The Nuclear Ban Treaty and the cloud over Trudeau’s ‘feminist’ foreign policy

“Because it’s 2015 …”

The Canadian Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, elected in October 2015, claims to be ushering in a new era in Canadian foreign policy. Declaring himself a feminist—and because, as he famously declared, “it’s 2015” ¹ —the prime minister insisted on gender balance in his cabinet, arguing that in both domestic and international settings, the equitable, high-level inclusion of women benefits policy decision-making. Since her appointment in 2016, his feminist foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, has emerged as a prominent global champion of policies and practices better serving—and empowering—women and girls. Though the focus of this paper is on the serious limitations of the Trudeau–Freeland bid to break decisively from the past, the serious steps taken in the direction of a “feminist foreign policy” should be acknowledged.

As Exhibit A, in 2017, the government published a comprehensive National Action Plan for the implementation of the landmark UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) on Women, Peace and Security. ² The Plan established a goal of ensuring that 95 percent of Canadian aid is directed toward gender equality by 2022, a welcome change from what Stephen Brown referred to as the “instrumentalization of foreign aid” under the previous Conservative government of Stephen Harper—that is, the use of aid as a means to the end of limiting women’s rights, by, for example, withholding from its “Maternal, Newborn and Child Health” initiative any funds “to support abortion services, even where they were legal.” ³ The Trudeau government also launched the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations, to increase the number of women in military and police peacekeeping, ⁴ and increased available funding to civil society groups through the “Women’s Voice and Leadership” initiative. ⁵ Internationally, it used its presidency of the G7 in 2018 to obtain a commitment of close to $4 billion for educational opportunities for girls and women in conflict zones. ⁶

Drawing on the UN’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda for its inspiration is both logical and laudable. As has been argued, however, the “WPS agenda is not in any way exhaustive of what a feminist foreign policy entails. Its contents, framings and implications have been subject to substantive critique among feminist scholars.” ⁷ Moving beyond the simple addition of women to existing structures, a feminist focus on the gendered constructions of the institutions within which policies are made is needed to produce a thoroughgoing re-articulation of the scope and nature of international peace and security.

The Trudeau government, for example, has been fiercely criticized for allowing the sale of light armoured vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia, a country with one of the world’s worst records of women’s (and other human) rights. In a satirical exposé of the prime minister’s hypocrisy, Kevin Dowse imagined a press conference in which Trudeau defended the sale:

‘I am going to keep saying loud and clear that I AM a feminist … and that I AM going to keep selling weapons to an oppressive regime that imposes travel and employment bans on women, until both statements are met with a shrug.’ Trudeau ended the press conference by aiming an LAV’s anti-tank missile gun at a large sign that read THE PATRIARCHY, and blowing the sign to smithereens. ⁸

Unarguably, the two gravest threats to global peace and security are climate change and nuclear weapons. Though the Trudeau government claims to take both issues seriously, its paltry performance and contradictory stance on each has earned the widespread ire of scholars and activists in Canada and abroad. In the case of climate change, the government’s adoption of its predecessor’s feeble greenhouse gas emissions targets, and its support for pipelines carrying dangerous and dirty “tar sands” oil, against the wishes of Indigenous peoples, are among the policy choices generating the greatest criticism and fiercest opposition. The focus of this paper, though, is on the government’s opposition to a major new agreement, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which not only seeks to finally achieve the long-cherished global goal of a world free of the threat of nuclear annihilation, but in its logic and language explicitly links issues of disarmament and gender, reframing “security” as fundamentally a question not of state but human (and environmental) security. It is this policy choice above all, we will argue, that does the gravest harm to—and in fact, makes a mockery of—the government’s claim of advancing a feminist foreign policy. Repeatedly linking women with peace and security in public statements might succeed in garnering support among those not paying close attention to the actions of the government (especially in the absence of informed reporting by the mainstream media), and the Trudeau government may be correct in its unstated but evident assumption that declaratory policy that contradicts action policy can win the day. ¹¹ But to place “the Bomb” off-limits from a “feminist foreign policy,” as we will argue the government has effectively—even patronizingly—done, is to explode the heart, and expose the hollowness, of the whole enterprise.

