"The Liberal party has always believed that Canada must have its own voice on the world stage. He did the right thing and said, 'No.'"

— Bob Rae praising former prime minister Jean Chrétien's decision to keep Canada out of the Iraq war.

By Mark Gollom

The question of the Iraq invasion may seem so five years ago for many Canadian voters. But it was resuscitated in this campaign following accusations of plagiarism over a speech Stephen Harper gave back in 2003 over support for the mission.

Actually, the Liberals have trotted out the issue in every campaign since Harper became the Conservative leader. In their view, had Harper been prime minister during the time of the invasion, Canadian soldiers would have been right along with the U.S. marching into Baghdad.

Harper's stance on the issue has, at best evolved, and at worst, done a complete flip-flop. He registered his profound disappointment that Canada wouldn't be involved before and shortly after the invasion. But about more than a year later he was massaging his view, saying Canada couldn't be involved because of the strain it would cause on our military resources.

It's Jean Chrétien, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae says, who took a principled stance from the start that highlighted Canada’s independent voice in foreign affairs.

But was Chrétien's decision really a show of foreign policy independence?

'Look, I want to be with you guys…"

In his memoirs My Years as Prime Minister, Chrétien said he told U.S. President George W. Bush and then British prime minister Tony Blair that Canada was set to join in the invasion if only they could get a UN resolution authorizing force.

"Look, I want to be with you guys, but I can't go without a United Nations resolution and neither can you, in my judgment,” Chrétien said he told Blair. "But it will be easy to go in under the flag of the UN as happened in the Gulf War."

He said the same thing to Bush: "If you get a resolution George don't be worried, I'll be with you."

In Parliament in 2003, Chrétien made his position public: "We have always made clear that Canada will require the approval of the Security Council if we were to participate in a military campaign."

So Canada's independent decision to join or not join with the so-called Coalition of the Willing then hinged completely on a Security Council vote.

This, despite the fact that Chrétien himself had misgivings about the evidence of weapons of mass destruction, saying the evidence was "shaky."

"All I knew for certain was that I wouldn't have been able to convince a judge of the municipal court in Shawinigan with the evidence I was given," he wrote in his book.

We had people there

Despite Canada's official position to stay out of Iraq, Canada, in fact, was contributing forces. There were about 100 exchange officers involved in technical support roles with the U.S and Britain.

(As well, although not publicly known at the time, the most senior Canadian officer, then brigadier general Walter Natynczyk, the current chief of defence staff, was involved in the planning of the invasion and led 10 brigades consisting of more than 35,000 soldiers in Iraq. He was awarded the Meritorious Service Cross for his efforts.)

Chrétien was slammed by opposition parties for hypocrisy, and asked to bring the exchange officers home. Chrétien's response was that those officers weren't involved in direct conflict, and that Canada had to honour its commitments.

But in their book, The Unexpected War, University of Toronto professor Janice Gross Stein and public policy consultant Eugene Lang write that the Liberal government would actually boast of that contribution to Washington.

"In an almost schizophrenic way, the government bragged publicly about its decision to stand aside from the war in Iraq because it violated core principles of multilateral-ism and support for the United Nations. At the same time, senior Canadian officials, military officers and politicians were currying favour in Washington, privately telling anyone in the State Department or the Pentagon who would listen that, by some measures, Canada's indirect contribution to the American war effort in Iraq — three ships and 100 exchange officers — exceeded that of all but three other countries that were formally part of the coalition."

Canada has often taken a multilateral approach to foreign policy, as it did with the first Gulf War. But the reality is that in this case, that policy doesn't seem to correlate with Canada having its "own voice."