International Security Assistance Force troops at Kandahar Airfield. Creative Commons photo by Aramis X. Ramirez/ISAF.

On October 7, 2001, U.S. and U.K. forces began an invasion of Afghanistan aimed at capturing or killing the perpetrators of 9/11, believed to be sheltered there by the Taliban. Canadian forces soon joined the fray as part of the International Security Assistance Force, beginning The Forces’ longest and most controversial military engagement in history.

After nearly a decade on the ground in Afghanistan, reaching nearly 3,000 soldiers at their peak deployment, Canadian combat troops withdrew over the summer of 2011. Approximately 950 personnel are scheduled to remain in Afghanistan through 2014, now focused on training Afghan security forces, including its army and local police.

As we approach the 10-year mark for Canada’s Afghan mission, This Magazine asked three expert observers to talk about Canada’s role in the war-torn country, what has—and has not—been achieved, and what the legacy of this conflict will be for Canada’s military and diplomatic standing on the world stage.

The panel:

Amir Attaran is an Associate Professor in the Faculties of Law and Medicine at the University of Ottawa, and holds the Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy. He is a frequent commentator in the press, having written for the Globe and Mail, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Literary Review of Canada, among others.

John Duncan is the director of the Ethics, Society, and Law program at the University of Trinity College in the University of Toronto. He is the founder of the international bilingual society for the study of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, and the co-founder and academic director of the Humanities for Humanity outreach program at Trinity and Victoria University in the University of Toronto. He writes on philosophy, the humanities, and politics.

Graeme Smith is a Globe and Mail correspondent who was stationed in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009. His reporting from Kandahar and Southern Afghanistan won numerous awards, including three National Newspaper Awards, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ award for investigative reporting, recognition from Amnesty International, and an Emmy for Smith’s online video series of interviews with Afghan insurgents, “Talking to the Taliban.”

The conversation:

This: The stated formal objective of the Afghan mission for Canada is “to help build a more secure, stable, and self-sufficient Afghanistan that is no longer a safe haven for terrorists.” By your estimation, are any of those criteria currently being met?

John Duncan: Terrorism is being suppressed, according to a few limited measures. But security within Afghanistan is now actually the worst it has been since 2001, which is to say violence including terrorism is a brutal fact of life for many Afghans, deepening resentment toward the West in the country and the broader region, which does not bode well for anti-terrorism internationally. In general terms, development has not been significant, governance is abysmal, and the situation of women and girls across the country has not improved significantly in 10 years.

Graeme Smith: You can make an argument that even though security’s worse right now in Afghanistan because the number of attacks keeps going up and up, there has been development in some places, and that in some places, it’s much harder for an organization like al Qaeda to organize their training camps. So you can argue that, in the short term, there has been progress. I think you really have to look at where the arc of this is going: where is Afghanistan going to be 10 years from now? And I worry that 10 years from now, all three of those indicators are going to be worse.

Duncan: Our allies in Afghanistan—the ones who are going to become incredibly more important as the drawdown continues over the next few years—are a bunch of people infiltrated by the warlords we supported against the Soviets, or their successors. And most of these folks are very nasty people. Take the assassination this summer of Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai. He was one of our staunchest allies, but I can’t think of anyone who believes he was anything like a straight-up guy. There’s a real sense that we won’t be leaving the place in significantly better hands than the Taliban.

Amir Attaran: The strongest remedy to terrorism is actually a government that functions. That was the reason Canada could deal with FLQ terrorism, or the British could deal with the IRA. Unless you have a functioning government of your own, one in which people can trust, you won’t solve it. What Canada, the U.S., and NATO seem to have missed is the very basic lesson that the Afghans have to solve the problem of violence in their own midst. We can’t do it for them.

Smith: Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.

This: The Taliban is obviously still a going concern. Are they still a kind of government in waiting? Will they ever be back at the table? Is this something that can be negotiated? Will they take over anyway?

Smith: It’s often been said that if NATO leaves Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai would be kicked out sometime within an hour and a day, and the insurgents will run the country again. Karzai’s regime has no strength without NATO. Now, that’s all supposed to be changing between now and 2014 as we withdraw and build up the Afghan security forces, but the Afghan security forces have proved to be extremely unreliable, the police especially. My analysis is still that we’re headed for a civil war and not that we’re headed for an immediate Taliban takeover.

Attaran: I can’t make up my own mind any longer whether it’s possible to negiotiate with the Taliban. I think that should have been tried years ago, and I think it would have succeeded years ago. One of Ahmed Wali Karzai’s gifts—apart from promoting his own interests—was that he was actually able to talk to the Taliban pretty well, as well as talking to the West. Back in 2008 he urged Canada to open a line of communication and that was done, somewhat covertly, although the government always denied it. Had that been done in earnest, I think we would be looking at a much happier situation today. But I don’t know that it’s possible today.

Duncan: The military leaders’ people have said all along that the campaign can’t be won militarily and there has to be a political settlement. I’m not sure our side is taking negotiations seriously, but anyway we need a partner with which to negotiate, and the insurgents are not serious about negotiations because they also see that NATO cannot win militarily. They see victory in the long run. “We have the watches, they have the time,” as is often said.

Maybe the most hopeful scenario we can see is that the regime won’t collapse as we withdraw, but will be able to hold significant parts of the country as well as the regime did after the Soviets left in 1989. But we’re standing up a bunch a guys there that are not humanitarians. Canada continually tries to sell the war to its own citizens on the basis of the idea that we’re improving the lot of women, and bringing development to these folks, but really we’re not standing up anything like feminists or pro-development people.

Smith: We’re not even standing up effective bad guys. Even if we were to make that compromise, and say, “Ahmed Wali Karzai is not a nice man but at least he can keep control of Southern Afghanistan,” at this point, at this level of desperation, that might be a bargain that we’re willing to make. But he wasn’t that guy.

Attaran: All three of us appear to agree that civil war is the most likely outcome in a few years. So the question ought to be on the part of policy-makers: “How do you minimize the intensity of the civil war?” Give up on the idea that you can avoid it. Just concentrate on minimizing its intensity. And to do that you need to take a page out of the playbook for resolving ethnic wars. That means going around to each of the affected interest groups and asking: “What will it take for you not to fight the people closest to you?” Find out grievances, find out wishes. Then a disinterested interlocutor could try and negotiate an agreement that bribes people to keep the peace. It will require subsidies, and incentives to settle old scores, except through non-violent means.

But of course through our stupidity of the war on terrorism, we’ve made this very difficult. Because today, under most countries’ laws, if you speak to a terrorist group and offer them training on making a peaceful transition, under the laws of Canada, the United States, Britain, and others, that’s considered giving material support to terrorism. So the international organizations or NGOs who specialize in peace-building negotiations and exercises, and who might be able to find a way out of this mess for the NATO alliance, would be criminals for doing their work, under the very stupid laws that exist in NATO countries today.

This: Let’s talk about the Afghan National Army. This has now become the primary focus of Canada’s mission there, to have Canadian military and police trainers on the ground to help the Afghan army and police reach a level where they can provide enough security for development to occur safely. Is the Afghan National Army in a position to provide that?

Attaran: Emphatically no. In successful states, it’s the state that holds what’s called the “monopoly of violence.” The current Afghan military, the police, and the National Directorate of Security are not able to maintain a monopoly of violence in the country.

Duncan: They can’t even do it with the help of 140,000 NATO troops, including overpowering air support and all the rest of the sophisticated NATO technology.

Attaran: No, it can’t. And in this case, one has to turn this axiom on its head. You have to say, “Whoever can provide the monopoly of violence becomes the state.” I think that’s how you have to do it. To minimize the intensity of the civil war that is coming, one has to send credible emissaries, and I have no idea who they are because every NATO country has no credibility on this issue now. You have to send a neutral emissary to approach all potentially violent factions and ask, “What will it take for you—by way of money, land, political influence—what will it take for you to not fight and not settle old scores? It all has a price.