Peace and security: Repositioning, or revisioning?

The National Action Plan 2017–2022 begins with the recognition that “if we want global peace and security, we must involve women in every aspect of it—from conflict prevention, peacemaking and humanitarian assistance to post-conflict recovery and state building.” ¹² While the announcement of the creation of the position of Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security in September 2018 can be seen as an apt step in furthering this objective, ¹³ it should also signal a major review and revisioning of foreign (and defence) priorities, including the vexed but vital question of Canada’s complicated relationship with, and long-standing strategic dependence on, nuclear weapons. Certainly, the announcement of this symbolically significant ambassadorship could and should help create the intellectual space needed to question more probingly whether a feminist foreign policy is compatible with continued membership in NATO, the organization at the traditional (that is, non-feminist) core of Canada’s security alliances and responsibilities. The Trudeau government’s decision to bow to US pressure to oppose and boycott the negotiation of a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons reveals a fundamental choice to side with those who see (or have a vested interest in presenting) nuclear weapons as effective and important contributions to their security. It also sets the Canadian government against an array of domestic and international civil society organizations (notably, the Nobel-prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons—ICAN), as well as the more than 100 non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS), tired of the failed promise of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to deliver “negotiations in good faith” (as stipulated in its famous Article VI ¹⁴ ) leading not just to nuclear abolition but to general and complete disarmament. Canada has long sought to balance its NATO and NPT obligations, regarding both as bastions of international peace and security. If ever there was a logic to this “having-it-both-ways” stance, however, it was a Cold War logic, which should, in the view of almost all non-NATO NPT states, have long since given way to the logic of denuclearizing, and indeed demilitarizing, world affairs. NATO, from this perspective, need not dissolve, but must denuclearize: a nuance that a “feminist foreign policy”—or any self-respecting ambassador for Women, Peace and Security—might be expected to grasp.

Rethinking security: A few preliminary (feminist) remarks

While Trudeau’s foreign policy might be considered feminist in the non-trivial sense that it attempts to increase the number of women playing an active role in government, military, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by re-orienting funding and policies in this direction, a much deeper feminist analysis is needed for important fundamental societal changes to be realized. For, while it is true that empowering women can lead to dramatic changes in policymaking, to realize that potential we must re-think the very construction of the concept of “security,” appreciating the pervasive gendering of existing notions of power and domination, strength and weakness, in the global order.

For several decades, scholars have sought to articulate ways that gendered ideas of masculinity have codified and constrained ideas of what an “efficient” and “effective” foreign policy entails. The issue is not biological differences between men and women, but the way specific behaviours—strength, rationality, objectivity—are gendered “masculine,” while others—vulnerability, emotional responses, subjectivity—are gendered “feminine.” In international relations, the traditional tendency has been toward not just accepting but celebrating those characteristics gendered “masculine,” and, in the process, rendering them seemingly synonymous with the “real world” (man’s world) security of the state. As Carol Cohn and Sara Ruddick have argued:

Once the gender-coding takes place … then any system of thought or action comes to have gendered positions within it. For example, we see the devaluation and exclusion of “the feminine” as shaping and distorting basic national security paradigms and policies. And once the devaluation-by-association-with-the-feminine takes place, it becomes extremely difficult for anyone, female or male, to take the devalued position, to express concerns or ideas marked as “feminine.” What then gets left out is the emotional, the concrete, the particular, human bodies and their vulnerability, human lives and their subjectivity. ¹⁵

