Seven Oaks Magazine.

Paul Martin and Stephen Harper have belatedly joined the anti-war movement. I guess we should all just be grateful –better late than never! –but this exercise in bandwagon jumping is just too cynical and opportunistic to let pass.

With polls showing roughly 80% saying they support Canada’s (publicly announced) non-participation in the Iraq war, the retroactive all-party political consensus on the conflict is convenient. Harper’s position, of course, is the most untenable, and it’s been almost embarrassing watching old Alliance hawks contort themselves to tow the new party line. The Conservative assertion is that our military was/is so ill-equipped and undermanned that there would not have been any question of Canadian troops being deployed to Iraq. We are supposed to just never mind Harper and Stockwell Day’s lament of Canada’s abstention in the Wall Street Journal on March 29, 2003, the Hansard record of Alliance MPs, or anything else. For all his eerie calm and Ken doll hair, even Stephen Harper can’t sell this spin. This one was on a tee for Lawrence Martin to hit out of the park with his piece in last week’s Globe and Mail (June 3, 2004): ‘Harper, Harper, Pants on Fire!’

But the newly disguised Canadian branch of the Republican Party is too easy a target. Paul Martin and his crisis-ridden team of star candidates should not be allowed to strike their hypocritical pose in peace. Martin, while awaiting assumption of the throne, was remarkably mute on the Iraq question throughout 2003. When he finally took power, he emphasized time and again the need to improve our relationship with George Bush’s administration. And he took action to this end, appointing David Pratt, one of the most vocal Liberal advocates of Canadian participation in Iraq, as Minister of Defence and entering into discussion with the US on the ‘Star Wars’ National Missile Defense program.

These negotiations, or “initial discussions,” on missile defence, are being used to preemptively eliminate any kind of real debate on Canada’s participation. The Liberals avoid taking a position, while asserting the importance of being at the table. But of course, no good negotiator goes to the table without a starting position; the Liberal non-position is simply a thinly disguised acquiescence in the face of US plans.

It is, in fact, pretty common knowledge which political parties and figures played an active role in protesting the war on Iraq: NDP MPs and leader Jack Layton, and in Quebec, Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Quebecois MPs, who joined the quarter million strong demonstrators in Montreal. And, of course, wily old Jean Chretien made the last minute decision to keep Canadian troops out of Iraq, choosing to support the US imperial effort under the table –with extra troops to cover the occupation of Afghanistan and with ‘escort’ war ships in the Gulf.

Interestingly, while Canada’s prime ministerial front-runners strive to conjure up an anti-war past, to the south John Kerry appears intent on making his activism against the slaughter in Vietnam disappear, preferring to tout his veteran, ‘war hero’ credentials. Kerry’s careful to keep his criticism of Iraq –a war he voted for –to the initial, nearly unilateral launching of the effort. Kerry vows to win the occupation, sending tens of thousands of more GIs if need be, managing to exploit general, but often still vague, anti-war sentiment while articulating a position that is the polar opposite of the movement’s call to end the occupation, and bring the troops home.

Canada’s elected politicians, even the most progressive, can also be accused of avoiding the demands being articulated by activists in the street –often until well after the fact. And so, while our politicians jockey for position in opposing troop deployment to Iraq a year and a half ago, all is quiet in terms of electoral rhetoric on fronts like Haiti, where Canada backed a coup against a democratically elected president, or Palestine, where a globally condemned wall concretizes apartheid-like misery and dispossession.

The people of Haiti and Palestine, of course, will never receive even belated support from the likes of Martin and Harper. The Prime Minister was a key party to regime change in Port-au-Prince, and the man who would be PM would love to see Canada adopt a more explicitly pro-Israel policy. Even by the fuzziest, broadest definition of the broad and sometimes fuzzy ‘peace movement’, Harper and Martin would never qualify.