Tag Archives: United Nations

Staples on Canada and NATO

Rideau Institute president Steven Staples discusses the future of NATO, interview published in the Globe and Mail, Monday, March 22, 2010, p. A4 (no online version): Leaving Afghanistan is the right move for Canada, says the president of the Rideau Institute, as he envisions what NATO’s future should be On Thursday in Ottawa, two of […]

Experts agree: Peacekeeping is alive!

Four years ago, David Bercuson, Director of the DND-funded Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, declared that UN peacekeeping was dead: As far as UN-led operations,… there just aren’t any left in the world today and you ought to really know that. These old Blue Helmet operations which our army stopped doing back in the […]

Fowler scorches Canadian foreign policy

Former Canadian diplomat Robert Fowler launched a blistering attack on the foreign policy of recent Canadian governments during a speech to the Liberal Party’s “thinkers’ conference” on Sunday (video of speech here). Fowler, now retired, was a senior member of the Canadian foreign policy establishment for decades, serving in a wide variety of posts, including […]

Canada and UN peacekeeping

A new fact-sheet published by the Peace Operations Working Group documents the collapse in Canadian government support for UN peacekeeping since the early 1990s. As recently as 1992, Canada was the single largest contributor of personnel to UN peacekeeping missions. We have since fallen to 56th place. In October 2009, we contributed just 55 of […]

UN pulls half its staff out of Afghanistan

On November 5, 2009 the United Nations pulled half of the staff it had in Afghanistan out of the country. A total of 600 of the 1,100 foreign UN workers currently in Afghanistan will now temporarily depart until the situation gets better. The UN also threatened to permanently remove all staff if the situation continues to […]