Putin viewed the incursion as a purely Russian affair. Ukraine had been governed by a staunch ally of Moscow, and rabble rousers had ousted him in favour of a European stooge: So Moscow acted.

But that doesn’t mean they didn’t factor in how the West would react. Igor Korotchenko, who edits a Russian military magazine and serves as a reserve colonel, explained to Ioffe that  “We didn’t know how America would react, and we examined all scenarios … including American military intervention.”

Evidently, Putin calculated the benefits — a nationalist cause to rally around, massive oil deposits in Crimea, access to the Black Sea, and mineral deposits near Donetsk — outweighed the consequences. Given that the World Bank estimates that the Russian economy grew from 2015 to 2018, perhaps his calculus was right.

The Putin regime is counting on the fact that we consider the cost too high, or the drawbacks too great, to support a democratic, liberal state that wants to be free to make its own decisions — to join NATO, or not; to elect a reformer, or another kleptocrat; to modernize its society, or to fully become a vassal of neo-Soviet empire. 

It should be a core tenet of Canadian foreign policy that we should leave people to make those decisions for themselves, whether that’s Ukraine, Haiti, or elsewhere. And we should make it clear that those decisions cannot be made at the barrel of a tank. To elucidate those consequences afterwards is too late. The cost to dissuade aggression rises exponentially once the tanks roll across the border — it’s likely a price we’re not willing to pay.

So it’s crucial that we outline the terms now. It’s imperative that we point to all the oligarch assets that will be seized and liquidated if they allow their client, Vladimir Putin, to continue his nationalistic war of aggression. We must point to all of the oil and gas projects that will be torpedoed. We should target cyber infrastructure being used to launch this hybrid war. All of the weight we are prepared to put behind Ukraine’s ascension to NATO.

If this government wants to back up the arrogance it showed when Trudeau proclaimed “Canada is back” six years ago, it should start by defending a friend against a foe.

The post Will Canada help save Ukraine? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

An oddly valedictory week for the Prime Minister. (Don’t read anything into it. What kind of fool would read anything into it?) On Monday Justin Trudeau sent out a release bidding his ambassador to Beijing, Dominic Barton, a fond farewell. “Dominic, my friend, thank you for your work and dedication to our country and to the people of Canada,” the PM’s release said. “Canada is stronger because of your service, and I wish you all the best.”

On Tuesday Trudeau dropped by France’s glorious embassy on Sussex Drive to watch his former ambassador to Paris, Isabelle Hudon, get inducted into the Légion d’Honneur. During her time in Paris, he tweeted,  Hudon “worked hard to advance gender equality, strengthen the relationship between Canada and France, and so much more. Congratulations, Isabelle!”

Both events raise questions. Trudeau writes that Barton helped shape “Canada’s priorities with respect to China. Thanks to his efforts, Canada is now better positioned to… achieve our diplomatic objectives.” Well then: What are “Canada’s priorities with respect to China”? And what are “our diplomatic objectives”?

As for Hudon, who consulted on the transition between Trudeau’s first and second governments and has long been a prominent figure in Quebec Inc., I’ve been impressed at how diligently she’s marketed her efforts during only her first few months as CEO of the Business Development Bank of Canada. One columnist once suggested she’d make a great mayor of Montreal. At that point, 13 years ago, she didn’t, and at any rate I’m wondering whether her ambitions, if any, lie elsewhere. Anyway, here she was on Sussex Drive with the Prime Minister of Canada.

Both Hudon and Barton benefited from strikingly exuberant prime ministerial praise. Mélanie Joly, Trudeau’s latest foreign minister, chimed in with her own ode to Barton and got into trouble from one of my colleagues for it. One presumes Joly is not too dismayed. Agreeing with the boss, as we have often seen, helps a Liberal’s career more than disagreeing with the Globe hurts it. Nor am I in a mood to rebut Trudeau’s praise. It’s clear that Barton worked hard to get the two Michaels released, and that Hudon was as well liked by her French hosts as by her Ottawa colleagues. But work, dedication and service are table stakes for any number of dozens of Canadian diplomats, and very few of them get public high-fives from the big guy on their way out. It’s hard to shake the suspicion that what Trudeau liked most about these ambassadors was simply that he already knew them before they submitted their diplomatic credentials.

These considerations matter as a number of key diplomatic posts open up around the world. There’s been grumbling among foreign-service lifers as the Trudeau government hands a number of ambassadorships to political appointees. Such grumbling is always self-interested—career diplomats will always prefer career diplomats that can, in theory, go to anyone—and in some cases the appointments are perfectly routine. Washington, London and Paris usually go to political appointees. Sometimes they do a hell of a job. David McNaughton helped alert the Trudeau crew to the possibility of a Donald Trump election win in 2016, and helped quarterback their response to it when it happened.

But when Ian McKay, a former national director of the Liberal Party of Canada who speaks Japanese, became Canada’s ambassador to Tokyo, it reinforced a dawning suspicion that the diplomatic corps faces stiffer competition than ever.

Now Canada needs new ambassadors in Beijing and Paris. Career diplomats used to regularly become Canada’s ambassador to Beijing. But so far Trudeau has sent a former cabinet colleague (John McCallum) and then a McKinsey kingpin who’d already advised Trudeau on economic policy. Sensing a trend, senior China hands at Global Affairs Canada have lately been leaving the department. Which leaves fewer China hands to send to China. I know everyone wants to debate what our relationship to China should be, and to say the least I’ve noticed Trudeau’s reluctance to engage substantively on that question, but the ambassador needs to be somebody, and now Joly’s department doesn’t have as many somebodies to consider as it once did.