In the context of current Canadian policy, it is interesting to note that just such a reframing took place with regard to the seemingly “intractable” issue of landmines in the 1990s. As long as “big players” in the landmine world were able to relegate humanitarian considerations to questions of “state security,” the issue was indeed intractable. But when a global civil movement, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL)—working closely with the International Red Cross and Crescent—was able to find some key state backers, a ban became suddenly both feasible and desirable. The most important state backer of all was Canada, with the diplomatic dynamism (and unorthodoxy) of Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy pivotal in producing the 1997 “Ottawa Convention,” as it is globally known, a comprehensive prohibition with innovative provisions for mine-clearing, victim assistance, and environmental remediation, couched in the language—and shaped by the logic—of human security. Though Axworthy did not claim he was motivated by a “feminist foreign policy,” millions of women and children benefited immensely from the ban on landmines, just as they suffered disproportionately from their use.

With 164 states parties—and with few states outside the regime still using, and even fewer producing, the once commonplace weapons—the Ottawa Convention stands as a crowning achievement of Canadian diplomacy. Could the remarkable lack of fanfare in Ottawa surrounding its twentieth anniversary in December 2017 be related to potentially awkward parallels with the Nuclear Ban Treaty then freshly adopted by the General Assembly? From the outset, ICAN modelled its campaign explicitly on that of the ICBL—though it had to look to Dublin, and Vienna, and other capitals, to find its “Ottawa.” ¹⁸

Is the difference in the Canadian approach simply one of the destructive scale of the weapon in question: that the bigger you get, the harder it is to “risk” a ban? It seems unlikely, as Canada wholeheartedly supports the Conventions banning biological and chemical weapons—bans creating the very “legal gap” that the nuclear ban seeks to fill. But mines, it is true, are not “the Bomb,” and predictably the human-centred language of nuclear disarmament has been challenged by the many champions of the (male-dominated) status quo. Indeed, we wonder whether there may be a broader connection between the more general demise of the human security agenda and the failure to add an authentically feminist dimension to it. In other words, without such a dimension necessarily radicalizing the government’s approach to arms control and disarmament, is not the decline of the human security agenda inevitable? Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will—the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—has pointed out that resistance to the feminist anti-nuclear discourse is expressed in tellingly gendered ways:

The association of masculinity with militarism, particularly in the context of nuclear weapons, is one piece of the puzzle impeding disarmament and the pursuit of demilitarised security arrangements. The association of weapons and war as a symbol of masculine strength makes it harder to open up discussions about disarmament. One current example is that proponents of abolishing nuclear weapons (or even of discussing humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons) are put down as unrealistic and irrational—and as ‘emotional’ and ‘effeminate.’ … This is also a problem for proliferation. When nuclear weapons are seen as a symbol of strength, they become attractive to others. They are seen as the platinum credit card of state security and as giving admission to a very elite club of powerful states. ¹⁹

Canada’s obligations: Nuclear weapons and the international order

It is too rarely recalled that the first resolution adopted by the United Nations (January 1946) established a Commission to “deal with the problems raised by the discovery of atomic energy,” and directed the new Commission to make “specific proposals … for the elimination from national armaments of atomic weapons and of all other major weapons adaptable to mass destruction.” ²⁰ Canada, of course, was supportive of this important marker—made with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ruins, and unprecedented radiation sickness ravaging those left alive—placing nuclear weapons beyond the pale of a civilized, or sustainable, world order.

As the Cold War deepened, the marker faded. By the 1960s, concerns over seemingly imminent, widespread proliferation began to take precedence, and the international community responded with the NPT, a grand and somewhat awkward “bargain” bestowing the dubious status of nuclear-weapon state on just five powers—the Permanent Five (P5) members of the UN Security Council—on condition that they negotiate the progressive reduction and complete elimination of their arsenals. Disarmament, in short—a nuclear-weapon-free world—was the price the nuclear-armed states declared themselves prepared to pay for non-proliferation—with the role of all other states parties not merely limited to honouring their own obligation not to “go nuclear,” but making sure the P5 honoured their obligation to “go non-nuclear.”

