Why Won't Stephane Dion Answer This Question?

Foresight missing in Dion's Green Shift plan

Yesterday, Liberal leader Stephane Dion kicked off his party's national campaign at the University of Alberta.

His speech (which will be covered in detail here at The Nexus) was followed by a Q-and-A townhall-style meeting, in which he answered a variety of questions. Some questions -- obvious softballs -- were handled fairly effectively and predictably.

Some weren't -- including a question asked about hypothetical post-Green Shift Canada, which envoked a rather perplexing non-answer:

First, the question:

"If your Green Shift plan is implimented, and is successful, inevitably what we're going to see is a decrease in the taxable greenhouse gas emissions. What I'm wondering is what would a Liberal government do to make up that lost revenue?"

And the distinct non-answer:

"If we decrease the level of emissions, then the revenue of the tax will go down.

I pray it will happen!

And at that time, you know what? We'll have our revenues coming from the green economy we'll have created. Good taxpayers and good companies that will not exist in a small number. They'll be everywhere in the country.

I will give you an example: Denmark.

Denmark at first it suffered a shock. They were closing the country on weekends. I mean that you had to drive elsewhere on Saturday and Sunday. They decided to come to tax on fuel. And increase the tax on fuel. It was controversial. At that time they were 99% dependent on oil. Today, they have 0% dependence on oil. They have full employment, and this small country is exporting to the world a third of its windmills. If it's possible there, why not here?

I hope that the carbon tax one day will not exist because we'll have so few greenhouse gas emissions. It's not for tomorrow. Today, we are the worst among the world for greenhouse comissions.

We have a lot to do and it's not possible to do effectively if you don't put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. We come with good programs, good incentives, with education.

For a significant rsult, you put the price greehouse gas emissions and reduce the tax on your income, your investments, your savings and, if you're in business, your profit."

So essentially, one of two things can be taken away from Stephane Dion in this distinct non-answer:

Either Stephane Dion has no plan for the future -- no post-Green Shift plan to restore the inevitable lost revenue due to decreased taxable greenhouse gas emissions -- or he imagines that all this lost revenue will essentially be made up by exporting windmills. Somehow.

If Stephane Dion indeed has no post-Green Shift plan, one could at least applaud his honesty if he were to clearly and openly admit so.

But the alternative explanation, sadly, does not hold water. After all, even if Canada does experience the Green industry boom that Stephane Dion imagines, one has to remember that, under his Green shift tax plan, the profits of such companies -- and the incomes of their employees -- will be taxed at a lower level. The likelihood of such revenues making up for the lost revenue from decreased greenhouse gas emissions isn't terribly likely. It simply isn't mathematically feasible.

Considering that Dion's post-Green Shift numbers just don't seem to add up (at least not in any realistic fashion) the only real alternative seems to be a post-Green Shift tax grab -- increasing tax rates (even if only to 2006 rates) in order to recover the lost revenue.

After all, Stephane Dion is the individual who has spent the last 18 months decrying the lost revenue from the Conservative government's tax cuts.

Someone in the Liberal party needs to remind Stephane Dion that it will take more than prayer to make his Green Shift plan successful. It will take an eye to the future.

If Stephane Dion really has no post-Green Shift plan, big questions remain about whether or not Canadians can trust him to impliment it.

My Meeting with Michael, So To Speak, Part Two

Ignatieff hears questions from students, gives answers

As promised yesterday, a full transcription of the lengthy (40 minutes +) question and answer period from Friday's Michael Ignatieff speech at the University of Alberta:

Q: "Mr Ignatieff, do you condone waterboarding, or any other forms of torture, allegedly used in Canada?"

Anne McLelland: "Is that a question or a statement?"

Q: "It's a question."

Ignatieff: "I not only don't condone it, everything I've ever written has been a strong conservative critique of waterboarding. If you don't know what waterboarding is, it's giving people the experience of drowning. It's a practice that has been used by some of our allies, and should have absolutely no part under any circumstances in Canadian practice and we should denounce it internationally. I hope that's clear."

Q: I really appreciate what you said in regards to saying that Canada needs to start strengthening and not be ashamed of our military. How to you suggest we get our NATO partners in Afghanistan to step up and take on more of the dangerous role Canada has been disproportionately been filling. How do we get NATO to step up?

Ignatieff: "That's a great question. I think that, let's be blunt, for many Canadians it's been a wake-up call to discover that we've got an alliance of... Oh dear, I'm going to do one of those things that old professors should never do -- I'm about to cite as fact something I don't know... I think there are 25 members of NATO? Can somebody tell me if that fact is accurate. It's a lot of countries? 25? Something like that.

Anyway, I've just given you the government health warning: some of the facts that come out of my mouth are not accurate.

