Over the last two decades, activists on the Canadian left have confronted two major trends in Canadian foreign policy. The first involved the free-trade agreements of the 1990s and the international expansion of Canadian capital as part of the globalization agenda. As a result, Canada became highly integrated with American and world capitalism, and established international conditioning frameworks for the imposition of neoliberalism at home. The second trend involved the militarization of Canadian foreign policy through NATO enlargement in the 1990s and the   post-9/11 “war on terror.” From the Gulf War in 1991, to the conflicts in Somalia (1994), Serbia (1998), Haiti (2004), and Afghanistan (2001-present), the Canadian state has adopted a more overtly militarist approach to international relations, especially in the context of US-led “counter-terrorism” missions in “failed” or “rogue” states.

This realignment of Canadian foreign policy has generated new debates on the left. On one side are those who view Canada as an economic dependency of the United States and the new Canadian foreign policy as a corollary of such dependence.[1] On the other side are those who view Canada as an imperialist power with distinct economic and political interests in the world market and nation-state system.[2] Although both political currents participated in the anti-war and anti-globalization movements, the analytic, strategic and tactical tensions between them were never resolved: the former current tends to advocate a citizen-based politics to restore national independence and sovereignty in matters of domestic and foreign policy, whereas the latter hopes to engender class struggles against the state and the economic system it defends.

Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (2009) makes an important contribution to these debates. By drawing upon academic, media, and activist research, Engler presents a reinterpretation of Canadian foreign policy history in order to guide present-day activism. He systematically assaults key mythologies of Canadian foreign policy – that Canada is either a middle power dedicated to peace and diplomacy in world affairs or an unwilling victim of American pressure and direction. Modeled on William Blum’s Killing Hope (2003), Engler’s book exposes the mercenary side of Canadian foreign policy from the time of British colonialism and the Cold War to the present.

In the process, Engler’s book undermines the dominant ideologies sustaining Canadian foreign policy and offers a new perspective, namely that Canada’s external statecraft supports the economic interests of the corporate and state elite within Canada to the detriment of democracy, development, and diplomacy in world affairs, especially in the Third World. As Engler puts it: “Canada’s role in world affairs has been…pro-empire (whether British, US), pro-colonial (whether British, US, French, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.) and serving narrow corporate interests” (231). Engler rejects the “junior partner” theory of forced collaboration with US foreign policy, arguing that Canada is “an independent player with its own self-interests, including those of Canadian companies.” Canada, Engler states, consistently uses “its wealth and power to act like an imperial bully” (5). He makes this argument by organizing the book into a number of regional and country case studies structured around common themes, including: support for colonialism; corporate expansion; diplomatic alignment with Washington; the economic and geopolitical logic of aid delivery; and Third World opposition to Canadian foreign policy.

In one important discussion, Engler considers the role Canada played in supporting the British Empire, shedding light, for example, on Canada’s involvement in putting down slave revolts in the British Caribbean in the early 1800s. During the age of “classical imperialism” (1870-1945), the Canada First Movement, the West Indies Union, and even the federal cabinet called for annexation to the Dominion of Canada of British possessions in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Prime Minister Robert Borden opposed these colonial ambitions not on anti-imperialist grounds, but rather on racist grounds. He was concerned primarily with “the difficulty of dealing with the coloured population, who would probably be more restless under Canadian law… and would desire and perhaps insist upon representation in Parliament” (8).

Furthermore, Canadian support for British colonialism was not confined to the Caribbean, but extended into the Middle East, Asia, and the African continent. In the late 1800s, Canadian soldiers participated in the British war against Boer farmers in South Africa. In 1919, they supported the British Air Force in Afghanistan. In 1857, the 100th Regiment helped to suppress the nationalist uprising in India. The British conquered Egypt in 1882 with the help of Canadian military personnel, and China and Korea were colonized by Japan in the 20th century with diplomatic, missionary, and economic support from Canada. Thus, although Canada did not itself possess overseas colonies, it nevertheless strongly supported the British Empire and other imperial ventures from the early 1800s through to World War II.

