For the first time as part of an election campaign, three of Canada’s national political leaders will debate Canada’s role in the world this Monday evening in Toronto on television.

What can we look forward to? Well, strap in. This may be interesting.

If we look at the campaign’s coverage by international media, the questions should be biting. The BBC News website on Wednesday asked whether Stephen Harper — who “has a conservative record that would make an American Republican proud” — is “turning Canada into the U.S.”

The Economist magazine, for its part, sarcastically described Harper’s Canada in its Sept. 12 edition as “strong, proud and free-riding” in terms of its dismal contribution in global defence and foreign aid.

The criticism mirrors that of former prime minister Joe Clark, who was the longest-serving Conservative foreign minister in Canadian history. In a recent book, he described Harper’s government as one that “lectures and leaves” in its implementation of foreign policy: “Canada now talks more than we act, and our tone is almost adolescent.”

In Harper’s defence, the BBC this week cited a 2013 profile of Canada’s Prime Minister in the conservative American magazine National Review that described him in these terms:

“Conservatives, wherever they live, can be pleased with Stephen Harper. He is a leader of the West, an advocate of freedom, democracy, capitalism, human rights — Western civilization, we could say.”

Now, doesn’t that description make you feel good?

But this is Canada, after all, and the rules about political debate are now different. In terms of honest and vibrant debate, darkness has indeed descended upon our land.

There are now three assumptions accepted by much of Canada’s political class — all of them false — that seem to kick in whenever “Canadian foreign policy” is discussed in polite company.

The first is that Canadians generally don't really care about global issues. And that we are actually, however well-meaning, genuine idiots at heart when it comes to understanding the “complexities” of international affairs.

Instead, we are completely absorbed with our own personal finances, fearful about being kidnapped on the way to yoga by “jihadi terrorists” and suspicious of the tiresome “pointy heads” who try to help us penetrate the fog.

The second is that Canadians have no memory of their past, and are scornful of the weak-kneed, feel-good “boy scouts” who continually invoke it. Isn’t Canada now a “warrior nation” ready to man up when required? Get with the program, please.

If anyone at Monday’s debate invokes the name of Lester Pearson, or his role in resolving the 1956 Suez crisis, or Canada’s stubborn independent policy over the years toward Communist China and Cuba, or the countless times Canada has led the world in welcoming refugees, or Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to cut through the Cold War stalemate with an independent foreign policy, or the gutsy moves by Brian Mulroney and Joe Clark to end apartheid and free Nelson Mandela, or Jean Chrétien’s courageous decision, opposed passionately by then-opposition leader Stephen Harper, to disassociate Canada from the disastrous U.S./British invasion of Iraq in 2003 — if anyone mentions any of this in Monday’s debate, I will scream.

Finally, the third assumption in debating Canadian foreign policy in 2015 is that politicians can lie to the Canadian people, and get away with it. Easily.

Do you remember the debate about the economy on Sept. 17? The callous and inept handling of the Syrian refugee crisis by the Harper government became an issue, and the Prime Minister completely distorted his government’s position while defending it.

It was a classic Harper manoeuvre to pit one group against another. He suggested that “bogus refugee claimants” were receiving health care that was better than “ordinary Canadians can receive” — and the government had no choice but to intervene.

In fact, what the government did was actually cut off health care for refugee claimants who hadn’t even had their hearing, and the real policy was that no refugee claimant received more health-care coverage than “ordinary Canadians.”

A lie. Easily told, and with no accountability. That’s politics in Canada, 2015. And that is what the debate about many issues in this campaign has become.

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Will Monday’s debate be different? We shall see.

But at stake, perhaps, is whether Canada’s face to the world in the next decade will remain inward and self-absorbed — or one that is self-confident, global, and consistent with the Canada that the world once knew.

Tony Burman, former head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com .

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