The point is, relating to your question, of those 25, only about five or six are ready for the full range of activities that NATO may be commanded to engage in i Afghanistan. We're one of them. I think that there's no question that we have to have a very tough eyeball-to-eyeball conversation with some of our allies. I think that we're entitled to do that. We're entitled to say "listen, come on guys, is this an Alliance or is this the kind of club where people head to the exit when the bill comes in?"

There is that. Let's not... you use the word "disproportionate". I think we have to be careful about using that word. Many other countries have paid a very heavy price in Afghanistan. I think strategically it's not wise to say our burden has been disproportionate. We've paid a terrible price, and I'm not wishing to minimize it for a second. Let's be careful about the word "disproportionate". Other countries have lost soldiers, brave men and women.

The right way to go with allies is not to talk as if we're the only ones who pay a price, but say "we've paid a price, so let's get some help here". I think we certainly support doing that."

Q: Mr Ignatieff, what is your opinion on banning nuclear weapons? What should Canada do in relation to foreign aid?

Ignatieff: "I've said something about what we should do about foreign aid so I think I'll focus on the nuclear question. It's interesting that that question is less salient now than it was in the '70s and '80s and yet there's still a huge number of nuclear weapons out in the world.

Canada has played a role in deactivating excess nuclear weapons. We need to reduce stockpiles. We need to talk to our American allies about a knee-roll on stuff. Can we get it right down, right down, right down, set us on a track to reduce risks.

One of the concerns we had at the end of the cold war were loose nukes scattered through the former Soviet Union. All of them just behind a chain-link fence. Canada's been part of the process to get that under control.

We've taken a lead against nuclear non-proliferation and on the issue one of the pressing issues is Iran. I just don't think anybody thinks that it is in the interests of global security for an Iranian regime to possess a nuclear weapon. We have worked within the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure that if they proceed to peaceful nuclear energy that it stays peaceful.

I regard the prospect of the Iranian regime having a nuclear weapon with enormous concern, partly because of the statements that come out of the mouth of its president."

Q: "Do you think Canada should, under any conditions accept a partition of Afghanistan and, if so, under what conditions?"

It seems one should, in hindsight, provide a caveat before Ignatieff's answer to this particular question (as some may recall, it's a question that I announced before hand I would be asking Mr Ignatieff). In hindsight, this turns out to be the wrong question to ask a sitting politician -- one who will, presumably, be seeking reelection in the near future.

While there was significant room for a more nuanced answer, in hindsight it became apparent that the question potentially carried undertones of separatism or outright imperialism (not the intent of the question, but this all can be explained in detail later.

As such, it's entirely understandable that Ignatieff would want to provide a brief "form" answer to the question -- even though this is an important question to consider (once again, this will be explained later).

Ignatieff: "Should Canada under any circumstances accept a partition of Afghanistan? I think the answer is "it's not our country". They have a democratically elected government. Canada takes a very particular view of partitions because of our history. We've taken a very firm stance everywhere in the world against secession, breaking up the unity of countries, and we're right to do so.

And so that question, if it's a question at all, is a question entirely for the Afghan government."

Although disappointing (even if understandably so), Ignatieff's answer touches on a number of important points: certainly, the Afghan people have the right to make such decisions unhindered (even if not necessarily uninfluenced -- we have earned influence via the commitment of blood and treasure to the stabilization of the Afghan state).

However, we must also keep in mind that when we speak about Afghanistan, we aren't talking about a fully-functioning state, and certainly not by the means by which we define the modern state.

Afghanistan is a country without enforcable borders, without the ability to fully exert its own sovereignty within those unenforcable borders, and with no overriding sense of nationalism to unite the various ethnic groups within its borders. The Pashtun 40% of its population has never submitted to centralized government by the remaining 60% (mostly Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras), and vice versa. Afghanistan, as it currently exists on the world map, has never been stabilized without billions of dollars in annual foreign aid.

In short, Afghanistan is less a failed state, and more a non-state. Under the means by which we define the modern state, it simply does not exist, and never really has.

We as Canadians should decide whether or not we wish to exert our efforts toward preserving an artificial geographical construct that was established more or less arbitrarily under the British Empire, or if we're prepared to condone a partitioning of Afghanistan along ethnic lines so long as that occurs peacefully (whether or not we hold any faith that this can be accomplished is another matter), and under natural conditions.

Of course, Ignatieff may agree with this entire assessment, and he would certainly be the one to do so -- he's been to Afghanistan, interacted with the Taliban, and possesses a unique perspective on Afghanistan and its prospects for reformation, particularly vis a vis human rights.

While a more nuanced answer to this question certainly would have been appreciated, it's far from fair to demand that Ignatieff pay the political price for an answer that, under any conditions, could be construed or misconstrued as a tacit approval of separatism. While I consider his answer disappointing, I would actually agree with him that he did the right thing.

Q: "I'm from a generation that welcomed American draft dodgers. What do you think Canada should be doing now with Iraqi draft dodgers?"

