diplomacy

Thursday August 12, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday August 12, 2021

Canada Considers Countering Winter Games and Hostage Diplomacy

Canada is being urged by legal and international experts to apply diplomatic pressure on both China and the United States to secure the release of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, following Spavor’s 11-year prison sentence by a Chinese court.

December 8, 2020

Spavor, an entrepreneur, was detained in China in December 2018 along with Kovrig on allegations of state spying, charges widely seen as retaliation for the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver in connection with a U.S. extradition request. Meng’s formal extradition hearing began on Wednesday in British Columbia.

Since their arrest, Canada has been pushing for the release of Spavor and Kovrig. Both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau condemned Spavor’s sentence on Wednesday.

“This decision was made after a process that lack both fairness and transparency including a trial that did not satisfy the minimum standards required by international law,” Garneau said at a press conference, adding Canada was is ‘intense’ discussions with both Chinese and U.S. officials to free both Spavor and Kovrig, who is still awaiting trial in China.

February 12, 2021

Trudeau, in a statement, called the sentence unacceptable and unjust.

“For Mr. Spavor, as well as for Michael Kovrig who has also been arbitrarily detained, our top priority remains securing their immediate release. We will continue working around the clock to bring them home as soon as possible,” he said.

Since the arrests in 2018, Canada has decried what it calls “hostage diplomacy” and in February launched the ‘Declaration Against Arbitrary Detention in State-to-State Relations,’ which has now been endorsed by 66 countries.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party leader has warned that it may soon be too dangerous for Canadians to travel to China for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. (CTV) 

December 12, 2018

Speaking at a news conference on Ontario on Tuesday, leader Erin O’Toole said: “We are approaching a point where it won’t be safe for Canadians, including Olympic athletes, to travel to China.”

Diplomats from dozens of countries gathered at Canada’s embassy in Beijing on Wednesday to hear the Spavor verdict. The fate of a fellow Canadian, former diplomat Michael Kovrig, remains unclear.

O’Toole was speaking after a court rejected the appeal of a third Canadian, Robert Schellenberg, whose prison term in a drug case was abruptly increased to death following Meng’s arrest.

March 24, 2008

Asked about the winter Games, O’Toole said: “Yes Canada should be considering a boycott.

“And I’ve said we’re going to be watching the decision very closely. Beijing has to know that the world is watching the genocide taking place against the Uyghurs. They’ve watched what’s been happening in Hong Kong and the situation with Mr Schellenberg, Mr Spavor and Mr Kovrig.”

He said Canada would have to think “long and hard on whether we reward a country like that with the Games”. (The Guardian) 

 

Thursday July 22, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday July 22, 2021

U.S. border to remain closed until at least Aug. 21

The U.S. land border will remain closed to non-essential travel until at least Aug. 21, according to a renewal order issued by the American government Wednesday.

June 23, 2021

In a notice pre-published in the U.S. Federal Register, the U.S. government says that while vaccination rates have improved, opening the land border to non-essential travel still poses too great a risk.

“Given the outbreak and continued transmission and spread of COVID-19 within the United States and globally, the Secretary has determined that the risk of continued transmission and spread of the virus associated with COVID-19 between the United States and Canada poses an ongoing specific threat to human life or national interests,” says the U.S. government notice.

The new order expires one minute before midnight on Aug. 21.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement that offered little additional explanation.

April 18, 2020

“To decrease the spread of COVID-19, including the Delta variant, the United States is extending restrictions on non-essential travel at our land and ferry crossings with Canada and Mexico through August 21, while ensuring the continued flow of essential trade and travel,” wrote DHS spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández.

“DHS is in constant contact with Canadian and Mexican counterparts to identify the conditions under which restrictions may be eased safely and sustainably.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was also tight-lipped.

“We rely on the guidance of our health and medical experts, not on the actions of other countries,” Psaki told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Cincinnati.

“We created these working groups so we can have an open line of communication, discussion on what the criteria look like, what measures needed to be met. Those are ongoing and of course, we continue to be briefed internally as well.”

June 27, 2015

The American order comes only a few days after the Canadian government announced its land border would open to fully vaccinated U.S. citizens on Aug. 9 and to fully vaccinated travellers from other countries on Sept. 7.

Speaking to reporters today, Public Safety Minister Bill Blair said he has been working closely with U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, who informed him of the U.S. government’s plan to keep its land border closed to non-essential travel.

