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Any campaign for one of the 10 temporary council seats involves a beauty parade before an electorate of poor and misgoverned countries, which tend to vote either for similar countries, or for those more important countries that outbid other contenders in various ways. There is a policy to assure that all regions are represented. North America is generally felt to be represented by the U.S., not an unreasonable position, given that it has over 70 per cent of the continent’s population. Given that fact, Canada has to strive very hard to impress the General Assembly majority of its merits for a council seat. The present composition of temporary members is three European, three African, two Latin American, one East Asian/Australasian, and one Middle Eastern state. Generally, there are not successive terms. The openings in 2020 are Belgium, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia, and South Africa. Canada’s claim would be to succeed Belgium or Germany as a representative of the advanced Western countries, or Dominican Republic as a state in the Americas.

To have any chance of election, Canada would seriously have to impress the under-developed world with its generosity as a contributor of aid, its advocacy of international climate policy that embraced the old Kyoto concept of large direct cash payments to underdeveloped countries as a reward for them having supposedly forsworn the eco-unfriendly economic activity that generates economic growth and raises national and per capita incomes at the expense of environmental standards (as China is so ostentatiously doing, with India right behind it). At the theatre-of-the-absurd UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, China, the world’s greatest polluter, and the fastest growing of the world’s 50 largest economies, was noisily unrepentant about its ecological performance. It accused the advanced West of stupendous hypocrisy in creating the problem of industrial pollution and then waving unproved theories of climate change about like a bloody shirt to deter other countries from following the same path (fair comment except the West’s problem has been naïveté, not cynicism). At the same time, with masterly, po-faced self-righteousness, China set itself at the head of G-77: all the under-developed countries demanding a stupendous quantum of compensation and reparations from the developed countries. The flip side of the Chinese performance was then-U.S.-president Barack Obama, who could not obtain an interview with the Chinese premier at the conference and padded about with an imaginary begging bowl asking for a commitment to annual contributions of U.S.$10 billion to a fund for the G-77, though even Obama acknowledged that he would not approve payments to China. He got no takers and was left holding an empty bowl.