Ignatieff: "This is a very painful issue for me. Because we're the same, without making reference to your age, madam, making reference to mine.

Many, many very deep and and close friends of mine when I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto came up to Canada to resist the draft. A Prime Minister that I very much admire made that a principle for Canada to give refuge to people who, for reasons of conscience, could not serve.

But I think that without pronouncing finally on the issue, I think there are some substantive differences between the situation in the '60s and the situation now. The individuals concerned volunteered for military service. The draft is not involved. Compulsion was not involved in the Iraqi case. I've met some of them personally. They volunteered for service and then came to have moral difficulties which they have every right to have. Now they want to stay.

The difficulty I have is that we are allies of the United States. Being an ally doesn't necessarily mean we approve of their policies in Iraq, but we're shoulder-to-shoulder in Afghanistan.

I'm uncomfortable about saying that people who volunteer for military service for a NATO ally should be given refuge in a country that is also an ally actively involved in combat. I'm not pronouncing finally on this, I'm just trying to be open and honest about my actual difficulty. This is an actual difficulty for me.

I don't want us to sacrifice our tradition of being a country that is a haven for people who have problems of conscience with military service, but I don't see that there is a perfect fit between what we did in the 1960s and what we're being asked for in 2007."

...

Ignatieff: "This is a question, for those who can't hear, about our relations with India.

I'm very struck by the lag time in my own consciousness about this, it's a story told against myself. I remember the Indian consul in Toronto -- by the way, we were at a Canada/India foundation meeting -- he said "do you have any idea what the value of the software industry in India is? Just the portion of the industry devoted to writing code?" I said, "I have no idea".

$28 billion. These are giants now. Their software industry, just in the code-writing side dwarfs Canada's. We have been, I think, very very slow to wake up to the realities of the multi-polar world. It's not just India.

When Laurier said "the 20th century belongs to Canada" what actually happened is we tied ourselves to the rocket of the American rise to power. We had a very good century tied to that rocket, and a lot of our foreign policy was driven, essentially, by our relationship to the Americans, our relationship with NATO and our preoccupation with European security.

But that created consequences. We neglected India. We neglected China. We were very slow to wake up to the fact that the world was changing very fast.

Canada is now faced the wrong way. We're faced south. We need to face west. We need to face east. We'll always have a close relationship with the United States.

I'm not talking policy, I'm talking what's in our helmet here. Until we realize that we're in a multi-polar world, in which all the action isn't in Washington, London, Paris, New York, but Delhi, Beijing, I don't think we're going to get a truly global foreign policy.

It's a generational change. I know everything there is to know by an educated person about Sienna and Florence and my education is Euro-centric.

I know nothing about Indian culture, to be frank. That's a second toll against myself. I know nothing about Chinese civilization. We've got whole elites in Canada that have the wrong helmet on. It's not just a matter of boosting the percentage of our economic activity, it's not a matter of recognizing their software industry dwarfs ours, it's a matter of taking off the old helmet and putting on a new one.

A global helmet. A truly international one.

I'm not going to be drawn into "should it be China, should it be India?". It should be both."

...

Ignatieff: "The question was about the Manley report on Afghanistan and the questioner made the very important point that changing the configuration of our military presence should be results-determined rather than time-determined. This is a very elegant way to express the kinds of decisions we have to make.

Mr Manley, as I understand it, is in the results-determined business. That is, people when they read the Manley report are a little concerned as it doesn't say when we're out of there. Manley's saying, "well, we're out of there when the job is done". That makes people legitimately concerned in Canada that you're opening up a never-ending can.

In a democracy we can't have never-ending commitments.

Solidarity is not endless. It's not unending. Duties have to be finite for them to be duties at all.

But where I would go is to say "let's define a role for Canada". That is, results-oriented, that defines very specific targets. Let me give you an example.

Canada should say, "we're willing to keep some troops in Afghanistan after 2009. But what we're going to do is we're going to train up 5,000 Afghan army for you. That's our target, and that's what we'll deliver. When we've done that, you get someone else to do this. That's a results-oriented approach to our military commitment. That training function is a potential role for our country. Similarly with the police but I think the army may be the priority.

The point here is that it relates to a value. Afghanistan belongs to the Afghans. It doesn't belong to NATO. It doesn't belong to the people who intervene. The only mandate we have to be there at all is that we have the permission of the Afghan government.

Our job here as Canadians is to work ourselves out of a job. To take the security burden that we have shouldered and transfer it slowly, in a results-oriented process to those who have to bear the burden. To the Afghan people themselves.

That's where I see a reflection of what Canada ought to do. It's on that track."

...

Ignatieff: "The questioner used the phrase I used about us being a middle power to suggest we were kind of a mild-mannered interlocutor, we're kind of a butler shuffling back and forth between the two. That's not what I mean by middle power.