This: If the NATO allies have no credibility when it comes to doing that kind of negotiation, is there a figure who could come in from outside who could do that negotiation and bring people to the table?

Attaran: In the past we relied on Norwegians or other usefully helpful small countries like Canada to solve big global messes for us. I don’t know that that can happen anymore because Canada doesn’t have any credibility with the insurgents, being a member of NATO in Afghanistan. I don’t think that even the Norwegians can do it. I think the only possible answer is for the emerging countries to really flex their diplomatic muscle. I’m thinking as far away as Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa. Unless countries of that tier in the world begin to do part of their role in setting and accomplishing big projects in global diplomacy, there’s no one to get NATO out of their mess.

Smith: Not only NATO but also the United Nations. One of the difficult things about this conflict is that the United Nations has taken sides. In previous iterations of Afghan civil wars you had the United Nations acting as the neutral go-between, the honest broker. The UN will not be able to play that role this time around.

Attaran: I think this is sure to be an unpopular thing to say: Afghans will develop a certain trust in institutions once they see those institutions able to prosecute Westerners for war crimes. Nobody disputes that Western militaries caused unlawful civilian deaths, or utilized unlawful means such as torture—much of that is admitted by NATO countries themselves. If we want Afghans to believe in the power of global institutions, one thing that will help is for certain Westerners to be made criminally responsible by Afghan institutions. If they can see their own institutions flex muscle and show that they are not about to bow before the most powerful nations on the earth’s face, then they will believe those institutions matter.

Duncan: You’re right that it’s an unpopular thing to say; I can’t imagine Canadians feeling too comfortable about it. But it’s also right that anyone who commits a war crime ought to be prosecuted.

Smith: Here’s my main concern about using war crimes as the bully stick. I’m worried that in the coming decades, I’m going to be standing in some war-torn country—Libya, Syria, Somalia—and I’m going to be writing stories where people are calling for foreign intervention, people are calling for peacekeepers to prevent an atrocity. And that if the lawyers warn the international forces that there is some percentage risk of exposure on the war-crimes front, that that intervention will not happen, and that lots of people will have to die because we’re afraid to stick our necks out.

Attaran: It’s undeniably a risk. Part of going forth in the world and trying to change things, whether you call it “responsibility to protect,” as it’s called on the left, or “regime change” as it’s called on the right, means going forward and doing so in accordance to the laws of armed conflict, such as the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law. And if you don’t, it doesn’t matter whether your reasons for the foreign sojourn is prompted by the fear of terrorism on the right, or the desire to rid the world of despots on the left. The reasons are irrelevant; you still have the same laws to abide by.

This: Let’s come back to the situation of Canada’s diplomatic corps. What is the legacy of the Afghan conflict for Canada’s diplomatic reputation, and how is this changing foreign affairs currently?

Smith: Well, we’re certainly seen as a country that can kick some ass. That wasn’t the case before, for better or for worse.

Attaran: Our diplomatic corps is certainly viewed as compromised. We had a great relationship with a great many countries in the world, and that did indeed land us on the UN Security Council with regularity in the past. It’s failed not because we’ve succeeded in alienating a huge number of countries—although I think we’ve done that for other reasons—we weren’t actually successful in getting on the Security Council in the last session because the U.S. declined to campaign for us. That’s the most shocking thing. Even though we showed ourselves to be willing to kick ass and to appeal to Washington in that regard, it wasn’t good enough for Washington. And for the first time that I know of, Washington did not campaign on Canada’s behalf, did not ask other countries to vote for Canada for the Security Council seat. The moral of the story is: being able to kick ass but losing your broad-based diplomatic respect among many nations doesn’t work to win your influence. It simply makes you a somewhat boring, middle-sized, un-influential country, which is what Canada is in danger of becoming.

Duncan: Former Liberal cabinet minister John Manley, who produced the very influential 2008 report on the Afghan mission, has made the argument in public a number of times that the great sacrifice Canada is making in Afghanistan is something that politicians in Ottawa need to make clear and well-heard in Washington, to make sure we improve our recognition down there, with our neighbour, with our dominant trading partner, and with the world’s leading power.

Smith: You know, behind the scenes, we do still have this role as a moderating influence within NATO. So, for example, when the Americans were thinking about sending in chemical sprayers to eradicate the poppy fields of southern and eastern Afghanistan—which would have just thrown gasoline on the fire and been a disastrous move—the Canadians and the Brits quietly persuaded the Americans to see reason, and persuaded them not to escalate the conflict that way. So there are times, I think, when Canada still can be part of this club of nations that is taking unpopular actions and doing some harm reduction, as it were.

Attaran: Our diplomatic standing is about much more than how we comport ourselves during wartime. We have to remember that as much as we try to suck up to the Americans by taking the most dangerous part of Afghanistan militarily, we weren’t successful in getting the backing of our closest ally to be in the UN Security Council, because on enough other diplomatic fronts, we’ve proven to be very irritating. Stephen Harper’s government displeased the United States on climate change, on Omar Khadr’s repatriation, and on a very personal level, on President Obama’s campaign to become president, where it appears we leaked information about what he said in a briefing on NAFTA. If, diplomatically, Canada behaves like this—practices bush-league diplomacy, which is a growing specialty of ours—we are going to lose influence, despite making blood sacrifice.

Duncan: There is a debate in the military and academic literature about this. Some people have worried since the bombing runs Canada carried out in Yugoslavia that our sacrifices, the things we’ve done in hardcore military efforts, have not been sufficiently recognized because our forces were too integrated with other forces as in Yugoslavia. So the idea for Afghanistan was to make sure that everyone could see that Canada was there doing really heavy lifting in the specific region of Kandahar, to achieve some real salience, boosting our recognition, our credibility, and ultimately our influence on the world stage.

In addition to this debate, there’s another about trying to understand what our diplomatic and military mission around the world has been, is, and should be. Some say we have often intervened for peace—our peacekeeping heritage—but others say that national interests have actually always trumped peacekeeping in Canadian interventions. Now, since the Canadian self-understanding is largely wrapped up in the perception of a peacekeeping heritage, the concern with Afghanistan has been about whether too much heavy lifting—that is, war fighting—will alienate Canadian popular support for the mission.

So we have tough talk about “killing scumbags,” on the one hand, and doublespeak about “peacemaking” and “peace-building,” on the other hand. We see from these debates, as well as from mainstream press coverage of the war, that a major concern has been not to alienate Canadian support for the war. I’m no fan of promoting war, but at least the analysts arguing for salience and national interests are straight shooters with respect to Afghanistan, where about 90 percent of the funding has gone to the military mission—not to development, governance, women and girls, and so on. Despite the rhetoric, this has been war fighting for 10 years, and if that is not bad enough we also have to face the grim truth that the war fighting has achieved virtually nothing.

This: So this conflict has changed our diplomatic reputation; how is it changing the Canadian Forces themselves?

Smith: We talked about the Canadian Forces becoming blooded, becoming more combat ready, and I think it’s had that effect. Though our presence in Kandahar may, at the end of the day, have done some harm to Kandahar, I think it may have done some good to the Canadian Forces as an organization. They now have more airlift capability, they now have a cadre of experienced counter-insurgency experts, so should the Canadians have the stomach for another overseas adventure, the Canadian Forces will certainly be ready.

Duncan: There has been a lot of press lately about athletes suffering serious long-term effects from even mild concussions. Well, many Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan have suffered serious concussions from improvised exploisve device blasts, as well as other serious injuries and illnesses. For many returning soldiers we don’t really know how long-standing or severe their problems are going to be, and there are things to worry about there, such as whether or not there is sufficient support or care for them, what the effects will be on their families and communities, and what the effects will be on the military itself. Already there are worrying cases of inadequate care and support, and south of the border there are alarmingly high rates of soldier and veteran suicide.