Despite its extraordinary success in limiting proliferation to three non-parties (India, Israel, and Pakistan) and one break-out state (North Korea), the NPT has been hobbled by two major weaknesses: the subsidiary bargain in Article IV identifying “civil” nuclear energy as a reward for non-proliferation, creating a group of over 30 “threshold states” producing weapons-grade fissile material (or material which could easily be enriched to weapons-grade); and, more fundamentally, the lack of any means for non-nuclear states to hold the P5 accountable for failing to act in the “good faith” demanded by Article VI to move toward Global Zero. The Treaty, which was concluded in 1968 and entered into force in 1970, was originally set to expire after 25 years in an effort to concentrate the minds and focus the actions of the P5. In 1995, however, amid high expectations that the end of the Cold War would see the start of Article VI implementation, the Treaty was indefinitely extended. Soon after, however, expectations were confounded, not least by the expansion of a still fully nuclearized NATO in the late 1990s.

In sum, Article IV has created a crisis of “virtual” proliferation, and Article VI has been honoured far more in the breach than the observance. By 2010, it was clear that many NNWS were coming to the conclusion that with the traditional NPT process—built around five-yearly Review Conferences (RevCons) preceded by annual Preparatory Committees (PrepComs)—not likely to produce the promised outcome, a bold reframing of the issue was needed.

At the 2010 Review Conference—a moment of both impatience and optimism in the wake of President Barack Obama’s speech in Prague the previous year pledging American fealty to the vision of “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons” ²¹ —the unanimously adopted Final Declaration explicitly expressed, for the first time in the history of the Treaty regime, “deep concern at the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.” ²² Although such a statement seems uncontroversial—in fact, blindingly obvious—there was a reason such language had not been favoured before, challenging as it does the state-centrism at the heart of both the nuclear arms control regime and the nuclear weapons status quo.

Indeed, it is not too strong to say that something of a diplomatic revolt was underway. As the promise of the “Prague Agenda” soon faded, sabotaged perversely by Obama’s commitment to a $1 trillion+, three-decade “modernization” of US nuclear forces, what became known as the “Humanitarian Initiative” ²³ rapidly gained traction. Drawing on important new research on the global effects of even a “limited” nuclear war, and stressing the disproportionate impact of ionizing radiation on women and girls, ²⁴ the Humanitarian Initiative was the centrepiece of increasingly well-attended conferences in 2013–2014—in Norway (128 states), Mexico (146), and Austria (158)— each preceded by a civil society forum organized by ICAN. ²⁵

The explicit aim of the Humanitarian Initiative was, as Nick Ritchie and Kjølv Egeland argue,

… to deligitimise nuclear weapons by challenging and transforming the established nuclear discourse … . The focus was no longer on deligitimising specific nuclear practices such as testing, first use or arms build-ups, but on the weapons themselves and, by extension, the practice of nuclear deterrence and the narrative of a ‘nuclear peace.’ ²⁶

Initially, support for the Humanitarian Initiative extended to some “nuclear umbrella,” and even some nuclear-armed, states, who sensibly saw it as a serious response to the language in the 2010 NPT Final Declaration, and thus likely to strengthen, not weaken, the NPT regime. Canada attended all three conferences, and the US and UK (after strong American cajoling) the third conference in Vienna. It was there, though, that the Pledge was introduced, opening the path to a prohibition treaty which the nuclear-armed and nuclear-dependent states definitely did regard as anathema to their interests and beyond the pale of responsible, even respectable, disarmament diplomacy.

