a missed opportunity for both Canada and South Africa

As an update to yesterday's post, I note that Ottawa has decided to appeal the IRB decision. This effectively says that the Canadian official who made the decision does not speak for Canada.

As I noted yesterday, this is likely the correct move when one limits the issue to the merits of this particular man's claim. But just as some South African commentators have described the incident as "a missed opportunity" for their government to acknowledge the concerns of white South Africans, the Canadian government could have set the stage for a more rational refugee policy going forward by snubbing the charges of Canadian malfeasance levelled by South Africa's ruling African National Congress. Under a sensible refugee policy, we simply would not entertain refugee claims from safe countries like members of the European Union. Because we DO entertain any and all claims with a formal hearing and legal rights to appeal, the Canadian government attempted to deal with a (resultant) surge in claims from Mexico and the Czech Republic that was overloading the bureaucracy by adding to (another area of) the bureaucracy in the form of requiring visas, and the associated processing costs, from all Mexicans and Czechs entering Canada for any reason. This latest episode was unsurprisingly just a repeat of the events back in the 90s that led to visa fees being imposed on Chilean visitors to Canada (and, in Chilean retaliation, on Canadian visitors to Chile). Why doesn't Canada have a "safe country" list? Because countries NOT on the list would complain, and at work here is the indulgent collegiality amongst national governments that is a product of a common enemy called domestic challenges to their moral or legal authority. So it is that they satisfy the demands coming from those of their peers who are unhappy that their subjects are exhibiting public interest in escaping from their regimes. To make a not unrelated observation here, the Obama government is now saying that with respect to Honduras it will further turn the financial screws against Zelaya's enemies (that is to say, Hondurans) and will "not support" "the outcome of scheduled elections in November" regardless of whether such elections were fairly and transparently administered sans Zelaya. If Zelaya could be overthrown and elections held because Zelaya contemptuously swung well left of the mandate that was granted to him by his electorate and that was sanctioned by his country's institutions, perhaps the same thing could happen to other powers that be!

Canada admits too many refugees period (50% of all applicants, the highest rate in the world according to a Forbes writer, while Italy admits 16% and France 13%), but a fair place to start in terms of cutting down on the cost to the taxpayer and the abuse of the system would be by summarily rejecting refugee pleas from citizens of safe countries and ignoring the howls of outrage coming from foreign leaders who insist that they ought to be on the safe country list as well because their benevolent government has precluded the possibility of anyone being persecuted in their jurisdiction. Ottawa, in other words, should generally do the exact opposite of what it did in this particular case which was to essentially apologize for a Canadian bureaucrat making the ANC look like the dodgy government it is. Parliament should then go one better and make the most substantive reform: pass a bill citing the notwithstanding clause to assert its discretionary authority over the unelected judiciary with respect to the Supreme Court's ill-advised 1980s decision to grant full Charter rights to every non-citizen who happened to get a foot inside the border.

Canadian policy re the Americas

The federal government has made some constructive comments about Honduras this past month. Peter Kent, incorrectly identified by the New York Times as Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister (he is, in fact, a more junior Minister of State for Foreign Affairs (Americas)), was quoted as saying "[t]here has to be an appreciation of the events that led up to the coup."

Kent has also argued against attempts by Zelaya to return absent a "mediated solution" and today said that Canadian military and development aid would continue to flow to the beleagered country. The Canadian Press story on the aid situation draws a contrast with the policy of the Obama administration, raising interesting parallels with Colombia:

In a thinly veiled slap at U.S. congressional Democrats who oppose a trade deal with Colombia due to rights concerns, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper used a trip to Bogota to present himself as a steadier ally.

So I have to give Harper his due here. With respect to Colombia, he told the Wall Street Journal in February that "[i]f we as the major countries of this hemisphere cut an ally off at the knees we will pay a tremendous price for it." Although the prime minister's policy on Israel ("[m]y government is a very strong supporter of the state of Israel") is problematic (something I will address in a future post), Harper's 2007 speech to the US Council on Foreign Relations calling on the US to support Colombia was one of his finest.

But conservative ideology should not drive foreign policy any more than liberal ideology. What matters is the facts and the particulars of the region at issue. And on that front, I would refer Honduras watchers to this lady ex-pat's blog.

political chameleons

From the Economist's July 2 edition:

The only people who don’t seem to want the president back in his job are Hondurans. On June 30th thousands of them filled the main square in Tegucigalpa, the capital, to show their support for Mr Zelaya’s removal and his replacement by Roberto Micheletti...
Mr Zelaya’s presidency has been marked by a rise in crime, corruption scandals and economic populism. He pushed through big wage increases for teachers and government workers. When money ran short, he turned to Mr Chávez for petrodollars. Despite more than $100m in Venezuelan aid, the government has stopped paying some suppliers.

