| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
On 1 October 2012 Canada's foreign minister addressed the United Nations
general assembly. Embedded in an otherwise bland text were several sharp
jabs at the UN, notably concerning the self-absorption of the organization's
internal reform processes and the inadequacy of its response to humanitarian
crises such as that engulfing Syria.1
These criticisms, predictably echoed in
the right wing of the Canadian media, soon evoked ripostes whose burden
was that the minister seemed woefully, perhaps willfully, ignorant of the
organization he was criticizing: UN reform is a process for which western
governments, including Canada's, had pressed for years; and it was some
member-states, not the UN as such, that were hesitant over Syria.2
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