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It is the context, not the content of Chrystia Freeland’s speech to Parliament Tuesday that makes it radical.

In any other context but the present, the foreign policy the minister laid out, in what was clearly intended to be taken as a Major Statement, would be regarded mostly as an anodyne recitation of liberal/Liberal nostrums: multilateralism, a rules-based international order, free trade, all laced with the usual “the world needs more Canada” self-congratulation and moral preening.

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Indeed, by tying foreign policy to “upholding progressive Canadian values,” the minister was able to repackage every other Liberal chestnut — multiculturalism, feminism, bilingualism — as an emanation, not of that party’s particular brand of clientelism, but of Canada itself. Again, pretty much par for the course.

To be sure, the speech’s assertion of the irreplaceable role of “hard power,” its clear-eyed endorsement of the “principled use of force,” where necessary, as part of our foreign policy, its stress on “pulling our weight” and “doing our fair share” in international military councils, rather than accepting the “client state” status implied by relying solely on the U.S. to defend us, are not the sorts of notes we have been accustomed to hearing from Liberal ministers. But I would suppose they sound like common sense to most Canadians.