 As Engler points out, Canadian policy in the emerging Third World was dictated by independent economic interests, not simply by imperial ties. For example, by the early 1900s, Canadian banking and insurance dominated the financial sector of the Caribbean, with hundreds of branches and tens of billions in assets. In nearby Mexico, Canadian firms dominated the rail and utility sectors and Canadian executives strategized with Porfirio Diaz on how to suppress the 1910 revolution. In an early example of gunboat diplomacy, Canada’s HMCS Rainbow and HMCS Athabascan were dispatched to protect corporate investments from revolutionary forces.

Canada’s foreign policy alliance with the United States was struck after World War II. In the context of the Cold War, Canada functioned strategically as a “middle power” inside the capitalist bloc, and tactically as a “peacekeeping” force in various military conflicts. Engler describes how peacekeeping contributions – to Egypt, Cyprus, and the Congo – were overwhelmingly motivated by geopolitical calculations. In Egypt (1956), for example, Canada’s peacekeeping mission (for which Lester Pearson won a Nobel Prize) was designed to maintain friendly relations amongst NATO countries, support the US as an emerging superpower, help Britain and France save face in withdrawal, and contain Arab nationalism; that is to say, Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Egypt was not (as is often claimed) devised to support the sovereignty and security of the Nasser government. In 1967, in fact, Pearson resisted Egypt’s attempt to expel Canadian peacekeepers, with the Department of Defence actually drawing up plans for a military occupation of the country. According to Engler, the mission in Egypt exemplified the particular strategies and tactics through which Canadian foreign policy operated in the Cold War system of imperialism.

Canada’s aid policy must also be understood through a geopolitical and economic lens. As Engler explains it, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) uses aid first and foremost to assist the global expansion of Canadian firms and to isolate or support Third World governments based on their alignment with US imperialism and Canadian corporate interests. This logic was first demonstrated in the 1950s as part of Canadian aid disbursements to India, where Canada worked to “disabuse Indians of their more extreme prejudices against the United States” (Lester Pearson in Engler, 159). Throughout the Cold War, CIDA worked in Latin America to counter Cuban influence and to expand markets through IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies.

More recently, Engler writes, Canada supported an aid embargo against Haiti in the lead-up to the coup d’état in 2004, after which Canada ramped up aid to NGOs and security services complicit in the coup. CIDA also works closely with Canadian mining companies, which increasingly dominate the economic landscapes of Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. As part of the new “3D” strategy of Canadian foreign policy, CIDA is currently developing a militarized model of aid delivery in Afghanistan, where development and reconstruction funds are tied to geopolitical goals of the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Department of National Defence.

As Engler points out, these new security and military strategies must be viewed, at least in part, as a response to Third World resistance. Indigenous peoples, environmentalists and trade unionists around the world have a long history of protesting Canadian corporate and military activities. In 1966, social justice activists in Guyana organized demonstrations outside the offices of Alcan and the Canadian High Commission. In the 1970s, Canadian banks were picketed and firebombed in Trinidad. Today, Canadian mining companies are facing a global wave of protest from Mongolia and Papua New Guinea to Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. In all of these countries, poor communities are mobilizing against the dispossession, impoverishment, and ecological destruction that attend Canadian corporate involvement in the Third World. By revealing Canada’s close support for European colonialism, the US empire, and corporate interests across the world market, Engler makes a strong case for understanding Canada as an “imperial bully” (5). Canada, Engler writes, is “part of the command and control apparatus of the world economic system,” and theorizing Canadian foreign policy therefore “requires an economic analysis” (33).

