Government’s Newspeak
The oped below, written with Adrian Bradbury was in The Mark a few weeks ago:
Government’s Newspeak
It is a curious feeling to wake up one morning and have the focus of your career banished from your government’s vernacular. But this is what recently happened to both of us.
An internal DFAIT email was leaked this summer which outlined a series of shifts in the language of Canadian foreign policy. These changes were politically directed, coming from Foreign Affairs Minister Cannon’s office.
The terms “gender equality,” “child soldiers,” “international humanitarian law,” “good governance,” “human security,” “public diplomacy” and “The Responsibility to Protect” have been blacklisted from government parlance.
While already limited to an unprecedented degree on what they are allowed to say in public, Canada’s civil servants and diplomats are now banned from using certain words.
We, respectively, work on the concept of human security and on issues surrounding international humanitarian law and child soldiers in northern Uganda. These terms were once championed by Canada, are in wide use around the world, and represent a wide range of international norms and precedent. Make no mistake, these semantic changes represent fundamental shifts to Canadian foreign policy. Each of the banned or altered terms carry with it significant policy implications, most related to the international human rights agenda.
For example, when speaking of the war in the DRC, where upwards of 3 million people have been killed, and rape is widely used as a tool of war, the terms “impunity” and “justice” can no longer be used when calling for an end to, and punishment for, sexual violence.
The shift from the term International Humanitarian Law (IHL) to simply International Law, not only blurs two entirely different concepts, but abandons the legal mechanisms developed to protect the rights of civilians, women, and children, aid workers, and prisoners of war, rather than states, in armed conflict. IHL also underlies the International Criminal Court, which Canada was instrumental in founding. Are we abandoning the ICC as well?
Expunging the term “gender equality” and replacing it with the term “equality of men and women,” while on the surface semantic, marks a departure from language that Canada fought hard to be included in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and which has since become part of the human rights language.
Finally, banning the terms Human Security and the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) are perhaps the clearest indication that these linguistic shifts are politically motivated, as both were signature foreign policy initiatives of past Liberal governments. The concept of human security focuses international attention on issues that may not threaten states, but that do harm large numbers of individuals – such as landmines. The concept of the R2P argues that governments have the obligation to protect their citizens from mass atrocities and to not commit genocide. Radical ideas indeed.
It is of course entirely appropriate for the current government to define Canada’s foreign policy. However, particularly in a minority parliament, the discussion should be had openly and in the public.
Indeed, last month’s UN summit would have been the ideal place from the Prime Minister to announce his bold new agenda to the world.
Had he attended the summit, he would have heard unabashed reference to many of the ideas he had just banished. There, he could have rebuked UN member states for adopting the international principles Canada was so instrumental in developing.
He could have done so on the very day, at the very podium, where President Obama gave the most forceful defence of the UN by a U.S. president since Truman.
On the other hand, perhaps these changes are not anything to brag about.