The jackals gathered quickly to pick over the cadaver of Canada's failed bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Environmentalists said the world was holding its nose over the Conservative government's greenhouse-gas policy. Others said various countries were punishing us for failing to sign a UN declaration on indigenous-peoples' rights. Others said Arab states rejected us because we support Israel these days. Traditionalists claimed Canada was snubbed because we haven't pitched in enough with the UN's peacekeeping efforts. Nobody has yet mentioned the seal hunt as a factor, but it's probably only a matter of time.
To be sure, the failure to win a seat on the Security Council is a setback. Germany was widely seen as a sure thing for one of the two non-permanent seats set aside for "Western countries" but Portugal, with a population a third the size of ours, has now obtained the second of the two-year positions on the UN's most important body.
Canada had campaigned for a spot, and in the hothouse world of UN diplomacy, losing your turn on the Security Council -Canada has had a term each decade since the UN was founded in 1945 -is the equivalent of being snubbed by the cool kids in the high-school cafeteria.
In Ottawa, the government tried to spin the failure as a success: We have a principled foreign policy and we don't cut unprincipled deals just to win votes like this.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quick, too, to blame Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who has mused out loud recently about Canada not deserving a Security Council spot. Ignatieff's comment was certainly dim-witted, and would have shocked his distinguished diplomat father. But we can't really believe that many countries voted against Canada on Ignatieff 's say-so.
We would not argue that "these grapes are sour." True, the UN does little these days except view with alarm, pass pompous declarations, and appoint backward autocracies to its Human Rights Commission, but our government tried to land this Security Council seat and failed; this is a setback in prestige, although perhaps not in any more palpable ways.
Jack Layton cheerfully declared that this incident demonstrates that Canada's whole foreign policy needs reworking. That's certainly wrong. The UN is not the arbiter of Canadian foreign policy. Nor are the voting blocs at the UN. Canada's national interest does not end, and should not begin, with winning a popularity contest.
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