I think it's very important to understand that Canada is not neutral about certain things in the Middle East. We are not neutral between a democratic state and terrorist organizations. We are not neutral between suicide bombers and democratic states defending themselves. It doesn't mean that we necessarily approve of every action taken by a democratic state.

We aren't neutral between those two parties. We can't be. This isn't about Israel. This is everywhere. When a democratic state is attacked by anyone we are on the side of the democratic state because we're a democratic state.

Israel is just a sub-case of a much larger thing, in which we cannot be partial. Canada has known terrorism in our country. Between the terrorist and democratic state, we can't be neutral.

Can we do something? To get to the second part of your question. I think we can. I think not a lot of Canadians realize that we have some very, very capable Canadians, some in the military, some in the police, who are working with international authorities to improve the capabilities of the Palestinian security forces. That's very important. It's very important for the Palestinians to have a capable, legitimate and honest security force. It's also very important for the security of Israel that the Palestinians have a capable and legitimate security force.

That's one place where I think we can provide technical expertise of an important kind.

We also have a historical mandate, on a more technical point, going back to the Madrid conference of 1991, about refugees. We were tasked to put together groups who could work on the problem of the refugees. We aren't neutral on that issue, but we can be helpful and facilitative on that issue. Again, it depends on if Abbas and Olmert, Palestinians and Israelis do a deal in 2007. If they do, then I think it would be a great thing for Canada to say that it's a good subsequent deal between the two parties, "how can we help?"."

...

Ignatieff: "This is a question about Canada's role in Darfur. Because I was involved so heavily in the drafting of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, it will be easy to see what my answer is.

I think that I've talked a lot to Romeo Dallaire and others and also to those involved in the Darfur campaign about what we could do.

There's a whole bunch of stuff.

One of them is to use diplomatic efforts to try and get the Darfurian rebel groups to together. The Darfurian resistance is splintering. They need to be brought together so there's a diplomatic peace. We can also provide command and control facilities for a combined UN-African Union peace force. We can also provide, or help to rent, some helicopters.

I think, for a variety of reasons, that the deployment of Canadian ground troops to Darfur is not called for at the moment because the African Union has not asked for them and the Sudanese don't want them.

Well, the Sudanese objections in my view, I don't have much time for the Sudanese government.

But there's a lot that Canada can do because this is where peacekeeping experience is so useful. We can provide the command and control units, the people who figure out what the strategy is. What the logistics ought to be in that unit. The telecommunications aspects of that. That would be an important contribution to this. It would make a real difference.

The problems in Darfur, however, are extremely serious. Sometimes people can say that "if I can just go there. Why Afghanistan? Why not Darfur?". The only thing to bear in mind when you say that is just think about what a deployment of Canadians in Darfur would look like.

It's 55 degrees centigrade. There's no cover anywhere. Do you think the Janjaweed are going to get off their camels and walk up when they see a Canadian flag and our hand? No. It's a combat mission.

I mention this simply because there are no soft options for Canada in the 21st century. There are no easy roles. They're all tough. You have to pick which role you think you can do, then do it as well as you can. That's the challenge for us.

One of the things I believe is most fundamental about our country, it's not just that we matter it's that we are serious people. We don't fool around. You ask a Canadian to do something and he'll do it to the best of his ability for as long as he or she is asked to do it. That is a thing about our country about which I'm fiercely proud.

We have to have a foreign policy in which we understand that the choices out there are tough and most of the things that we'll be asked to do are difficult.

Because we're a serious country if you ask a Canadian to do something we just get on and do it. That's how we should do our foreign policy."

...

Ignatieff: "The question is about why doesn't Canada take leadership on a mission where we're the leader like in the Congo or possibly some other nation, instead of in Afghanistan, appearing to follow on with the Americans.

I think there is some anxiety in Canada bout that question: are we just doing the American's business in Afghanistan? I've always taken the view about Afghanistan that that's not the case. That while the Americans are present in Afghanistan, it would not be true to say that it has become an American mission.

It's a NATO mission, with UN approval, with the explicit authorization of the Karzai government. We're not following anybody's precepts.

Of all the places in the world right now where Canada matters, Canada matters most in Afghanistan.

I'm an opposition politician, and not a very important one in a foreign government. The president of Afghanistan doesn't give an opposition politician an hour of his time unless Canada matters, and we had an hour of his time in Afghanistan.

You've got to understand that.

The capabilities that Canada has put on the ground in Afghanistan gives clout. Many Canadians are even a little anxious about when I use words like clout, or matter, or that kind of stuff. This isn't macho talk, I don't like macho talk.

I'm just saying we count. And if we count, we should use our influence to the maximum. We don't count simply because we're allies of the Americans. We count because we've done hard work there. Crucially, our work has won the confidence of Afghan authorities and the Afghan people. For that reason I think we should stay the course.

