Roland Paris

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals favour multilateralism and soft power on foreign policy—for now

Roland Paris considers the Harper government’s rhetoric on Iran.

Roland Paris worries about the Prime Minister’s rhetoric on Iran.

Roland Paris considers the Prime Minister’s comments on soldiers and arguments.

Roland Paris reads the Prime Minister’s interview with this magazine and wonders what Mr. Harper is worried about.

http://www.vimeo.com/12903946

Word last night from Roland Paris at the University of Ottawa, with whom I recently travelled in Afghanistan and who sent an Access to Information request last April for public-opinion polling carried out by Canadian authorities in Afghanistan. Turns out the Canadian Forces have been asking a lot of questions to Kandaharis. And we can even see what the questions are. We just can’t see most of the answers. Here’s a web page with the .pdfs of the massively-redacted files Roland received, along with his letter of complaint to the Information Commissioner. Roland points out that the full results, if we could see them, would be at least as accurate a barometer of progress or its absence in Kandahar as the Defence department’s own quarterly reports on the situation there.

So my trip to Afghanistan was a Government of Canada junket. Might as well just say it outright. They (Privy Council Office, Foreign Affairs, and National Defence; it was DND that extended the invite) run occasional “opinion leaders’ tours” so people with some chance of influencing the national debate over Afghanistan can actually see the place. Typically the guest list is a mix of academics, think tankers and journalists. The model is very similar to the one that led to me being invited by NATO to visit Afghanistan from Brussels in October 2007, except that, of course, that group was multinational and this one was Canadian.