For a certain generation Two Freedoms invokes a nostalgic era when Canada briefly strode on the world stage. In 1955 the nation had 118,000 men and women in uniform and the world’s fourth largest air force. And now? “When a Canadian surface vessel HMCS Athabaskan sailed to Haiti to position itself off the coast where Canadian forces, replete with medics, nurses, technicians and doctors were to be deployed to come to the aid of the local population, amphibious small vessels had to be borrowed from the Americans to get our own folks ashore,” Hugh Segal wrote.
Critics lament a “decade of darkness” in Canadian defence spending and foreign policy but it has been five decades and “darkness” is debatable. Electors decided generations ago they could not have a big navy and pensions and medicare and good schools all at the same time, and made their choice. This was not a conspiracy. It was the will of the voters.
Hugh Segal, former senator, died last August 9 at 72. He published Two Freedoms in 2016. He was a warm and thoughtful man and Two Freedoms is a warm and thoughtful book. Segal lamented Canada was not a big power or even a middle one.
“There is nothing particularly venal or myopic about Canadian foreign policy goals or desired outcomes in the key regions of the world,” he wrote. “They are simply wildly unambitious and surprisingly narrow for a modern democracy like Canada.”
“We need a radical reboot,” wrote Segal. The instinct of the Department of Foreign Affairs was to “go along to get along.” Segal lamented Ottawa thinks small: “We spend less than 1.5 percent of our GDP on defence and deployment capacity.”
Yet the current tide is unmistakable and Two Freedoms swam against it. The cabinet rates Indigenous land claims a more pressing challenge than military recruitment. We live in an age of nationalism, and everyone wants the right to be left alone.
This troubled Segal. He advocated a muscular Canadian foreign policy committed to combating freedom from fear and freedom from want. “The lessons of history are sadly and inevitably clear,” warned Two Freedoms. “The collapse of freedom from want into a state of economic and social despair can produce huge, even cataclysmic consequences.”
We embraced a “lazy, liberal optimism” of “sovereignty uber alles”, Segal wrote. “The freedoms that matter most and whose protection should be central to Canadian foreign policy are the freedom from fear and freedom from want. How these two freedoms are built, strengthened, attained and defended should form the true nucleus of a modern foreign policy mission worldwide.”
Instead, cabinet since 2012 sold 52 embassies and missions abroad and decided they’d sooner spend the money on children’s tax credits. Nobody seemed to mind.
By Holly Doan
Two Freedoms: Canada’s Global Future, by Hugh Segal; Dundurn; 228 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-34456; $19.99
