Prime Minister Harper won’t take the easy way out on foreign policy
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is forging a foreign policy for our nation with morality as the bottom line.
Well, that surely makes a change from the weasel-like policies of former PMs Paul Martin, Jean Chretien and Pierre Trudeau.
This is a dramatic shift, and one that bodes well for our image. From the Far East to the Middle East to Europe to the U.S. to Latin America we’re rebuilding alliances with friends and refusing to kowtow to our enemies.
It’s actually in keeping with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s determination to stand up against apartheid in South Africa no matter how much it cost.
In dealing with Communist China, Harper contended there is more at stake than the “almighty dollar.”
We should also ask why Communist China, which just announced a $10-billion aid package for Africa, was Canada’s largest foreign aid recipient under the Liberals.
How come a nation of more than one billion people, with a military of 1.3 million men and women, and 700 missiles aimed at tiny democratic Taiwan, was entitled to be top of the list when it came to foreign aid from Ottawa?
So Harper was bang on when, refusing to kowtow to President Hu Jintao, he declared Canadians do not want to sell out important values such as democracy, freedom and human rights just to haul in a few more dollars from a nation governed by a rigid regime.
Remember, no one gets to vote in free elections in Communist China, read free newspapers or magazines, look at free television, or go on the Internet without Big Brother looking over their shoulder and censoring them.
Under Mao Zedong at least 20 million innocent people were put to death for expressing thoughts the regime didn’t like. Millions more went into labour camps. Communist China invades Tibet and starts a program of cultural genocide. Canada’s Liberal government stayed silent.
Not so Harper’s Tories.
Harper’s team also defends Israel after years when the Liberals stood on the sidelines, or voted with Israel’s enemies at the UN.
When Aleksei Kosygin visited Canada, Trudeau declared he wanted to build a friendship with Moscow to counterbalance the influence of the U.S.
That was in the 1970s when the Soviet Union still had hundreds of thousands of men and women in gulags and held much of Europe—Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and other nations—as slave states.
But then, two of Trudeau’s heroes were Mao and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, who was actually an honorary pallbearer at Trudeau’s funeral.
Again, in Cuba, under Castro’s iron fist, no one gets to vote in free elections, read free newspapers or magazines, look at free TV or see uncensored Internet.
And no one gets to leave unless they escape in small boats and avoid the dictator’s secret police patrols.
But most Canadians turn a blind eye to this thug’s victimization of his own people, preferring instead to visit one of the island’s secluded tourist spots—Potemkin villages.
Fortunately, as seen by making Tibet’s Dalai Lama an honorary Canadian citizen despite outrage from the Beijing dictators, foreign policy in Ottawa today is based on ethical values.
One side of this is there are a hefty number of Conservative MPs who want to recognize Taiwan’s de facto independence as a nation state.
This, too, enrages the dictators in Beijing.
One can guess there is much more to come.
Canada has a conscience again.
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