—By Jerome Klassen, Upping The Anti

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It is commonplace even for critics of Canada’s role in Afghanistan and Haiti or of its vocal support for Israel’s recent military campaigns in Lebanon and Gaza to suggest that Canada has abandoned a long-standing tradition of being an honest broker in international politics. In her book Holding the Bully’s Coat, for example, Linda McQuaig condemns recent Canadian foreign policy choices because they no longer “champion . . . the United Nations and UN peacekeeping.” It is telling that even McQuaig, who has done commendable work criticizing Canadian policy, has internalized the idea that there is a mythical past in which Canada was an even-handed arbitrator of international conflict. Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (Fernwood Press, 2009), one of the most import­ant studies of Canada’s international role in years, explodes this illusion.

Engler convincingly argues that, histor ically, Canadian foreign policy has been to serve as the junior partner in British and then American imperialism and to favour corporate interests to the detriment of the Global South. Engler provides a thorough examination of, for example, Canada’s role in the overthrow of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, its assistance to the United States during the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and its financial entanglement with apartheid South Africa. Moreover, Engler scrutinizes Canada’s consistently one-sided support for Israel and the use of Canadian “aid” money to leverage favourable contracts for Canadian mining companies in less-developed countries.

While Engler’s book debunks the smug self-image of many Canadians, it also functions as an iconoclastic critique of prominent figures like Prime Ministers Lester B. Pearson and Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Pearson’s actions during the Suez Canal crisis warrant scrutiny because the Nobel Prize that Pearson was absurdly rewarded for his involvement in the conflict is in many ways the origin of the myth that Canada has been a sober moderator of international conflict. Engler’s research demonstrates that Pearson supported British, French and Israeli aggression in the Suez Canal and his embrace of the UN was strategic rather than principled. He aimed to bridge a rift within NATO between the invaders and the United States, who deemed the attack unwise.

Engler shows that in 1957, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser regarded UN troops as necessary to protect Egypt, Pearson threatened to withdraw them if Nasser did not abandon his program of reform. A decade later, when Nasser and UN Secretary-General U Thant decided it was time for UN forces to leave Egypt, Pearson was among those who fought to keep the troops in the country. Moreover, the record shows that Pearson oversaw the sale of Canadian-made weapons to the United States for use in Vietnam, including defoliants and navigation systems used by the Americans to burn the Vietnamese with napalm. The Pearson government has the equally disgraceful distinction of choosing to send more aid to Indonesia than to any other non-Commonwealth state in the aftermath of Major General Suharto’s slaughter of 500,000 people in 1965.

Trudeau, meanwhile, plainly preferred Pinochet to Allende: while the Trudeau government diplomatically isolated and financially subverted the democratically elected Allende, they were quick to recognize General Pinochet’s coup regime when it seized power on September 11, 1973, to support its bids for loans from the IMF and the Inter-American Development Bank and to sell it six Twin Otter aircraft. Trudeau was also on the wrong side of history in South Africa. Trudeau helped extend International Monetary Fund loans to the apartheid regime and, when Afro-Cubans volunteered to fight South African troops in Angola, Trudeau responded by ending the Canadian International Development Agency’s small aid program in Cuba. As Nelson Mandela has repeatedly noted, Cuba’s actions in Angola were instrumental in bringing down apartheid.

The primary weakness in Engler’s book is that, at times, his arguments could be better contextualized. For example, his discussion of Canada’s tacit support for the 1980 U.S. invasion of Grenada fails to illuminate the geostrategic importance of Grenada at the time and to situate that war within President Reagan’s broader terrorist policies in the hemisphere. Some readers might also find Engler’s prose overly mechanical, which is why I want to suggest that The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy is best served with a helping of Daniel Brooks and Guillermo Verdecchia’s 1991 play, The Noam Chomsky Lectures. The play is a memorable meta-theatrical exercise in agitprop that, like Engler’s book, interrogates Canada’s self-image as a benevolent player in global affairs. While the play is not and does not pretend to be a comprehensive overview of Canadian foreign policy, Engler’s book affects none of the artistry and postmodern levity that Brooks and Verdecchia bring to political discourse. Reading the two in tandem is an exercise in shifting between the playful and the solemn, two attitudes that much of today’s Left could balance more effectively.