In 2022, by the usual rhythms of rotation, posts in Moscow and at NATO headquarters in Brussels seem likely to open up. And then there’s Stéphane Dion, whose 2017 appointment to Berlin and Brussels confused and upset the neighbours and whose more modest appointment to Berlin alone seems likely to end soon.

Trudeau, and Joly if she can influence the PM’s choices at all, have half a dozen chances to name envoys whose departure will be worth over-the-top tweets when their appointments end in turn. A government defines its priorities whether it wants to or not, by the sum of its choices on questions like these.

The post Trudeau, Joly and Canada’s (un)diplomatic corps appeared first on Macleans.ca.

No mandate letters: Six weeks after being sworn in, Justin Trudeau’s cabinet has still not been issued mandate letters, CTV reports.

These letters are essentially marching orders for each minister, in which the prime minister spells out his expectations and priorities, calling on his front bench to act on certain campaign and throne speech commitments. During a press conference discussing the second piece of legislation he’s tabled in recent days, Justice Minister David Lametti said Tuesday that he has yet to see his mandate letter. Responding to a reporters’ question about a promised Black Canadians justice strategy, Lametti said he couldn’t get into specifics “until we see the mandate letters.” Asked whether he knows when he will receive his mandate letter his response was: “I wish I did, I’m hoping it’s soon.”

Former CF HR head charged: Vice-Admiral Haydn Edmundson, the military’s former commander in charge of military human resources, has been charged with sexual assault and committing indecent acts, CBC reports.

The allegations against Edmundson date back more than two decades, to when he was a lieutenant-commander overseeing training at the naval officer training centre in Esquimalt, B.C. Retired Canadian Forces member Stéphanie Viau went public with her allegations in March in a CBC News story.

Viau alleged that Edmundson raped her onboard HMCS Provider in early November, 1991, while the ship was docked in Pearl Harbor. Edmundson’s lawyer, Brian Greenspan, said his client denies the allegations.

“Vice-Admiral Edmundson continues to deny any suggestion of criminal misconduct and looks forward to the opportunity to restore his distinguished reputation for service to our country,” Greenspan wrote in a statement to CBC News.

Fewer minimums: The Liberals introduced a bill Tuesday that would repeal mandatory minimum penalties for drug offences and some gun-related crimes, CP reports.

The bill would allow a judge to exercise discretion in imposing sentences that relate to the facts of the case, including considerations of the individual’s experience with systemic racism and whether they pose a risk to public safety. The legislation would allow for greater use of conditional sentences, including house arrest, counselling or treatment, for those who do not threaten public safety. It also would require police and prosecutors to consider alternative measures for cases of simple drug possession, such as diverting individuals to treatment programs, instead of laying charges or prosecuting.

No more conversion therapy: The Senate agreed to the expedited passage of a bill banning conversion therapy on Tuesday, CTV reports.

On Tuesday after a brief period of debate on the bill, Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos rose in the upper chamber to seek unanimous approval to move Bill C-4 through all legislative stages in the upper chamber, echoing sentiments from his Conservative colleagues in the House who led MPs to fast-track the bill through the House last Wednesday.

Chinese warning: Beijing’s ambassador warned that Canada risks driving away Chinese investors and companies if it bans Huawei from its 5G network, the South China Morning Post reports. Cong Peiwu said he hoped Canada had learned a lesson from the outcome of the “Meng Wanzhou incident.”

CSIS warning: CSIS warned Justin Trudeau that China’s efforts to influence media outlets in Canada “have become normalized,” CBC reports.

The warning is contained in briefing documents drafted for Canadian Security Intelligence Service Director David Vigneault in preparation for a meeting he had with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier this year. That meeting focused on the rise of foreign interference in Canada — something CSIS says has become “more sophisticated, frequent, and insidious.”

Boycott: In Maclean’s Aaron Hutchins looks to the Beijing Olympics and the question of whether Canadian athletes should be in attendance given China’s human rights abuses.

“Canada should not be going,” says David Mulroney, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012. “I feel terrible for the athletes, but I feel worse for Uighurs who are imprisoned. There are no good outcomes here. But participating in the Games as a genocide is happening is profoundly wrong.”

Repatriation details: In the Star, Tonda MacCharles has an interview with outgoing Chinese ambassador Dominic Barton, who shares some interesting details about the repatriation of the two Michaels.

He said Kovrig and Spavor, who had known each other casually before their arrests and were aware of each other’s plight, saw each other for the first time just before the flight. “They came into the room and then …” Barton paused, choked up. “Them seeing each other was pretty special, you know. They had their bags, they were given clothes, like sort of jacket and slacks to wear, but when they walked into the room, that’s the first time they’ve seen each other. And … it was just emotional, they hugged each other.”

Unimpressed: In the Globe, John Ibbitson writes that Mélanie Joly went too far in her praise of Barton.

New mandates: The Liberals announced Tuesday they will impose COVID-19 mandates on banks, telecommunications companies and all other federally regulated workspaces, Reuters reports. The new rules would come into effect in early 2022.