The last stand of the P5 (united on this as on no other issue) and their allies—“the nearly 30 NNWS,” in Tariq Rauf’s words, “seemingly indefinitely wedded to notions of nuclear deterrence”—came at the 2015 NPT Review Conference, where they

… openly dismissed the credibility of the HINW [Humanitarian Initiative on Nuclear Weapons], rejected claims that there was any new information or data on the consequences of nuclear detonations or that their nuclear weapons posed risks of accidental detonation, dismissed all recommendations from the NNWS for prohibiting and eliminating nuclear weapons, and remained wedded to their step-by-step approach to nuclear disarmament based on the principles of strategic stability. ²⁸

Ironically, ICAN, the ICRC, and many non-nuclear states parties were unhappy at language on humanitarian consequences, which they regarded as “watered down” from 2010, and generally tepid on Article VI obligations. Rauf is right to conclude that “[i]n reality, the rejection by the USA and two of its close allies was received with imperceptible relief by those NNWS”—well over 100—“for whom the draft Final Document was much too weak on the nuclear disarmament front and thus saved them from raising their own objections or reservations.” ³²

The multi-dimensional debacle of the 2015 RevCon—culminating in the sacrifice of consensus for the benefit of a nuclear-armed non-state-party—clearly represented a new low for the whole treaty regime. As Project Ploughshares director Cesar Jaramillo concluded, the NPT, “as currently structured and implemented[,] is simply no longer a credible path to nuclear abolition … . The lack of a consensus document constitutes a necessary shock to an ailing system.” ³³ And as Rebecca Johnson, executive director of the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy, argued, “humanitarian initiatives for a nuclear weapons prohibition treaty” now “look like the only way forward.” ³⁴

And so, in a diplomatic blink-of-an-eye, it proved. In October 2015, the UN First Committee voted to reconvene an Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) in Geneva to explore ways of “taking forward multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations for the achievement and maintenance of a world without nuclear weapons.” The Group had first met, inconclusively—though inspired by the 2010 NPT language on humanitarian consequences—in 2013. In three sessions in 2016, a large majority of OEWG participants reached broad agreement on a momentous recommendation: that the UN General Assembly authorize negotiations in 2017 “on a legally-binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons.”

Canada’s new feminist government issued a dissent, arguing that while a ban “may offer the prospect of winning agreement by a majority of non-nuclear weapon states, it … may further harden the stance of nuclear weapon possessing states and make them resistant to any efforts to disarm.” ³⁵ Despite attempts by the Obama administration to delay the vote by demanding that the full cost of the necessary conference be determined, the UN General Assembly duly accepted this recommendation (by 113 to 35, with 13 abstentions) in December 2016. The UN Budgetary Committee, incidentally, reported that negotiations would cost $692,000—a sum criticized by the US delegation for being too high—at a time when “between them, in fact, the world’s nine nuclear-armed states spend over $12 million an hour ($300 million a day) on their weapons, compared to an annual budget of around $10 million for the United Nations’ Office of Disarmament Affairs.” ³⁶

The Treaty: The “beginning of the end” of nuclear weapons?

After just two sessions of negotiations (March 27–31, and June 15–July 7) the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted at the General Assembly by 122 votes to 1 (the Netherlands, a NATO state compelled by a parliamentary resolution to attend) with one abstention (Singapore, strongly leant on by Washington). The accord, in Acheson’s relieved estimation, was “a good one,” a “progressive, sound, legally-binding prohibition of these genocidal, suicidal weapons of mass destruction.” ³⁷

The ban, specifically, is on the development, testing, manufacture, possession, transfer, receipt, use, or threat of use of any nuclear weapon (or “other nuclear explosive devices” such as radiological “dirty bombs”). States parties are also banned from hosting nuclear weapons on their territory (as five NATO states—Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey—currently do), or from assisting “in any way, anyone to engage in any activity” undermining the Treaty (such as participation in NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group). For the purposes of our critique, the focus here is on the Treaty’s humanitarian ethos and emphasis, welcomed by feminists such as Acheson and Beatrice Fihn as a decisive break from the state-centric conservatism all too often characterizing and retarding nuclear disarmament diplomacy in the NPT era.

