EDMONTON - Instead of taking a year off to backpack through Europe, I went straight to university after high school. It is not profitable to spend time and energy on regret, but I regret it. My friends who ironed Canadian flags on their backpacks and flew to Lisbon or Venice or Frankfurt still talk about their time abroad the way I talk about ... to be honest, I talk about nothing that way.

We're a young country, dominated by stories of immigration and integration. Without ethnic links, it's difficult to understand what it means to be a Canadian until we travel. Not to Disneyland or Las Vegas or Cancun but out there, in the actual world.

I was in my 30s before I first crossed an ocean but I still wanted what my friends had experienced: that feeling of being a Canadian abroad, of entering the Canadian story. I had learned why I ought to be proud in high school: we were peacekeepers, diplomats, a soft power with international prestige, a fair country, known for our concern about human rights and, more recently, the right mix between industrial growth and environmental protection. By the time I arrived in Paris, my first time, all of this had evaporated. Canada doesn't have a bad reputation. We have, if anything, a non-reputation. I couldn't enter the Canadian story because we had stopped telling it.

There are many reasons why Canada has declined, as an idea, outside its borders. Some of it has do with events outside our control: new alliances, the end of the Cold War, the increased importance of China and India. The Chretien government in the 1990s began to reduce our diplomatic services and our aid budget. Military spending has gone up, more recently, but without a context and a focus -the presence of active diplomats -it's difficult to attach our efforts to any clear philosophy. In 2006, shortly after the Harper government won its first mandate, Canada became the only G8 nation without any cultural diplomacy programs.

To reduce and clarify Canada's message, whatever it has become, fewer and fewer people are empowered to speak on our behalf.

"I feel sorry for our ambassador to the United Nations," said Douglas Roche, former Conservative MP for Edmonton-Strathcona, Liberalappointed senator and Canadian ambassador for disarmament to the UN. He launched his new book, How We Stopped Loving the Bomb, in Edmonton this week.

"The chap can't say or do anything on behalf of Canada. This muzzling, I'll say it again, muzzling of senior foreign affairs officers does a great disservice to Canada's interests. I think the best example of what's been happening is Canada losing its seat on the UN Security Council. The reason for it, clearly, is the rapidly declining reputation of Canada internationally. I travel internationally and I deplore it."

I lived in Europe for a year and developed a stock speech, explaining my country to strangers. If any of them knew a thing about Canada, it was a vague image of Trudeau, the music of Celine Dion or Cirque du Soleil. Some of them had heard we were involved, in some manner, with the mission in Afghanistan. It didn't look like Canada, on television. Over the course of a year, the one time English Canada made it to the front page of a national newspaper, in France, was for a film retrospective of Winnipeg director Guy Maddin, and the cultural attache in charge of the project was chastised by Ottawa for putting it together.

This isn't a Conservative problem. It's certainly related to the "control the message" strategy of the Harper government, and the attack ads on Michael Ignatieff have been based on the idea that an international career is equal to treason. But it isn't ideological. The decline began under the Liberals.

The Conservative platform is based on international security, with the big-ticket items be ing 75 new fighter jets that will cost between $16 billion and $30 billion. The NDP are keen to focus on a renewed military, international development, health and human rights. Of the three major parties, the Liberals have the most comprehensive plan to remedy the problem of Canada's declining international stature, by refocusing our efforts on UN peacekeeping, working with the international community on climate change, making Africa our foreign aid priority and -ironically, given what we've had to endure in this election campaign -exporting our knack for good governance with a Canada Democracy Agency.

Most importantly, the Liberals would rebuild Canada's foreign service. "Telling our story" abroad isn't easy, but if we do it well everything else becomes easier. Restoring our foreign service, and allowing Canadian diplomats, artists and business leaders to speak for our country, all around the world, is just as important as having a strong, stable and focused military. We can't afford to be one of the world's great air powers, but we could easily be what we once were: a country with influence.

If the polls are anywhere near accurate, it's obvious we're at a point of indecision -even experimentation. No one has been talking about foreign affairs since the writ dropped, aside from how much the fighter jets will cost, with or without engines, but there's still time to think about the story you want to enter, as a Canadian, the next time you land in Lisbon, Frankfurt, Beijing or Mumbai.

tbabiak@edmontonjournal.com

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