Then the issue is whether staying the course in Afghanistan precludes other activities. I think it certainly does limit our options. I cannot believe it precludes other international engagement, including participation in the same scale in the Congo."

...

Ignatieff: "Peacekeeping is where you have two combatants who reach an agreement to stop fighting and then you have a nice Canadian from Chicoutimi or Edmonton and he walks up and down until they're all cooled down and everybody goes home. That's Cypress and we've done that and that's peacekeeping. We're proud of that. We invented it, and I hope we have further examples where we can do that.

But in the modern world conflict is not between belligerent states but within the states. There are states of civil war. The Afghan insurgency is partly a civil war that comes out of Pakistan, but involves the Pashtun tribes against the central government.

In these situations, we're in what could be called peacemaking. Let me tell you what peacemaking I saw us do in Afghanistan.

We're in the Argendav valley, Panjwai -- this may begin to trigger stuff from the news bulletins. They fly you in in a Linx helicopter, very low. What you see as you sweep along the valley is farms on either side of the river bed, 175-200,000 people living there and Canada provides the security there.

Now, what are we trying to do there? We're trying to train the Afghan army and the Afghan police to provide security for that region. If we succeed in doing this, and that's peacemaking of a kind, that is we're creating security where it didn't exist before, the second thing we'd like to do is, flowing down the Argendav river, at the top of it is a dam. The entire irrigation system for the Argendav valley starts from that dam and runs down to the bottom. If we can establish security and put a command post of Canadian soldiers at the top, near the dam, we can restart the irrigation, right down the valley. We transform the agriculture in the Argendav valley and provide not only security, but economic development for 200,000 people.

Now that strikes me as peacemaking and peacebuilding. It creates security and it creates the conditions of economic development. We've never done this kind of stuff before using military force. And so it's new and unfamiliar for Canadians. We don't even know if it will work. One thing I do not want to do is oversell it to you. It's a work in progress and it might fail.

But I think this is the kind of thing, the difficult work, that Canada should be doing. It will combine something we've not put together: a combat soldier, a trainer of police, and an irrigation engineer. It's a combination we've never tried to do.

I think we should persevere and get that done. Get it done right. Thank you for your attention."

Further analysis of Mr Ignatieff's comments will follow in later days. Stay tuned.

My Meeting With Michael, So To Speak

Ignatieff's message: "Canada matters."

On February 1, 2008, Michael Ignatieff visited the University of Alberta.

Wrapping up the U of A's annual International Week, Ignatieff addressed a packed lecture theater about the challenges Canada will face in the 21st century, and how to best meet them.

Here is what he had to say:

"Thank you so much for coming in such huge numbers. I'm almost as nervous standing up here as I am in the House of Commons.

I do want to make it clear that although I am capable of bare-knuckled partisanship, in most occasions, this is not a partisan political occasion. This is an actual academic lecture.

It's wonderful to be back in the classroom, but I do want to make a point of welcoming everybody regardless of your political affiliation and extend a particular welcome to a couple of Conservative Members of Parliament and candidates in the audience: welcome, welcome, welcome.

My subject is Canada in the world. I have a very simple thing to say to you on the basis of a lifetime's experience outside the country: Canada matters.

We matter intensely.

We matter more than ever before, so let's shed the kind of "who cares? Who's listening?". Canada counts. It's important for your generation to sieze the opportunity to assert leadership for Canada outside our borders.

I think we as a country need to focus on a few simple fundamentals.

Defend, maintain and enhance our sovereignty as a people.

Defend, maintain and enhance our union as a people. We can't do anything outside unless we're united at home. Unless our unity is an example to the world outside.

The third thing is we have to back our values, Canadian values with capabilities. We can't be a country that gives people little lectures. We have to be a country that says, "here's where we stand, and here are the capabilities. Here are the investments we're going to make to make those values real in the world."

Sovereignty, unity and this third idea of basically putting our money where our mouth is are the things that orient my thinking about Canadian foreign policy.

I want to start with Canada/US relations because it's so much the centre of any foreign policy. I want to talk to you about security, economic issues, military issues, diplomatic issues and finally some political issues.

Let me start with the US/Canada relationship. I had a funny thing happen to me in politics. I sat down with a very wealthy Canadian who shall remain nameless (you can probably guess who he might have been). I said to him, "sir," in my earnest way, "what is the biggest issue you confront as a billionaire businessman?"

He looked at me in the way that businessmen sometimes do to politicians, like "where do I start with this guy?", with this look in his eyes and said, "It's the border, stupid."

He has businesses that cross the border. Maintaining a strong border, defending our border, investing in the capabilities to defend our border, equally to defending our sovereignty.

We have to enhance our border infrastructure. You can't go to Windsor, you can't go to many of our border crossings without being concerned that the border's going to become a choke chain.

