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For all the bluster it generates, Canadian foreign policy can sometimes seem as the poet Earle Birney once lampooned it, the awkward pose of a lesser nation that “teeters tiptoe on his arctic roof / (ten brittle legs, no two together) / baring his royal canadian ass / white and helpless in the global winds.”

Largely inconsequential, except alongside more powerful allies like America or Britain, Canada’s foreign affairs have always been ripe for national myth-making.

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For half a century, that myth has been of multilateral engagement, peacekeeping, diplomacy and aid, broadly known as liberal internationalism, and pursued just as keenly under the Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney as under the various Liberal leaders from Lester Pearson, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for it, through Paul Martin.

This year, however, Canadians will have their first chance to vote on a plausible new contender for the national myth, an ideal that is equally visionary and based on morals, but colder, more cynical, solitary, realist and militaristic. The coming election will highlight the shift. Liberals, once moral visionaries of a sort abroad, have become pragmatic critics at home, while Conservatives, once so keen to call out sanctimony in those who see Canada as a “Boy Scout imperialist, the busybody of international politics,” are now preoccupied with their own values and visions.