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Trudeau will join the other leaders for the government-initiated Canadian Debate Production Partnership events — the English-language debate on Oct. 7, and the French-language debate on Oct. 10. Trudeau has also committed to a second French-language federal leaders’ debate Oct. 2 hosted by the TVA network, to which Elizabeth May, whose Green party is doing quite well in Quebec, has been left strangely uninvited.

It’s a peculiar thing, the way 'foreign policy' tends to get set apart from other matters of national concern in Canada

Foreign policy will come up at least tangentially in the three debates that all the leaders will attend, if for no other reason than it would be near to impossible to have Trudeau, May, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, the New Democrats’ Jagmeet Singh and Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet addressing voters’ concerns without the matter looming darkly in the room. You just can’t hive off foreign policy from the environment, the economy, immigration and refugees, national security and so on.

It’s a peculiar thing, the way “foreign policy” tends to get set apart from other matters of national concern in Canada. It may be partly because Canada didn’t gain full foreign-policy sovereignty from Britain until the Statute of Westminster in 1931. It’s still considered a field “best left to the experts.” Maybe there’s a lingering Upper Canada deference to authority involved, too. It could also be that during all those years when the United States was the world’s pre-eminent superpower, there wasn’t that much heavy lifting for us to do anyway. We’d just follow along behind the Americans, reaping the economic rewards the Americans won by their enforcement of a global order conducive to our interests. And in those times when we did follow our own course, we’d flatter ourselves for our better judgment, no matter how irrelevant we were in the result.