I see I'm not the only one who was prompted by this post from Paul Wells to do a little looking around. Wells wondered out loud whether the sudden resignation of the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs might be connected to the closure of four Canadian consulates.
At that first link, Lemon Chicken & Lawn Signs has a lengthy quote from the news story on the closures, a story that appears in the Embassy newsweekly but appears to have flown largely under the radar elsewhere. (And perhaps that's because Canada's New Government™ neglected to make any domestic news release on the subject.) Suffice it to say that a lot of people are puzzled and disappointed by a decision ostensibly taken as a cost saving measure.
In a Globe and Mail op-ed Peter Donolo, who was the consul-general in one of the affected consulates in Milan for three years, describes what Canada loses in this bargain.
In Milan, as in Osaka, Fukuoka and St. Petersburg, Canada will lose the expertise and networks it has spent decades building up. It will lose opportunities to attract new business and new investors to our country — the types of opportunities that come only from being on the ground in a business centre, that can only be seized on by entrepreneurial, business-oriented personnel.And it will lose something else, too.
Call in prestige. Milan has the second-largest consular corps in the world (after New York). By pulling out, Canada hardly comes across as the G7 country it is.
It is this narrowing of ambition that is perhaps the most troubling aspect of these closures.
I could have sworn that this government was concerned about "Canada's place in the world." How does that gibe with abandoning these consulates and losing the institutional expertise that it's taken so long to gain?
Donolo also connects a few dots for us.
It's not coincidental that as we close these consulates overseas, we are expanding our consular network in the United States. More than half a dozen new Canadian consulates have been opened in the U.S. in the past two years alone.
So it begins to look like a calculated decision to focus even more on trade with the U.S. at the expense of trade with other international partners. Which makes no sense to me at all.
Even putting aside the fact that we know the U.S. feels free to ignore its trade agreements when convenient, increasing our reliance on our neighbour to the south just now looks like a bad bet. The Bush administration has left the American economy in tatters and it's difficult to envision a scenario where there won't be a surge of protectionism there. Apparently the lessons of the softwood lumber fiasco really haven't penetrated the brains of those who want Canada to have a strong, independent economy. Or perhaps those who've taken those lessons to heart simply aren't in evidence when policy decisions like this are made.
It's been said that when the U.S sneezes, Canada catches a cold. That hasn't been as much in evidence in recent years but decisions like this seem likely to make us more vulnerable, not less.
So what the heck are they thinking?
What they are thinking should be obvious from the entire body of rhetoric they've been spouting for the last 15 years.
Three of those cities are such major sites for trade and for tourism both -- I can hardly believe Harper would do this.
You know what this reminds me of? The decision of major North American media in the early nineties to start closing down most of their foreign bureaus, cutting back on full-time correspondents, relying on inexperienced reporters from New York or Toronto or London to play fireman whenever a full-blown crisis erupted anywhere (the backgrounds of which the visiting firemen never knew very well, of course). And we all know how that turned out.
If nothing else it shows, domestically, the clout that Peter McKay hold in cabinet.
Jesus Christ it's a dark day. You're right about trade with the States - even if the states wasn't on shaky ground economically, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. Aside from that, EU is starting to replace (or at least compete with) the states for 'economic superpower with hard currency', Japan even at it's lows is a major world centre of finance, and Russia is a major exporter.
What a joke.
Add to this Margaret Atwood's column today in the G&M:
http://www.rbcinvest.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/PEstory/LAC/20070127/COATWOOD27/Comment/comment/comment/6/6/10/
"...The Canadian Embassy staff in Paris did a lot of work for the festival but the embassy didn't spend much money. It couldn't even afford to throw its own reception. Thus it was while attending the U.S. Embassy's reception for its own authors that I first heard an astonishing fact: The Canadian government had just cut every penny once budgeted for the promotion of Canadian artists abroad.
That's it -- every penny, for everything cultural and Canadian, around the world. Some of those pennies have now been "unfrozen" but they're not enough to save the programs and networks that have been built up over the past 40 years (in part by art-savvy Tory cabinet ministers such as Flora MacDonald, Marcel Masse and Barbara McDougall). Staff remain in place, but they can't do much. It's like a dance floor with no more dancers..."
It's an excellent column in which she dissects their possible motives: ignorance, hatred, stupidity, frugality.
Looks like a cult kind of pattern, as in 'let's cut off all of our family and friends and devote ourselves wholly to the interest of the USA.'
From the Atwood column as well:
The banner under which the Conservatives have been ditching stuff that displeases them has been "waste." They're trashing programs that "don't work." They want things that "get results." (That went for the environmental plans they once binned, and have now hastily revivified.)
That was also the logic of the cuts to SWC and the redefinition of its mandate. It appears to be Tony Clement's logic when he puts the Vancouver safe-injection site on notice, cuts grants to researchers who were showing its effectiveness, and yet says at the same time that he wants to study its effectiveness more -- he just needs "a diversity" of research approaches.
I think Atwood is not wrong in imagining what the Harper government's notion of "a diversity" of approaches to the arts is going to be. Disney, ABC, glug glug glug.
So there are people who have this aggressive, vengeful, faux-proletarian notion that The Ahts are for effete liberal do-gooders, and that The People, who are philistines eating pretzels in front of the Superbowl, do not benefit from spending on The Ahts.
This fits very well into Reformist faux-populism, and I'm betting that's part of where this comes from.