The ruling Liberals had initially promised to help most federally regulated sectors with vaccinations. But they are now taking a firmer line. Data show that almost 15 per cent of Canadians above the age of 12 are not fully vaccinated yet at a time when the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus is starting to spread.

Pressing pause: The Ontario government announced Tuesday it is extending its pause indefinitely on moving to the next step of the reopening plan as COVID-19 cases continue to increase, CTV reports.

Ontario warning: Ontario’s science advisory table warned Tuesday that Ontario could see between 250 and 400 COVID-19 patients in ICUs in January, not accounting for the presence of the Omicron variant, CBC reports.

MPP ejected: Cambridge MPP Belinda Karahalios was removed from the Ontario legislature on Tuesday morning by Speaker of the House Ted Arnott, Global reports. Karahalios, who tested positive for the coronavirus last month, initially refused to leave and had to be escorted from the building.

Grim quarantine: Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos said Tuesday that the conditions reported in some of the federal government’s quarantine hotels are “totally unacceptable,” the Globe reports.

On Monday, The Globe and Mail reported that travellers who are required to stay at the quarantine facilities pending a negative test result were met with unsanitary conditions and not released until days after getting a negative result

Duclos said PHAC should do better: “I asked public health to do the job it needs to do, which is to make sure that the standards are met by the service providers,” he told reporters outside of the House of Commons.

Ford victory: Doug Ford had a legal victory on Tuesday when an Ontario Superior Court judge has ruled that controversial restrictions on campaign advertising do not violate constitutional rights, the Star reports.

Justice Ed Morgan dismissed a challenge by the Working Families coalition of unions, saying the government’s amendment to the Election Financing Act “does not infringe the right to vote” guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

— Stephen Maher

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The Olympic flame-lighting ceremony was underway at the Temple of Hera, the oldest temple at Olympia in Greece, as Chemi Lhamo hid nearby, hoping security wouldn’t spot her. She listened quietly as the actor playing the role of high priestess offered a symbolic prayer to Apollo, the Greek god of light. She watched as the iconic torch was lit. She waited until the flautist stopped playing.

Then, amid the silence, Lhamo made her presence known. “How can Beijing be allowed to host the Olympics given that they are committing a genocide against the Uighurs?” the Canadian shouted.

She called out in support of Taiwan, as well as those persecuted in Hong Kong and her homeland of Tibet—until security whisked her away. “I didn’t realize how loud I was,” Lhamo said in an interview, a week after her protest in mid-October. “After three days in jail, I got to see a video [of the incident], and people could actually hear my voice. I truly believe that voice came from somewhere within, amplified by all of the oppressed people around the world.”

READ: What it’s like to be on trial in China 

Lhamo has kept up her calls for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to find a new host nation for the 2022 Games. And she’s not the only one making her voice heard. More than 160 human rights and advocacy groups delivered a joint letter to the IOC in September saying the reputation of the Games and the Olympic spirit will suffer if the event is held in China. In Canada, Bloc Québécois MP Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe spearheaded an open letter demanding a new location—and it earned multiparty support in the House of Commons. It condemned the Chinese government, stating that “close to two million Uighurs and Turkic Muslims are being held in concentration camps that Chinese authorities odiously refer to as ‘vocational training centres.’ ” It spoke of children being kidnapped, of women being sterilized and of cultural erasure.

“We are not asking our athletes to give up their Olympic dream, because we know full well how much effort will have gone into pursuing it,” the letter went on. “However, we believe that there is still time to demand that the International Olympic Committee move the Games to another country if the Chinese government continues its genocidal campaign.”

But with the Games slated to start in February, and the IOC steadfast in its decision to let the Chinese capital host them, many critics concede that a move is highly unlikely. Which leaves a question many Canadians are asking in the early weeks of 2022: should we be sending our athletes to Beijing at all?

“Canada should not be going,” says David Mulroney, Canada’s ambassador to China from 2009 to 2012. “I feel terrible for the athletes, but I feel worse for Uighurs who are imprisoned. There are no good outcomes here. But participating in the Games as a genocide is happening is profoundly wrong.”

RELATED: ‘Only athletes pay the price’: The COC president on the folly of boycotting the Beijing Olympics 

The Trudeau government has ducked the issue, saying the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic committees operate independently of the government, and that the choice of whether to go to the Games lies with them. The COC has been resolutely in favour of Canada attending. Doing so will help “shine a light on these Games,” says CEO David Shoemaker, who adds: “It creates a global dialogue around issues, and our participation amplifies the conversation.”

The COC says it is committed to providing opportunities for athletes to express themselves freely, and to amplify their voices where they can. And the IOC has assured them that China will abide by Rule 50 of the Olympic Charter, says Shoemaker, which now allows athletes to protest so long as it’s not on the Olympic podium, at the opening or closing ceremonies, in the athletes’ village or on the field of play.

That leaves more space for dissent than you might think, including press centres and mixed zones where athletes speak to media. “Many athletes feel they can actually make more of a statement by going, and then tweeting or participating in social protests, rather than not being there at all,” says Angela Schneider, a former Olympic rower and now director of Western University’s International Centre for Olympic Studies. “China has a lot of power, but it doesn’t have control over an individual athlete’s Facebook account.”