The biggest hole in Zelaya's legitimacy, however, is the fact he was elected a moderate and then veered sharply left. When David Emerson, elected as a Liberal, crossed the floor of the Canadian Parliament to sit as a Conservative, the charges of political chameleon was common. Yet few seemed to consider the possibility that it was not Emerson's color that changed, but his environment's. What if a politician is elected by campaigning on platform X, and then the political party he was associated with happens to endorse a platform of "not X"? I would think that crossing the floor to another party that stood for what he campaigned for would be consistent with democracy, and failing to do so would actually be inconsistent. "Liberal" and "Conservative" are coats of paint. They are contingent, to use the term I've been employing a lot this week. What matters is the substance, and on this point the moderate policy Hondurans had voted for in the last election had been usurped by a president who decided to throw in with the Chavistas. Playing the populist card to change the constitution was one move too many from the Chavez playbook.

From the Calgary Herald:

The real information is different from what the world has been fed," said Chet Thomas, an American who runs the development charity Project Global Village, based in Tegucigalpa.
"What happened is the army disposed of a constitutionally elected president in order to restore a democratic system of government, not to break the democratic system. This case cannot be catalogued as a coup d'etat.

The official line from both Canada and the USA has been to follow the lead of the OAS, but OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza was a part of the government of former Chilean president Salvador Allende. Allende was the first Marxist to be elected as a head of government in the Americas, and was supported by the KGB. Given that Allende was deposed by Pinochet's 1973 coup, Insulza can hardly be expected to take a nuanced view of the deposition of a leftist president. The fact the OAS is unanimously calling for Honduras' ouster from its membership (should Zelaya not be reinstated) while more than two dozen of the 34 OAS member states are calling for Cuba's unconditional admission severely undermines the organization's credibility.

Octavio Sánchez's informative piece in the CS Monitor makes for a good read, while Roger Noriega's blogposts of this past week (he is a former US Ambassador to the OAS) make for required reading, as does Carlos Alberto Montaner's WaPo piece.

Honduras continued

According to the Miami Herald,

[Ousted Honduran President Manuel] Zelaya started distributing the ballots nationwide on Saturday. 'There were cars, buses and planes getting those ballots all over the country,'' said [National Human Rights Commissioner Ramón] Custodio, [who "defends the replacement of Mr. Zelaya as constitutional"]. 'I don't know where he got the cash to do all that.'

At 9 that night, [armed forces head Romeo] Vásquez said he was called to another meeting with the members of the Supreme Court and the attorney general, where he was shown a court order to arrest Zelaya.... 'We felt that if he stayed here, worse things were going to happen and there would be bloodshed.'

From the latest Wall Street Journal:

... populist intimidation has worked elsewhere in the region, and Hondurans are understandably afraid that, backed by Chávez agents and money, it could lead to similar antidemocratic subversion there. In Tegucigalpa yesterday, thousands demonstrated against Mr. Zelaya, and new deputy foreign minister Marta Lorena Casco told the crowd that 'Chávez consumed Venezuela, then Bolivia, after that Ecuador and Nicaragua, but in Honduras that didn't happen.'

On this Canada Day, the WSJ's suggestion that "Maybe it's time to sort the real from the phony Latin American democrats" leads one to ask just how "real" Canada's democracy is. Post-Zelaya Honduras may be democratic in substance, but is being attacked by everyone from Chavez to Castro to Obama on reasons of form, specifically, the absence of impeachment formalities (the mere formality of which should be obvious from the fact both the legislature and the judiciary want Zelaya out of office). Many people believe that Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms stands as a substantive guarantor. In fact, section 1 of the Charter allows Charter rights to be abridged if justifiable in a "free and democratic society". And even if such abridgements are not justifiable, a government can simply cite Section 33, the notwithstanding clause! Ultimately, Canada's democracy is protected by its prevailing culture, not the form of its institutions. The particular form of a democratic constitution is highly arbitrary. What if one of Canada's 308 MPs "crossed the floor" to the Green Party? The Green Party's representation would rise from zero percent of the seats to 0.3%. Given that the party won 6.8% of the vote in the 2008 federal election, this would not strike me as undemocratic. Yet some people would swear that it was highly undemocratic because the electorate in that floor crosser's particular riding cast more votes for another party (just look at the rage when David Emerson crossed the floor following his election in Vancouver Kingsway as a Liberal).

The bottom line is that the amount of moral weight that most people place on constitutional formalities is disproportionate: the particular incarnation of whatever the ideals are is typically far too contingent to support the absolutistic moralizing that occurs. Take the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik. Apparently, the moral reponsibility of the federal government for this man would change enormously were his historical residence status slightly different. That residency qualified him for Canadian citizenship documents, yet this man's concrete ties (non-abstract, non-institutional) to Canada are negligible (e.g. birth, dominant ethnicity, dominant religion, dominant culture, etc). If it would be inhumane to leave him to his own devices (since when is government inaction a coercive denial of one's right to liberty?) in his country of origin, how would it be more humane to take the same inaction should he not happen to have Canadian citizenship along with his Sudanese citizenship?

Being Canadian is, or ought to be, more than just having a piece of paper saying "Canadian citizen". Whether the new head of government in Honduras ought to be supported ought to be a substantive as opposed to a technical question.