Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 7, 2017
Canada faces new world order in the face of dramatic change, says Chrystia Freeland
Canada is facing a new world order threatened by climate change, Daesh extremists, Russian aggression and the reality that many Americans want to “shrug off the burden of world leadership,” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said Tuesday.
November 12, 2016
In what was billed as a major speech on Canada’s foreign policy priorities, Freeland sketched out the challenges the country faces today and the role it aspires to play.
She acknowledged the dramatic changes unfolding in Washington under U.S. President Donald Trump, who has pulled out of a global climate change pact, assailed NATO alliance for not pulling its fair share and talked up protectionist trade barriers.
While Freeland called the United States the “indispensable nation” in the postwar world order, those times may be coming to an end.
In laying out Canada’s foreign policy priorities, Freeland said that Ottawa will “robustly” support the rules-based international order and its institutions.
February 10, 2017
Those include G7, the G20, APEC, the Commonwealth and La Francophonie, NATO and the UN, she said.
In those forums, Canada will promote Canadian values that include feminism, and the promotion of the rights of women and girls, Freeland said.
Freeland also pledged that the Liberal government will boost investments in the military “to not only redress years of neglect and underfunding, but also to place the Canadian Armed Forces on a new footing—with the equipment, training, resources and consistent, predictable financing.”
October 20, 2016
The third pillar of Canada’s foreign policy will be trade, starting with the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and renewed efforts to diversify trade worldwide,” she said.
Freeland highlighted Canada’s past roles on the world stage, in diplomatic circles and battlefields, from Europe to Korea to Afghanistan.
But the global order is changing in unprecedented ways, she said, with the emergence of the global south and Asia, notably China. That brings the need to integrate these countries into the world’s economic and political system “in a way that is additive, that preserves the best of the old order that preceded their rise, and that addresses the existential threat of climate change,” she said. (Source: Toronto Star)