The tone is resoundingly set in the Preamble, which stresses that “the catastrophic consequences of nuclear weapons cannot be adequately addressed, transcend national borders, [and] pose grave implications for human survival, socioeconomic development, the global economy, food security and the health of current and future generations,” with a “disproportionate impact on women and girls, including as a result of ionizing radiation.” In light of this brutal reality, the Preamble insists that “the equal, full and effective participation of both women and men is an essential factor for the promotion and attainment of sustainable peace and security.”

In terms of “operative” provisions, Article 6 (“Victim Assistance and Environmental Remediation”) obliges states to provide “age- and gender-sensitive assistance, without discrimination,” to “individuals under its jurisdiction … affected by the use and testing of nuclear weapons,” while Article 7 (“International Cooperation and Assistance”) mandates financial and other assistance for those states most affected by such nuclear violence. Both Articles follow from the recognition in the preamble of “the disproportionate impact of nuclear weapon activities on Indigenous people.” Indeed, Indigenous activists from lands ravaged by nuclear testing played a prominent part in the Humanitarian Initiative and the treaty negotiating process. Reflection on this fact casts another shadow on Trudeau’s anti-ban stance. Given both Canada’s own nuclear history with regard to uranium mining in Dene territory and Trudeau’s purported support for the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, this stance constitutes a denial of Indigenous rights and realities at home and abroad. These then were the progressive highlights of the Treaty that was opened for signature at the UN on 20 September 2017, and will enter into force 90 days after the fiftieth ratification. At the time of writing, there are 70 signatories and 26 states parties, a comparatively brisk pace expected to accelerate in the run-up to the 2020 NPT Review Conference.

Appropriately, the last word at the July adoption ceremony was given to Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor (hibakusha) of the Hiroshima bombing, and since the 1950s a Canadian citizen and peace activist. To a standing ovation, she concluded:

I’ve been waiting for this day for seven decades. And I am overjoyed that it has finally arrived. This is the beginning of the end of nuclear weapons. To the leaders of countries across the world, I beseech you: if you love this planet, you will sign this treaty. Nuclear weapons have always been immoral. Now they are also illegal. ³⁸

Not talking: “Feminist” Canada, the no-show at the ban-show

Where was Canada—with its supposed feminist foreign policy and concern for human security—during these important negotiations? The Obama administration was unwilling to participate and determined not to allow its allies to do so either. On 17 October 2017, Christina Cheshier, the US representative for the US Delegation to NATO’s Committee on Proliferation, sent a letter to fellow NATO members requesting they vote “no” to any proposal to begin negotiations on such a treaty and boycott any talks if they went ahead. Ms. Cheshier proposed that alliance countries “instead keep our focus on actions that build upon past progress, that are achievable, and that appropriately balance disarmament goals with the security environment.” ³⁹ It was, of course, the demonstrable insufficiency of this “past progress”—measured against the stringent demands of Article VI—that drove the Humanitarian Initiative, particularly after the debacle of the 2015 Review Conference, in the direction of a ban. In the report attached to her letter, Cheshier revealingly expresses concerns about the potential of the negotiations to shift the view of nuclear weapons away from one of security to one of humanitarian concerns:

Ban advocates seek to shift the focus from the proven step-by-step approach to nuclear disarmament, in keeping with our NPT commitments, to one that aims to stigmatize nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence without regard to whether the approach of ban advocates make the international security situation better or worse. ⁴⁰

Having failed to take the Humanitarian Pledge, it is not surprising the Trudeau government complied with Washington’s request: Canada voted “no” on the UN resolution establishing the Open-ended Working Group, “no” on the resolution backing its call for negotiations, and refused to send representatives to the subsequent negotiations.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that powerful women’s voices against the nuclear ban were indeed heard. On the day the talks opened, standing outside the General Assembly flanked by the ambassadors of France and the UK, US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley stated:

