16 September 2007
For Personal Use Only

• Author: Janice Kennedy
• Source: Ottawa Citizen

With his easy smile, self-deprecating manner and earnest brown eyes, Vancouver professor Michael Byers looks nothing at all like a scourge or a thorn. But he is both, and tirelessly.

Ask Stephen Harper.

An insistent thorn in the prime minister’s side, Byers is also the scourge of “Canada’s New Government.” Possessing the most impeccable of political and intellectual credentials, the 41-year-old scholar and expert on international law returned just three years ago from teaching stints outside the country to add his voice to the public dialogue.

And he minces no words. “I’ve been very open,” he said during a visit to Ottawa last week. “I don’t think Stephen Harper is an appropriate leader for this country.” Byers believes Harper is leading the country into a lockstep arrangement with the United States, one that is steadily erasing our border, eroding our independence and hobbling our capacity to be a major player — and a major contributor — on the world stage.

An increasingly familiar voice in the Canadian media and author of three books, Byers articulates his position with compelling eloquence in his latest volume, a subversive gobsmacker of a book. I mean that as a compliment.

For anyone who loves Canada, hates Canada or is ambivalent about this whole vast land mass and its contrarian population of self-doubters, Intent for a Nation may be the most exciting book to appear in decades. Subtitled What Is Canada For? and sporting the tag, “A relentlessly optimistic manifesto for Canada’s role in the world,” the book is an assemblage of new ideas and timeless values turned out in fresh new clothes.

The thesis of the book is a challenge to George Grant’s seminal 1966 work, Lament for a Nation, which argued that, since consumption had become the purpose of life, continenentalism was inevitable and Canada as a distinct nation was disappearing into the great American maw. Byers believes Harper took that view to heart. “And he’s internalized it to the point that I don’t think he believes Canada has any options but to follow the United States.”

In Intent for a Nation, Byers challenges Grant’s thesis. “A country’s soul is not just about economics,” he says. It’s about social harmony, concern for neighbours, traditions of peacekeeping — “stuff you can’t measure in GDP.” And he uses that position to challenge neo-conservative views, both American and Canadian, about appropriate responses to terrorism, about environmental issues, about warring and peacemaking, about a continental economy and co-ordinated military, about responsibilities to shoulder part of the global burden. Readable and impassioned, Intent for a Nation is 240 pages of undiluted inspiration. It should be required reading for the prime minister, his cabinet and anyone else who hopes to guide this ship of state.

And anti-Harper though it has to be, given its philosophical underpinning, the book is refreshingly positive, free of rancour. It is not even particularly partisan. Byers, who describes himself as an old-school red Tory, just wants Canadians to think about what is happening, and stop it before it’s too late. Details, no doubt involving various partisan approaches, can be worked out later.

A political science professor at the University of British Columbia and the director of its Liu Institute for Global Issues, Byers also holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at UBC. But while these titles lend serious credibility to his observations and exhortations, it is his essential identity that provides his book — and his crusade — with its spiritual backbone.

Byers loves Canada. Listen to how he characterizes this place that has such a hold on his soul he turned in his U.S. green card, telling the incredulous officials who received it he had chosen to live permanently in Canada. He cites our vastness, our location, our educated and connected population, our high standard of living and resources, our harmonious society, the values that support our sense of collective responsibility, our healthy economy, our reputation for diplomacy, international law and peacekeeping. “We are,” he observes in his Preface, “the envy of the world. We are — take a deep breath and don’t laugh — a powerful country.”

Byers loves Canada so much he wants to convince the rest of us to love it, too — which means not succumbing to the self-defeating resignation that encourages us, through the current government, to sign over our birthright to our powerful neighbours to the south.

No, Byers says with something between a sigh and a smile, he is not anti-American. His two young children have American citizenship, having both been born in the U.S. while he was director of the Canadian studies program at North Carolina’s Duke University. He loves the American can-do attitude. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor of California, is his environmental hero for having played Terminator to the climate-change beast. And, he adds, some of his closest friends are his American former colleagues.

“No, I’m simply pro-Canadian. And I even take the long view that it’s in the interests of the United States to have a progressive, independent Canada and not another Puerto Rico,” he says, referring to the U.S. territory where residents are U.S. citizens without the right to vote in presidential elections. “Another Puerto Rico adds very little to humanity’s quest for peace and justice.”

It is within that global quest that Byers feels Canada has a significant role to play, one it has not been playing for some time. To hear how he thinks we should be getting involved, rather than playing little brother to the Americans, is energizing.

Not that Byers reserves all his criticism for Harper, though he believes the current prime minister has brought things to an alarming new head. Except for Jean Chr√©tien’s refusal to join the U.S. on the Iraq misadventure, and Paul Martin’s demurral in the face of missile defence plans, little new has happened in Canadian foreign policy in 20 years — despite massive forces of global change, including the end of the Cold War, the rise of China as a mega-economy and the urgent international challenges of climate change.

“But where’s Canada? The eighth largest economy in the world with 32 million outward-looking, educated people — and it’s just sitting there on its hands. The only thing that we seem to be able to do, now that we have Mr. Harper as prime minister, is follow along in the slipstream of probably the worst president that the United States has had in its entire history. I find it disturbing.”