Attaran: I don’t think this war has been good for the forces. There will be a great many young veterans who will be less well-cared-for than in previous generations because of the change to veterans’ benefits in this country. I think our military leadership—the brass if you will—has become markedly arrogant to the point that they’re showing their ill schooling. I blame no one for this more than General Rick Hillier, because he was the one who signed the status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan. That is what launched this mission in southern Afghanistan, the Kandahar mission, and he did so on terms that were wholly unrealistic. When I read it I was gobsmacked to find his name above a statement to the effect that our mission was to “eradicate” the Taliban and al Qaeda. Eradicate—that was the word he used. History teaches that insurgencies are almost never eradicated, so for General Hillier to set that goal was stupid from the get-go. I’m profoundly in agreement with those who think the military would be better off reaffirming Canada’s territorial claims in the Arctic. We’re a country who’s been around since 1867. We have to think in 100-year, 200-year cycles, and in the long run, will Afghanistan matter to this country? Hardly. But the Arctic? Definitely. That’s what we gave up by going on this adventure.

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”

Illustration by Matt Daley.

In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, the Canadian government commissioned the departments of Foreign Affairs and National Defence to investigate the feasibility of a United Nations rapid-response service. The research was co-directed by Peter Langille, an academic and defence analyst known as a critic of NATO’s military doctrine, a key figure in the development of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, and a national expert on UN peace operations. Langille and his team realized early on that such a service was both possible and necessary, as events in Rwanda and Srebrenica had already grimly proved, but would require three things: a compelling concept; a broad base of national and global support; and the strength to withstand the inevitable opposition.

The United Nations Emergency Peace Service, as the initiative came to be called, is imagined as the UN’s answer to 911: a permanent first responder, capable of deployment within 24 hours of authorization from the UN Security Council. Langille, whose slow, deliberate speech suggests years of explaining concepts that people don’t or won’t understand, stressed that UNEPS would be a service, not an armed force, meant to complement existing national and UN arrangements. “It would draw on the best and brightest of individuals who volunteer for a dedicated UN service—military, police, and civilians who are well-prepared, highly trained, and likely more sophisticated [than national armed forces] in addressing a wide array of emergencies,” he says.

It’s designed for five key functions: to stop genocide, prevent armed conflict, protect civilians, address human needs, and launch—quickly—the complex and long-term peacekeeping operations of the UN. The Canadian study, which concluded in 1995, “did attract 26 member states into a group known as the Friends of Rapid Deployment,” Langille says, “but it became clear that it was running into a lot of powerful political opposition.”

Despite strong endorsements from a number of high-ranking UN officials, politicians, and prominent peace researchers, UNEPS has yet to get off the ground. “We haven’t attracted the broader organizational support required, the funding necessary, the backing of key member states,” explains Langille. Apparently, there are threats implied in anti-militarist global cooperation. “Some see this as a harbinger of world governments, or a stronger UN that might actually work. Some don’t favour that system.” This is unfortunate, because UNEPS proponents see it as the best means of preventing another Rwanda. Off the top of his head, Langille lists other recent crises where UNEPS could have helped: East Timor, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Darfur, Ivory Coast, Haiti. “It’s not hard to go on,” he says.

When Langille visited the UN in December, it was clear to him that interest in UNEPS was up. There’s a new emphasis in global politics on protecting civilians from war, he says, and more and more groups are calling for the creation of a UN standing force to deal with humanitarian crises. Still, the need for advocacy remains; the general public must be made to understand that an alternative to current defence arrangements exists, that it’s been derived from the experience of UN officials and various defence establishments, and that it addresses, sustainably, the urgent requirements of collective global security.

The Canadian chapter of World Federalist Movement is at the forefront of national efforts to promote UNEPS, actively advocating for its creation in an effort to swing public policy. I ask Langille if there’s something we can do to help them. “Yeah,” he says, without hesitation. “Send money.”

It was comforting, at the end of our conversation, to know that some answers remain so simple.

— Katie Addleman

The following are the countries that supported the amendment (79): Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belize, Benin, Botswana, Brunei Dar-Sala, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, China, Comoros, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Mozambique, Myanmar, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russian Federation, Rwanda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United Republic of Tanzania, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The countries that abstained (17): Antigua-Barbuda, Barbados, Belarus, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Fiji, Mauritius, Mongolia, Papau New Guinea, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

The countries that were absent (26): Albania, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Chad, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Marshall Island, Mauritania, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Sao Tome Principe, Seychelles, Solomon Islands, Togo, Tonga, Turkey, Turkmenistan.

The Charter represents the cornerstone of Canadian civil society: it proscribes the democratic, legal, equality and language rights that, together, make up the freedoms we enjoy.  It is the bill of rights that guarantees all of the civil and political rights that make Canadian society the open, free and generally tolerant place (the G20 aside) that it is.

The rights enshrined in the Charter–the right to “life, liberty and security of the person,” among others—are key to Canada’s national self-image, and so you would assume that they would amount to more then a mere trifling concern.  Yet the federal government’s failure to repatriate Omar Khadr is reinforcing a lesson hard learned by many Canadians during the G20: our government is entirely capable, and far too willing, to ride roughshod over our rights. And what’s even scarier is the public’s non-reaction to Khadr’s case, which proves just how complacent many Canadians will be while their rights are stripped.

And it is in this respect that the Charter and the rights it enshrines have been forgotten by many within Canadian society–and if not fully forgotten, then perhaps forcefully consigned a safe distance behind a barricade of riot police as our government elevates fear-mongering and ‘security’ over liberty and legality.

Despite numerous rulings from Canada’s courts, including a recent ultimatum from the Supreme Court demanding our government act to protect his rights during the trial or repatriate him for trial in Canada, Toronto-born Khadr is the last remaining Western citizen held at Guantanamo Bay.  While all other nations have repatriated their detainees—including England, France and most recently Yemen—Canada remains the holdout.

At question here is not Khadr’s innocence or guilt.  Even if we presume the worst of Khadr—that he is indeed guilty of throwing the hand grenade that fatally wounded American medic Christopher Speer in 2002, that he did so unprovoked, willingly and, at the tender age of 15, with complete awareness of his actions and that he is an unrepentant jihadist—his treatment since his arrest would make even those responsible for the Patriot Act blush.

Here are the facts. Khadr has been held for eight years without trial: so much for section 8, 9, 10 and 11 of of the Charter guaranteeing a presumption of innocence until proven guilty, a “fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal” in a “reasonable time.”  A pretrial hearing revealed that his initial questioning at Afghanistan’s Bagram prison occurred while he was shackled to a stretcher following his hospitalization for severe wounds suffered during the fighting and was sedated for pain.  His first interrogator, identified in a fittingly Orwellian manner only as “Interrogator One,” was later convicted of detainee abuse in a separate case; he threatened Khadr with gang-rape and death to coerce the 15-year-old suspect into talking.  For parts of his interrogation he was hooded and handcuffed with his arms restricted painfully above his shoulders, and he was systematically deprived of sleep before cycles of interrogation. This conduct clearly violates the Charter’s section 12 prohibition on cruel and unusual treatment or punishment.

Khadr’s case represents the first time a Western country will try someone for war crimes allegedly committed as a child since the Second World War, an act that has earned condemnation from the United Nations, Amnesty International, and many others.

The most recent court verdict placed the onus on the Federal Government to protect Khadr’s rights and bring him home; Ottawa, predictably, appealed the verdict knowing full well that with Khadr’s impeding trial set to begin next month they’ve dodged any legal responsibility to act.

So–what are we left with?  Well, for one, we’re left with Omar Khadr facing the grim prospect of a military tribunal in the United States with zero support or interest from Ottawa. But more pertinently we’re left with a government who has shown their true nature yet again—they prorogued Parliament when it raised unappealing questions on the Afghan detainee issue, they quashed civil liberties when people took to the streets to demand change, and they rebuffed the Supreme Court and the international community in what is set to be the first case in modern history of a child soldier standing trial.

