Recharging Canada: Round Two

Dear Tyee Readers,

Thank you for taking the time to respond to our article on Canada’s role in the world. (Read the original article and reader comments here. We are thrilled that our piece would generate such a lively debate. We also feel that it is important we continue to push the debate forward and in pursuit of this goal present the following comments.

Before we begin however, we would encourage people to download the Canada25 report . It is obviously difficult to convey how to re-conceptualize Canada’s role in the world in 700 words. Please note that our piece for The Tyee was only a summary of a 112-page report created with the input of over 400 Canadians aged 20 to 35 across Canada and around the world. In this article we will try to address many of the Tyee readers’ comments and concerns expressed in the online debate.

1. Citizens and Canadian Foreign Policy

Our fundamental point in our first Tyee article is that Canadians engage with the world through a range of everyday choices, including the food we eat and the clothes we buy.  These activities are not class restricted. The purchase of food and clothing are incredibly political acts — our consumption has a huge impact on the world, which means Canadians as consumers are deeply implicated in foreign policy. Our decisions to buy fair trade coffee are more important to Guatemalan farmers than our decision to participate in missile defence.

Consequently, power in the international arena is increasingly shared by actors beyond the state, and with this power comes an opportunity for social justice that could not exist when the state monopolized foreign policy decisions.

We acknowledge that this is not necessarily a new phenomenon — 50 or 100 years ago people could and did organize themselves to effect change on the international arena. Instead, we are asserting that the capacity for citizens to mobilize has increased exponentially. Within a few days after hearing of the South Asian tsunami, Sri Lankans in London hired cargo planes to send medical supplies to their home communities. Doctors in Canada set up a response centre.

These are incredibly dynamic responses to a situation on the other side of the world that involved coordinating the activities of hundreds of people within a few days. The complexity, number and size of initiatives the private and voluntary sectors can support — and consequently their impact on international affairs — has increased dramatically over the past century. 

This itself does not mean there is no role for government. Indeed, in the opinion piece, and the downloadable report, we outline a very clear role for government. As quoted from our original article we outline our vision of “a government that can work as a coordinator, facilitator, and organizer of foreign and domestic governments, citizens, NGOs, businesses, and other actors” and we use Canada’s leadership in the Land Mine Treaty as an example. There is clearly a role for the state — the goal of our piece is to identify the opportunities for non-state actors to contribute to solving problems that have traditionally been the sole responsibility of civil servants and elected officials.

2. Class Analysis and the Construction of the Citizen

Our piece seeks to construct the citizen as an empowered actor capable of effecting change to make for a more just and safe world. It is true that today, citizens from the upper classes often have access to networks and tools that enable them to act. The question the report raises is how do we enable all citizens to operationalize their citizenship in this way.

What we are arguing is that social relations in a period of advanced capitalism can be structured to enable traditionally marginalized groups to access power in the ways that only the most privileged could in the past. The network is the organizing principle for success, and this has enormous implications for educational policy, family support programs, youth leadership initiatives and the work of social service agencies.  With the right supports, all citizens can function as network-savvy actors able to wield levels of influence traditionally reserved only for the most privileged.

Here are two concrete examples of how people from traditionally marginalized communities can operate as network actors in this sense:

a) As a collaboration between three levels of government and non-profit organizations, the Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness in the Lower Mainland enabled eight youth with experiences of homelessness and addictions to participate for over a year in the decision making process of a sub-committee of the RSCH that allocated money for homelessness services. These eight youth became tapped into a previously marginalized network of street kids and through a supportive model of engagement, were able to contribute to the decision making process allocating several million dollars of federal resources. Today they have representatives on the RSCH itself, and are developing their own agenda to use the RSCH as an advocacy platform to lobby the federal government to take action on the lack of affordable housing as a root cause of homelessness.

b) A peer support program for new immigrant and refugee youth, now in its fourth year, has linked together newcomer youth in a supportive environment that facilitates their own self organizing. Participants come together to do a range of advocacy and community development work, from presenting policy positions to government officials to organizing recreation activities for other new immigrant and refugee youth. With the right supports, many of these youth have recovered the sense of confidence and pride that they possessed in their home countries, and are tapping into their own assets in partnership with their peers to become self-organizing advocates for social change. They are operationalizing themselves as networked citizens, using their network to improve their lives and those of their peers.

