What was Canada's best international moment of 2011?

Commanding NATO’s operations in Libya, under a UN Security Council mandate for the responsibility to protect, from the end of March 2011 onwards.

There were lots of mistakes made in NATO’s management of this mandate. Notably, having been given the mandate by the UNSC, a total failure to keep informed or consult with the non-NATO members of the Security Council was a basic, and foolish, diplomatic error, for which the West will pay for some time. (And indeed, Syrian civilians are paying right now: having invoked the ‘responsibility to protect’ and then having watched NATO turn the mandate into a campaign to overthrow Qaddafi’s regime, the non-western members of the Security Council are once bitten, twice shy.) But those mistakes were made by London and Paris. Ottawa, alongside Copenhagen and Oslo, played quiet but staring roles: explicitly invoking the UNSC resolutions and the concept of R2P gave credence and relevance to NATO’s air assets. 

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The decision to intervene in Libya. It was the right decision but Ottawa was strangely silent about what our aircraft (and ships) were doing. The worst moment was to listen to Peter Kent in Durban and then withdrawing from Kyoto.

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There weren’t a lot of good moments for Canadian foreign policy in 2011, but the best (as things happily turned out) was the decision to join NATO in Libya. Since the UNSC resolution to intervene in that carnage was based on the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, a Canadian idea first proposed by Lloyd Axworthy; and since the resolution was serially linked to the Council’s referral of Libyan human rights abusers to the International Criminal Court, another idea with deep roots in Canada, our presence on that particular stage was a natural fit. Failure in Libya would have been destructive to NATO, including to Canada. It might also have have suggested that the Responsibility to Protect doctrine was simply too politically risky. But all’s well that ends well and the Canadian government could (and did) brag mightily about its engagement.

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The “Own the Podium” Vancouver Winter Olympics didn’t make much of a lasting impact. Hopefully, and more seriously, the Arab Spring is doing so. New Foreign Minister Baird’s ditching of support for Mubarak offered up by his utterly inadequate predecessor Cannon and the way Canada then stepped up energetically and professionally to the unprecedented UN R2P intervention in Libya revealed a democratic value lens for foreign policy that is promising.

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