Liaison Newsletter > LIAISON Vol. 3, No. 5, September 1999

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UNA-Canada: Think Globally and Act Locally
By Geoffrey Pearson, National President

The principles and purposes of the UN Charter have long been an inspiration for Canadian statesmen. It was Louis St. Laurent, the first Secretary of State for External Affairs, who spoke in 1946 of the vocation of the UN as being Canada’s vocation too, and all Canadian governments since then have acted in this spirit.

This is not to say that they have regarded the Charter as sacrosanct. Far from it. From the start, Canada has had misgivings about the veto powers of the Permanent Members, and, more recently, we have sought to amend the Charter to provide for increased membership on the Council. Moreover, the Charter prohibition of intervention in the domestic affairs of Member States is at odds with the priority Canada gives to the protection of human rights.

Nevertheless, the concept, and often the reality, of international co-operation to keep the peace and to promote the norms and practice of one law for all in an ever-more interdependant world accords with Canada’s place in such a world as a nation that depends on the free movement of goods and people. We also bring a relatively impartial and objective judgment to bear on the problems and disputes that threaten “We, the peoples”.

We are, of course, a fortunate country compared to most members of the UN, and we run the risk either of expecting too much of the behaviour of others or of turning inwards to debate the nature of threats to our own identity and future.Yet this very debate has come increasingly to reflect the way the peoples of the world are interacting.

As a nation of immigrants from many lands, we ought to be at the forefront of ways to reconcile ethnic and cultural differences and to build a global regime of international behaviour. The efforts to rid the world of landmines and to create an international criminal court do, in fact, represent this match of Canada and the changing world.

The UN, however, is still, and will long continue to be, no doubt, an association of sovereign states. It is, and will be, the task of UNA-Canada and all concerned Canadians to try to reconcile the practices of UN Member States, and especially the suspicions of our powerful neighbour, with the purposes of the Charter, and with the trends of the time. Think globally and act locally is still a good slogan. UNA-Canada tries to do both by helping Canadians to understand and to support the ideals for world order and equity which motivated the UN’s founders.