Did Carney go too far in offering 'support' for U.S. strikes against Iran?

Every prime minister is called upon, at one point or another, to comment on the actions of an American president. For Mark Carney, still less than a year on the job, there have already been several such moments.

The latest moment of necessity arrived this past weekend, when the United States and Israel launched new attacks on Iran.

The response, a six-paragraph statement in the names of Carney and Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, has raised questions with which the prime minister may have to wrestle.

Most of the statement reiterated Canada's criticism of the Iranian regime. But in the fifth paragraph, Carney and Anand said that "Canada supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to prevent its regime from further threatening international peace and security."

The Australian government offered a similar response, including almost exactly the same expression of support. But a joint statement from the leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Germany did not go that far.

Perhaps there is some ambiguity to mine about what exactly Canada supports. But this weekend's statement was also notable for how it differed from an earlier one about a previous American action — the January attack on Venezuela and the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Carney's initial three-paragraph response stopped short of expressing support in that case.

Reporters travelling with Carney have not yet had the opportunity to ask him about his weekend statement. But the criticism has come quickly — and from Liberal corners.

In an op-ed published on Saturday, Lloyd Axworthy, a former Liberal foreign affairs minister, compared Carney's statement on Iran unfavourably to Canada's decision in 2003 to not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Like that invasion, Axworthy argued the attack on Iran could not be justified under the United Nations Charter, something Carney and Anand's statement did not address.

"Iran is also not an isolated case," Axworthy added. "It is the seventh country against which President Trump has ordered unilateral use of force while in office. That should be a blaring alarm for a middle power like Canada."

Liberal MP Will Greaves expressed similar sentiments in a video posted to social media on Saturday night.

"Canada cannot endorse the unilateral and illegal use of military force, the killing of civilians or the kidnap and assassination of foreign heads of government while also insisting that our sovereignty, our rights and our independence must be respected," said Greaves, who was a professor of international relations at the University of Victoria before being elected to the House of Commons last year.

In his celebrated speech at the World Economic Forum in January, Carney said Canada would remain "principled in our commitment to fundamental values," including "the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter."

It is probably impossible to avoid speculating about how the imperative to manage Canada-U.S. relations may have influenced Carney's statement.