MORE: At Michael Kovrig’s trial, the world had Canada’s back 

Not everyone is convinced. MacIntosh Ross, a kinesiology professor at Western who has written frequently about Olympic boycotts, says giving Canadian athletes any assurance they can speak freely against human rights abuses in China is “a terrible idea.” “The IOC can’t protect them,” he warns. “They don’t have a military. They don’t have police. And all visitors are subject to the host nation’s laws.”

Ross has instead advocated for a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games, as the U.S. government announced earlier this week. “U.S. diplomatic or official representation would treat these games as business as usual in the face of the [People’s Republic of China] egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang,” explained White House press secretary Jen Psaki. “We simply can’t do that.”

As the Canadian government is reportedly mulling over joining such a boycott, Ross says broadcasters like the CBC could also boycott showcasing the Games on TV. But he too says Canada should not be sending athletes, a sentiment that a large number of his compatriots appear to share. An August poll from Nanos Research found that a majority either supported or somewhat supported a boycott. And while critics of such actions point to the 1980 Games in Russia, which didn’t end the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Ross counters with the massive, decades-long international sporting boycott of South Africa—an important tool, he says, that “put pressure on the apartheid government.”

What impression Canada’s absence from these Games would make on Beijing is an open question. Xi Jinping’s Communist regime responded with contempt to widespread Canadian outrage over the arrests of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were detained for more than 1,000 days in China, and released only after Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s house arrest in Vancouver ended. Less well-known is the plight of Uighur human rights activist Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen who was arrested in 2006 while visiting Uzbekistan and sent to China, where he’s been detained ever since—reportedly without a single consular visit.

READ: Inside the fight to bring the two Michaels home from China 

One of Celil’s most vocal supporters in Canada says he’d “love to hear the athletes say they aren’t participating” in the Olympics. “The fact that we’re giving a genocidal regime the opportunity to take this very prestigious world event that is supposed to symbolize unity, dignity and peace—while they’re actively perpetrating genocide against Uighurs and Turkic Muslims—is a disgrace,” says Calgary’s Babur Ilchi, program director at the non-profit Campaign for Uyghurs.

But current Olympians willing to speak up against China have been hard to find. When Bloc MP Brunelle-Duceppe spoke with Canadian Olympic legend Jean-Luc Brassard about signing that open letter, he asked the 1994 gold medallist if he could find any active Olympic athletes willing to add their signatures. “I’m not going to find any,” Brassard recalls telling him. “I can swear to you now there’s absolutely no Canadian athlete that will sign it.”

Brassard explains: Not only do the Olympics and Paralympics mean the world to athletes, but the money they make can be tied to Olympic performance. Missing out on a medal, or making the COC look bad, can have a knock-on effect on how their sport is funded, or how they are treated after they retire from competition.

MORE: How social media impacts athletes at the Olympics 

But Brassard, who has distanced himself from the COC after resigning as chef de mission prior to the 2016 Games, was willing to sign. “I don’t think it makes any sense that we go to a country that doesn’t respect human rights,” he says. “I know relocation won’t happen. The reason I signed is because it’s sending a message to the IOC: ‘This is enough.’ ”

***

If it feels as though the Olympics were only recently navigating talks of a boycott of Beijing, that’s because the Chinese capital is hosting its second Olympics in less than 14 years. In the months leading up to the 2008 Summer Games, similar criticism erupted over China’s crackdown in Tibet. “We believe the Games are going to move ahead the agenda of social and human rights as far as possible—the Games are going to be a force for good,” then IOC president Jacques Rogge told Reuters in the lead-up to the event.

Still, once the cauldron was lit, those issues were mostly brushed aside as the focus shifted to sport—a phenomenon some call “sportwashing.” By the end, says Mulroney, the former ambassador, “all anybody could think about was how great the fireworks were and how amazing the stadiums were. China used those Games as an advertisement for the regime, as it always does.”

READ: China’s mission to Mars opens a new phase of the space race 

Human rights advocates argue that China’s record has only become worse since 2008, and they told the International Olympic Committee as much in the run-up to these Games. But the IOC has portrayed itself as powerless on such issues. “We have no ability to go into a country and tell them what to do,” IOC vice-president John Coates said at a press conference in October. “All we can do is award the Olympics to a country, under conditions set out in a host contract . . . and then ensure they are followed.” The IOC’s remit, he added, “is to ensure that there are no human rights abuses in respect of the conduct of the Games within the national Olympic committees or within the Olympic movement.”

In a 2020 op-ed, IOC president Thomas Bach said the Olympic Games “are not about politics,” a stance that has often raised eyebrows. Why, ask critics, would a non-political organization want—and receive—permanent observer status at the United Nations? Rob Koehler, the director general for the Montreal-based international advocacy group Global Athlete, points to the IOC’s successful effort alongside the International Ice Hockey Federation to put together a joint North and South Korean hockey team for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games: “If that’s not political, I’m not sure what is,” he says.

Global Athlete is opposed to government-led boycotts, which Koehler says make “political pawns” of the athletes, especially when they have no say in where the Olympics are held. Instead, the organization calls for the IOC to embed the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights into the Olympic Charter as well as the bid documents for future host nations. And he wants governments to stop tiptoeing around the IOC and national Olympic bodies when it comes to advocacy. “Who is the biggest funder of sport in Canada? The Canadian government,” Koehler says. “They should be putting pressure on the Canadian Olympic Committee to be pushing [the IOC] for reforms.”

