Hitchhiking Home From Libya

Why should Ottawa pay millions to evacuate Canadians who shouldn't have been there in the first place?

In the Ottawa Citizen, David B. Harris makes the case that the Canadian government’s efforts to evacuate our citizens from Libya has set a dangerous precedent. He argues that faced with “dreadful national debt … we are diverting precious diplomatic, military and other government resources” on evacuation efforts. He believes the Canadians who willingly traveled to Libya knew the risks of going to a “country-sized prison camp” and he wonders how many of those being evacuated are merely “Canadians-of-convenience” who hold dual citizenship with other countries. Harris is right that the current situation raises some difficult questions about the extent of responsibility to citizens, but the notion that travelers should have been aware of the danger Gadhafi posed shouldn’t let Ottawa off the hook, particularly because our government showed little determination to depose him before the current crisis erupted. And by the extension Harris’s argument, would we not rescue Canadians from New Zealand or Haiti because they should have known such countries are earthquake-prone? Surely that would be cruel.

While some observers, including the National Post’s George Jonas, portray the current uprisings in the Arab world as essentially “illiterate mobs” rising up against their masters, the Post’s Conrad Black says it is their affluence, not their backwardness, that has pushed Arabs into the street. With a per capita annual GDP of $13,000, Libyans are “far from grudgingly poor,” he argues. “The takeaway message of non-democratic government in the last 50 years is that those who put democracy ahead of economic development just get back to despotism,” he writes. “Those who put economic development first achieve prosperity and then democracy.” In light of this, Black draws two important conclusions: China’s rising affluence is surely a growing threat to the ruling communists, and the uprisings in the Middle East will only be sustained if they’re matched with sustained economic growth. Black isn’t too optimistic of that happening, but considering Arab citizens are sitting on oceans of oil, one would hope they find enough wealth to go around.