Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer has got one big thing right. The world has indeed changed in fundamental ways over the past four years, since Canadians last elected a government. It’s more dangerous, more unpredictable, and more difficult for a middle power like Canada to navigate.

That much is obvious, and Scheer has laid out not so much a policy to deal with these new challenges, as an attitude. Canada, he said on Tuesday in a major address on foreign issues, must be stronger, tougher, harder. No more “style over substance,” his fundamental criticism of how Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has dealt with the rest of the world.

But how would a Scheer government be tougher with the likes of China and the Trump administration? How would it handle the challenges to multilateral institutions and the world trading order that have emerged with the election of Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism? Even after his lengthy speech that’s far from clear.

Scheer is certainly right that any Canadian government should avoid the sort of own goals that Trudeau scored in his shambolic trip to India early last year. The prime minister still hasn’t lived that one down.

But Scheer is wrong in his implication that the Liberals should be held responsible for the difficulties Canada has encountered in other major relationships over the past few years.

On Canada-U.S. relations, Scheer’s approach amounts to “blame Canada first.” It wasn’t the Trudeau government that upended every norm of cross-border relations. It wasn’t Ottawa that insisted on tearing up a successful trade deal amid threats and unjustified tariffs. It isn’t the Liberals who treat their allies as opponents to be insulted and abused.

This is all on the Trump administration, and the Trudeau government has managed to defend Canada’s vital interests while not shying away from making plain where it disagrees with Trump’s embrace of unilateralism and strong-man rule.

If Scheer knows a better way to walk that line, we’d like to hear it. But he had little concrete to offer on Tuesday.

On one point, though, the Conservative leader did propose something new. He would start talks to join the U.S. missile defence program, something both Liberal and previous Conservative governments refused to do. This would be a positive gesture toward co-operation with the U.S. on joint defence, and is worth doing if the cost can be kept reasonable.

On China, too, Scheer blames Trudeau for bungling the relationship. But it is China, and China alone, that has gone out of its way to make an awkward situation involving the extradition of an executive of the Chinese telecom giant Huawei infinitely worse. Beijing has made clear how little it values its relationship with Canada, and that is a hard lesson for all Canadians.

Taking a tougher stance on China is conventional wisdom after the past few months, and Scheer is quite right to say he will deal with China “with eyes wide open.” He proposes several steps, including ending a funding agreement with a China-led Asian infrastructure investment bank.

That would send a signal, but Scheer had nothing to say in his speech on the trickiest decision the government faces regarding China — whether to ban Huawei from so-called 5G wireless networks because of security concerns. Why duck the toughest issue when you’re supposedly all about being “tough”?

On the Middle East, Scheer would revert to the Harper government’s unquestioning support for Israel — and go a step further. He repeated his commitment to recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a move that would put Canada firmly in the camp of the Trump administration and almost nobody else.

In fact, there’s good reason to believe Scheer is inclined to go beyond that and move Canada’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, reversing decades of Canadian policy that this an issue to be settled in an eventual peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.

A draft version of his speech contained that promise, but he didn’t speak that line when he delivered his remarks. Then on the way out of the hall he told a Canadian Press reporter that recognizing Jerusalem as the capital would “obviously” mean that Canada’s “representation” would have to be there.

So which is it? This is a highly charged and highly symbolic issue. Would a Scheer government have Canada join the U.S., along with those giants of diplomacy Guatemala and Honduras, as the only countries with embassies in Jerusalem? Or wouldn’t it? Apparently even Scheer can’t make up his mind, or at least couldn’t decide whether to say it out loud.

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This is far from the biggest issue facing Canada in its relations with the rest of the world. But the way Scheer handles it will speak volumes about the tone a Conservative government he leads will set. At this point he seems to be heading down the wrong path, and the fact that he and his team can’t manage to spell out a clear message on what they know is a very controversial question doesn’t inspire confidence.

It’s easy to fault the Trudeau government for its mistakes in dealing with the rest of the world; there have been plenty of errors among the successes. But Canadians must decide whether Scheer has the judgment to do the right thing when the unexpected happens. On current evidence the jury is still out on that.

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