MORE: Don’t buy the hogwash about the release of Kovrig and Spavor 

Instead, some of the most vocal protests have come from a lone Tibetan-Canadian. Released on conditions and back home in Toronto, Chemi Lhamo is calling on companies like Airbnb, Intel and Coca-Cola to drop their sponsorships; for official Olympic broadcasters like the CBC to highlight China’s human rights abuses in their coverage; and for athletes themselves to announce they will not participate.

Her surprisingly powerful voice should not be underestimated. Nor should her impeccable timing. Lhamo plans to appear in person at her next court date in Greece, which is Feb. 3—the day before the opening ceremonies in Beijing.

Editor’s note: The digital version of this story was updated to include news of the U.S. diplomatic boycott after the print version went to press.

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This article appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “Why are we playing games in China?” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post Why is Canada playing in the 2022 Beijing Olympics, amidst China’s human rights abuses? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

What’s the most important thing your workplace does? Maybe you work at a restaurant, so making food is a key to success. Maybe you’re in journalism, so you need to sell advertising. If you’re in trucking, logistics—keeping track of freight, fuel and carriers—might be what keeps you up at night.

Have you ever considered splitting your central operation—the one thing that will make your organization succeed or fail—in two?

Instead of one kitchen, have two, with same-sized staffs and identical mandates. Orders for steak frites will sometimes go to one kitchen, sometimes to another. Instead of one ad department, have two teams of equal size calling the same clients (or different ones! Who knows?) and pitching ad sales to them. As for trucking, why not have two offices lining up supplies, tracking shipments and assigning work shifts?

Perhaps you are saying, “No, Paul, I have never considered doing this because it would be a recipe for chaos. Some customers at my hypothetical restaurant would get two steaks. Some would get none. Rivalries between the staffs at the two kitchens or ad departments or logistics hubs would be inevitable. Effort would be wastefully duplicated, or would need to be painstakingly coordinated. It might make sense to have a savoury kitchen and a dessert kitchen, but two full-service kitchens running at the same time? That’s just weird.”

MORE BY WELLS: The future of the Liberal Party—without Justin Trudeau

I tend to agree. Which is why I was struck by the latest list of cabinet committees released on Friday by the federal government. Cabinet committees are often the first point of entry for big government decisions to get looked at by a group of cabinet ministers, instead of just the minister directly responsible. Committees consider plans, draft bills, important decisions before they get kicked upstairs to the full cabinet. It’s important work.

The latest list is mostly committees we’ve seen before. “Agenda, Results and Communications” is roughly the Priorities and Planning Committee that played a coordinating role in earlier governments. “Operations” also has many antecedents. “Treasury Board,” “Canada and the World,” and several others are self-explanatory.

But what are we to make of the “Cabinet Committee on Economy, Inclusion and Climate ‘A’” and its identical twin, the “Cabinet Committee on Economy, Inclusion and Climate ‘B’” ?

These are the two largest committees on the list, each with 14 members. They have very broad mandates: integrating economic and climate concerns is the Holy Grail of modern governance, but it’s no walk in the park. Adding “inclusion” to the mandate hardly simplifies things.

But having decided to integrate all of those themes in one cabinet committee, why then decide to have two committees?

Perhaps their mandates are different. But that’s not what it says in the release. Committee “A,” it says here, “considers such issues as sustainable and inclusive social and economic development, post-pandemic recovery, decarbonization, and the environment as well as improving the health and quality of life of Canadians.” Committee “B” is to do the same things. In the same words. In the same order.

By now perhaps you are saying, “Look, Paul, just ask the government.” I’m way ahead of you. On Friday I wrote to the Prime Minister’s Office:

“Can anyone explain to me why there are now two cabinet committees on climate, with identical mandates? Will they split up their work, or duplicate it in parallel, with a goal of arriving at better policy? Why is climate the only topic that gets two committees, unlike ‘results’ or ‘the world’?”

My source there sent me the original news release that had inspired these questions. Then, on background so I can’t quote them—which is fine, because these answers never come from a single person, but from a collective process—they sent this fuller response:

“This structural change will produce results for Canadians by accelerating the delivery of our platform pledges. As we finish the fight against COVID-19 and build a resilient recovery, the two committees will be able to work on policies to ensure they promote economic growth that works for Canadians and builds a cleaner and greener future.”

Perhaps this answer is informative to you. I can’t say the same. To me it’s a laughable dog-ate-my-homework answer. It does nothing to answer why there are two committees. It doesn’t say whether each will tackle the same work—the way Ben Bradlee sometimes used to assign the same story to two young reporters at the Washington Post, knowing each would work their tail off to beat the other—or whether some draft bills will go through committee A, and some through committee B.

Surely it’s the latter. If both committees consider Draft Bill X, that’s not a time-saving exercise, it’s a massively redundant time-wasting exercise. But neither is the government much ahead if the two committees get distinct workloads. Think it through: if Committee A considers Draft Bill X, and then B gets handed Draft Bill Y whose proper consideration depends on a bit of context from Draft Bill X, then B isn’t well-placed to understand this new bill. It’s like splitting your book club in half and giving only the odd-numbered chapters of each new book to New Book Club A and the even-numbered chapters to New Book Club B. This probably sounds like an efficient way to get through books, if you’ve never read a book.

