U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was expressing her personal opinion when she criticized Canada's maternal health initiative, not the policy of the Obama administration, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Sunday.
"Mrs. Clinton expressed not her government's position; she expressed her personal point of view … her personal opinion," Cannon told CTV's Question Period.
But in the wake of Clinton's criticism of the Canadian initiative, a key foreign policy program for the Conservative government going into this summer's G8 summit, Cannon acknowledged that the Canadian plan may have to be amended.
During a visit to Canada last week, Clinton said any maternal health plan must include family planning and abortion, issues the federal government had initially attempted to leave out of its initiative.
Cannon said the issue will be on the agenda when ministers of international aid and development from the G8 nations meet later this month.
"This is a discussion that is ongoing. There are other options that are out there [and] they'll be looked at."
But Liberal MP Scott Brison called Clinton's criticism a "smack down" of the Harper government's maternal health initiative.
"You can't improve the lives of women in the developing world or the lives of children in the developing world without a maternal health plan that includes contraception and family planning as part of it. And everybody knows that," Brison told Question Period.
"Hillary Clinton was simply stating a fact. Her words were welcomed by a lot of progressive Canadians on this issue."
Cannon said that the criticisms voiced by his blunt and outspoken U.S. counterpart during last week's visit did not signal a cooling of relations between Ottawa and Washington.
Clinton appealed to the government to consider keeping some Canadian troops in Afghanistan after their 2011 deadline for withdrawal, and criticized its decision not to invite indigenous groups and Scandinavian countries to talks on the Arctic.
"This is a tempest in a teapot," Cannon said. "This is not snubbing anybody; this is nothing that is detrimental to Canada-U.S. relations. Our relations are the best relations in the world."
