EDITORIAL: Make foreign affairs, defence an election issue
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The next Canadian federal election is going to commence any day now. While the received wisdom is that the coming few weeks will be a referendum on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance during the pandemic, we all know elections don’t go the way they’re supposed to go.
Anything can happen. Curveballs abound.
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All it takes is one strange policy proposal or one quirky gaffe and everything gets derailed and can head in any direction.
Or something big can unfold and the campaigns start to chase the headlines.
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“Events, dear boy, events”: That’s the phrase attributed to former British prime minister Harold MacMillan, when asked by someone what it was that saw governments fall.
That said, there’s one big topic that we really hope doesn’t get passed over this time around. That’s foreign affairs and defence matters.
The world has only become more complicated and, by some accounts, more dangerous since the 2019 election and the beginning of the pandemic.
The Taliban is on the rise once again in Afghanistan. The challenges this presents range from general instability in the region to the lives of Afghan interpreters who stood shoulder to shoulder with Canadian soldiers being placed at risk.
There are perennial concerns around Russian aggression in eastern Europe, which is the whole reason several hundred Canadians went there with NATO allies to participate in Operation Reassurance.
Then there’s the big one: China.
Serious questions remain about the origins of COVID-19 and what exactly happened in Wuhan over a year and a half ago.
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While China has not been transparent and forthcoming with COVID-19 accountability, they have continued to make inroads leveraging developing nations around the world.
They’ve been holding Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor hostage for what is approaching 1,000 days now.
China, under Xi Jinping, wishes to reorder the world so that everything revolves around them and is consistent with their authoritarian Communist values.
Canada cannot be party to that. Instead, we must join our allies in countering that.
These conversations and more need to be front and centre during the upcoming federal election. Hold politicians to account on foreign affairs and defence.
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