I met Lloyd Axworthy in the sixties, when he was an executive assistant to Liberal Cabinet Minister Arthur Laing. The minister’s gatekeeper was an impressive man who was rather imposing to a naive university student visiting parliamentary offices for the first time.

Axworthy moved from being a ministerial assistant to sitting as an MP. He then served a dozen years as a Cabinet Minister, rising to be Minister of Foreign Affairs. Since leaving politics, Axworthy has had a distinguished career in the academic world. He is now Chair Emeritus of the World Refugee & Migration Council.

Today Axworthy commented on Mark Carney’s pathetic response to Donald Trump’s Wag the Dog effort. Thousands will die as the American president seeks to divert attention from his political troubles. Axworthy’s statement was published by The Star newspaper.

Read the entire article at The Star.

Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.

We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat — doing the bombing. For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security, that is not realism; it is recklessness.

…Under the UN Charter, cross-border uses of force are prohibited except in two narrow cases: collective decisions of the Security Council, or self defence in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack. Operation Epic Fury, as the U.S. has dubbed it, fits neither. There is no Security Council mandate, and Ottawa has not tried to argue that Washington and Jerusalem are responding to an attack that is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means.” Instead, it supports bombing to “prevent” Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon — the classic logic of preventive war.

…Iran is also not an isolated case. It is the seventh country against which President Trump has ordered unilateral use of force while in office. That should be a blaring alarm for a middle power like Canada. We are a trading state beside an increasingly unpredictable superpower that claims the right to intervene wherever and against whoever stands in their way. We have neither the military heft nor the economic leverage to dictate outcomes alone. Our security lies in a world where power is constrained by rules.

…The contrast with our language on Ukraine is stark. For four years, Canadian officials have rightly called Russia’s invasion an “unprovoked,” “unjustifiable,” “illegal” violation of the UN Charter and of Ukrainian sovereignty. Yet when the United States and Israel launch large scale strikes without UN authorization, Ottawa drops the legal vocabulary entirely. No talk of aggression, no warning about Charter erosion, no insistence on emergency debate in New York. The double standard is obvious: when Russia uses force without lawful grounds, it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.

I am one Canadian truly ashamed of Mark Carney’s government.