Just how seriously is Canada’s voice taken now?

It was a moment made-to-order for Stephen Harper’s dark way of talking about the world. Going back to the 2011 election, the Prime Minister has often portrayed Canada as an island of safety in a global sea of dangers. Sometimes that imagery comes off as alarmist, but the rhetoric works when the topic at hand is the rise of Islamic State extremism in Syria and Iraq. So, when Harper rose in the House of Commons last week to make his case for joining U.S. President Barack Obama’s air campaign against the terrorists, he sounded very much himself in framing the disturbing new threat. He also said that deploying CF-18 fighter jets was necessary to maintain Canada’s international standing. “If Canada wants to keep its voice in the world—and we should, since so many of our challenges are global—being a free rider means you are not taken seriously,” Harper said.
Perhaps inadvertently, though, Harper suggested a question: Just how seriously is Canada’s voice taken now? Conservatives’ claims about having restored Canada’s clout on the world stage have always rested heavily on their reinvestment in the military. But Harper’s early defence-spending hikes turned to cuts after the 2009 recession, while he staged a tactical retreat from his high-profile pledge to buy F-35 jets to replace the aging CF-18s—eroding his image as an unwavering builder of the Canadian Forces’ might. After more than eight years of his rule, does Canada’s military reputation really rank noticeably higher? As Obama assembled his coalition to bomb Islamic State (also know as ISIS), the U.S. signed up a raft of other allies days, or even weeks, before Canada, including bigger military powers such as France and Britain, but also the likes of Australia, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Of course, standing on defence isn’t the only measure of Harper’s strength or weakness in the world. Back before his 2006 election win, he set Canada-U.S. relations as the litmus test. As Opposition leader in 2002, Harper delivered a tough attack in the House on then-prime minister Jean Chrétien’s “consistent and complete inability” to bolster Canadian economic interests in the U.S. As PM, however, Harper hasn’t fared better. American border restrictions remain a serious Canadian government frustration. The low point came in early 2012, when Obama told Harper there would be no quick approval of the Keystone XL pipeline to siphon Alberta crude to U.S. refineries. A wounded Harper sent out Joe Oliver, then his natural resources minister, to tell reporters the “decision by the Obama administration underlines the importance of diversifying and expanding our markets, including the growing Asian market.”
For those who remember Harper’s opposition days, that message delivered by Oliver, now Harper’s finance minister, had an ironic ring to it. Back in his 2002 assault on Liberal foreign policy, Harper had derided Chrétien’s attempts at diversifying Canada’s trade beyond the U.S. as an unrealistic echo of the so-called “third option” pursued by Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s, “which did not work then and is not working now.” Harper learned the hard way that there was something to the old Liberal position that Washington’s intransigence leaves Canada no choice but to cultivate trade options overseas. Still, Conservative fans of his no-nonsense style can at least take solace in the way Harper has ditched the old soft-power Liberal brand of multilateralism—the ethos behind former preoccupations such as creating the International Criminal Court, or a treaty to ban land mines—for much sterner stuff.
Or has he? In the days leading up to a key Harper speech at the United Nations late last month, advance stories were full of confident predictions about which world issues he would tackle. After snubbing the General Assembly for three years—ever since his government’s embarrassing failure to win a UN vote for a temporary seat on its Security Council in 2010—the PM had to be returning to blast Russia for incursions into Ukraine and to denounce Islamic State outrages in Iraq. Or so it was assumed. As it turned out, he spoke almost entirely about an aid initiative to improve the health of mothers and newborns. Alluding only vaguely to border tensions in Eastern Europe and bloodshed in the Middle East, he urged UN members to look past violent conflicts to “the long-term opportunities and efforts that can truly transform our world.”
It was a classically Canadian internationalist plea, issued in the New York temple to multilateralism held sacred by Harper’s most bitter critics. Was this really the same Harper who had so often scoffed at Canada’s historic approach to the UN as a matter of  “going along to get along”? Even more scornfully, he once summed up his foreign-policy philosophy this way: “It is no longer to please every dictator with a vote at the United Nations.” But, with the maternal and child health initiative, a growing preoccupation of Harper’s for several years now, he is clearly trying to put his stamp on what looks like the sort of UN-focused project his Conservatives used to mock Liberals for championing.
It would be an absurd stretch to suggest that the Harper who championed the Forces, was suspicious of the UN, and assigned enormous importance to Canada-U.S. economic relations, has disappeared. But he has found those pillars too unsteady to bear the full weight of his foreign policy. It’s been a steep learning curve. Before he won power in 2006, he had barely travelled outside Canada and had focused almost exclusively on domestic issues, mostly economic and constitutional. “Since coming to office,” he told Maclean’s in a 2011 interview, “the thing that’s probably struck me the most in terms of my previous expectations—I don’t even know what my expectations were—is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but, in fact, that it’s become almost everything.”
Harper inherited the most challenging overseas file in a generation: Afghanistan. Five weeks after being sworn in as Prime Minister on Feb. 6, 2006, he was on a Kandahar airfield telling the assembled troops, “You can’t lead from the bleachers; I want Canada to be a leader.” His Conservatives backed that up by boosting annual defence spending from about $15 billion the year before they took power to closer to $20 billion. Impressive as that top-line figure is, though, it hardly tells the whole story.
David Perry, a senior analyst at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute in Ottawa, offers perhaps the most fine-grained analysis of Canada’s military budget available, outside of classified documents. Perry says defence spending, adjusted for inflation, is actually lower today than it was in 2007. He points to four consecutive years of shrinking outlays on new military hardware, a trend he now calls “seemingly irreversible.”
Perry even argues that there never was any sharp divide on defence between Liberal and Conservative times. The real watershed came in 2005, he contends, when the Liberals, flush with surpluses after slaying the deficit, reinvested heavily in the Department of National Defence. Taking over the following year, Harper built on that new spending policy, to be sure, but only until the 2009 recession. Since then, according to Perry’s analysis, spending restraint has again been the order of the day, with defence absorbing fully a quarter of all federal spending cuts in last spring’s budget.