Ear Candy
| Published date | 01 December 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200506000408 |
| Date | 01 December 2005 |
| Author | Kim Richard Nossal |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Kim Richard Nossal
Ear candy
Canadian policy toward humanitarian intervention and
atrocity crimes in Darfur
| International Journal | Autumn 2005 | 1017 |
The autumn 2003 issue of this journal featured eight articles offering some
uninvited suggestions on international relations and foreign policy to Paul
Martin as he was making his debut as prime minister. In his overview of
the challenges faced by the new Martin cabinet, Denis Stairs cautioned the
new prime minister against “the tendency to indulge in inflated and self-
serving rhetoric, a rhetoric clearly designed to appeal to the preferences and
prejudices of a population indoctrinated by its own myths.”1In this, Stairs
was reflecting a common criticism of the foreign policy of the government
of Jean Chrétien: that over the nine years that Chrétien was in power, a
growing gap had emerged between rhetoric and reality. On the one hand,
the efforts of the Chrétien government to bring the deficit under control
had led to a dramatic diminution of Canadian capabilities on the interna-
tional stage as the Canadian armed forces, the foreign service, and the
development assistance budget were all slashed.2On the other hand, the
Kim Richard Nossal is professor and head of the department of political studies at Queen’s
University.
1 Denis Stairs, “Challenges and opportunities for Canadian foreign policy in the Paul Martin
era,”
International Journal
58 (autumn 2003): 503; See also Stairs, “Myths, morals, and reality
in Canadian foreign policy,”
International Journal
58 (spring 2003): 239-56.
2 See, for example, Kim Richard Nossal, “Pinchpenny diplomacy: The decline of ‘good interna-
tional citizenship’ in Canadian foreign policy,”
International Journal
54 (winter 1998-99): 88-105.
The best overall summary of the argument is in Andrew Cohen,
While Canada Slept: How We
Lost Our Place in the World
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2003).
| Kim Richard Nossal |
| 1018 | International Journal | Autumn 2005 |
Chrétien government sought to cover this declining capacity by turning to
what Allan Gotlieb has called a “feel-good foreign policy” marked by “a ten-
dency to moralize and proclaim superior values.”3As Stairs put it,
“grandiose and self-serving rhetoric” was crucial to this exercise: “The
spinning of tales—tales not false, but certainly canted—becomes an
increasingly valued and admired art as the policy establishment struggles
to bridge the gap between what well-intentioned Canadians think and what
the government really is doing.”4
In short, over the course of the 1990s, the Chrétien government
increasingly pursued what might be thought of as an “ear candy” approach
to foreign policy: government ministers tended to speak about Canada’s
role in the world in terms that were so sweet-sounding to Canadians that
not only did the rhetoric convince listeners that their government was
actually doing something worthwhile in their name, but it also generated
considerable political support for those engaging in the rhetoric. But the
sugar high produced by a steady diet of ear candy tends to be no less addic-
tive than a diet of real candy: the more that their governors fed them feel-
good rhetoric about Canadian foreign policy, the more that Canadians
appeared to expect such rhetorical excesses from their government—and,
as importantly, to be entirely unsatisfied with more honest, realistic, or
sober assessments of the options available to Canada in the real world of
world politics. Moreover, the dynamic quickly became circular as govern-
ment ministers themselves became addicted to telling Canadians about
their role in international affairs in terms that they knew would generate
political support.
Although it was hoped by some in 2003 that Martin would bring a less
rhetorical and more realistic approach to the conduct of Canadian foreign
policy, it can be argued that Martin himself and the government he leads
have proved to be as addicted to ear candy in foreign policy as the Chrétien
government had been.5There is no better indication of this than the Martin
government’s policy towards the humanitarian disaster in the western
3 Allan Gotlieb, “Romanticism and realism in Canada’s foreign policy,”
Policy Options
26
(February 2005), esp. 18.
4 Stairs, “Challenges and opportunities,” 489-90.
5 For one assessment, see Andrew Cohen, “Martin’s first year on foreign policy: The rhetoric of
good intentions,”
Policy Options
26 (February 2005): 47-50.
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