All these events add up to a gradual erosion of our civil liberties and constitutional rights, and the blithe indifference of so many Canadians is ominous.

One Thursday last spring, an Angolan MP named Faustina Fernandes Inglês de Almeida Alves addressed an assembly at United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Those present—members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, professors, commissioners, Parliamentarians, and observers from more than 40 countries— had gathered to discuss the role of Parliaments in the advancement of women’s rights. It had been 15 years since the Beijing Declaration, adopted during the Fourth World Conference on Women, promised to achieve greater equality for women. It was time to take stock of how the world was progressing.

While the five women representing Canada sat nearby, Alves spoke of her government’s push to increase the number of women in the National Assembly. “This action allowed, from 1992 [the year of Angola’s first general election], the number of Parliamentarian women to rise [from] 26 to 86, in 2008” she announced. By 2008, women accounted for 38 percent of Angola’s main legislative body. This means that Angola—a country where securing basic human rights for women remains a major concern—elects far more women than we do.

Canada ranks 50th on the IPU’s annual list of women’s representation in world Parliaments. Iraq—a place not renowned for its achievements in gender equity—ranks higher. This isn’t because the women’s rights movement in Iraq is particularly advanced; it’s because of the Iraqi electoral system. The first-past-the-post system—used in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and virtually nowhere else— does not help women get into power. In fact, it impedes their chances. Doris Anderson, always ahead of her time, knew this 50 years ago. As editor-in-chief of Chatelaine from 1957 to 1977, she introduced a generation of Canadians to women’s rights issues many hadn’t known existed: abortion, pay equity, female sexuality. But one of her greatest passions was equality in government. Anderson believed that women lawmakers made women-friendly laws. You need only look to Denmark, Germany, Sweden or Spain, each one a top-20 country on the IPU’s list, to know that this still holds today.

Anderson was a fierce proponent of proportional representation, the electoral system used by nearly every Western country and emerging democracy. Under PR, if one party receives 60 percent of the public’s support and another receives 40 percent, those two parties get 60 and 40 percent of the legislative seats, a close approximation of voter sentiment. In addition to being a more accurate reflection of the electorate’s will, PR has also proven to open up legislative bodies to women and minorities. In other words, it produces governments that look more like the populations they serve.

Ten years ago, Larry Gordon, a political activist who had lately become concerned about the future of democracy, approached Doris Anderson and asked if she would join Fair Vote Canada, his new campaign for electoral reform. “At the time she was, like, 80 years old,” Gordon remembers. “She was amazing. She was writing in the mid-50s on things that were considered controversial in the U.S. women’s movement in the mid-60s, and getting death threats.” Anderson quickly agreed to become a founding director of Fair Vote Canada, the final endorsement Gordon had been seeking.

His citizens’ campaign has since become the strongest voice advocating for electoral reform in Canada. It operates 21 chapters in eight provinces, has thousands of members across the country, and its advisory board includes such luminaries as Maude Barlow, Ed Broadbent, and David Suzuki. In May, the group held its 10th annual conference at the University of Ottawa. The lecture hall was packed with people: old, young, veterans of 60s activism, and fans of Bill Maher’s page on Facebook. Most of them had paid $35 to be there, thrilled at the chance to spend nine hours pondering a favourite subject, one usually shunted to the spidery back corners of political debate.

The speakers program progressed from Judy Rebick (“Grassroots Mobilization”) to Walter Robinson (“Reaching Conservatives on Electoral Reform”), and on to Mercédez Roberge after lunch (“Electoral Reform Developments in Quebec”). One by one, they were greeted by applause and rapt attention—the left-wing journalist, the Conservative tax consultant, the Québecoise activist—though it was unclear what, at the end of the day, the crowd would be putting its energy into, aside from remaining optimistic. In the past ten years, Fair Vote Canada has seen the failure of three provincial referendums on voting reform, and there’s nothing on the horizon to indicate another shot. A decade in, the group is no closer to its goal.

Gordon insists that “things are happening,” but his unabated zeal for the project has an air of the religious—he believes so strongly in the mission that its actual feasibility is unimportant. Because it is right, its success is assured, the team cheer seems to go. Someday, we shall overcome.

Larry Gordon has no hair to speak of and wears thin wire-frame glasses that nearly disappear into his ruddy face. He is the kind of person you wish could always come to family dinner— a fantastic storyteller, with the permanent grin and the quick, unfaltering speech of a seasoned professor (or salesman). At 60 years old, he has worked in the nonprofit sector his entire adult life, beginning his career at the Grindstone Island peace and justice centre, a nowdefunct co-operative in the Rideau Lakes. (“It was fabulous,” he says. “A 12-acre island overrun by hippies.”) It was the 1970s, and Gordon had shed the vestiges of his conservative, pro-Reagan Cincinnati upbringing with great success. He worked at Grindstone every summer before moving to Toronto permanently.

Around 1999, he says, after peddling the idea of economic democracy (e.g., worker-controlled production) for 20 years, it occurred to him that he’d never read a single book on democracy and wasn’t really sure what it meant. He picked up On Democracy, by Yale political scientist Robert Dahl. “I had gone into reading that book thinking, well, we’ve got democracy in the Western world, we’ve done that.” But Dahl turned out to be more concerned about reforming democracy in the U.S., Britain, and Canada than exporting it elsewhere, and believed proportional representation was critical to democracy’s survival in the 21st century. “All of a sudden it was like a big light bulb going off,” Gordon says. Canada’s population was not properly represented in Parliament. Democracy in this country was manifestly sick. (Everyone I spoke with from Fair Vote used the same light bulb analogy. Scrutinizing our electoral system, it seems, is good for producing epiphanies.)

Between 1970 and 1993, Western countries using proportional representation saw the proportion of women MPs rise by 14 percent; in first-past-the-post countries, it increased by 7 percent. Germany uses first-past-the-post to populate half of the Bundestag and proportional representation to populate the other; the latter contributes twice as many women. New Zealand’s parliament used to be 21 percent female; in 1993 they switched to proportional representation, and by 2008 it was 33 female. PR was finally ushering women into legislative roles and improving the representation of other minorities, too.

It’s delightfully simple. So why are governments ignoring it?

The Canadian government would say they’re not. There have been three provincial referendums on voting reform since 2005. None of them passed.

Wendy Bergerud sat on the citizen’s assembly that preceded the first: a group of 160 randomly selected B.C. residents, most of whom had no deep political ties and very little knowledge of voting systems. They had been charged by Premier Gordon Campbell with investigating the current system and possible alternatives. For seven months, they heard experts and laymen speak on different voting systems; they learned what was used in different countries around the world, and the effects that various systems had on political bodies. Then, for one month, they deliberated on the recommendation they would make to the B.C. legislature. In October 2004, they submitted their final report. They had decided, almost unanimously, to propose a change from first-past-the-post to a form of proportional representation called single transferable vote. Bergerud, a recently retired Ministry of Forests employee, had no previous interest in voting systems; she is now a member of Fair Vote’s national council, the president of its Victoria chapter, and a member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The experience turned her into an activist.

“I think a lot of people were really surprised that the assembly worked together and came up with such a high consensus on the recommendation,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Victoria. Her voice is gruff, though she laughs easily. She answers my questions without pausing to think. “I’ve come across people who expected us to fight like our political parties. But most of us in the assembly were committed to the common good, the public good. We were very serious about communicating on what would work for most people. It seemed, as we learned more about voting systems, that a PR system was going to give parties a number of seats in the House that closely matched their support and that that would change quite a bit how the parties behaved. Another thing we learned is that an awful lot of countries use PR. Here in North America we live in this little hole that doesn’t know much about the rest of the world. We don’t realize that most countries in Europe use one form or another of PR.

“No new country chooses first-past-thepost,” she continues. “Whenever anyone sits down and says, ‘We’re forming a country here, what should we use?’ They always choose some form of PR.”