“There are a number of considerations that I know that the American government is currently undertaking with respect to their borders and that work will continue,” he said.

Blair said the U.S. policy doesn’t affect Canada’s decision to open its border next month.

“Our responsibility, of course, is to look after the best interests of Canadians and to follow the advice of our public health officials,” he said. “That’s precisely what we have done.” (CBC) 

 

Wednesday June 23, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday June 23, 2021

The retreat of North Americanism: Canadians and Americans keep moving further apart

Back in the day, when Canada signed the landmark free trade agreement with the United States, there was a good deal of fear and loathing.

February 6, 2001

The Progressive Conservatives led the way on reciprocity and the Jean Chrétien Liberals, as former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy recalled in a phone call this week, reluctantly climbed aboard. Like many, he worried the border would weaken, that continentalism had won out.

Then, deus ex machina, beginning with 9/11, expectations were overturned. The response to the terrorist horror – with many Americans believing the hijackers had come through Canada – was to fortify the world’s longest undefended border. Passports became necessary.

A bitter split with the George W. Bush administration ensued over Canada’s refusal to take part in the invasion of Iraq. Later, under the Republicans, came the populist explosion on the right. Donald Trump treated Canada more like an adversary than an ally. His medieval empire, his attack on truth, democracy and decency, soured the opinion of Canadians on America like never before.

April 30, 2021

Maybe the bigger the border, Canadians reasoned, the better.

Then, taking the boundary divide to the max, came the shock of the coronavirus pandemic, which had the effect of cocooning Canada, shutting down the border to all but essential traffic. The closure has endured more than a year and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in no hurry to end it. He’s been hearing from his public: Keep the Americans out.

It doesn’t make sense, Maryscott Greenwood, the North Carolinian who is head of the Canadian American Business Council, said in an interview. “You’re saying vaccines don’t matter.” Canadians shouldn’t underestimate the opposition and frustration this has provoked in Washington. She’s hearing from top officials, she said, that the U.S. is considering opening its side of the border fully on June 21. If Mr. Trudeau and company don’t respond in kind, so be it. To heck with them.

October 10, 2020

All said, there’s been quite a turn since the heady days of free trade. Instead of continental cohesion, much division. Instead of a border thinner than ever, one thicker than ever. Instead of a new North Americanism, a retreat to a more fragmented mindset.

“The heyday of the Canada-U.S. relationship has come and gone,” said Christopher Kirkey, director of the Center for the Study of Canada at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “The trend is toward more divergence than convergence.”

In addition to the advent of Mr. Trump, the calamities of 9/11 and the coronavirus, there were other factors. Free trade, as Mr. Kirkey observed, coincided with the end of the Cold War. That termination meant Canada needed the U.S. less and the U.S. needed Canada less. The special relationship between the two countries that was built in the period 1945 to 1990 became too difficult to sustain and it isn’t, in his view, about to be restored by Joe Biden’s protectionist Democrats. “I can tell you Canada is hardly on the radar screen in Washington. Let’s be blunt about that.”

 

July 14, 2020

Michael Adams, the head of the Environics Institute who has been surveying Canadian attitudes toward Americans for decades, concurs that the North Americanism envisaged with free trade is pretty much kaput. In the post-Second World War years, Canadians used to look up to the U.S. in so many ways, he said. “It used to be like the utopia.” Now, given the hold Mr. Trump’s populist authoritarianism has on such a large swath of the population, “it’s more like the dystopia.”

 
Of course, as was rightly noted by Goldy Hyder, chief executive officer of the Business Council of Canada, economic dependence on the American market is here to stay, despite any other decoupling tendencies. The Trudeau government better be careful, he warned. With companies reviewing their supply chains in the wake of the pandemic, more investments will remain in the U.S. if the Canadian border poses too much of a barrier.

March 13, 2021

If the Liberals were following the science, they’d quickly open the border, he added, but instead they’ve been following the politics (their polling). He said Mr. Biden told Mr. Trudeau in Europe that he promised freedom for Americans by July 4 and that opening the Canadian border is part of the deal.

