John Baird's Summer Tour '11

On John Baird's trial-by-fire mission to China, the Libya campaign's magical disappearing act, and the we-swear-they're-actually-important international summit circuit.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird is off to China to strike up trade and lecture his counterparts on human rights that they'll surely take to heart. The Sun Media editorialists, in an inadvertently hilarious piece, tell Baird to basically deliver an ultimatum to “Red China” (they call it Red China every time, which brings to mind everything awful about the 1950s) over their rights record. Baird “has to speak loudly that Red China must curb its human rights abuses if it expects Canadian coal to keep coming,” they write, but he also must “tread softly” if he wants to help fulfill the Tory goal of doubling trade with China by 2015 – and it's not as though the honourable minister is exactly known for treading softly in anything he does. So Baird's in a kind of "damned if he doesn't, damned if he does" scenario, but such is the life of a foreign minister.

In other matters foreign, Scott Taylor of The Halifax Chronicle Herald wonders if Canada will have “the only seat left at the proverbial Libyan rebel table,” given how much we've invested ourselves in a conflict that Europeans are abandoning left, right, and centre. In the rush to “give Canada 'a big seat at the table' within the NATO alliance,” Taylor says we've probably involved ourselves too deeply in a conflict that won't have much in the way of winners. The U.S. clearly doesn't want to attach itself to the war for too long, Norway's pulled out, the Dutch have stopped bombing, Italy's rethinking its part in the mission, and even France and the U.K. are considering ways to hastily bring about an end to the campaign. “One has to wonder, why?” asks Taylor about Canada's unrelenting involvement. Don't look to us for the answer on that one.

And Gordon Smith, writing in The Globe and Mail, urges Canada not to let the myriad international bodies – the “game of summit musical chairs” that is the UN Security Council, the G8, and the G20 – pass it by. The Canada-less Security Council could soon expand to nine permanent members (adding Brazil, Germany, Japan, and India) while the G8 is fast becoming merely a security forum, a sort of political extension of NATO. Which is why it's time Canada went about hitching itself to the G20, says Smith, as it's emerging as the world's premier economic summit. “We must realize that it is essential the G20 succeed and act accordingly,” says Smith. “If it doesn’t, the risk is that we shall be dropped from the inner table.” So the government ought to invest itself heavily in Mexico's G20 summit next year, says Smith. Although, considering how the G20 summit went down in Toronto last year, they might rebuff our offer altogether.