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More broadly, what Canada should do is double its defence budget and recreate an oceanic navy, spend stimulatively in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries as befits one of the world’s ten most important countries, propose a broadening of the Western Alliance to all democratic countries, set up a serious multi-national stand-by defensive and disaster relief force, and seek international agreement on the definition of a failed state and the right to intervene proactively to prevent such places from becoming nurseries of terrorism or natural human calamity.

Entirely separately, we should seek as much immigration by desirable people as this vast and underpopulated country can accommodate, with a preference for legitimate fugitives from oppression. In 1912, Canada, with a population of seven million, accepted 402,000 immigrants, under the brilliant policy of Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Sir Clifford Sifton (though Laurier’s government had left office the year before, it was his immigration policy, which was all that allowed us to keep pace with the demographic growth of the United States). This would be like admitting two million immigrants to Canada in one year now.

Instead of a national vision in the midst of an election campaign, when there might actually be some receptivity to a bit of public policy imagination, we have paranoid xenophobia and tokenistic militarism from the government, witless pacifism and passable gestures of sanctuary from the official opposition, and dissembling from the unofficial opposition. As this last is the least inadequate of the responses, someone determined to be optimistic can embrace it as a possibility for unstated visions of pulling our weight in the Western Alliance and among the world’s generous countries.

It is thin gruel for someone who has waited many decades for Canada to pull its weight in the world and stop patting itself on its beaver hat or Mountie cap for “punching above our weight,” something we have not done since the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan was shut down in 1945 (after the surrender of civilization’s enemies). But hope triumphs over experience.

National Post