The call to action at the end of Brooks and Verdecchia’s play is elliptical; one might say that Engler’s final chapter fills in their ellipsis. The course of action that Engler recommends for conscientious Canadians is, perhaps surprisingly, moderate, simple and, I suspect, likely to have mass appeal. Among initiatives such as withdrawing from NATO, he also calls on Canadians to pressure their government to operate in accord with basic ethical guidelines. These include the principles that “Canadian aid should do no wrong,” that it should be used for the benefit of the people of the Global South rather than for the benefit of companies like Barrick Gold, and that Canada must support governments that are democratically elected. The last part is particularly important given Canada’s shameful role in the disastrous coups against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Salvador Allende, and in the siege of Gaza following the 2006 election. Engler’s capacity to weave together accessible, widely held notions of justice with a detailed historical critique make him one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today

 —Reviewed by Greg Shupak, Briarpatch Magazine, May/June 2010

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Z Mag Review by Tamara Lorincz

The Canadian government supplied the uranium for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II. Ottawa supported South African apartheid by allowing trade and commerce with the racist government there. With the support of its foreign service, Canadian mining companies weakened environmental regulations and propped up dictators in Central and South America. In 2004, Canada helped France and the United States overthrow the democratically elected government of Haiti. 

Canadians will be shocked and saddened by Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, a critical examination of Canada’s role in the world. Engler is a Montreal-based independent journalist/activist who has written two other books, Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical and Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (co-authored with Anthony Fenton).

It was Canada’s role in the coup that ousted Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide, a populist priest to the poor, that caused Engler to question more broadly Canadian foreign policy. “Democracy,” writes Engler in his new book, “requires citizens to keep themselves informed about what their government is doing. Canadians have a right and a responsibility to know, debate and to ultimately shape what is being done in our name around the world.”

Engler describes the history of Canadian foreign policy in the Caribbean, the Middle East, Mexico, Central and South America, Central and South Asia, and Africa. Using declassified documents, government sources, and extensive research, he uncovers the darker motives and machinations behind Canadian decisions on international trade, foreign aid, and military operations.

The format of Engler’s book is similar to American author William Blum’s 1995 tour-de-force Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II. Like Blum’s recounting of U.S. destabilizing interventions over the last 50 years, Engler indicts Canada’s corporate elite and, in particular, Canadian banks and mining companies. He documents how companies—such as Barrick Gold, Inco, Falconbridge, Alcan, Placer Dome, Goldcorp, and others, with the financial assistance of the Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Bank, and the Export Development Corporation—weakened environmental and labor standards, displaced indigenous populations, employed brutal private security guards, and contaminated land and water in the countries they were operating in—such as Honduras, Guatemala, Peru, and Papua New Guinea.

Engler notes that the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) aid follows Canadian corporate and military moves around the world. For instance, he discovered how CIDA funds were channeled through Canadian mining companies for their development projects in Ghana and the Philippines. Often these mining companies would not pay taxes or royalties and the Canadian government would force these poor countries to shoulder onerous economic policies, such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs that privatized and deregulated their public services.

He also condemns Canada’s military transformation to war fighting and its integration with the U.S. military. He specifically cites the deployment of Canadian warships with the U.S. fleet in the Persian Gulf and the operation of Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2)—a secretive special combat force that has no parliamentary oversight—alongside the U.S. Unknown to Canadians, JTF2 has operated in Indonesia, Iraq, Haiti, Colombia, and Afghanistan (as an undeclared asset).

Engler concludes with his explanation for why Canadian foreign policy is the way it is and how to change it. Canada has a long tradition of supporting imperialism and colonialism, from fighting with the British Empire in the 19th century to integrating militarily with United States today. He argues that the Canadian corporate elite and defense establishment have disproportionately dictated its foreign policy to the exclusion of Parliament and the public. For instance, Canadians were not consulted on the Canada First Defence Strategy released last June that committed the federal government to spend $490 billion on the military over the next 20 years. Further, Engler blames the media for embedding with the military and not adequately investigating policies and actions abroad.

