The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Speaking truth to power, Canadian-style

    By acanuck on Mon, 03/29/2010 - 12:59am | Politics, World Affairs

    The Liberal Party, which ran Canada for most of the past half-century but recently has lost its resonance with voters, held a weekend policy symposium in Montreal. A featured guest was Robert Fowler, a now-retired top diplomat who advised every prime minister -- regardless of party -- for at least three decades.

    After leaving Canada's foreign service, Fowler worked as a special envoy for the UN secretary-general -- a job that got him kidnapped by Islamist rebels in Niger. He spent five months as a guest of a nasty group called Al-Qa-'ida in the Mahgreb before his release. Less than a year later, he found himself addressing Canada's main opposition party. He didn't exactly tell them what they expected or wanted to hear:

    http://can150.ca/day-3-robert-fowler-africa-in-2017-and-canada-as-partner/

    Much of his speech may seem too Canada-centric. But if accurate, his main conclusions -- Afghanistan is a lost cause, Africa is the crucial battlefield, an Israel-Palestine solution is an immediate need -- hold true for U.S. policy as well. This guy had five months faced with imminent beheading to clarify his thinking. His words are worth a listen.

    Topics: 
    Politics
    World Affairs

    Comments

    After his introductory remarks, he basically begins by saying, "liberals will endorse anything and everything that will return them to power and nothing that won't."

    He definitely had me at hello.

    Unfortunately, I have to get ready for work and don't have time to finish listening until later, which I will definitely do. Thanks for posting it!


    by Orlando on Mon, 03/29/2010 - 1:18am

    Robert Fowler is Canada's equivalent of Richard Holbrooke or Zbigniew Brzezinski -- or Henry Kissinger, minus the war-crimes allegations. He basically shaped the country's foreign policy while it gained international credibility, so I believe him when he says that political capital has been pointlessly squandered.

    I also hope the Liberal Party does the kind of soul-searching he recommends. A majority of Canadians back Liberal core values. It's just hard to work up any enthusiasm to vote for confused, corruptible incompetents. You Democrats know what I mean.


    by acanuck on Mon, 03/29/2010 - 2:04am

    Just to clarify, when I compare Fowler to Brzezinski or Kissinger, I'm talking about his enduring impact on the country's foreign policy -- not his public profile, which has been almost non-existent. At least until he got captured by Al-Qa'ida.

    He's a career civil servant, not a political appointee. That's a key difference between the Canadian and U.S. systems. We lack the theoretical division between executive and legislative powers (Prime Minister Harper in effect combines the roles of Obama, Pelosi and Reid). But we balance that with a nominally independent, non-partisan, unionized bureaucracy that moderates wild policy swings when Conservatives take over from Liberals or vice-versa.

    When, for example, a new defence minister is appointed, he inherits the deputy minister and assistant deputy ministers of his predecessor -- there is no wholesale purging of senior department heads and their replacement by political hacks with no institutional memory. Same goes for the foreign service: only a handful of ambassadorships go to partisan appointees.

    If Fowler is here expressing public policy positions before a political gathering, it is simply because -- as a retiree -- he is now free to do so.


    by acanuck on Mon, 03/29/2010 - 3:32pm