Still, Byers has described his new call to action as “a relentlessly optimistic manifesto,” and he’s as positive in person as he is in print. “Life’s too short to despair,” he says. “We are so lucky to have this fabulous country. We’ve had the luxury of fretting about small things, but it’s time for Canadians to stop whining and to realize their potential.”

This is what it comes down to: “We’re independent. We actually are quite powerful. And we have a moral obligation to contribute in a positive way.”

Byers bases his optimism on a deep reverence for the visionary impulses he believes built this country, made it great and still lie at its heart. “Ideologically, I am a red Tory. I’m part of that long tradition that built this country, the British organic tradition of nation-building, which had the state as a central progressive force in the creation of vibrant markets and the direction of collective energies.” He mentions Macdonald’s achievements (”We owe this country to the national dream. Dream — not national ‘plan.’”). He cites R.B. Bennett and the creation of the CBC.

“For me there’s nothing inconsistent about being progressive and being part of something deeply centrist and nationalist, because of course these red Tories — the John A. Macdonalds and Bennetts and Diefenbakers — were all nationalists. This is a mainstream conversation.”

Nor are the Canadian values at its heart constrained by partisan ties. That explains the voting habits of his grandparents in rural Saskatchewan. (Byers has lived across the country but is essentially a Westerner.) They used to vote federally for John Diefenbaker, he says, and provincially for the CCF’s Tommy Douglas. “And they saw absolutely no contradiction.”

Those values are still with us, he says, even if the “Progressive” Conservatives no longer formally exist. In fact, he believes it was the old label, despite its amputation, that led in part to Harper’s election. “I think many people voted Conservative in the last election thinking they were voting for what they’d voted for on previous occasions. And Mr. Harper’s a brilliant tactician. He knew exactly what he was doing. But I think many Canadians will start to wake up.”

In some ways, Byers sees the new-Conservative victory — in a minority situation — as almost a good thing. “It will give Canadians a chance to see what they are — despite the fact that they’re trying not to show what they really are — and reject them without giving them the majority that they would need to fundamentally change the country.”

For Byers, what this country needs is not so much change as a greater appreciation of what we already are. “If we didn’t live in the shadow of the United States — if we were located where South Africa’s located — the whole world would think Canada’s a powerful country.”

Michael Byers already knows it is. Now he wants his fellow Canadians to make the same discovery.

jkennedy@thecitizen.canwest.com

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>From Intent for a Nation,

Michael Byers on …

The Canadian psyche

“Harper and his colleagues have always believed that Canadians would just as happily be Americans, and they have done their best to make us so. Fortunately, George Grant was wrong. Our distinctiveness — our love of country — is rooted in the non-economic compartments of our national psyche. If Canadians have an inferiority complex, it is only because we have become accustomed to living in the shadow of the world’s most powerful state.”

Stephen Harper’s Americanization of Canada

“In just one year, the Harper government extended our involvement in a U.S.-led war in Asia, gave the Pentagon access to maritime surveillance over our coastal waters, followed the lead of the Bush administration on climate change and the Middle East and took surreptitious steps towards participating in missile defence.”

“Were it not for George W. Bush, Canada might be on its way to becoming the 51st American state. But the U.S. president’s bellicose rhetoric and overt religiosity made many Canadians nervous, while his administration’s regressive cuts to taxes and social programs and massive increases in defence spending transformed the United States into a more unequal, fearful and militaristic place.”

On fighting terrorism

“As the Canadian major general Andrew Leslie said in August 2005: ‘Every time you kill an angry young man overseas, you’re creating 15 more who will come after you.’ A security-focused, militarized approach is not necessarily the best way to reduce and manage terrorism.”

On Afghanistan

“Just five weeks after he became prime minister, Stephen Harper flew to Kandahar. In a photo op that could have been scripted by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s chief political adviser, he told our troops that Canadians were subject to the same terrorist threat as Americans. …The prime minister sounded remarkably like Bush when he said, ‘Canadians don’t cut and run at the first sign of trouble.’ Yes indeed. But surely we’re beyond the ‘first sign of trouble’ now?”

“Whatever our political inclination, we all have a tipping point at which we’d call for Canada’s troops to be brought home. Nobody is willing to argue that the counter-insurgency mission in Afghanistan would be worth the lives of a thousand Canadian soldiers. On that basis, it is essential that we engage in a hard-nosed assessment of where our national tipping point should be.”

On responsibility

“For decades, Americans provided global leadership with regard to human rights and international humanitarian law. Since September 2001, they have abdicated that role, leaving space for an experienced, well-minded middle power such as Canada. But if we are to lead the way on this or any other international issue, it is essential that we remain on our best behaviour and not let standards slip in the way they have next door.”

On Canada’s continuing failure to come close to the international foreign aid target, set nearly 40 years ago

“The fact of the matter is, Canada can afford to raise its overseas development assistance to 0.7 per cent of GDP. Real incomes in this country have, on average, increased by about 20 per cent over the past two decades. Canada has the most robust economy of any G8 country, and it has posted large budget surpluses for the past decade. We also have far more than our fair share of some of the world’s most valuable resources.”

Canada’s future

“Canada should, as a country, be asserting itself as a ‘global citizen,’ shaping the international agenda and using its influence to secure positive, progressive change. As Canadians, we should dare to dream great dreams. As Canadians, we should dare to make them happen.”

Filed by Ivana Jankovic under Regional Security