To change course, Engler’s specific recommendations are to withdraw from NATO, cut the size and spending of the Canadian Armed Forces, and provide aid to the poorest people in the poorest countries. “Above all else it is key that Canadian aid should do no wrong,” he demands.

Engler’s recommendations align with Canadians’ views. Last year, Environics commissioned a survey that found that the majority of Canadians believed their country should make a positive contribution and respect international bodies that provide mechanisms for dialogue and co-operation. An internal poll prepared for National Defence, and obtained by the Canadian press, found that most Canadians view their soldiers as peacekeepers and would rather see them helping disaster victims than fighting. “While citizens of Canada, we are also neighbours to everyone who shares this planet. We must be good neighbours. That should be the underlying premise of Canada’s foreign policy,” writes Engler.

To be good neighbors, The Black Book of Foreign Policy compels Canadians to stay informed, to care, and to hold their federal government to account.

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When long-time Liberal “busboy” and former “rat-packer” Don Boudria was briefly minister for International cooperation and the Francophonie, he invited me to lunch during “Development Month” in 1997 to get some exposure in La Presse about his new portfolio and plans.

“Canada is received with open arms in Africa, you know. That’s because we come without the colonial baggage of the French and the Brits”, said he, a History graduate.

I could not let that delusional mantra go unchallenged. “That’s not true”, I said, “Canada is the very model of successful colonialism, or we’d be speaking Cree, Ojibwe or Inuktitut, instead of English and French”.

“Vous avez un point là”, he conceded after some thought, translating literally from the English: “You’ve got a point there”.

Yves Engler’s The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy is chockfull of such “points”, that demolish, as he writes in his Introduction, “Canadians’ self-appraisal of their country’s foreign policy (as) more positive that (that of) any other country”.

Consider the following hidden gems highlighted by Engler and his editors, Fernwood and Red Publishing, in promoting the book’s launch in the Spring:

• After World War I, Canada asked Britain for its Caribbean colonies;
• Washington did not press Ottawa to break relations with post-revolutionary Cuba because it wanted Canada to spy on the island;
• Canadian companies were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa;
• Canada helped overthrow Patrice Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Congo (Kinshasa), who was then murdered;
• Canadian “aid” has often been used to rewrite mining codes to benefit Canadian mining companies;
• Days after the September 11, 1973 overthrow of elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, Canada’s ambassador in Santiago called the victims of the military coup “the riffraff of the Latin American Left”;
• Canada has been the 5th or 6th largest contributor to the US war against Iraq;
• On many occasions since 1915, Canadian gunboats have been deployed in the Caribbean and around Central America’
• Canada had between 250 and 450 nuclear-armed fighter jets in Europe in the 1960s;
• Leftist US intellectual Noam Chomsky considers Peace Nobelist Lester Pearson, the icon of Canada’s “peacekeeping diplomacy”, a war criminal because of his support for the US war on Vietnam.

These are not State secrets anymore. They are facts available to any researcher.  But few are interested to go there. And that’s the beauty of Engler’s nearly 300-page book: it draws its contents from the public record, churning and sifting the material for gems that, strung together, present a shining mirror to Canada’s dark side, and the reality check is devastating.

It is a measure of Canada’s ambiguous role in world affairs–an appeasing discourse to go with its well-polished image of a peace-loving “middle power” ever-ready to mediate in conflicts, coupled with a dark record of its treatment of its First Nations and a loyalty to Britain going back to the Boer War, a loyalty then transferred to Uncle Sam with World War II, as befits this major offshoot of the British Empire–that its intellectual elite has not produced any comprehensive and sweeping History of its Foreign policy.

What exist in print are scattered and partial studies of specific issues, like Canada’s role in the two World Wars and in UN peacekeeping or its relations with Europe or Latin America, or more recently on its part in the eight-year Afghan War, written by career-driven academics or journalists in line with the official or at least the dominant view.

