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METTA SPENCER: Today I get a big treat. In the 54 years that I’ve lived in Canada, this guy was the best foreign minister Canada has had. So, I’m thrilled to talk to Lloyd Axworthy.
I think you and Alan Rock teamed up to strongly urge the Europeans to use that Russian money that’s mostly in Belgium. And they said, “nothing doing”!
LLOYD AXWORTHY: It’s disturbing to realize that the European Union simply caved into the pressures of the bankers and the pettifoggers and the legal guys, including three European Union countries who were pro-Russian.
And you had the United States undermining it. As you saw last week when they talked about their national security strategy, it was very clear that they wanted to reserve those Russian stability it needs. And to her credit, Chrystia Freeland, who was the finance minister, actually picked up on the idea. We brought in legislation – a new act enabling Canada to take the step to converting these assets. And she raised it at the G7. So it really was the new government under Mr. Carney – because he’s a banker who had no interest in it. He’s part of that club. And so when he took over at the G7 meeting, they didn’t even mention it. It wasn’t on the agenda. So Canada has dropped off the radar on this one.
SPENCER: I didn’t realize that Canada had anything to do with what happened two days ago when the European leaders met.
AXWORTHY: We just didn’t want to participate. We have 22 billion dollars of Russian assets in Canada, and as a result, we should have been part of that discussion.
It was Canada, two years ago, at the G7 who put this proposal forward and we were working very actively with the Europeans on how to put together the right legal system to repurpose these assets.
But once the Mr. Carney’s government came in, they just dropped the whole thing. He’s part of that inner circle of bankers who think it’s more important to preserve the banking system than to preserve the security of Ukraine.
SPENCER: Well, they do have an argument. I don’t know how much weight to give it, but they say that it would be considered a precedent, and that next time, if one of the European countries was considered to have violated international law, the shoe would be on the other foot and it wouldn’t be so good for the rule to apply. So they’d be establishing this legal thing that they don’t like.
AXWORTHY: If you have enough lawyers, you can always make a explanation. But after the Second World War, Germany paid reparations. In the attack on Kuwait, Iraq paid reparations. We’ve had five or six reparations in the Congo. There’s a basic international law that an aggressor has to pay for the damage and the violence that they’ve done. So how do you do it? Well, we had a situation where Russia was still at war. They were out to destroy the Ukrainian infrastructure. And the opportunity arose to use Russian government assets, not just personal ones, to start supporting Ukraine.
It’s overwhelmingly difficult effort to stop the stop the Russians. Putin has no compunction about how many people are killed or what it’s doing to his economy. He’s got this crazy notion. But in lieu of transferring Russian assets to Ukraine, the European Union has now decided that they’re going to make a commitment of a $90 billion loan, but that’s going to be based upon the taxpayers of Europe. They’re going to be saying, “we have to carry this additional financial burden.” That just gives more ammunition to the far-right parties in Europe to say, “Oh God, Ukraine is making us go broke. We’re having to raise taxes to do these things.” So rather than holding Russia accountable, Russia’s off the hook.
SPENCER: Putin reacted as if he’d been badly damaged by this. And I think this Ursula lady tried to put the best face on it possible, to make it sound as if this is maybe just as good as what they were going to do, and that the Ukrainians will get the help they need. Of course, ‘we’ll just pay for it ourselves.’
AXWORTHY: It’s camouflage. There was $220 billion of Russian assets being held in a place called Euroclear in Belgium – $220 billion. The two European Union has said they will now make a contribution of $90 million so there’s a very large gap. This is enough to keep Ukraine going. It’s not enough to give the kind of support it needs to continue to push back against Russia. This is what I would call a holding action.
SPENCER: This upbeat conclusion – they tried to spin it.
AXWORTHY: It’s dissembling, and it just points to what I think Canadians should be concerned about – the unreliability of the European Union. We’re into this new world where you can’t rely on Americans anymore. The Russians and the Chinese, all the big powers, are flexing their muscles. European Union has held onto notions of law and liberal democracy, but they don’t have the political guts or mojo to make it work, and they allow Hungary and Slovakia and these countries to put a wedge in the works. When we started saying we have to diversify our relationships, Mr. Carney is off to Europe to do it, but Europe, increasingly, in my view, is not a reliable partner
SPENCER: What is Trump going to do?
AXWORTHY: It’s very clear he’s going Russia’s way. He refuses to really implement the sanctions effectively. Here’s again, another total contradiction. He likes to brag about how he’s amassed the largest naval armada in the history of the world around Venezuela and is intercepting their oil tankers. Well, Russia has the same kind of a sanction against them, and they’re the ones who are using these ghost ships. I don’t see Mr. Trump placing an armada in the Baltic ocean or anywhere else to hold the Russians to account.
From his first term, for reasons known only to him, or maybe the people close to him, he was a Russian fan, and this whole peace proposal he put out was based on one basic aim: that Ukraine loses and Russia wins.
SPENCER: Well, Happy New Year, or whatever is coming up and happy birthday, but honest to god, I can’t find much to be happy about.
AXWORTHY: I agree. We’re badly governed in this world. I don’t think we have effective leadership anywhere that I can find in terms of meeting the challenges that are there. We’re turning our government over to the corporations and the business world to make the decisions. Mr. Carney is step-by-step turning us into a neoliberal petro-state, and where’s the leadership coming?