We don't want a choke chain.

We're just to be proud of having the longest undefended border in the world. It's become stickier, and stickier and stickier since 9/11. But the thing we have to do is be a competent, capable, credible security partner with the United States while maintaining an absolute control over our sovereignty and our border. That's a very, very difficult trick and important that we have to get right.

But our border is not just on the 49th. We now have an enormous sense of the salience of the arctic frontier. Our arctic border, and the immense importance of protecting and investing in our sovereignty as climate change literally changes the geographical dimensions of our country.

I'm a strong defender of investment in sovereignty and our border. But I'll make another point: we have to invest in international law here. There is a lot that is unclear and obscure in who owns what and who does what there. You can't fix this stuff just with icebreakers and overflights and patrols, although they're enhancements I support. You have to sit down with our partners and work out a stable long-term legal framework for the development of the north for those who live there and for developing those resources. The last thing we want is a sovereignty complex up there.

I want you all to go out and study arctic law, the law of the sea, and who owns the undershelf stuff and all of that. That's a challenge for you. Someone needs to become Canada's expert on arctic international law.

It's crucial to our future as a country. So those are a few thoughts about our security relationship across the border with the United States.

Let me say a little bit about our economic relations.

One of the things that I see happening is that NAFTA has been very good for our country. But I see it creating an Atlantic Canadian economy, a central Canadian economy and a western economy.

One of the questions we've not been asking, I think, as clearly as we should, is whether we're still maintaining a national economy, from coast to coast to coast.

The north-south linkages in our economic system, I think, are now stronger than our east-west ones. When I was in Edmonton recently someone showed me a map of the pipelines and the natural gas pipelines. Much stronger north-south than east-west. No problem with north-south, that's our chief market.

My concern is to strengthen the east-west spine of our country. Energy cooridors. Pipelines. The national economic space is not as unified as it should be. BC and Alberta have set a good model for the rest of the country by sitting down and working to reduce the friction in the labour markets between Alberta and British Columbia. This is good.

We need federal leadership to strengthen the ties that bind. What's what the federal government of Canada for? It's to maintain common economic space and common citizenship.

The north-south pull fostered by the post-NAFTA world is great, provided that we don't splinter and fragment into increasingly separate economic spaces. That, it seems to me, to be the challenge that is at the center of Canadian economic policy.

It's also one of the biggest puzzles in our relationship with the Americans. I'm not an economist. What is the nature of the linkage between our economy and theirs?

In the old days we used to say "they get a cold, we get pneumonia." Right now, they've got a cold. They've got a nice, big bronchial infection right now. And nobody rejoices over their unhappiness, least of all me. One of the themes of our economy, we're unclear about that. We need to have much better economic analysis right now, but all I know that we can do is keep our fiscal fundamentals sound.

Sound fiscal discipline. No deficits. Management of our economy. Those fundamentals are thing we can do do maintain our economic sovereignty.

But the other thing we have to do in this context is understand the tremendous importance of investing in you. The future of our country is in this room. We have to bet the store in investing in training in education in science and technology. If we continue to be an economy based on hewers of wood and drawers of water, exporters of untreated natural resources, increasingly integrated into the American economy, I don't like what I see for you in 25-30 years, because I don't think our economy the gets the value out of the high-end of the economy. We get the untreated, raw end of the economy, not the high-value end.

So invest, invest, invest and invest in what? Invest in you.

The other thing I feel very strongly about and I know we've been saying it for 30 years: diversify, diversify, diversify. 86% of our economy is integrated with the Americans. That's a good thing. It's natural. It's the market, it's close. We're the largest investor in the United States by a considerable margin.

But I would hope in the next generation, it's China, it's India. We start putting our eggs in a bunch of baskets. My instinct tells me that builds a stronger and safer economic foundation for your future.

A few thoughts there about our economy.

A little thought about the role of the military in our foreign policy and international profile:

I've always thought one thought. I remember where I started: Canada matters. Canada has mattered because in the First War, for example, we were in combat three years before the Americans. In the Second War, three years before the Americans. Canadians forget that we have always stood and fought for what we believe even when our neighbour to the south was not there. It's part of our DNA as a people.

Our use of military force is fundamentally different from any other country's. We cannot use military force for aggression, or conquest or occupation. The decision by the Liberal government, and I'm not about to launch into partisanship here, to keep us out of Iraq was the right decision for Canada. One of the reasons it was the right decision for Canada is that use of military force did not have UN Security Council authorization.

So, in general, I think that we have to maintain a military capability. It's not to use for aggression, conquest or occupation, but is to use with the authorization of the United Nations wherever possible, and then is used to protect human beings.

Anne [McLelland] very kindly referred to the fact that I was part of the commission that drafted the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. That doctrine says that when people in country A are being chopped into small pieces or driven from their homes en masse, or if a genocidal massacre and ethnic cleansing are occuring in another country, and that state is either unable or unwilling to stop it, other states have an obligation under the UN Charter to do what they can to stop it.

