It’s elbows down as Mark Carney and Anita Anand throw Canadian ICC judge Kimberly Prost under the American bus
“It was an extraordinary moment,” remembered Stephen Lewis, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. “I was at the UN for four glorious years. I had never seen anything like it before, and I never saw anything like it afterwards…”
On October 23, 1985, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney gave an “electrifying” speech to the UN General Assembly, in which he not only denounced the evil of South African apartheid but promised Canada would to do everything in its power to end it:
Canada is ready, if there are no fundamental changes in South Africa, to invoke total sanctions against that country and its repressive regime. More than that, if there is no progress in the dismantling of apartheid, relations with South Africa may have to be severed absolutely.
At the next year’s Commonwealth Conference in Vancouver, Mulroney famously faced down British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher over her opposition to sanctions, pointedly asking her whether she would respond in the same way “if she was dealing with a country with a population of 25 million whites that was ruled by four million blacks.”
Less than four years after Mulroney threw down the gauntlet at the UN, South African President F.W. de Klerk, under heavy international pressure from sanctions, began to dismantle the odious edifice of apartheid, legalizing the African National Congress and releasing its leader Nelson Mandela after 27 years imprisonment on February 11, 1990.
Mandela and de Klerk jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and Mandela went on to become South Africa’s first democratically elected president in 1994. That did not stop the US listing him as a “terrorist” until a few days before his 90th birthday in 2013, weeks before his death.
“On the 10th anniversary of our democracy,” Mandela wrote in a personal letter to Brian Mulroney in 2004:
one recalls the momentous time of our transition and remembers the people involved both within and outside South Africa. As prime minister of Canada and within the Commonwealth, you provided strong and principled leadership in the battle against apartheid. This was not a popular position in all quarters, but South Africans today acknowledge the importance of your contribution to our eventual liberation and success. (more...)
In the latest, inexplicable instance of “elbows down,” Canada’s Ambassador to the UN Bob Rae has deleted his tweet condemning the U.S.’ sanctioning of a Canadian ICC judge, and linking it to similar attacks on the court’s legitimacy by Israel and Russia. #cdnpoli https://t.co/bqOjpf7rMc pic.twitter.com/ov6dU8UJKO
— Stuart Benson (@LeftHandStu) August 20, 2025
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