But around the world, there’s still a kind of effort by ordinary people to go on the street, to protest against corruption. There are young Americans in the United States trying to stop the Trump’s National Police force called ICE from deporting people. You’ve got women in Afghanistan getting in the way of the Taliban. Look look what happened in Australia this weekend after a mass murder! The number of people who showed up and tried to do the protection! There’s still a lot of good sense. There’s something to the Christmas story. There are a lot of people with goodwill. But unfortunately, that hasn’t translated into good government.
SPENCER: I have friends who focus on nonviolent resistance – including even the notion of protecting Canada from potential US invasion, however unlikely that may seem. They reminded me that there was this enormous demonstration with a million people or something. I read The New York Times every day on my iPad. There was nothing mentioning it. They don’t cover these movements! I mean, the New York Times is as progressive and lefty as you’re going to get in mainstream America. Why aren’t they paying attention to this kind of resistance?
AXWORTHY: It’s a good question. A lot of the traditional, regular media in the United States are now owned by large corporations who want to make sure that they don’t ruffle Mr. Trump’s feathers.
SPENCER: The Washington Post,yes. But the New York Times shouldn’t.
AXWORTHY: They are not always out there on the edge. For example, the war Secretary, Mr. Hegseth, announced Friday that the United States was now going to no longer abide by the rules of the Landmines Treaty, which they had committed to way back when. And he said, ‘we can use landmines wherever we want, where we think our security is.’ It wasn’t covered in the New York Times. It was covered in The Washington Post because they broke it. The story wasn’t covered in The Globe or The Toronto Star. It wasn’t covered on CBC, and yet, this is an issue very important to Canadians.
But no Canadian official is standing up and saying, “We object! We’re going to make a response to this.” There’s just so much hidden under the carpet that I increasingly do my writing in Substack because I find that social media has a lot more informed, responsible reactions. You can have a real dialog in a debate, and it’s also an incredible form of good information.
SPENCER: You’re right. I’m an enthusiast too, about Substack. We’ve shifted over completely and disseminate all our stuff through Substack. I believe you finished your term as the head of the Migration Council only a few days ago. Was that when you started your Substack?
AXWORTHY: Oh, I’ve been doing it for the last six months or so. I have a birthday edition out today, so you’ll have to read it.
SPENCER: Okay, wonderful. I should let you go. You’ve got family with chocolate cake, but first let’s speculate a little about how to save the world. I think if I put my highest priority on anything, it is how to get international law enforced.
AXWORTHY: You have to start with rules and laws and treaties and agreements. We should be having a much stronger pushback on the efforts to dismantle them. We had the Paris Agreement with governments committing to deal with serious threats and risks to people – extreme weather patterns, drought, floods, freezing, you name it. But sudddenly the security issue takes precedence, and now every country, including our own, is backfilling. All kinds of excuses about let’s continue to use fossil fuels.
I even saw our prime minister saying, ‘ I don’t think rules and regulations work anymore. I want actions.’ Well, rules and regulations do work. They’re there for a reason – to hold people accountable. If you’re allowing a free flow of fossil fuels and investing money to make sure that more of it is produced and shipped, we’re going to have more forest fires and more droughts and more floods. It’s a very practical reality, but it’s being covered up by this lack of political will.
I was in politics close to 30 years as an elected representative, and I can’t remember where I’ve just seen such a lack of what I would call serious democratic procedures. Parliament’s treated simply as a rubber stamp. And now these ultra-wealthy Digital Bros and oligarchies – seven or eight white men who make more money than 50% of the population.
They buy votes, they influence decisions. They inserted this guy, J. D. Vance, into the Trump government. These guys are wicked and nasty, and they don’t believe in democracy. We’re letting our democratic systems wear away, even here in Canada, where we were slowly making progress in the participation of indigenous people. Well, we’re now back-filling on that. You know, it’s more important to get the pipeline built than to make sure that there’s full participation.So I think we have to start asking for a better system of democracy than we have.
SPENCER: A number of countries are trying to start some sort of UN reform. I don’t know how far that can go, since the UN is really run by countries and not individuals. Unless we get some sort of Parliamentary Assembly that’s run like a citizens’ assembly with sortition and human beings making the decisions instead of the governments, it’s hard to see how anything can be enacted. I don’t want to end with such a sad projection, but 2026 is coming up and I don’t have anything cheerful to say
AXWORTHY: Well, Metta, as long as there’s people like you who still believe in these basic principles and tenets, then it’s alive. We have to introduce the lessons we’ve learned to young men and women. And even these elections in the United States, younger men and women now are saying we’re going to provide free childcare and open grocery stores. But we have to keep the Bay Street corporate crowd from thinking that they can run without any accountability
SPENCER: Okay, we’ll keep after it. What are you going to do with yourself now that you have all this free time?
AXWORTHY: I have an interesting project going on in Manitoba. The premier has asked me to chair a major study on railway relocation, about how we can take the historic railway system of the Winnipeg region and modernize it to open up new green spaces to provide better public transportation. I’m back where I started out many years ago, working at a community level. I’m enjoying that. And I can now write with total freedom. I think I have another book in me. I spent all those years on the Refugee and Migration Council, and I want to write a book about the migration refugee issue from that perspective. Going from when we thought we could make changes to now, when it’s become a third rail.
SPENCER: Have a wonderful birthday! Thank you so much.