3. Relations with the USA

Some readers claim that Canadians, particularly working class Canadians, want to move away from the U.S. Our experience is that the working-class Canadians want employment and income security, much of which depends on maintaining our economic ties to the U.S.  Canadians export 90 percent of our goods to the United States. The challenge is to continue to chart an independent domestic social policy agenda as well as an independent foreign policy agenda while faced with the reality that our quality of life is heavily dependent on a healthy economic relationship with the U.S.  Jennifer Welsh makes the case very well — the problem with our stance on Iraq, for example, was not that it was different from that of the U.S.; the problem was that the three reasons why our stance was different were not articulated clearly, concisely and with determination.

4. Nature of the International System

Some readers suggest that our representation of the international arena as a chaotic system is incorrect — that in actuality we have one super state that is inflicting its will on the globe, and a series of emerging power states such as China and the EU as other players.  We agree that the international system remains the playground of states as the primary actors — what we are suggesting, however, is that states are no longer the sole actors.  Non-state actors have an important role in setting the agenda and resolving issues on the international stage. As requested by Allan, we give three examples from the area of ethical economics.

a) With state regulatory mechanisms co-opted by private economic actors and weakened by international financial institutions, mining companies often operate with impunity.  Oxfam Australia worked with citizens from local communities affected by mining to develop an alternative governance mechanism — a Mining Ombudsperson housed in Oxfam that can advocate on behalf of citizens from the South who feel that the economic activity in their home place is not beneficial to them.  A non-state actor (Oxfam) working with other non-state actors (local citizen groups) to engage the private sector and the state system itself.

b) An NGO, Global Witness, brought global attention to the issue of conflict diamonds and catalyzed a massive international process to reduce the impact that diamonds can have on the perpetuation of brutal civil conflicts in Africa.  While hardly flawless, the Kimberley Process combined state to state partnerships and international alliances with NGO’s, citizen groups in Angola and Sierra Leone, and private companies like De Beers.  Just recently, Amnesty USA ran a national blood-diamonds campaign whereby U.S. citizens approached jewellery stores across the country and requested proof that the diamonds they are buying did not come from conflict zones, putting pressure at the grassroots level on private economic actors engaged in international economic activity.

c) Citizens in Angola and Nigeria regularly hammer their governments about equitable distribution of the wealth derived from oil revenues. A U.K. organization picked up on these issues and began to pressure a U.K. oil company to make public the value of the royalty payments they provide to the Angolan government, to help citizen groups in that country demand accountability for how those payments are used for social and economic development.  The U.K. government in turn co-founded the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a process by which southern governments are voluntarily making the royalty payments transparent as a gesture of good faith to their citizens and international donors.

The World Bank is also making good governance a condition for their loans to the extractive sector, recognizing that they have been complicit in funding extractive activities that enriched developing country elites and western mineral companies without reducing poverty or sustaining income generation in the south.

Some closing thoughts

Clearly all the Tyee respondents are passionate about the core issues the world faces — inequitable distribution of wealth (symptom) and structural reform of the world’s economy (cause).  We whole-heartedly agree that globalization has two faces — it has the potential to unleash prosperity and justice, as well as becoming a mechanism through which the powerful retain power and privilege at the expense of others.

We feel that the only way to change this is to unlock the capacities of individual citizens to mobilize, and that the best way for citizens to mobilize is through connecting with like minded individuals in networks.

We are passionate believers in this ideal — Nadim has spent the last 10 years working with youth from a range of communities to catalyze this exact type of participation, while David has worked to engage a diverse range of people in Canada25 to enable them to articulate their ideas for building a better world.

David Eaves is lead author of From Middle to Model Power: Recharging Canada’s Role in the World and is currently volunteering full time with Canada25 to engage Canadians on the report’s ideas. Canada25 is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that brings the voices and ideas of Canadians, aged 20 to 35, to the nation's public policy discourse and takes action on issues of local and national significance.
 
Nadim Kara is a contributing author to From Middle to Model Power: Recharging Canada’s Role in the World. He is currently volunteering with Amnesty Canada’s Business and Human Rights program and Oxfam Canada to engage Canadian citizens and the Canadian government on how to build an ethical economy at the local and global level.