Use It or Lose It

Stephen Harper has all the essentials to make Canada's presence felt at the G8 summit. Will a majority broaden his international outlook?

The G8 leaders' summit is underway in Deauville, France, where a full roster of pressing issues awaits them, not the least of which are the Arab uprisings. The Toronto Star figures the summit would be a great venue for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to flex his new majority muscles on the international scene. “By now he’s one of the G8’s seasoned leaders,” they write. “We’re players in Libya, Afghanistan and Haiti. And our aid program is substantial.” Free from having to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations in public support back home, “Harper can make use of his face time with like-minded leaders to signal that Canada is back in the game, with vision and energy.” But he'll have a rough time of it if he maintains his opposition to the tenet of U.S. President Barack Obama's Israeli peace plan, which would revert the state to its pre-1967 borders.

Canada's relatively stable economy means Harper is “one of the few leaders able to back words with money,” writes Peter O'Neil, the Postmedia chain's European correspondent. “All the G8 leaders except Harper face some combination of political insecurity and/or economic stress,” says O'Neil, “with Japan beset by the tsunami and nuclear disaster and the four EU leaders grappling – some say ineptly – with the continent's debt crisis.” Despite vague platitudes promising a “robust” foreign policy, though, O'Neil doesn't imagine Harper's too keen on throwing money at the fledgling democracies in Egypt and Tunisia. So whatever a robust foreign policy entails – if it's not providing material support for countries that have thrown off the shackles of oppression – is anyone's guess.

Timothy Garton Ash, in a wonderful column in The Guardian, hopes Obama, or anyone else for that matter (cough Harper cough), will soon call for the dissolution of the G8. “Its core business, the management of the global economy, cannot properly be discussed without the presence at the top table of countries like China, India and Brazil,” says Ash, calling the current arrangement “an anachronistic survival of the old, cold war west.” The G20 might not be perfect, but it is at least “a grouping much more appropriate to the economic, political and cultural realities of the 21st century,” says Ash, and could easily assume whatever it is the G8 does now besides cost host cities exorbitant amounts for security.