After their recommendation, Bergerud and other assembly members grew concerned: the government was going to include a referendum on electoral reform with its provincial election in May, but it didn’t look like they were going to do anything to educate the public about the choices that would be placed before them. If voters didn’t understand their options, surely they’d vote to stick with the status quo. Impassioned by everything they had learned, assembly alumni began a massive educational campaign. Bergerud estimates that between them, they gave 800 presentations leading up to the referendum, and on May 17, 2005, the “Yes” side won almost 58 percent of the vote. But it wasn’t enough—the threshold had been set at 60 percent.

“Fundamentally, we won that one,” Bergerud says. “Something that’s annoyed me for a long time is that the press will say, ‘It was rejected here in B.C.,’ and I go, ‘well, 57.8 percent isn’t rejection.’ New Zealand changed into the new voting system with something like 53 percent and Ireland didn’t change with something like 57 percent [against]—so everyone else in the world used 50 percent.” She wonders why the Liberal government would have initiated the assembly process if it was not going to follow through. I ask her if she thinks it was all for show. “Oh, I think it’s highly likely,” she says.

Electoral reform is not a partisan issue: Doris Anderson and Troy Lanigan, the president of the right-wing Canadian Taxpayers Federation, sat next to each other on Fair Vote’s founding board, agreeing on nothing except the need for voting reform. The problem with changing the electoral system is that parties in power—regardless of ideology—never want to do it. Larry Gordon learned this early on in his campaign, and has re-learned it repeatedly over the past decade. “I very naively thought that all left-ofcentre people, all left-of-centre parties would obviously support this, until I discovered that NDP governments, provincially, relate to this just the same way that Conservative governments or Liberal governments do: ‘If first-past-the-post puts us in power, we’re not going to reform anything. If we’ve been really badly screwed by first-past-thepost, we’re all in favour of reform.’ The NDP is 100 percent on board for proportional representation—because everybody should be equal, it’s atrocious that the voting system distorts results, we need democratic equality in this country—except in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia or Nova Scotia when they’re in power.” Doesn’t that make him angry? I ask. “Oh, very angry, yeah,” he says, smiling.

In two later referendums, one in B.C. and another in Ontario, the governments in power again dragged their heels and did little to educate voters on the choice they were facing. Consequently, the 2007 referendum in Ontario lost with 36.9 percent of the vote; last year’s in British Columbia lost with 38.2 percent.

June Macdonald, chair of Fair Vote Canada’s Women for Fair Voting committee, echoes Gordon’s anger. “The major parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals—stand to win big under our system. They can parlay a minority popular vote into a majority of seats. They don’t want to give that up.”

Fair Vote’s inaugural conference, on March 30, 2001, took place in Ottawa. There were around a hundred attendees and a single reporter, who, Gordon says, had a single question: “You people don’t think this will ever really happen, do you?”

Ten years and several close calls later, the group remains convinced that it will. Gordon thinks that the current era of minority government, with all of its dramas and public dysfunction, may present Fair Vote with its moment. Proportional representation forces parties to work together; when no one can win an outright majority, the major concern shifts from gaining an edge over the opposition to determining allies and how best to cooperate.

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would have us believe that coalitions don’t work: the governments of Israel and Italy, which suffer the strains of shifty and ill-advised allegiances and powerful extremist factions, are held up in terrifying example. But you could just as easily blame the dysfunctional politics of Zimbabwe on their firstpast-the-post electoral system, and it would be equally specious. The political culture of a country is not soley a product of the voting system it uses.

In Canada, meanwhile, it’s become very obvious that our parties would rather one-up each other than work together for the public good. The current system compels combative behaviour, a problem that, war-ravaged and corrupt countries aside, proportional representation naturally amends by encouraging cooperation. The prime minister has presented coalitions as undemocratic, says Bergerud, but what many people don’t understand is that “it is quite legitimate and proper for parties to work together to form a government, and that it happens on a regular basis in Europe.”

In April, Environics released the results of a poll on public support for proportional representation, showing that 62 percent of Canadians are in favour of adopting the system for elections. “On the idea of fair voting, Canadians are there, always have been there, will be there,” says Gordon forcefully.

Fine—but getting the issue on the political agenda is another matter. I ask how he sees it happening. He lists several possibilities, but then slowly qualifies each one in turn: the NDP could demand it in exchange for supporting the Liberals in government (but that won’t happen with the current configuration of seats); Britain could reform, thus paving the way for Canada to do the same (but the movement there is very much up in the air); the Supreme Court of Canada could rule first-past-the-post unconstitutional—a Quebec court case to that effect is currently winding its way through the courts (but it’s a long shot).

Gordon pauses. His voice has grown progressively shakier. He knows how it sounds and what he’s up against. In the end, he speaks of serendipity. Large-scale social change, he says, is ultimately effected only when “unexpected events, completely outside of your control, come together at a particular moment in history and allow big change to happen.”

In other words, he’s waiting on a miracle. He acknowledges that it’s a hard thing to mobilize people around.

Whether or not electoral reform ever comes to this country, the fact is that democracy is a people’s concern. The government has proven its lack of interest. Canadians will have to demand it—and Gordon believes that they will, once they understand what they stand to gain. We are living with a system under which 900,000 people can vote for the Green Party and get no representation, but 800,000 Conservatives in Alberta alone can elect 27 Conservative MPs. That’s not a truly representative democracy, and Fair Vote wants to make sure we know that, at the very least.

“Fair Vote Canada is going to continue to do what it’s always done,” Gordon says, rallying: “outreach, trying to mobilize as many people as possible from all points on the political spectrum to appreciate how fundamentally important it is for the issues that you’re passionate about, and for your own quality of life, the community, the quality of environmental life, how fundamentally important it is to you to make sure that we have a democratically elected Parliament.”

He pauses, and then twists the knife. “Which you’ve probably never experienced.”

Protestors march down Toronto's Yonge Street as part of anti-G20 All Out In Defense of Rights Rally, Monday June 21 2010. Photo by Jesse Mintz.

The Toronto Community Mobilization Network kicked off its themed days of resistance to the G20 on Monday with activists converging around a mixed bag of issues including income equity, community control over resources, migrant justice, and an end to war and occupation. It’s an ambitious start­ for the week-long campaigns. On their own, each issue is complex. So wouldn’t combining them create one massively hopeless problem? Not necessarily.

Uniting the struggles sends a clear message:  justice for one means justice for all. Organizing in solidarity weaves together the various conditions of oppression and injustice affecting populations around the world. It gives us a deeper understanding of these conditions, and how to act against them.

In effect, you can’t talk about income equity without addressing migrant justice. The fact is, so-called developed states have built their economies on the labour of underpaid and overworked “temporary” migrant labourers. A recent Stats Can report suggests that throughout the 31 countries that make up the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (compare these to the countries that have ratified or signed the UN Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, or to the G20 roster for that matter), the “temporary migration of foreign workers has increased by 4 percent to 5 percent per year since 2000.”

The same report states that over 94,000 non-permanent residents worked in Canada full time (30 hours per week or more) in 2006. Many came to this country as part of temporary foreign worker programs, such as the Live-in Caregiver Program or the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program. Activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, politicians—pretty much everyone—have denounced the current state of both programs for their exploitative policies, racist legacies and harmful social effects. And it only seems to be getting worse for migrant workers as third-party recruiters become increasingly popular.

The fact that business is booming for recruiters means there’s a pool of people willing to put up whatever money they have for the promise of work abroad.  And here’s where we connect the dots from migrant justice to ending war and occupation and restoring control of resources to the people—what has compelled, and continues to compel, the estimated 214 million migrants of the world to leave their home countries in the first place? That’s what migrant justice group No One Is Illegal wants us to think about:

Government and public discourse fails to address root causes of forced migration. On the one hand, because of free trade policies—including Canadian free trade agreements—and structural adjustment programs, governments throughout the global South have been forced to adopt neoliberal policies that have restructured and privatized their land and services, resulting in the displacement of urban and rural workers and farmers. On the other hand, capital mobility has led corporations to create millions of low-wage jobs and to seek vulnerable workers to fill them, both in sweatshops in the global South and exploitable labour sectors in the global North.