It’s also worth noting that Jonathan Wilkinson, the former environment minister now assigned to natural resources, is on committee A, while Steven Guilbeault, the new environment minister, is on B. Natural resources and environment have long histories of not getting along. Of course this government believes it has solved this problem the same way it solved the problems involved in planning prime ministerial travel: by hoping for the best. Tossing each minister half a pool cue may not, in the long term, prove helpful.

In the end I doubt this will be a huge problem because I expect this system to collapse under the weight of its own absurdity. It’s such a dumb way to organize a government that it’s hard to imagine it lasting past Easter. The two committees with identical mandates will become one bigger committee, or two committees with explicitly distinct areas of concentration. The Trudeau cabinet had a “Canada In the World and Public Security” committee for years. Now it has a “Canada and the World” committee and a “Safety, Security and Emergencies” committee. This change would have come even sooner if there had been two world-and-security committees eyeing each other warily from the outset.

I burden you with all this for a couple of reasons. The first is that after six years in power and one of the most leisurely post-election transitions in the last 20 years, this government is still capable of coming up with head-scratchingly bad ideas.

The other is that while it was good fun giving me a terrible answer to some basic questions, they were also not giving you, dear reader, a better answer. And I’m pretty sure it’s because none of them has done the thinking that answering the question would have required.

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On Sept. 20, voters returned a Parliament that will look a lot like the one Justin Trudeau was stuck with before he called the 2021 election. But one big thing did change. In conversation, senior Liberals were remarkably candid about discussing the last days of Justin Trudeau’s government, and the prospect of a government led by somebody else.

“Well, the PM’s going to need legacy projects,” one cabinet minister said, when invited to chat about the government’s priorities.

Another member of Trudeau’s inner circle was matter-of-fact in discussing the danger a leadership change would represent for the governing party. The Liberals had a decade of increasingly disappointing electoral outcomes before Trudeau became the leader, this person said. It’s an open question whether Trudeau’s tenure marked the end of those trends, or merely an extended break before the party declines again.

This sort of talk is new. In a party whose unity of purpose Trudeau did much to restore, it’s long been considered poor form, or wasted energy, for Liberals to contemplate the prospect of life without the leader who brought them back from the brink of irrelevance. This fall, that taboo lifted. It’s as though a screw that had secured some plate in the Liberals’ psyche for nearly a decade had been loosened by one full counterclockwise turn. Suddenly Liberals are granting themselves licence to speculate. And so the biggest question in Canadian politics in 2022 is whether Justin Trudeau will still be Prime Minister when the year is done.

READ: Erin O’Toole, unresponsive 

For what it’s worth, the man himself insists he’s not leaving the top job anytime soon. At his first news conference after the election, a reporter asked Trudeau whether he’ll lead the party into the next election. He replied with an emphatic “Yes!”

That’s pretty much the only way you can answer a question like that. The moment you acknowledge an intention to leave, you’re basically inviting everyone to ignore everything you say. But it may also simply be true. Trudeau has been Prime Minister for only six years. Voluntary departure from the job—because a PM is tired, or wants to arrange an orderly succession, or doesn’t like their chances in the next election—is relatively rare, and normally comes after more than six years. Jean Chrétien gave up the job after a decade, under considerable pressure. Brian Mulroney hit the eject button after nearly nine years, dooming his successor Kim Campbell to a brutal electoral reckoning.

Only one prime minister has ever retired voluntarily by the seven-year mark, which is the milestone Trudeau is scheduled to hit in 2022. Lester Pearson retired in 1968, after not quite five years. But Pearson was over 70. Walking away from the best job you’ll ever have is a big decision, after all. And Trudeau, who has not yet made a decision about home renovations at 24 Sussex Drive, cannot be accused of being impetuous.

RELATED: There’s no you in Team Trudeau

But already the question of Trudeau’s future is becoming a feature of political conversation. A Maru Public Opinion poll days after the September election found that 55 per cent of respondents thought Trudeau should step down. A Nanos poll two weeks later found that 36 per cent shared that opinion. Obviously, most of the people who want to see any leader go voted for a different party. But in both polls, Trudeau was mentioned more than other major party leaders as the one who should leave. If nothing else, these results suggest the PM has a tenuous grasp on the hearts of the nation.

Nowhere is it written that a political leader needs to be beloved. All they really need to do is win. In September Trudeau won his third consecutive election. Excellent work, but not all that rare. Seven of his predecessors also won three in a row, including Stephen Harper, Jean Chrétien and Pierre Trudeau. What would be truly unusual would be racking up a fourth consecutive win. Only John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier have ever managed it. (Mackenzie King, whose first and last days as prime minister were separated by nearly 27 years, lost a couple of times amid all the victories, breaking what would otherwise have been longer streaks.)

These considerations start to wear on a leader after a while. And on his team, which helps explain why the Trudeau inner circle has lately grown markedly more quitty. Catherine McKenna and Navdeep Bains once seemed to reside at the heart of Trudeauism. Bains played a key role at the summer retreat at Mont Tremblant in 2012 at which a small team of loyalists hatched and workshopped the Trudeau leadership project. Now both senior ministers have left. So have important political staffers whose lower public profile spared them from some of the indignities of elected office, people like Mike McNair, Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard.

