Chris Selley: Conservative or Liberal, foreign policy ambitions clash with Canadians’ utter apathy

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Except at times of acute crisis, the choice is between underinvesting in soft power and underinvesting in hard power. And voters seem fine with that

One campaign promise Justin Trudeau’s Liberals can genuinely claim to have kept appears on page 69 of their 2015 platform: “We will renew Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping operations.”

They cleared the bar very slowly — in Trudeau’s first year in office Canada’s peacekeeping forces shrank from 112 to 106, in his second to 62 — and perhaps only briefly. In March the UN formally asked Canada to extend its mission by two-and-a-half months, to prevent a gap in medevac capabilities. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland declined.One wonders, though, just how many people noticed. It barely made a dent in the news.

Should Scheer win in October, it will be fair to give him a chance to follow through. But it’s tough not to notice how much he sounds like Stephen Harper in opposition. “For decades, successive Liberal governments have undermined and under-funded Canada’s armed forces,” the Conservatives’ 2006 platform alleged. Military spending was at 2.9 per cent of government expenditures when they took office, peaked at 3.2 per cent in 2008, then bottomed out at 2.5 per cent in 2013.

Harper’s policy on China, too, famously evolved from that of a democracy-and-human-rights hardliner, who derided his predecessors’ shameless pursuit of the “almighty dollar,” to that of a thoroughly conventional PM who pays the right compliments to the right people and comes home with his trade deals and pandas.

 

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We cannot be bothered to be apathetic.

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