Sure, not all migrant workers are explicitly forced to come to Canada as a labourer, as one analyst with the Fraser Institute griped in an interview with The Dominion, but then again lots of people are. Forced migrants are refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced and trafficked people, as well as survivors of developmental displacement, environmental and manufactured disasters.

Huge construction projects like dams, roads and airports squeeze people out of their homes. Stephen Castles, the former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, writes that many of these initiatives are funded by the World Bank and displace as many as 10 million people annually. Though World Bank offers compensation for resettlement, Castles concludes:

Millions of development displacees experience permanent impoverishment, and end up in a situation of social and political marginalization.

People displaced by environmental change, by industrial accidents, and toxins generally face similar fates.

That’s why war and conflict, immigration and refugee flows, jobs and wages, and global economics are, together, a “focus” of protest. Far from being separate and unrelated problems, they’re inextricably entangled. And the solutions will be too.

Managing Environmental Resources to Enable Transitions to More Sustainable Livelihoods Through Partnerships and Land Use Solidarity, or MERET-PLUS, is a joint project between the Ethiopian government and the United Nations’ World Food Programme. Through it, Tekale and thousands others are employed to plant rows of tiny trees, destined for hillside farms like his. The roots should stop erosion, and the fruit can be eaten, traded or sold. “Our whole livelihood now depends on this,” says Tekale.

Thanks to MERET-PLUS, dozens of seedling nurseries and other small-scale sites have sprung up across Ethiopia. The program pays participants in grain to make compost to refresh tired soils, build retaining walls to stop erosion, and ponds to catch rainwater. Tekale earns 135 kilograms of grain per month, which feeds his family, his wife’s family and her relatives.

Meanwhile, though, MERET-PLUS itself is going hungry. A 2009 WFP report says expected donor contributions to MERET-PLUS fell nearly 50 percent since 2007, a shortfall blamed on food price increases and the global economic meltdown. Of US$166 million promised for 2007–2011, MERET-PLUS officials now expect to receive US$75 million. Major donors are Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway and Russia.

WFP officer Arega Yirga won’t say which country is the weak funding link, but Canada claims to be doing its part. Denise Robichaud, media officer at the Canadian International Development Agency, says we met our 2006 commitment of $20 million. It’s of little comfort. The funding gap caused postponement of 260 planned projects in 2008, and only 76,000 people—of a planned 122,000—received grain payments.

This wasted potential frustrates Fisseha Gizachew, MERET-PLUS regional coordinator in Awassa, southern Ethiopia. “People are coming to us because they understand the problems they are facing,” he says, adding, at the same time, lost funding has his office waiting for grain promised by the WFP seven months ago.

He won’t be the only one. This year, lost funding will force over 45,000 Ethiopian farmers off work while their land degrades. Too bad; during that time thousands of retaining walls and catchment ponds could have been built—long-term investments that help Ethiopians help themselves.

Cover of the March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine. Click to enlarge.

The March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine will be landing in subscribers’ mailboxes this week and is now on most newsstands coast to coast. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, this is a great time to do it, locking in a great price before the HST comes along. Just sayin’!) As always, the stories will all appear here on the website over the next few weeks. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet interwebby goodness.

On the cover this issue is John Duncan‘s investigation into the Canadian Forces’ future plans in Afghanistan. As the clock ticks down to the 2011 date for pulling out, Duncan finds, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that deadline will be met, and that Canada’s military is quietly prepping for alternate scenarios — including the possibility of Canadian CF-18s supplementing the Nato air campaign. And Aaron Broverman finds that militarization is creeping into other aspects of our lives as well, in the form of a global geopolitical struggle to control the ebb and flow of information on the internet. As repressive regimes abroad—not to mention law-enforcement agencies here at home—look for ever more intrusive ways to monitor civilians online, a small clutch of Canadian hackers are fighting back and working to keep the lines of communication open. And while the Communist Party of Canada has long been in the political wilderness, finds Eric Rail, its leader, Miguel Figeuroa, has been busy anyway, serving as party leader for 17 years and changing Canadian electoral law in some pretty substantial ways in the process.

There’s plenty more: Ashley Holly McEachern sends a postcard from Honduras reporting on the coup that has thrown the country into turmoil; Nav Purewal uncovers the unlikely origins of a Canadian movement to ban the burka; Alison Garwood-Jones reports from January’s Interior Design Show on the designers who are planning for our post-petroleum future; Paul McLaughlin interviews Globe and Mail former Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith; Max Fawcett warns that Canada’s looming pension crisis is a demographic time bomb; and Susan Peters profiles the authors of a new graphic novel telling the story of Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree girl abducted and killed 30 years ago, and whose story has largely gone untold until now.

PLUS: Tara-Michelle Ziniuk on The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Darryl Whetter on e-books; Allison Martell on the global shipping industry; Joshua Hergesheimer on an innovative Ethiopian aid project withering for lack of funds; Herb Mathisen on cellphone tower radiation; Kelly-Anne Reiss on Craik, Saskatchewan’s new eco-village concept; Alixandra Gould on progressive religions; Bruce M. Hicks on public inquiries; Raina Delisle on the aftermath of the Olympics; Ava Baccari on a literary atlas of Toronto; Navneet Alang on the internet’s high-culture pirates; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s broken aid promises.

With new poetry by Jason Camlot; and new fiction by Jessica Westhead.

[Editor’s note: today we launch “Verbatim,” which will be a regular feature where we provide a transcript of our new podcast series, Listen to This. We’ll put these up on the blog shortly after each podcast goes online.]

In the first installation of our new, relaunched podcast series (Oh! And we’re now on iTunes!) Nick Taylor-Vaisey interviewed Scott Gilmore of Peace Dividend Trust, a development NGO based in Ottawa and New York, with projects currently underway in Afghanistan, East Timor, and Haiti. PDT promotes a buy-local strategy for international development, helping connect international aid agencies with local suppliers in the countries where they work. By directing funds to local businesses, PDT believes they see faster, more stable economic recovery in post-conflict zones, with lower overhead costs for funders and higher incomes for local businesspeople.

Listen now at this.org/podcast, or subscribe on iTunes for new interviews every second Monday.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Tell me about Peace Dividend Trust, where it came from, the first moment of its life.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I think this was a baby that was born twice. The first time I was working in East Timor for the UN and was paying $500 a month to a Timorese fellow who had lost everything in the Indonesian fighting and had lost his company and lost his house, and what he had done is basically put a tin roof on the remains of his house, white-washed the walls and charged me $500 to rent the top two floors, because there was no housing there at the time. And one day I saw him hauling into the yard of the house, the burnt-out wreckage of a bus and I thought nothing of it. The next month, right after I gave him my next rent cheque, he had bought tires for it and he had bought a new engine. The next month and after the next rent cheque he was repainting it and in about three months he had a working bus. After about a year an half, he had a fleet of working busses, and had gone from being virtually homeless and jobless with no money, to becoming one of the most successful businessmen in that neighbourhood, employing the most people in that neighbourhood and becoming the seed of recovery in that particular part of town, and it was all because of my rent cheques. So the light bulb went off one day. The international community had arrived, the aid money was going nowhere, (it had not touched the ground), and yet this man had suddenly become a major employer simply on the backs of my rent cheque, and I thought, “Wow, that’s an interesting phenomenon.”

