The Trudeau government has joined many western allies in condemning the Hamas assault on Israel and calling for a release of hostages. Whether it will follow in the footsteps of the EU and the UK in calling for an urgent review of development aid to Gaza remains to be seen. Back in June, the Government announced additional funding for Palestinian “refugees” and their plight in the West Bank and Gaza.
https://www.canada.ca/en/global-affairs/news/2023/06/canada-continues-its-support-of-palestinian-refugees.html
All Canadian funding flows through a UN agency, The “Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees” or UNRWA. There may be additional scrutiny and controls to ensure that any Canadian relief aid sent to Gaza does not directly or indirectly aid the Hamas organization. Hamas, along with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which also took part in the assault on Israel, were both listed—legitimately in my view—as terrorist entities by the Canadian government in 2002.
The question of future aid for Gaza is probably not yet on the agenda of the Canadian government. But it will be. For now, the focus of attention is on the immediate situation in Israel and in the Gaza strip. While Israeli forces may now be mopping up remnants of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters who penetrated across the border, the fight is already being taken to Gaza directly, through a massive Israeli aerial attack. An IDF ground incursion must be considered an imminent possibility.
Canada can do little to affect the immediate outcome. What the government needs to be doing is thinking ahead, to the strategic implications of the Hamas surprise attack and its brutality. It seems clear that both the Hamas leadership and the Netanyahu government plan to make this war into a contest that will fundamental change the political dynamic in the Middle East in their favour. They won’t both get their wish, but Middle East politics have been fundamentally upended.
In this context it is surprising, even distressing, to see that the Canadian government has convened is emergency response Cabinet committee, the Incident Response Group, rather than its newly created National Security Council, to discuss the current conflict.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/readouts/2023/10/08/prime-minister-justin-trudeau-convenes-incident-response-group-discuss
The NSC should be the place for strategic analysis and decision making on the implications of the Hamas-Israel war for the Middle East. Intelligence assessments should be at the heart of this.
And yet, the NSC remains dormant. Possibly because it is new. Possibly because the government has not yet figured out how to use it. Possibly because the government doesn't intend to use it as advertised. I hope the answer is either newness, or figuring it out. Some part of me fears its potential will never be realized.
My recollection from the Rouleau testimony is that no cabinet committee is a decision-making body except the IRG (and the full cabinet meeting as such). I'm going from memory here but this is from the day Janice Charette testified or the day before. PMO used to tell us who showed up for IRG meetings, then they didn't for a while, then they did again, and I think they're back to not telling us. I think it's possible that all or most of the National Security Committee is sitting as the IRG, with the difference being they get to wear their decision-maker decoder rings. But that leaves whole the question of why there's a National Security Committee.
And the third possibility is that it is not implemented because the Trudeau government has no idea what it is doing and just says things to continue with their performative nonsense of publicity and no action. Not the time for this kind of waffling.