Analysis. The crash of the Ukrainian Boeing shot down Wednesday January 8 " by mistake " by an Iranian missile, which cost the lives of 57 Canadians in particular, highlights an already widely established reality: Canada's difficulty in weighing on the international scene. In the absence of diplomatic relations between Ottawa and Tehran, severed by Stephen Harper’s Conservative government in 2012, Canada has had to fight hard to be considered a prime interlocutor by Iranian authorities. A few hours before the disaster, it was also a helpless spectator that Ottawa witnessed the Iranian reprisals on Iraqi military bases. Powerless and yet implicated: some 500 soldiers from the Canadian Armed Forces were then in Iraq, notably on the intended Erbil base, to participate in the NATO training mission.
"Canada is back" on the international scene, however, had promised Justin Trudeau during his first election, in 2015, making this comeback a marker of his policy of rupture with the conservatives. Has he managed to achieve his ambition? 2020 promises to be a test year for someone who has just been re-elected but now heads the country as the head of a minority government. Canada is in fact applying to find a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council on June 27 which it has not occupied for twenty years. The previous Canadian candidacy ended in 2010 with a bitter failure against Portugal. "This vote of confidence demanded of the world will be a life-size test to know if Canada has regained its influence", estimates Jocelyn Coulon, researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal, adviser to the Trudeau government until 2017.
"Justin Trudeau's influence is very limited with Donald Trump," said Justin Massie. Since the G7 incident in 2018, Trump has judged Trudeau to be weak and given him no seriousness ”
This challenge seems far from over. First, because the results of Justin Trudeau’s first term leave many observers skeptical. "He never put the resources up to the political ambition he had set for himself", analyzes Justin Massie, professor of political science at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Above all, he lost the ear of his best and most powerful neighbor. "Justin Trudeau's influence is very limited with Donald Trump, adds Mr. Massie. Since the 2018 G7 incident [the two men were hooked on Canadian customs taxes], Trump judges that Trudeau is weak and does not take him seriously. "