Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Every Summit is a Success — Is That True?

Every sum­mit is a suc­cess.  Some are more suc­cess­ful than others.

That, appar­ently, is the offi­cial line on every major sum­mit that hap­pens — G8, G20, Copen­hagen, and oth­ers.  I heard that at a meet­ing ear­lier this week.  No mat­ter how much, or how lit­tle, gets accom­plished at each of these sum­mits, they are offi­cially and invari­ably con­sid­ered successes.

Obama isn’t per­fect, but he seems to speak more sin­cerely than many other politi­cians do — cer­tainly more than our Cana­dian Prime Min­is­ter and Envi­ron­ment Min­is­ter do.  Obama came out from Copen­hagen, yes, say­ing that things went well and that we now have a mean­ing­ful and unprece­dented inter­na­tional agree­ment.  That’s the polit­i­cal side of him speak­ing.  But he also said that while the agree­ment is not entirely what any indi­vid­ual party wanted to see, that every­one involved is at least slightly dis­ap­pointed with it, it is a first step.  He said to the world, to his cit­i­zens, and to his vot­ers, that what we ended up with was dis­ap­point­ing.  That’s a strong streak of sincerity.

A summit’s suc­cess can only truly be deter­mined by relat­ing the out­come to the goals set for it in the first place.  The trick that I think is played almost every time is that there are no clearly stated goals for these sum­mits.  You can call any­thing a suc­cess if there’s noth­ing against which to mea­sure your results.

Politi­cians play games.  That’s what they do.  That’s why most vot­ers hear what they have to say with vary­ing degrees of sus­pi­cion and dis­trust.  What we need — what we have always needed and con­tinue to need — are states­men and lead­ers.  We need peo­ple in posi­tions of power who will call a duck a duck, admit when they or other world lead­ers are fail­ing.  They will read­ily toot their horns when they do things right, don’t worry about that.  What’s miss­ing from the games that politi­cians play is the other side of the picture.

Canada’s Min­is­ter of the Envi­ron­ment says things went hunky-dory with Copen­hagen.  We ended up with an agree­ment stat­ing what Canada wanted for the past sev­eral years.  It was a success.

Well, what do you think of that?  Do you think it was a suc­cess?  Do you think every sum­mit is a success?

If not, then think care­fully about who you vote for.  Think care­fully about what you write to your PM, MP, Pre­mier, MPP, mayor and coun­cil­lor.  Oth­er­wise, we’ll all con­tinue to have peo­ple in power who call any­thing they do a success.