The second moment came when every night after work, myself and some other people that used to work for the UN, would get together for drinks at a grass hut on the beach and complain about our jobs, and complain about how things like the aid money wasn’t arriving, or that the UN jeeps weren’t getting out into the districts because they were missing license plate holders, (even though there were no licenses to put in them), but UN regulations said you had to have a license plate holder so these jeeps sat on the wharf until somebody brought these in from Italy. And we began saying, “there must be a better way to do things”, and one of us suggested that there are a lot of good ideas out here about how to fix peacekeeping and how to improve aid, we should try doing something about it. And that’s where it began about 10 years ago.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Let’s talk a bit about you, let’s go back. You were in East Timor hanging out with some UN associates, how did you get there, what was your route to that route?

Scott Gilmore: It was sheer luck, I had joined the foreign service and was looking for my first posting and Indonesia was falling apart, and I thought, “that would be an interesting place to be.” The government was collapsing, Suharto, the dictator, had resigned, and so I volunteered for it and was sent out to Jakarta. And because I was a low man in the embassy I was given the crap files and one of them was East Timor, because at that time it was a forgotten conflict, there was nobody on the ground, the UN wasn’t there. The only foreigners anywhere near it were nuns and the Red Cross.

So I would go out every couple of months to silently bear witness, to talk to the nuns very furtively, to find out what the latest atrocity was, (or human rights abuse), to record what was actually happening on the ground and report that back up to Ottawa and our permanent mission in New York. It was very depressing and very upsetting, and a very futile exercise as a junior diplomat.

What happened was that, bizarrely, one day, the new Indonesian president just announced he was going to hold a referendum for independence for the Timorese. And suddenly what became a lost cause became the cause celebre. The UN arrived and the donors arrived and the media arrived, and there was only about two or three of us at the time, Western diplomats: somebody for the US embassy, somebody from the Australian embassy and myself, who actually had been paying any attention, who knew any of the Timorese, who could speak the local language, who knew how to get a hold of the guerrillas. So we had very valuable skills for a short period of time and so it wasn’t long going from that to working for the UN because, frankly, there weren’t very many Timorese experts. And even those who had been very, very active on university campuses in Canada and amongst human rights NGOs, who were very big Timor proponents, had no Timor experience, and so we were rare commodities. That’s how I ended up working with the UN.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So what was your role then, you were the expert in the area?

Scott Gilmore: I had a very strange job. It was a very unique UN mission because it was one of the first times the UN actually ran the country, as opposed to just trying to broker peace or maintain peace. The UN was running everything from the health department to creating the East Timorese defense force and I landed in an office called the National Security Advisory office, where myself and a colleague who I had actually known from grad school, found ourselves sitting across a desk from each other at a very young age, doing things like designing with the defence agency for what East Timor should look like, or with the intelligence agency for what East Timor’s supposed to look like, and actually trying to create these things on behalf of the Timorese.

Pretty preposterous actually, given the fact that as a Canadian diplomat, you are by definition a generalist and what I knew about creating a department of defence or intelligence agency can fit an 8-by-10 piece of paper.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So then at that point, you started talking to your colleagues and looking at some problems that existed within this project to rebuild Timor —

Scott Gilmore: That’s right. What happened was there were a lot of us in these preposterous positions, people that were in charge of human rights, people that were in charge of procurement, logistics, police, who were all facing the same challenges. We had a very small amount of time to take a war-torn country and put it on its feet. And whether that meant trying to set up food distribution networks, or a police system, or an intelligence agency, we were all facing very similar problems, which were things like: being able to get paperwork to move through the UN, being able to hire the right people in a quick time, being able to move around the country.

These were nuts and bolts problems–logistical problems. We spend so much time in Western universities and elsewhere debating these grand problems like, what is universal human rights? You know, what are the normative features of democratic reform? How does gender empowerment affect the bureaucratic structure of a third world country? But once you get on the ground, none of that really matters. What matters is, how do you get power into your office? How do you find some local staff? How do you train them? How do you get pens? How do you get from the national capital or the provincial capital if there’s no vehicles?

Nobody pays any attention to these really important nuts and bolts things and Peace Dividend Trust was created to try and pay some attention to some of these things and fix some of these things.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So how long has Peace Dividend Trust been around?

Scott Gilmore: We’re young. The idea started around 1999 or 2000. I quit my day job in 2004, so PDT’s been around for about five or six years. We’ve operated in about 12 different countries so far. We currently have permanent offices in Afghanistan, Haiti, Timor, and we’ve got a project office in the Solomon Islands. And of course, our headquarters is in New York. And in 2010 we will likely be opening an office in Africa.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: What kind of work do you do in these countries? You saw problems when you were in Timor, and you weren’t the only one, so how do you fix these problems?

Scott Gilmore: If you take a lot of the type of work we do, it seems very diverse on the surface. Everything from trying to improve procurement systems, to economic research, to creating wikis for the United Nations. What the common strand is, is that we find and test and implement new ideas for making peace and humanitarian operations work better. So we only do projects that are new projects, in the sense that they’re new ideas.

To give an example, we will never go out and do a microfinance project or build wells in Africa; however, if somebody comes to us and they say, “We have a new idea for building a better well,” or “We think that there’s a better way to manage and target microfinance projects”, then we’ll do that. So we only test new ideas, which is why some people refer to us as a do-tank.

We’ll only do projects that focus on the nuts and bolts; the management, the operations of aid and peacekeeping. We feel this is really the neglected sweet-spot for trying to improve the impact of places like Afghanistan and Haiti. So what do we do? In Afghanistan, we found that the vast majority of the aid money wasn’t actually entering the local economy. Stuff was being bought overseas and flown in, and that was billions and billions of dollars of missed opportunity.

So we put a team of people on the ground whose job it is, is to make it as easy as possible for the laziest procurement officer to buy local, to find an Afghan entrepreneur to provide him with the wheat or water or tires as opposed to finding it in Dubai or Italy. And so far it’s redirected over $370 million of new spending in the Afghan economy. It’s created thousands of jobs, and because of its success, the U.S. government, the British government, NATO and the UN have all changed their procurement policies globally, recognizing one of the fastest and healthiest ways for them to help local economies is to buy local.

In New York, we have a team of people that have been working on this problem that the UN has done 50 peacekeeping missions and they’ve actually never figured out how to do it, they’ve never mapped it out, they’ve never put together a procedural manual on how to launch a peacekeeping mission. So we did that for them. We sat and put our people in their offices in New York and we figured out, okay, what’s a peacekeeping mission supposed to look like? What are you supposed to do in the first ten days? When do you set up your fuel depot? When do you fly in your secretaries? What type of forms are your secretaries supposed to use? And it’s now a pocket-sized baby blue manual called the Mission Start-up Field Guide, which is what every UN manager uses around the world.

So we do very diverse things, but they’re all focused on the nuts and bolts and they’re all new ideas.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Now, it seems like your friends in the West probably love what you do because essentially you make their lives easier, I mean you create a pocket-sized handbook about how to start a peacekeeping mission, but I’m wondering, as helpful as you are to those people on that side, do you find that you are still a foreign voice, you’re still foreign people in foreign lands. What about the local people in Afghanistan and East Timor? How do they react to your presence?

Scott Gilmore: Frankly, they’re more positive, and supportive, and helpful than internationals are. The nationals recognize, whether they’re Afghans or Timorese or Solomon Islanders, that there’s an incredible amount of money being spent on these missions and there’s a lot of foreigners that are being flown in, but that the change on the ground is not as dramatic as everyone expected. You know, they’re not seeing the jobs being created, they’re not seeing roads being improved. And one of the reasons they like PDT and why the local governments and local people are so supportive of PDT is that they recognize that we’re actively trying to change this, that we’re trying to drive money into the local economy, and we’re doing it.

One of the frustrations that I found as a diplomat and now as somebody who’s in the aid industry, is that you pull a random project proposal or project description, from something that’s funded by an international agency in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia and read it, and it will says things like, “This project will seek to support the creation of conditions that will facilitate empowerment of locals to improve this, this, this and this.” But it doesn’t actually do anything. It doesn’t actually say anything. It talks about setting in place processes and holding workshops and this and that, whereas what we’re doing is very simple, we’re pushing money into the economy, we’re making sure Afghan businessmen will get more money and create jobs, and so it’s very tangible, and so they see it.