Engler, like many other Canadians, was amazed at the poverty of the existing literature and at the total lack of any critical analysis of Canadian foreign policy as a whole. But unlike them, he set out to fill that need, an endeavour perfectly in line with his political activism.

Engler, who is not yet 30, has a thick record of arrests and suspensions related to his militancy on topical issues as campaigns against the WTO and the FTAA, Canada’s 2004 intervention in Haïti to topple the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Palestinian rights.

He was suspended in 2002 from Concordia University for his role in  blocking an address by Benjamin Netenyahu. Other suspensions followed for “breaches” of the initial order. He was seen distributing leaflets on campus. He argues he was there not as a student but in his capacity as elected VP of the Student Union, an exemption granted by the court. All this led to a five-year suspension in 2004.

He also made headlines un 2005 by smearing Foreign Affairs minister Pierre Pettigrew with cranberry juice during a press conference and shouting: “Pettigrew lies, Haitians die”. He was again arrested later that year for heckling Prime Minister Paul Martin and shouting: “Paul Martin lies, Haitians die”.

These are the burning concerns that drove his research. He points out in his introduction that he is neither a foreign policy expert nor a veteran diplomat. And that’s a very good thing too. He delves into the material unfettered, informed by his basic commitments and thirsting for a critical grasp of Canada’s behavior on the world scene.

The result is fascinating. Engler tackles his subject as a conscientious student and, even better, as a probing journalist. He uses classic tools of investigative journalism and presents his material through quotes from media articles, journals, books and electronic interviews and statements, injecting himself editorially to the strictest minimum.

Individual chapters deal with the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin America, East Asia, Central and South Asia, Africa, and Canada’s international alliances. Each chapter comprises essays on individual countries, alliances and topics, and concludes with a discussion where the author sums up his insights, and a long list of footnotes giving the sources of quotations used.

But Yves Engler remains first and foremost a political activist. His Black Book is obviously not intended to adorn library shelves. It is meant as a tool for reflection, discussion and action. The penultimate chapter is in fact entitled: “Why our foreign policy is the way it is and how to change it”. The book closes with an 18-page bibliography.

Yves kindly invited me to say a few words at the Montreal launch of his book. I said it was the best gift I could have hoped for as I retired after 35 years as a foreign affairs journalist with La Presse. I tried over the years to bring a Southern sensibility to the readers of La Presse in trying to understand current affairs, way and beyond the simplistic dominant media and official discourse of Canada and its wealthy partners as “good guys” and the rest of the world as “evil, bad, unpredictable and all incompetent”.

I also said that a vote of thanks should go to Concordia University for giving Yves Engler the time and further motivation to write this book, following Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical, and Canada in Haïti: Waging War on the Poor Majority (with Anthony Fenton). To be fair, he has earned his degree.

—Jooneed Khan, Montreal Serai

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Canadians have long taken a certain pride in our overseas presence. Studies suggest we see ourselves as a nation of peacekeepers, of defenders of the right and the just. But in his new book The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Montreal-based author and activist Yves Engler probes the reality of Canada’s long history of backstopping the imperial ambitions of our Southern neighbour, and doing away with pesky impediments—like democratically elected governments—to the success of Canadian corporations operating abroad. 

Just look at who frames Canada’s international agenda to get an idea of what underpins our international activities, says Engler, citing a 2007 article that appeared in the Ottawa-insider magazine Embassy headlined “40 Names Influencing Canadian Foreign Policy.” There, alongside Department of National Defence generals and Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade policy wonks, are names like Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Perrin Beatty, Scotiabank president and CEO Rick Waugh, Manulife Financial honcho Dominic D’Alesandro, Encana Oil CEO Randy Emerson and Barrick Gold founder Peter Munk (whose name graces the University of Toronto’s School of International Studies). Nowhere on the list are individuals representing organized labour or the causes of human rights or social justice—the very values we claim to uphold in our overseas missions.