The Prime Minister will take his sweet time in reciprocating. Continental consolidation isn’t as big a priority as it was before the century turned. Since that time, it’s become increasingly clear how different Canadians are. Rather than welded to an American block, they much prefer their own. (Globe & Mail) 

 

Tuesday June 15, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday June 15, 2021

The Wreckage Donald Trump Left Behind

January 16, 2020

Somewhere in China, a company recently received an order for boxes and boxes of reusable face masks with g7 uk 2021 embroidered on them. Over the weekend in Cornwall, in southwest England, these little bits of protective cloth were handed to journalists covering the 2021 summit of some of the world’s most powerful industrial economies—so they could write in safety about these leaders’ efforts to contain China.

August 24, 2019

The irony of the situation neatly summed up the trouble with this year’s G7 summit. The gathering was supposed to mark a turning point, a physical meeting symbolizing not only the beginning of the end of the coronavirus pandemic but also a return to something approaching normalcy after the years of Donald Trump and Brexit. And in certain senses it was. With Joe Biden—the walking embodiment of the traditional American paterfamilias that Trump was not—no one feared a sudden explosion or American walkout as before. Biden is not the sort of person to hurl Starbursts at another leader in a fit of pique. And yet, the reality was that the leaders in attendance were playing their diplomatic games within tram lines graffitied on the floor largely by the former U.S. president, not the incumbent one.

January 12, 2021

Emerging from a weekend of summitry last night, it was hard to avoid the reality that the great questions hanging over the gathering were ones shaped either by Trump or by the years of Trump: Europe’s frustration with American vaccine protectionism (which began under Trump but has been maintained by Biden), ongoing disputes over Brexit, the future of NATO, worries over Russian interference, and, ultimately, China, the great other at this event. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in her closing remarks: “Look, the election of Joe Biden as U.S. president doesn’t mean that the world no longer has problems.”

June 9, 2018

Everywhere you looked—whether in the communiqué itself, or the press conferences and summaries of leaders’ meetings—you could see the unresolved questions of the past few years, as presidents and prime ministers reacted to the problems thrown up, exacerbated, or actively caused by Trump. All agreed that they wanted to move on from the instability of his tenure, but they seemed divided and unclear about how, never mind what the new era should look like. With Biden’s congressional majority in doubt and Trump’s future intentions uncertain, Europe retains a latent fear that the U.S. is merely between eruptions, not recovering from one.

May 24, 2017

The leaders seemed to embody this sense of time being paused. Merkel has been chancellor so long, she attended her first G7 summit with George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Italy’s Mario Draghi might be a new prime minister, but he is no stranger to the world’s global establishment—a representative of the old order if ever there was one. Even Biden himself, hailed as a “breath of fresh air” by the summit’s host, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is hardly a new face on the world stage.

Ultimately, this G7 summit seemed to be stuck somewhere between the past and the future—between the era of Trump and the world some of these politicians hope to create. (The Atlantic) 

Saturday March 20, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday March 20, 2021

Biden Takes First Jab At Vaccine Diplomacy, Sharing Doses With Mexico, Canada

Under pressure to share AstraZeneca vaccine doses not yet being used to inoculate Americans, the Biden administration is finalizing plans to loan millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to Mexico and Canada. It’s a first foray into vaccine diplomacy for the Biden administration, weeks after global competitors China and Russia began using vaccine doses to exert influence.

March 13, 2021

The U.S. government has contracts to buy hundreds of millions more vaccine dosesthan there are people living here, but with most of those doses not yet delivered and Americans still struggling to get vaccination appointments, the Biden administration has so far focused on making sure Americans get vaccinated first. 

While AstraZeneca’s vaccine has been approved for use in many other countries, including Mexico and Canada, it still hasn’t been given emergency use authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. So, the White House announced it is working through the technicalities to loan 2.5 million doses to Mexico and 1.5 million doses to Canada from its stockpile of 7 million doses. 

“This action will allow our neighbors to meet a critical vaccination need in their countries, providing more protection immediately across the North American continent,” said Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus coordinator.

February 9, 2017

While the United States has vaccinated more than 12% of its population according to Johns Hopkins data, Canada has vaccinated only 1.7% of its population and Mexico only 0.5%.

Zients said the loans will be repaid through dose deliveries from AstraZeneca later in the year. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said many countries have asked to borrow from the stockpile, but said it’s not yet clear whether other requests may be granted.

After briefly pausing vaccinations with AstraZeneca in Europe due to concerns about blood clots developing, health officials there this week announced they believe the vaccine to be safe and effective and resumed administering the vaccine. (NPR)