The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

Yves Engler

Shortlisted for the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction in the Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards

This book could change how you see Canada.  Most of us believe this country’s primary role has been as peacekeeper or honest broker in difficult-to-solve disputes. But, contrary to the mythology of Canada as a force for good in the world, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy sheds light on many dark corners: from troops that joined the British in Sudan in 1885 to gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and aspirations of Central American empire, to participation in the U.N. mission that killed Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, to important support for apartheid South Africa, Zionism and the U.S. war in Vietnam, to helping overthrow Salvador Allende and supporting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, to Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan today.

“We bear responsibility for what governments do in the world, primarily our own, but secondarily those we can influence, our allies in particular. Yves Engler’s penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada’s role in the world, and poses a challenge for citizens who are willing to take their fundamental responsibilities seriously.”

”Yves Engler’s penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada’s role in the world.”
—Noam Chomsky

“Engler has done for Canadian foreign policy what I tried to do for United States foreign policy in my book Killing Hope — cover each region of the world, showing how ‘peaceful, benevolent, altruistic Canada’ has, on numerous occasions, served as an integral part of Western imperialism, particularly the American version, helping to keep the third World down and in its place.”
—William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II

About the Author

Former Vice President of the Concordia Student Union, Yves Engler is a Montréal activist and author. He has published three books: The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy; Playing Left Wing: From Rink Rat to Student Radical; and (with Anthony Fenton) Canada in Haiti: Waging War on The Poor Majority.

”Yves became a foreign-policy expert by working as a night doorman in Montreal...He’s in the mould of I. F. Stone, who wasted no time with politicians, who all have an agenda, but went instead straight to the public record.”
- Rick Salutin, Globe and Mail

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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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Filling a crying need and shaking the myths

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.

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The Peacekeeping Illusion: Don’t be fooled by Canada’s foreign policy PR

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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Canada’s (Disgusting) Dirty Laundry

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 not the Peacekeeper Many Led to Believe

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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