What I’ve found is that there have been two main motivations for Canadian foreign policy, and that is support for empires, historically British empire and today American empire,” Engler said in an interview with Monday. “Not because Washington bullies Canada into it, but because the Canadian elite see the world in a similar way to the U.S. elite who decide U.S. foreign policy. And the second motivation is support for Canadian corporate investment abroad.”

Engler argues the source of Canadians’ misperceptions about our international presence are twofold. First, since Canada has never had its own overseas colonies (despite its best attempts to convince Britain to surrender its Caribbean holdings as a reward for Canadian blood shed in WWI), there is less of the historical baggage associated with the cultural and economic conquests of other Western nations. Second, says Engler, Canada has been sold a bill of goods by its intellectual elite that masks the true nature of our activities.

You have someone like Lester Pearson and his concept of peacekeeping—and peacekeeping was basically designed to serve U.S. geopolitical interests in the context of the Cold War—but it is a very high-minded sounding principle or doctrine, and through someone like Pearson, it’s very good marketing,” he says. “And the equivalent today is someone like Michael Ignatieff or Lloyd Axworthy and the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect, which is basically high-minded sounding cover for Western imperialism.”

Stephen Harper’s Conservative government recently presided over a re-direction of foreign aid from Africa to Latin America. Engler says this move reflects the Canadian government’s fear of the recent rise of socialist-minded leaders throughout Central and South America, whose commitment to wealth redistribution means reigning in the activities of foreign corporations.

It’s designed to blunt any moves away from dependence on Washington in the hemisphere, moves away from a sort of neo-colonial situation and any move toward independence or socialistic forms.” 

While Canada’s ongoing involvement in Haiti provides the most stark example of this policy, Engler says actions like Canada’s recent free trade pact with Colombia are from the same playbook.

[Harper] has done what he can to support the free trade agreement with Colombia, which is largely designed to support the most right-wing government in the hemisphere, which is an implicit and at times explicit challenge to the leftward shift in the hemisphere,” he says.

But perhaps Canadians have grown so accustomed to a government that acts as security for its business interests that the impact of Engler’s message is blunted. After all, a recent government press release on Canada’s pending free trade deal with Colombia stated, “Colombia is an emerging market of 44 million people. An increasing number of Canadian investors and exporters enter the market each year. The free trade agreement will provide greater stability and protection for Canadian companies involved in the oil and gas, mining, manufacturing and financial services sectors.” 

Regardless, Engler says Canadians must look behind the headlines to their government’s true motivations abroad, both today and over the last century.
The real story is that Canadian corporations are involved in horribly environmentally and socially destructive operations all over the world, and Canadian diplomacy, Canadian aid and sometimes even the Canadian military is going to support that process.

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Want to buy a thick black book replete with salaciousness and skullduggery?

In The Black book of Canadian Foreign Policy, Montreal writer and activist Yves Engler compiles a long and disgustingly dirty laundry list of Canada’s international transgressions. For those who would stand by Canada’s status as a “peacekeeper” and “honest broker,” Engler presents an impressive cascade of evidence that Canada is not exactly a force for good in the world.

According to Engler, Canada has carefully maintained its “good guy” image as a convenient guise for its real foreign policy priorities: the aiding and abetting of empire (first British, now American), and protection and promotion of investments of our major corporations. Our country is home to some of the world’s largest mining, resource, and manufacturing firms; it comes as no surprise that these, along with our five banks, have made multimillion dollar investments in places like the Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Chile, apartheid South Africa, China, Vietnam, and others. Our diplomatic efforts and foreign aid policies have not only directly supported these corporation, Engler demonstrates, but have also been used to rewrite labour and environmental codes for the worst industrial practices in the world.

