Corporate Canada has been ’tilting’ towards Israel for a long time, building roads that Palestinians can’t drive on in the territories, for example. (That link goes to the “Canada Highways Infrastructure Corporation”, a company with a contract worth hundreds of millions to build said roads).
Corporate Canada has been ’tilting’ towards Israel for a long time, building roads that Palestinians can’t drive on in the territories, for example. (That link goes to the “Canada Highways Infrastructure Corporation”, a company with a contract worth hundreds of millions to build said roads).
But it turns out that the Canadian government is planning to do some more ’tilting’ of its own. A Globe and Mail column of October 15 by John Ibbitson cites Canadian bureaucrats, who:
maintain that responsibility for managing the Middle East file has shifted from the Lester B. Pearson Building, home of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa, to our embassy in Tel Aviv, where senior diplomat Jill Sinclair serves as special co-ordinator of the Middle East peace process. They complain that Ms. Sinclair is ignoring Arab and Palestinian contacts in favour of close co-operation with Israeli officials.
They cite a recent United Nations General Assembly vote criticizing Israel’s security wall. One hundred and fifty nations supported the resolution. Only Israel, Australia, the United States and its dependencies opposed it. Canada was one of 10 nations, and the only developed nation, that abstained.
They cite as well a statement by Canada strongly criticizing Peter Hansen, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who acknowledged that UNRWA may have Hamas members on its payroll. They claim that Justice Minister Irwin Cotler, a passionate supporter of Israel, is involving himself in Foreign Affairs deliberations, and generally exerting pressure on the administration to take a more pro-Israel stand. And they point to Jonathan Fried, the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, whom they insist is fixated on security issues, at the expense of retaining a balanced foreign policy.
Indeed, the whole tilt toward Israel, critics claim, is part of a reorientation of the Martin government toward a security-trumps-all stand, part of this country’s efforts to reassure nervous Americans about Canada’s trustworthiness as an ally. It also reflects once again the schism between the Chrétien and Martin wings of the Liberal Party. Jean Chrétien was sympathetic to the argument that Western indifference to the plight of the Muslim peoples contributes to Islamist terrorism.
Ibbitson argues that this debate should take place in the open, and if Canada is going to ’tilt’, then Canadians should have a say in said ’tilting’. That’s hard to argue with, although of course given the media presentation of the conflict — including liberal papers like Ibbitson’s own G & M, Canadians would be hard-pressed to make genuinely informed choices about how Canada should ’tilt’. The Canadian media’s ’tilt’ towards Israel is quite obvious (take a look at En Camino media analyses of the Canadian media’s treatment of the issue. There are numerous pieces over the summer of 2003: here, here, here, here , here, and here). It shouldn’t be surprising that all this is having an effect on policy.
