Banned from the club

The UN rejected our bid to join the world's most powerful countries at the Security Council table. But what exactly are we missing out on?

Groucho Marx famously quipped that he would never want to be part of a club that would accept him as a member. Canada’s diplomats are going through something of the opposite after being denied a seat on the UN’s Security Council. Now that the club has rejected us, we’re not sure whether we ever wanted to join in the first place.

It’s the UN that needs to revise its policies, not Canada, writes David Van Praagh in the Globe and Mail. Despite committing to some lofty goals at its founding after World War II, “the UN has not prevented – and could not prevent – many more wars. The UN has made a cruel mockery of human rights. It has done little beyond grand proclamations to promote the rule of law. And … its economic aid to poor countries has often been more corruptive than constructive.” Why would Canada want to be a party of that?

The UN is definitely the kind of club the Toronto Star’s Haroon Siddiqui wants to be in, and he's clearly feeling the sting of rejection. He blames Canada’s failure on Stephen Harper’s foreign policy, which he says is “a far cry from Canada’s historic commitment to human rights.” For evidence Siddiqui presents a litany of Harper’s offenses, which includes the snubbing of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, the sabotaging of the UN climate accord, and blind support for Israel. Given that these are all things Siddiqui himself opposes, he seems confident the international community’s views pretty much mirror his own.

Adam Chapnick says that both the club and applicant need to sort themselves out. Within Canada and the UN, there has been a troubling “decline in diplomatic behaviour,” he writes in The Mark. Canada’s two main parties should have been working together to win the seat, but instead have publically blamed each other for screwing things up. Meanwhile, the UN countries “disregarded their own interests … by shunning the seventh largest contributing member to the UN’s budget” and electing Portugal, “a country whose ongoing economic struggles will prevent it from making anything but a rhetorical contribution to international peace.”