First and foremost I’m a mom, I’m a wife, I’m a daughter. … As a mom, as a daughter, there is nothing I want more for my family than a world with no nuclear weapons. But we have to be realistic … . Today, when you see those walking into the General Assembly to create a nuclear weapons ban, you have to ask yourself, are they looking out for their people? Do they really understand the threats that we have? ⁴²

In Canada, the defence of nuclear weapons, and the scorn for the diplomatic process to prohibit them, may be less publicly obvious, but is no less real. In the House of Commons on 6 June 2017, as the ban negotiations were entering their final phase, Minister Freeland began a major address on Canada’s role in the world by asking, “Is Canada an essential country, at this time in the life of our planet?” “Most of us here,” she answered her own question, “would agree that it is. But if we assert this, we are called to explain why. And we are called to consider the specifics of what we must do as a consequence.” ⁴⁴ Celebrating the military successes Canada has enjoyed, she went on to explain the many ways Canada continues to serve with distinction as a developer and defender of the liberal international order built in the aftermath of the Second World War. Absent from her remarks was any reference to Canada’s NPT obligations to work to achieve nuclear disarmament.

The day after Freeland’s speech, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced a $62 billion increase in military spending over the next 20 years, a “hard power” boost, investing massively in major offensive weapons systems, widely seen as a response to President Trump’s demands for increased military spending by NATO members. Two days later, Minister of International Development Marie-Claude Bibeau announced the launch of a “feminist foreign aid policy,” centred round a plan to reallocate existing development funds to women’s organizations in 30 countries over the subsequent five years, leaving the overall aid budget at less than 0.3 percent of GDP, far below the UN target of 0.7 percent long ago proposed by former Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson in his 1969 Commission on International Development report. Drawing the obvious comparison between the big spending on big weapons and the stagnant aid budget, Elana Wright asked bluntly, “If the government believes women’s empowerment is a catalyst for peace, why has it chosen to invest massively in defense instead?” ⁴⁵ And why, we might add, would a government committed to a feminist foreign policy boost the military (rhetorically and financially) and boycott UN talks on nuclear disarmament? Again and again, we hear faith placed in “the ongoing importance of reflecting gender perspectives in disarmament and international security.” ⁴⁶ At the UN First Committee on Disarmament and International Security in October 2018, for example, the Canadian delegation insisted:

Advancing international peace and security depends on our collective ability to recognize and account for the gender dimensions of non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament. Integrating gender perspectives into this work requires systematic and dedicated efforts.

Canada prioritizes these efforts in line with our Feminist Foreign Policy. We believe that advancing gender equality, including in the disarmament field, is the most effective way to build a more peaceful, inclusive, and prosperous world.

…

Applying a feminist lens to disarmament provides essential perspectives on how Governments can prevent and respond to violence and conflict and better support victims of violence. ⁴⁷

Canada has long been at the forefront of efforts to break the impasse, most recently by chairing a UN-mandated High Level Expert Preparatory Group to define the basic probable parameters of any talks. In its failure to countenance moving negotiations out of the Conference on Disarmament, however, the Group’s report, issued in September 2018, “deserves a failing grade”—the damning verdict of Paul Meyer, former Canadian ambassador for disarmament. ⁴⁹ This has not stopped the Trudeau government from consistently claiming that its performance on the fissban file proves its leadership role on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues—or even, in a surreal parliamentary moment, from claiming that its efforts had already led to a fissban being signed. ⁵⁰ As Meyer and Ramesh Thakur wrote in a searing opinion piece entitled “Canada’s nuclear diplomacy is make-believe,” on the very day the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was opened for signature,

… the government was questioned again in the House on why Canada was rejecting it. Transport Minister Marc Garneau’s reply distorted reality to an egregious extent. He asserted that in 2016, Canada had led 159 states in signing the FMCT [Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty]. That is ‘real action,’ he proudly proclaimed. The fact that the FMCT doesn’t exist … didn’t seem to intrude into his talking points.