Compare that to the internationals, they’re not always as supportive because our mere presence implicitly criticizes the aid industry. We’re basically saying that things aren’t working, things are incredibly inefficient. There are so many problems in the way that the international community does its job, whether it’s in Rwanda or Afghanistan, that we’re only having a fraction of the impact we should be having.

When we go to the UN and say, “Listen, we’re going to help you create a Mission Start-up Field Guide,” what we’re also saying implicitly is, “Oh my God, it’s been 50 years of peacekeeping and you still haven’t created a Mission Start-up Field Guide”. So while we’re not that overtly critical, we’re implicitly critical and we don’t get this sort of open-arm support form the internationals anyways.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: Is anyone else doing what you’re doing?

Scott Gilmore: No.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: And why is that?

Scott Gilmore: Well, because it’s not sexy. It’s not sexy, for example, with the donors. The donors, frankly, are much more likely to look at supporting a conference on gender empowerment in Afghanistan, or a workshop that supports capacity building for empowering Afghan government officials because that checks off all the boxes. They’re less likely to get behind something that does something as dull as fixing a logistic system or a communication system, or fixing the way that the UN hires, or the way that the donors plan because it’s just not sexy.

So we don’t have any competitors, but that’s changing because we’ve been remarkably successful. In five years, the impact that we’ve had on peacekeeping, the impact that we’ve had on the way aid is spent has been pretty significant, and now in these difficult economic times a lot of agencies, a lot of Canadian NGOs in particular, are really suffering because money is being cut back, whereas with us we’ve doubled every year. We’ve gotten twice as much donor money every year than the year before and so people begin to realize, “wait a second, these guys are attracting attention and they’re doing good work”, and so we’re now seeing some agencies trying to replicate what we’re doing.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: The reason I ask is because there’s no shortage of people who are critical of development in a broad sense, you know, this idea that Western countries are imposing their solutions to other countries’ problems with just a broad stroke, but you don’t do that.

Scott Gilmore: You know, I find in Canada and in New York, every week there is a conference, or seminar, or brown bag lunch being hosted by agencies, you know the usual suspects of Montreal or Ottawa, to talk about these issues. The neo-imperialism of aid trying to impose these evil World Bank policies on these poor unsuspecting aid recipients.

I frankly have no time for them because the vast majority of the people that are attending these conferences are academics who have had no experience on the ground. They’re espousing positions on behalf of Kenyans or Afghans or others without having actually spent too much time in those places, and they’re using theoretical arguments and ridiculous jargon to make these positions. And when you go in the ground you have to dig pretty hard, for example in Kabul, to find an Afghan who says the international community should pull out here, who says it’s worse now than it was before, you have to dig pretty hard. But you can find one or two of them, and the one and two you can find, get flown to Canada, they get put on the talk shows and they get moved around to universities and they stand up at these conferences and, quite frankly, it’s ridiculous.

I can tell you that the Afghans that I know roll their eyes at these arguments because what they’re more concerned about right now is the fact that their girls can now go to school. Or that fact that the infant mortality rate in Afghanistan has dropped, from 2001 to now, so significantly that every year 30,000 babies survive to their first year who wouldn’t have otherwise under the Taliban. That’s more than all the children in Ottawa under the age of five. So it’s very easy for an academic to stand up and say, “Oh, it’s worse now, we’re trying to impose these Western ideals on a culture that doesn’t want them,” but it’s pretty hard to do that when there’s 30,000 kids looking at you.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: I’m wondering about then, what works and what should be avoided because, no matter the social change that has been sparked by the regime change in Afghanistan, there’s still a pretty brutal war going on, and there’s a lot of combat and Canadians know all about it. What about that strategy?

Scott Gilmore: Well listen, Afghanistan’s a mess, there’s no denying it. And the war, I hesitate to comment too explicitly on what Canada’s doing in Afghanistan right now and what’s working and what’s not, but it is a horrible, horrible mess. And in many ways and many places or parts of Afghanistan, things are worse now than they were ten years ago, there’s no denying it.

But here’s the moral dilemma that I face as a Canadian voter, as somebody whose spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, as somebody whose has worked in Afghanistan; it’s that it’s going to be very, very difficult for them to be happy ending in Afghanistan, but if we were to pull out now, whether it’s pull out Canada’s military, or reduce our aid or withdraw our efforts to just urban centres, it will reduce the moral angst that we have to deal with here in Canada, it will make it easier for Canada politicians, but people will be suffering on the ground.

If one were to do the thought experiment to say, ok let’s say, you can’t pass a Canadian campus without seeing all the posters about “Stop Bush’s war, pull out now”, so let’s imagine, let’s just do that thought experiment, let’s pull out. Let’s pull out all the troops, pull out all of the Canadian forces, what’s going to happen?

Well, let’s say we try to keep our aid there. We’ll only be able to keep our aid there for a handful of months. People forget that before September 11th, the Taliban had kicked out every Western aid agency, and in fact in the days before September 11th, they’d even kicked out the last few Doctors Without Borders that were there. So that would happen again because we would also have to accept that the Taliban will be able to push out the fledging Afghan military and Afghan government.

So the aid’s gone now, the military’s gone, what’s going to happen to the Afghan people? Well, there won’t be any clusterbombs, that’s for sure. There won’t be any collateral damage anymore, but you will go back to the beheadings in the markets and in the stadiums, you will go back to things like the typical way (pre-2001) for Afghan prisoners to be executed, which was to put them into a shipping container and do one of two things; leave it in the sun until the people inside it literally cooked to death, or if you were merciful you threw in a couple grenades.

I will never forget in 2002 when I first entered Kabul, there was all of these shipping containers lined along the side of the road that had been blown up from the inside and I couldn’t figure out how they were damaged this way, and that’s what it was from. The Taliban, or the other warlords would push their enemies into these shipping containers, throw in a grenade, and that was the end of it.

So when you do a thought experiment about us pulling out of Afghanistan and just accepting defeat now, it’s a pretty miserable place that you end up with. None of the girls would be going to school, the infant mortality rate would go back up, the women would be pushed out of civil service, and so this is the dilemma I struggle with. Where things are going well, but the international community is not doing a very good job, frankly, but if we throw in the towel the alternative is pretty nasty.

Nick Taylor-Vaisey: So does that mean sticking with Afghanistan until it’s helicopters on the roof of the US embassy?

Scott Gilmore: Yeah, see that’s the struggle. You know, if your neighbour’s house is on fire and there’s kids on the upper floor who are screaming for help, how long do you try saving them even when you know that the house is going to burn down? And I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a decision I’m glad I don’t have to make. But it’s a debate that’s not being had in Canada, unfortunately, because both sides are being disingenuous.

On the side of those who are for keeping us in Afghanistan, one of the things that’s frustrating me is they’ve continually changed the reasons why as we get worse and worse at it. Originally we were in Afghanistan to get rid of Al Qaeda, and then we went into Afghanistan to cut poppies and opium, and then it was for women, and then it was for economic development, and then it was for AfPak. And as each reason becomes less and less likely to succeed, they change the reasons, so they skew the debate.

The other side, those that want us to pull out, they skew the debate as well because they talk about well, you know, we could be doing so much more in Sudan, that’s a usual, you know, the Canadian military should pull out of there and we should go back to being peacekeepers in Sudan. Well there are two problems with that. Canada has almost never been a peacekeeping nation. No one’s asking for Canadian peacekeepers anywhere, and surely they’re not asking for them in Sudan. The Sudanese government would never allow Canadian peacekeepers in Sudan. And the situation with Sudan is just as messy and just as complicated, but we don’t know about it because there are very few people reporting on south Sudan and Darfur.

It’s a very poor debate that we’re having in Canada and it’s a very, very difficult moral dilemma, and I’m glad I’ve got a day job that doesn’t force me to resolve either one of them.