Canada's Israel Policy on the Day After the Elections

Mira Sucharov, haaretz.com

Harper may have had a different tone when it came to Israel, but some argue that he 'changed not one comma' on Canada's official policy.

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Excerpt:

With the largest voter turnout since 1997, the Canadian electorate has spoken, replacing Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives with a Liberal majority government led by Justin Trudeau. The third major party, the social-democratic NDP, also took a beating, losing more than half its seats. ...

Harper has been widely seen by his critics as undermining democracy: abolishing the long-form census, not relating openly to the media, and as constitutional law expert Adam Dodek - an active Jewish community member in his own right - wrote the morning after the elections, “championing secrecy over disclosure, bureaucratic resistance over cooperation and risk management over public engagement.” ...

And then there’s the question of Israel. ...

Most would agree ... that there was something different in Harper’s approach to Israel: its tone.

Benjamin Shinewald, former senior policy advisor in the Privy Council Office under both prime ministers Harper and Paul Martin, knows how important tone can be in shaping the conversation on the world stage. Shinewald notes that on an array of indicators — capped by Canada’s loss of its UN Security Council bid, its “international standing in the world and in the Middle East is in a shambles. We don’t have much of a voice with anybody. The first thing a new Liberal government could do is try to get our voice heard again.”

Shinewald believes there’s a host of things Canada could do in the realm of Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding, starting with empowering the many diplomats who are “demoralized.” Under the Harper government, Shinewald says, they simply “weren’t allowed to engage in public diplomacy.” It’s a story I’ve heard time and again from civil servants and foreign service officers who have felt hemmed in by the Harper government. ...