Despite the dearth of mainstream media coverage of nuclear disarmament issues, many influential voices—leaders of NGOs, disarmament experts, even 900+ members of the Order of Canada—urged Trudeau to reverse course and support the ban negotiations. Douglas Roche, the highly regarded former senator and Canadian ambassador for disarmament, condemned the government’s “vapid excuses for not supporting efforts at the United Nations to prohibit nuclear weapons.” Roche concluded:

It’s hard to imagine that Canada—that most trusted of world states—is boycotting a process to develop a legal measure to prohibit nuclear weapons just because the United States insists on maintaining its nuclear arsenals. The issue is not legality but humanity. ⁵¹

“Antiquated and patriarchal”: Chrystia Freeland’s branding effort fails

Foreign Minister Freeland’s feminist credentials in the area of development, gender equality, and issues of diversity and inclusion are being undercut by her unwillingness to include nuclear disarmament on her own agenda. As nuclear disarmament emerged as a high priority for many of those seeking to advocate for human security, Freeland’s own department avoided the topic, with the government’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security failing to mention either nuclear weapons or human security.

In September 2018, Freeland co-hosted (alongside High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherini) a meeting of women foreign ministers. Beginning on the UN International Day of Peace—September 21—Freeland welcomed participants with an address declaring that “key foreign policy issues and pressing challenges facing the world” would be discussed. The role of women was celebrated:

We all know that prosperity, peace and security are more likely in places where women and all people in our societies can actively participate in political life and where the fundamental rights of all people are respected. ⁵⁹

Conclusion: Filling the gap between feminist fact and fiction

At the May 2017 NPT PrepCom in Vienna, the government of Ireland released a working paper titled Gender, Development and Nuclear Weapons, which placed the issue of nuclear disarmament in a genuinely feminist light, arguing unambiguously that “we must approach our commitments to disarmament of nuclear weapons with due regard … to our commitments under humanitarian law, to sustainable development, gender equality and our commitments under the Women, Peace and Security Agenda.” ⁶¹ This kind of feminism, championed by a traditionally highly patriarchal nation, adheres to the rigorous requirement that the “transformative ambition of feminist foreign policy requires sensitivity to the study of new practices, actors, policies and ethical frameworks.” ⁶²

While Trudeau is clearly sincere in his desire to increase the number of women in his cabinet, in military/peacekeeping ranks, and in the lists of recipients of Canadian aid and investment, he does not seem interested in challenging the gendered construction of security. In her classic study of feminist perspectives on achieving global security, J. Ann Tickner argued perceptively that “feminist reformulations of the meaning of security are needed to draw attention to the extent to which gender hierarchies themselves are a source of domination and thus an obstacle to a truly comprehensive definition of security.” ⁶³ Elin Liss, Swedish activist and communications manager at the Swedish section of WILPF, argues that “[f]eminism always investigates power with the goal of transforming it.” If so, it is also surely true that a “feminist foreign policy views conflict through a gendered lens and sees how patriarchal structures fuel violence and conflicts, especially in societies where masculinity is militarized. Therefore, a feminist foreign policy should be anti-militaristic and put human security at the centre.” ⁶⁴ “Feminist policy,” Liss adds, “is about walking the walk and not just talking the talk.” A “step-by-step” approach, one might say, but in the direction of deep transformation, not public relations. Though the representation of women is important, it is a feminist reclamation of the practice of power—and of the power of peace—that is needed.

In her recent “Feminist critique of the atomic bomb,” Acheson wrote: “Nuclear weapons are the ultimate symbol of injustice. They bring death and destruction, but also inequity and manipulation. They are the ultimate patriarchal tool: the ultimate way for the privileged to maintain their power.” ⁶⁵ And any genuine “feminist foreign policy” would recognize in the ban treaty a potential “beginning of the end” of such a reign of terror.