MORE: All the good politicians are in Montreal

Every departed colleague stands as a reminder that there’s life after politics, a life with more money and less public scrutiny. The temptation to chuck it and find a beach somewhere must always lurk in the background. Alain Juppé, who served briefly as France’s prime minister, gave this impulse a name with the title of his 1993 book, La Tentation de Venise, the temptation to drop everything and head to Venice. For Trudeau, the poster child for that temptation might be Barack Obama, whose U.S. presidency was capped by a constitutional term limit at eight years but who now makes more money from a single speech than he used to in a year.

Trudeau is likely to resist the siren song of a life away from politics for some time yet. But politics will change even before he leaves. Paul Martin’s ambition was a central feature of Liberal Party life for every day that Jean Chrétien was prime minister. Other party figures who thought they had the luxury of playing the waiting game more coolly than Martin eventually woke up with his footprints on their backs.

If you’re François-Philippe Champagne or Mélanie Joly or Mark Carney or Anita Anand—names that often figure in speculation about Trudeau successors—you have to ask yourself two questions, starting right now. First, are you going to be a candidate for leader? Second, is there a subtle way to stop Chrystia Freeland?

READ: The new conductor of Montreal’s orchestra ‘looks like fun but sounds like business’ 

Surely I deserve some credit for getting this far in an election speculation essay without mentioning Freeland, the finance minister, deputy prime minister and stalwart Trudeau defender. She’s not universally beloved among Liberals. She’s aloof toward caucus colleagues, pays little attention to most briefings from officials, and her oratorical skills land somewhere this side of spellbinding. But so what? Right now her occasional detractors are far outnumbered by those who think she’d represent a substantial improvement over Trudeau in intellectual capacity, worldliness and the possession of a closet blessedly empty of skeletons. Almost alone among reputed pretenders to the throne, she has a network within the government of loyal staffers who could form the basis for a solid campaign organization.

Most importantly, her position as frontrunner is generally assumed. In the Liberal Party of Canada, such assumptions normally carry the weight of self-fulfilling prophecy. Liberals have been voting on their leaders since 1919. In all that time, with only a single exception, the winner has been the person who led on the first ballot. In fact, more often than not, there wasn’t more than one ballot. The exception was Stéphane Dion in 2006. He was in third place on the first ballot. His tenure as leader didn’t go well. More than members of any other party, Liberals live to back winners. Offhand it’s hard to imagine why else anyone would want to be a Liberal. So if your name isn’t Chrystia Freeland and you want to lead this party, you need to do more than make your case. You need to make yourself inevitable. And you don’t have a week to spare.

But it’s probably early to be measuring the prospects of individual candidates who haven’t yet even identified themselves. Liberals face a bigger question: what kind of party do they want to be?

Whatever happens next, Justin Trudeau will almost certainly be remembered as a significant Liberal leader, not only for the way he brought an end to a terrifying decade-long losing streak, but because he provided novel answers to the question of what the Liberal party is for. The change he has wrought was perhaps clearest this past Sept. 14 in Brampton, when Trudeau’s nervous and embattled campaign enlisted the help of Jean Chrétien to nail down voter support in the suburban ring around Toronto.

Chrétien peddled his trademark middle-of-the-road nostrums. “It’s not the time to move to the far right or to the far left,” he intoned. “It is the time to be in the middle.” And the middle, he said, is where Canadians have always known they’d find the Liberal Party of Canada. “The Liberal Party is the same party since 1867.”

READ: Jason Kenney is sinking. How it all went wrong for him. 

Surely Trudeau had to bite his tongue nearly in half to resist the urge to rebut the old man. Nobody in Trudeau’s party talks about the centre. When presented with evidence of its existence, say in the person of Chrétien or John Manley or really anyone in a suit, Team Trudeau’s normal instinct is to recoil. Trudeau’s Liberal Party is a party of cultural combat, self-consciously designed first as a counterweight to Stephen Harper’s Conservatism, then to Donald Trump’s heady toxic stew, and now to anything that isn’t Liberal. The location or even the existence of some purported “centre” simply doesn’t enter into it.

If pressed to explain themselves, Trudeau Liberals would insist that, far from limiting its electoral fortunes, the contemporary party’s wokeness has actually bolstered and ensured its electoral success. Trudeau didn’t defeat any of three consecutive Conservative leaders thanks to his superior ability as an economic manager. He won as a superior reader of the cultural moment. He didn’t win despite the bundle of diversity, reconciliation, feminism, climate activism and abortion rights that grates on earlier generations of Liberals like fingernails on a chalkboard. He won because of those stances, which put a solid floor under Liberal support and motivated a sufficient number of voters to believe they had something at stake in a Liberal victory.

If enough candidates show up for a post-Trudeau leadership campaign to make things interesting, they will surely debate the merits of a move to the centre. If there are enough candidates to debate, at least one will say: “Sure, the six-year shopping spree started out fun and turned out to be crucial to getting through the COVID crisis. But now recess is over. It’s time to rein in spending, attract foreign investors, grow the economy and do all the other responsible stuff a natural governing party used to worry about.”

One of the other candidates will serve up a rebuttal that may sound like this: “The centre only looks like the place where the votes are. Historically, the centre has often been where you find apathy and a demotivated electorate. That’s what Joe Clark and Tom Mulcair and Michael Ignatieff found, in three separate parties. The middle of the road is where you go to get run over.”