That doctrine is, in my view, a core Canadian value and interest. It's a value because human right is indivisible. My right is not worth any more than Ali Johnston's.

Human indivisibility is the driving force of the sense of international obligation and international citizenship. But it can't just be talk. Responsibility to protect moves us from talk about human indivisibility to the protection of human indivisibility, which that seems to me in turn requires from Canada a military capability.

One of the things I have learned in 15 years out there in the killing fields of Africa and the Balkans, is that you can't protect human beings with blue berets and a sidearm. I'm fiercely proud of our peacekeeping tradition. Where peacekeeping of the traditional Pearsonian sort can be practiced we must practice it. But in a lot of cases now, in situations where you want to protect human beings, you want to prevent them from being ethnically cleansed or massacred because of their race, religion or ethnicity, you've got to have bulked up capabilities. You gotta go in there with flak jackets, you've got to have armour, you've gotta protect them.

This is a very tough issue for Canadians, because they feel fiercely attached to that Pearsonian model, with the sidearm and the blue beret.

But don't forget Rwanda. Don't forget what happened to Romeo Dallaire. Don't forget the situation when we had troops watching people being chopped into little pieces. You don't ever want to put a Canadian in that position ever again.

I feel a fierce conviction that when we make a promise to protect civilians we do it right or we don't go at all.

That has to be the basis on which we act in the international arena. It's just fundamental. I work with Romeo every day and I just don't like to see what that experience did to a proud Canadian soldier.

So we have to pledge ourselves: do it right or don't do it at all.

We can't do it everywhere. We have limited capabilities. This is not a charter to intervene in every place. But when it's really bad, when it really offends the conscience, Canada matters.

And Canada can only matter if we have a capability -- a military capability -- appropriate to that role. And that comes down to decisions that we as Canadians have to have the guts to make. Which is, we have to pay for it.

Everybody wants to spend it on your education or on hospitals or on schools much more than they want to spend it on the military and I fully understand that, and even respect it.

But if we believe in human indivisiility, we have to stump up. That's how I see this issue.

We've got difficult issues in Afghanistan right now. I don't want to be drawn into the whole debate, but understand what I believe, and I think what most Canadians believe.

Canadians are intensely troubled by this mission. Are we making progress? Are we really helping? Is our security better now than it was when we started? Those are real questions, and I don't have some heartening, tub-thumping, bang-the-table kind of answer. I'm not going to spin you. It's tough. It's difficult. The Manley report is to be praised simply because it says how difficult it is.

It's saying, we could lose. We could lose.

We don't know what success looks like in Afghanistan but we sure know what failure looks like. The Taliban take over, civil war restarts. The girls who are going to school don't go to school. The women who get health care as they deliver their children don't get health care. We slide back. I speak with feeling on this matter because I happened to be in Kabul in September 1997 when the Taliban took the city. I've spoken with the Taliban, I've worked with the Taliban, I've talked with the Taliban, and I know what they think about women.

This isn't propaganda.

Victory is not clear. But losing this is pretty clear to me, and I don't think we want to lose.

What Canada should do here is an urgent matter of Parliamentary debate. Canadians need to think. As a politician, I sit and listen to Canadians all day on this issue. They are troubled, not sure that we are making progress, but they are fiercely proud of the men and women -- it's a fact, it's a political fact. You may be against the mission, you may be for the mission, I respect both opinions -- but there isn't a Canadian who isn't proud of what we're trying to do. That's a political fact. There are very few Canadians who don't think Canada should persevere in Afghanistan in some form.

Because the thing about international engagement, like domestic engagement, with any issue is that it amounts to a bunch of promises to particular people. We have made promises to the Afghans. Canada has to decide what those promises are worth. What solidarity with Afghan men and women means to us. That's the issue. That's the difficult moral issue. And what form should that solidarity take? The Parliament of Canada is debating that issue right now.

I hope we will come to the right decision. I hope we won't polarize this on political lines. I hope we will do the nation's business. I hope we will serve your interests.

Let me talk a little bit more about a couple of other issues. I've talked about security, I've talked about the economy, I've talked about the military side of our international presence. Let me talk a little bit about the diplomatic and the international assistance side.

One of the other things that is fundamental to Canadian foreign policy and has been since my father worked for Mr Pearson. It goes back a long time. Canada likes to join any club that is going. And we're great members of every club we join: the UN, NATO, the Law of the Sea Conference, you name it. And we do that because it's in our interest.

We're a medium power. How do medium powers expand their influence? They get into the key clubs, and they run the club. That's how we do it.

We don't like to talk about Canada's power but we have power through our participation in multilateral institutions. One of the things we must not do is wait for the United States to build the multilateral world we want.

