Who's to blame for Canada's UN embarrassment?

Canada failed to win a seat on the UN Security Council yesterday. Whose fault is it, and more importantly, should we even care?

There are some bruised feelings in Canada today as the UN General Assembly voted yesterday to give Portugal a temporary seat on the Security Council. Stephen Harper had been lobbying hard for the seat, and immediately blamed Michael Ignatieff for spoiling his efforts by publically criticizing the Conservatives' foreign policy. No one’s buying it.

If Ignatieff “genuinely does carry such global weight, why did the government not enlist his support early on in a non-partisan effort to win the Security Council seat?” asks a Globe and Mail editorial. Maclean’s blogger Scott Feschuk paraphrases the Tories’ position a bit more succinctly: “Ignatieff to blame for Security Council defeat, dinner being ruined, everything else ever.”

“Compared to the serial damage Harper did to Canada’s image, Ignatieff’s role in this debacle was small beer,” says a Toronto Star editorial. “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been undermining Canada’s bid for a United Nations Security Council seat since he was first elected” by taking up an unpopular pro-Israel stance and being soft of climate change.

Allan Gotlieb and Colin Robertson offer another perspective in the Globe, blaming the failure on Harper’s gutting of Canada’s diplomatic corps. Harper has shifted the Afghanistan and climate-change files away from Foreign Affairs, forbidden diplomats to speak without his consent, and slashed embassies’ budgets, “forgetting that an embassy without an entertainment budget is like a frigate without fuel.”

The attitude of the Postmedia papers towards the UN is akin to "you can’t break up with us, we’re breaking up with you." To win the vote we would have had to win over countries whose leaders are all a bunch of thugs, anti-Semites, and tinpot dictators, and we should never have tried. “(Y)ou can be ‘principled’ or you can be popular,” writes the National Post’s John Ivison, and Harper “should have figured out much earlier that you can’t be both.” Or, as the Post’s Kelly McParland puts it, “Given the anti-Israel bias that pervades the UN, campaigning for a seat … is the international equivalent of applying for membership at a club that bans Jews.”