Engler further argues that our international aid as well as weapons sales have helped prop up a rogue’s gallery of brutal dictators: our forces have been involved in the deposition of democratically elected leaders such as Aristide in Haiti and Lumumba in the Congo. For all the positive spin on our refusal to join the US in invading Vietnam or Iraq, closer examination shows that we have provided extensive military and logistical support for both ventures. Even our peacekeeping and Pearson’s role in the Middle East – which led to his Novel Peace Prize – are revealed by Engler to have had questionable aims and results. With recent talk of “pulling our weight” in the world, it becomes clear that we are a willing, if underhanded, junior partner of the United States. As Engler informs us, Jean Chrétien in his memoir recounts telling Bill Clinton, “Keeping some distance will be good for both of us. If we look as though we’re the fifty-first state of the United States, there’s nothing we can do for you internationally, just as the governor of a state can’t do anything for you internationally. But if we look independent enough, we can do things for you that event the CIA cannot do.” While Engler’s writing delivers plenty of punch, he mostly lets facts – meticulously researched and substantiated – speak for themselves. The Black Book is so full of detail it can makes one’s head swim: at times, it is a rather academic read. It will doubtless prove a significant resource for international solidarity activists and specialists in foreign policy. For the rest of us, it provides a valuable glimpse into shadowy machinations that all too often fall entirely under our radar.

Engler’s is a high ideal: that Canadians, armed with the knowledge in his book, “debate and shape what is being done around the world in their name,” and ultimately “demand altruistic aid, real international cooperation, benevolent peacekeeping, instead of militarism, and the rule of law instead of an empire’s might.” Foreign policy, however, has almost never been high on our election agenda: our leaders, at first daunted by the world stage, soon find it an easy place to perform. Perhaps with further activism Engler and others will succeed in altering the tincture of our national discussion.

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Canada carefully cultivates its “peacekeeper” image. But in reality, an independent journalist maintains, this nation has been implicated in brutal events in many parts of the world. And Canada’s politicians, says Yves Engler, have succeeded in covering up most of those covert activities. The Montreal-based writer spoke at the University of Lethbridge as part of a cross-Canada book tour. Even Lester Pearson — though he won a Nobel Peace Prize — was much more interested in maintaining European control of the Suez Canal than protecting citizens of Egypt, Engler said. Canada has been involved in a series of less peaceable actions in the years since, he said during a session organized by the Lethbridge Public Interest Research Group.

Yet many Canadians still believe their army leads peace-making efforts, he said, and even more have no real knowledge of Canada’s foreign policies. That’s why Engler wrote “The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy,” released last month.
His goal, he explains, “is to reveal a side of international relations that our government and corporations have kept hidden from the vast majority of us.”
Regardless of whether they’re aware of what their government or their armed forces are doing in countries around the world, Engler says all Canadians are complicit in those events.

“Every year tens of billions of our tax dollars are spent on the military, on foreign aid and other forms of diplomacy,” he points out. “We ignore foreign affairs at our peril.”

But others may be in much worse peril, he warns. There were about 8,000 murders in Haiti, he says, after Canadian and American troops deposed elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Canada also supported South Africa’s apartheid policies for many years, he points out — with this nation’s ways of marginalizing its First Nations peoples widely cited as the model. And even today, Engler says Canada’s foreign aid dollars are used to rewrite safety codes to benefit Canadian companies mining in those lands.
“Our politicians are lying to us” when they’re faced with some of this information, he claims.

The Canadian public doesn’t pay much attention to overseas incursions, he notes, and their news media doesn’t spend much time digging into those issues, either. So he’s not surprised to find university students among the uninformed.
“For the most part, people have been taken aback,” Engler says, describing response to his appearances across Canada. “Even people who think they know about foreign affairs.”

The book, he says, is offered “in the spirit of democratic accountability.” Engler is hoping to hear differing views once knowledgeable Canadians — like military historian David Bercuson at the University of Calgary — have an opportunity to read it and reflect.

Americans may be better informed on their nation’s foreign adventures, he says, partly because their freedom of information laws are more powerful than ours. As well, many Americans support their government and their armed forces when officials cite their “responsibility to protect” policy as justification for taking over a “failed state.”

In Canada, elected officials believe citizens still see their military as peacekeepers in green berets.

“Maybe they wouldn’t lie to us if they didn’t think they needed to.”

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