Former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy: Canada once rejected America’s aggressive, unlawful foreign policy. Today Mark Carney embraced it
Sid Shniad
Toronto Star Feb. 28, 2026
Former prime minister Jean Chretien receives a standing ovation from his caucus in March 2003 after announcing that Canada will not participate in a U.S.-led war on Iraq that does not have the support of the UN Security Council. Tom Hanson/The Canadian Press file photo
Lloyd Axworthy is a former longtime MP who served as Canadian foreign minister from 1996 to 2000.
Canada’s response to the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran exposes a fault line at the heart of our foreign policy.
We invoke international law and the “rules based international order” when adversaries engage in unlawful actions, but abandon those same rules entirely when it’s the Americans — whose current government 60 per cent of Canadians now see as a threat — doing the bombing. For a country that depends on law more than force for its own security, that is not realism; it is recklessness.
Ottawa’s statement on the attack is telling for what it says, and what it refuses to say.
The Canadian government condemns Iran as a destabilizing actor, insists Tehran must “never be allowed” to obtain nuclear weapons, and declares that Canada “supports the United States acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” The statement also reaffirms Israel’s right to self-defence. Yet it never once invokes the language that any legally grounded justification would require: self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, or authorization by the UN Security Council.
Under the UN Charter, cross-border uses of force are prohibited except in two narrow cases: collective decisions of the Security Council, or self defence in response to an actual or truly imminent armed attack. Operation Epic Fury, as the U.S. has dubbed it, fits neither. There is no Security Council mandate, and Ottawa has not tried to argue that Washington and Jerusalem are responding to an attack that is “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means.” Instead, it supports bombing to “prevent” Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon — the classic logic of preventive war.
That logic looks even weaker in context. The strikes were launched while diplomatic talks were ongoing. That’s precisely the moment a government that claims to believe in peaceful settlement should have been throwing its weight behind negotiations. Those talks were necessary in the first place because the Trump administration had already torn up an agreement made by former president Barack Obama for a functioning multilateral framework that placed verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program. Trump’s decision to walk away from that deal, and now to use force rather than return to a negotiated framework, is part of the same pattern: disdain for international agreements and a preference for coercion over law.
None of this is to romanticize Iran’s rulers. The Islamic Republic is a brutal, repressive regime. Iranian women, workers and students have paid a terrible price for demanding basic freedoms. But durable change must come from within Iranian society and not through military campaigns that kill civilians, strengthen hardliners and give the regime fresh excuses to crush dissent in the name of national defence. If Canada truly stands with the Iranian people, our focus should be on amplifying their voices, supporting exiled civil-society networks, and tightening targeted sanctions on perpetrators of abuses.
Iran is also not an isolated case. 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. We are a trading state beside an increasingly unpredictable superpower that claims the right to intervene wherever and against whoever stands in their way. We have neither the military heft nor the economic leverage to dictate outcomes alone. Our security lies in a world where power is constrained by rules.
We have been here before, and once knew better. In 2003, Canada refused to join the American invasion of Iraq because there was no Security Council resolution, and the case for war rested on preventing a hypothetical future WMD threat. Today, by endorsing preventive strikes on Iran during ongoing diplomacy and after Washington itself shredded the previous agreement, we are embracing the very doctrine we used to reject.
The contrast with our language on Ukraine is stark. For four years, Canadian officials have rightly called Russia’s invasion an “unprovoked,” “unjustifiable,” “illegal” violation of the UN Charter and of Ukrainian sovereignty. Yet when the United States and Israel launch large scale strikes without UN authorization, Ottawa drops the legal vocabulary entirely. No talk of aggression, no warning about Charter erosion, no insistence on emergency debate in New York. The double standard is obvious: when Russia uses force without lawful grounds, it is condemned as an outlaw; when the U.S. does something legally analogous, we kowtow in an effort to curry favour.
Parliament should urgently debate Canada’s position: the legal basis, the implications for our Ukraine policy, our obligations to the Iranian people and how to build an independent security strategy. MPs should be tasked to answer a simple question: do we believe the rules on the use of force are universal, or do they apply only to designated adversaries?
In a world where preventive wars multiply and great powers act first and explain later, middle powers like Canada will someday wish they had defended the UN Charter when they still could.