Former UN ambassador ‘shocked’ by young-voter apathy in Canada
“The civic and political literacy of young Canadians is appallingly low,” the former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations told a group of University of Ottawa graduates Sunday. “Your age group’s involvement in the political process, at all levels of government, stretches any reasonable definition of apathy.”
Fowler, who spent 130 days as a hostage of al-Qaida in Africa in 2008 and 2009, made the remarks after receiving an honourary doctorate — his first — at the university’s fall convocation.
Fowler, 66, said it was “intellectually dishonest” for those who’ve “collectively ignored their civic responsibilities” to moan about the abysmal standards of political leadership in Canada.
Just 54 per cent of adult Canadians voted in the 2008 federal election, which ranked Canada 16th out of 17 “peer countries” in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And barely one in five of those eligible to vote for the first time in 2000 chose to do so.
“You seem to be enthusiastically disqualifying yourselves from any right to demand good government in your own country, and effective Canadian engagement abroad,” Fowler said. “Surely you are going to fix that.”
In an interview, Fowler said he finds the low voting rate among younger Canadians “shocking.”
Despite that, when he speaks to his adult children’s friends, he said, “They feel perfectly free to bitch and scream about the state of governance in our cities or our province or our country.”
But, he adds, “They do nothing about it. What I’m really saying is, they don’t deserve bitching rights.”
There’s a tendency to a “narrower view” of the world among many young Canadians, Fowler said, a sense they’d rather just “hunker down here and hope the world doesn’t get in my way.” But in his view, that’s no longer an option.
“They can’t decide whether to go out there and engage or not, because the world out there is part of their world. And that world will get back at them, whether they like it or not. It’s going to impact them,” he said. “It makes sense for them to want to influence it and change it in a way that will make that impact positive rather than negative.”
In his speech, Fowler — who also served as a foreign-policy adviser to three prime ministers — said the gap between rich and poor continues to grow. The “exploding population” will only make that worse, he said.
“Yours is a world that will necessarily impact everything you do, everything you hope to achieve, and if you allow it to get much sicker, it will threaten your potential successes and diminish your prospects.”
When he was kidnapped by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in December 2008, along with his colleague, Louis Guay, Fowler was acting as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy to Niger. The pair were held hostage in the Sahara desert until their release in April 2009.
Fowler said he’s fully recovered from the ordeal, and is just wrapping up a book about the experience that should be published next fall.
As Canada’s longest-serving UN ambassador, Fowler sat on the Security Council a decade ago, the last time Canada was elected to the UN’s governing body.
He said Canada’s historic failure last month to win election to the Security Council — the first time its candidacy has been rejected — should prompt “a little soul-searching.”
“It’s an election of our peers, and we didn’t measure up,” he said. “Canada can’t run on fumes. It’s nice to say the world needs more Canada, but it’s mostly Canadians who say that.”
Fowler made headlines last spring when he slammed the Harper government’s approach to foreign policy, saying the world was becoming increasingly distrustful of Canada and that the country didn’t deserve a seat on the Security Council.
He described the government’s response to Canada’s rejection — which was to disparage the UN — as “small-minded.”
“The UN matters. The security council takes decisions which have the force of law in Canada instantaneously,” he said. “There’s no other place in the world where that happens.”
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