One of the things we got right in the 1990s is that we didn't sit there waiting for the great powers to act. On landmines, we acted. On supporting the International Criminal Court, we were a key player. On Responsibility to Protect we didn't sit there waiting, we took leadership. We pushed that doctrine in international bodies.

We've got an issue coming up on cluster munitions. It's a terrible, terrible weapon. Because when it's out there, you fire cluster munitions, they have a military purpose, but when they're left around, all they do is kill little kids. When they're left around a battlefield, you can tell cluster munitions have been used by the number of amputations you see in hospitals and most of it is some poor kid kicking a soccer ball around and blowing his leg off.

So we don't like cluster munitions. That's a place where Canada can say "let's work to get the scourge of cluster munitions out of the international system." It'll be difficult. It'll be hard. You can only do it multilaterally, but we can do it.

We mustn't hesitate in the international scene to use our leverage. We're in Afghanistan. 78 of our brave men and women have died. It entitles us to go to the Pakistani government and say "turn off the water for the Taliban. Stop this stuff".

Canada is unaccustomed to banging the table. It's unaccustomed to using leverage. But we have to use leverage. We have to be much tougher in the international arena. We need to get NATO to go talk to Musharrif and say "your security apparatus has enduring ties to the Taliban. Let's work together. It's not in your interest, it's not in our interest for those links to continue. How can we work together to ensure that the Taliban don't basically have a secure base in Pakistan?".

Because if we don't get that under control then I don't know quite how we get the Taliban insurgency under control and I really don't see how the Afghan government makes progress toward peace and stability.

Let me say a few other things about international assistance. This will be controversial and difficult, but I don't think CIDA is working the way it should. Too many people in Ottawa, not enough people in the field. Too bureaucratic, too bulked up.

What are the better models? It's another question for you to ask. Jeffrey Simpson had a good column in the Globe and Mail today saying we're too parochial. Canada's got to look up over the parapet of political debate and say, "okay, what country in the world does international assistance right? Is it Denmark? Is it Great Britain?" Because we sure aren't doing a terrific job.

How do we learn from other than countries that get it right? Find a model that works, then let's do it.

My sense is that we have to focus. We're still offering assistance to China and India. That doesn't make any sense to me.

Let's focus on the poorest countries, the most desperate countries. Let's adopt a country, let's have Canada say, next five years, it's Mozambique. Everything we do, every high school visit, every university exchange, every university connection, it is with Mozambique. Every bit of aid we do is to Mozambique. That would be a way to focus. Why Mozambique? Because it's a good country. We can get some return. We can get a partnership going that they'll never forget and we'll never forget.

So focus, focus, focus. Find models that work.

And be tough enough to say CIDA isn't doing its job.

Another think I think we need to do in our international presence is understand why Canada matters to the world. I've always believed that the kinds of things we're good at are absolutely crucial to peace and stability in the world.

We're a bilingual country. It's incredibly important that we help other countries divided by linguistic tensions to figure out how to do that. The world needs that specific expertise.

We're relatively well governed.

We've got things to teach the world about governance. About good governance. Sometimes I would hesitate to export Canadian federalism to my worst enemy. But I also think that Canadian federalism is a model to many countries to accomodate regional, linguistic, social and national difference.

The key problem in the 20th century is not climate change. It's providing political systems with the legitimacy capable of meeting the challenge of climate change, and poverty, and everything else.

The challenge of the 21st century is political stability. Making sure that countries are well enough governed that they don't blow themselves up. If they can maintain political legitimacy and stability they can do anything, and this is where Canada, I think, can help.

One of the things where I think government is behind the Canadian public, and I see it in a room like this, is you are the most international generation in human history. Many of you come from 190 countries. In this room there might be 30 or 40 languages that you speak.

Canada has never really seized the opportunity to represent a multicultural society. We have this untold wealth and strength of expertise on other countries. Our foreign service doesn't fully reflect that diversity. Our political system doesn't fully reflect that diversity. Our board rooms, the exporters, don't fully use that quality that we have.

That is an extraordinarily valuable asset. For those Canadians who don't have that automatic internationalism created by their origins, I can't see why the federal government, working with the provinces, exempting the fact that education is a provincial jurisdiction, why we can't make a year overseas a standard feature of every single Canadian's education.

Many of you are already doing that, but can't we do more of it? It's the best way for Canada to make friends. It's the best for Canada to get smart. It's the best way for Canada to pass on the values that make us the exceptional country we are."

Ignatieff's speech was followed by a 40-minute question and answer period, which will be transcribed here tomorrow.

In the meantime, here is Mr Ignatieff's speech for all Canadians to consider and enjoy. Far from the cariacture that predominates among Canadians on either side of the political spectrum, Ignatieff's vision for Canada is valuable and respectable, even if not quite perfected.

More tomorrow. Stay tuned.