RELATED: The broken triumph of Justin Trudeau 

It’ll be a fascinating debate, one the Liberals have avoided in public for most of a decade. It will also mark a moment of maximum danger for the party, because leadership changes give voters an excuse to shop around for alternatives. The current Conservative and NDP leaders replaced predecessors who were thought to be electoral under-performers—and managed to attract even less of the popular vote. So did every Liberal leader between Chrétien and Trudeau. This, too, will wear on Trudeau’s mind as he ponders his future: does he have the luxury of leaving a party that keeps winning elections under his leadership?

Anyone purporting to know Trudeau’s mind on these questions is guessing. He’ll let us know. Either post-election will drift into pre-election and it will be clear that Justin Trudeau is bidding to enter a pantheon so far occupied only by Laurier and Macdonald; or on some random morning he’ll invite Liberals to try their luck without him. All that’s changed now is that the various considerations behind such a decision are now being discussed, just a little more openly, by the people who’ll live with its consequences.

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This column appears in print in the January 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “The life of the Party.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.

The post The future of the Liberal Party—without Justin Trudeau appeared first on Macleans.ca.

The first session of the 44th Parliament (finally) began last week, almost two months after September’s general election. While voting intentions have (unsurprisingly) remained generally stable during that time, this long pause in parliamentary hostilities does not appear to have benefited Conservative leader Erin O’Toole, whose party has been embroiled in internal squabbles since its election defeat. To wit, a new poll released by Abacus Data shows that impressions of the Conservative leader have fallen back to their pre-election levels.

To the question: “Do you have a positive or negative impression of the following federal party leaders?”, O’Toole’s favourable responses nosedived: 23 per cent positive against 45 per cent negative, for a net score of -22, the worst score among major federal party leaders.

At the start of the federal campaign in August, Abacus had measured O’Toole’s impression at a similar net score of -21. However, as the campaign progressed, the CPC leader’s perception improved substantially, until it reached a score of -10 in mid-September. In hindsight, his improving personal numbers were a leading indicator of his party’s growing support, which would peak in early September only to fall back after the leaders’ debates.

Here are the numbers for the three main party leaders:

While the Prime Minister’s approval rating has slightly eroded since the election, Abacus did not measure any dramatic shifts. With 40 per cent positive and 41 per cent negative impressions, Justin Trudeau enters this new Parliament with a net score of -1 in the Abacus poll, down from +5 at the end of the campaign.

Only NDP leader Jagmeet Singh fares well, with 42 per cent positive and 23 per cent negative, a net score of +19. Nonetheless, these numbers remain similar to those measured at the end of the campaign last September, and the challenge for Singh in this 44th Parliament will be to find a way to turn this positive perception into actual support at the polls, something he failed to accomplish in both the 2019 and 2021 elections. Federal leaders who are given a third kick at the can are few and far between, but it appears that Singh is firmly in the saddle as leader of the NDP, at least in the short to medium term.

Let’s take a look at these leaders’ approval ratings based on respondents’ voting intentions. Not surprisingly, the Prime Minister’s best numbers come from Liberal voters. Eighty-seven per cent of this group of voters have a positive impression of Justin Trudeau. Among voters of the other parties, one-quarter of Bloc Québécois and NDP voters say they have a good impression of Justin Trudeau, but a majority of Bloc Québécois (61 per cent), Green (64 per cent), Conservative (78 per cent) and People’s Party (84 per cent) voters have a negative impression of the Prime Minister.

In the case of Jagmeet Singh, he registers high support among his party’s voters (in similar proportions to Trudeau among Liberals), with 86 per cent of positive impressions. Among supporters from other parties, there is a significant split: on the one hand, there are Liberals and Greens, among whom Singh registers net scores of +24 and +18 respectively; on the other hand, the NDP leader is mostly viewed negatively by Conservative (-16), Bloc (-30) and PPC (-33) voters.

What about Conservative leader Erin O’Toole? Among his party’s supporters, 70 per cent still hold a positive impression of him, a proportion slightly lower than for Trudeau and Singh among their respective constituencies, but higher than what Abacus Data had measured last spring (62 per cent). However, we note that the Conservative leader scores poorly among voters of other parties: only 8 to 13 per cent of NDP, Bloc, Liberal and Green voters view O’Toole favourably.

Even among Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC) voters, O’Toole receives a dismal net score of -33 (21 per cent positive impression and 54 per cent negative impression).

These low levels of appreciation across party lines suggest that the Conservative Party, while winning the popular vote in the last two general elections (by one point over the Liberals), is still hindered by limited potential for growth, even with a leader who is perceived as more centrist than his predecessors. Given that O’Toole must find a way to expand his voter base if he is to have any hope of winning  the next election (if his party keeps him in office until then, of course), how should he and his team interpret this data?

Some Conservative strategists may believe that trying to bring PPC voters back into the fold would give the Conservative party a chance to return to power (Maxime Bernier’s party received 5 per cent of the vote last September). However, this strategy could prove to be a dead end for O’Toole: Although the sample of PPC voters in this survey is small, the differences between positive and negative impressions of the Conservative leader are well beyond a reasonable margin of error. Most PPC voters view O’Toole unfavourably, and so if O’Toole were to court Maxime Bernier’s voters, this strategy might convince only a small number of them to switch parties, while further pushing away swing voters, among those many might be looking for change in government after a decade of Trudeau in power.

We shall see whether O’Toole can improve his numbers now that Canadians are finally able to see him in action in the House of Commons.

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