I have not decided whether the same benefit should be afforded foreign undergraduate students. Undergraduates certainly do not have nearly the impact that grad students do. However, foreign undergraduates pay the full cost of their education and then some and so subsidize the domestic student population. For this reason alone, it is worth giving them at the very least citizenship points.

If tightly regulated, a similar point system could be set up for those wishing to study English in Canada. ESL students bring millions upon millions of dollars into the Canadian economy. They are de facto 6 month or so tourists. Furthermore, ESL students from countries outside of the Western world are fmostly from upper middle class families. If these students choose to stay in Canada, important economic, political and social bonds will be created with these countries upper middle classes.

Saying that intervening in foreign conflicts purely for humanitarian reasons is bad foreign policy is certainly legitimate -in fact, this is basically the position of the neocons who dominate the Bush administration (and recall that Bush himself opposed "national building" like NATO's eventual intervention in Yugoslavia after the spectacular failure of the UN in the 2000 election campaign). 

The Bush administration has never has been a unified monolith. There are and have been fissures. State and DOD were frequently at loggerheads when Powell was still there and CIA and Vice President’s office were not exactly friendly. Moreover, there are very real differences between 41 and 43. Philosophically, realists Scowcroft and Baker simply do not see eye to eye with neo cons such Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. Before you interject I would certainly not accept Wolfowitz’s implication that what distinguishes the two camps is that one believes in democracy and the other in propping up tyrants. If I was to draw the line, I would say the main difference is how powerful each group believes the US to be.

Anyway, whereas you imply that Bush’s hostility to nation building in the 2000 campaign is continuous and compatible with post 911 rhetoric, I believe a major shift has occurred. After 911 the neo cons not only won over W, they won the battle for the Republican hearts and Republican minds. Their victory was so complete that in the lead up to the Iraq war realist critiques of the potential consequences of such an adventure went entirely unnoticed. The Republican base bought into Neo Con assumption that the UN was only ever a constraint on US power and rejected that realist belief that the multilateral institutions were a useful way of limiting potential costs and risks. Rumsfeld’s yammering about “old Europe”, "freedom Fries" etc were seen by the Republican base as evidence that Gulliver had at long last broken free of the Lilliputians. It was cause for celebration and no thought was given to the fact that such comments or campaigns might have caused the US a great deal of damage. Similarly, traditional realist laments about nation building went unnoticed for one simple reason. A key neo con assumption is that nation building, in the traditional sense, is not necessary. This is the main reason for the complete lack of planning in Iraq.  Society is organic.  Free it and the market from various “unnatural” restraints and it will flourish all by its own. The Republican base swallowed this assumption whole. With concerns over nation building out of the way, the Republicans were able to play up the humanitarian angle to a much greater extent then they would have had such a campaign occurred before 911 and in the process draw closer the liberal interventionists/ “liberal hawks”. (Sure the administration focused primarily on WMD, but Republican chattering classes, most notably those at the weekly Standard, and the right wing think tanks certainly pushed transformative power of democracy and the market line.)

For me whether Ignatieff can offer a convincing reply to this question is the litmus test that determines whether he is legitimately a liberal interventionist or merely an academic apologist for the Bush administration's imperial fantasies. 

Look there is always going to be a decent humanitarian case for following the Bush administration on any given adventure. After all, the type of places the Americans are limited to attacking openly are always going to tokens of world’s worst. That is why the rise of neo conservatism has made me dislike liberal interventionism a lot more than I used to. Not constrained by with usual realist laments, the project for new American Century promised to turn liberal interventionists into kids in a candy store. The Neo Cons insured that no one would be attacking them from the right flank at a time when post 911 zeitgeist in the States had muted left wing of the Democratic party. In return, these so called "liberal Hawks" did the intellectual heavy lifting for Bushco on the Iraq war.

I would love it if a Liberal candidate made a speech resembling the following. 

For starters this means removing the fig leaf of Conservative procedural misconduct and having the very debate about Afghanistan we, rightly claim the Canadian people missed out on.  In doing so, pace Ignatieff, scared cows are not the only wild animal to be avoided.  We must also be wary of elephants and guerillas.   Let us not pretend, for example, that our Afghanistan policy will not have domestic consequences.   We have recently seen that it does.   We can not pretend, as Stephen Harper does, that sending troops to Afghan we not protect us from terrorists who have never set foot in that country but wish us ill will because we have sent troops there.  We must accept that in a democratic society, politicians have a duty to base their arguments on the truth and that they do not have the option of designing arguments to obscure it even if believe our hearts in the right place.    

Bob Rae has adopted the NDP line that the problem with Afghanistan is that our role has supposedly changed and we have moved from being peace keepers to peace makers. "The unilateral extension of the combat mission is a departure from Canada's traditional role of peacekeeping and reconstruction. Bob believes Canada could have instead focused our military, aid and diplomatic resources on reconstruction and rebuilding that war-torn country . . ." This is kind of idiotic reasoning born of focus groups and polling. Such polls show that Canadians have a high opinion of peacekeeping, but a low opinion of offensive missions. So the NDP says give the people what they want. The thing is, though, that Peace keeping means what it says. It involves keeping the peace between two identifiable warring factions who want peace and have invited third party in for that very reason. (Ignatieff says that Rwanda was peace keepings death nail. I disagree. Rwanda was never suited to be a peace keeping mission. Indeed, in many ways having peace keepers in Rwanda lessened the chances of the needed military intervention. The killing of Belgium peace keepers made intervention far harder politically and the prospect of more dead UN peacekeepers also probably played a role. The two groups were not geographically separate. That said, just because you can not use a hammer as a screw driver does not mean that hammer is useless. A hammer is only useless only in so far it no longer serves any purpose and that might just be happening with peace keeping. As guerilla war supplants state on state violence as the dominant form of conflict, peacekeeping missions have become less and less useful. In this sense Peace keeping is indeed dying.) Despite what Rae, Volpe and Layton might say, Canada was never doing this in Afghanistan nor could it ever hope to. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are not so kind as to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population and they simply do not recognize the distinction between a foreign military force focusing on peacekeeping and reconstruction and those focused on peacemaking. (Some have suggested to me that a focus on reconstruction and peacekeeping would result in fewer causalities, would make us less susceptible to terrorism and would produce better results. This is bullocks. The Auzzies took on an offensive role in Iraq and Spanish took on the role of nation builders. The Auzzies lost far fewer soliders than the Spanish, spent far less than the Spanish and it was Spain and not Australia that was attacked by terrorists for their role in Iraq. If Canada signs on to some furture American adventure, I hope they have the good sense to at least to take on a short term offensive role (special forces air strikes), a la Austraila in Iraq, and not a nation buidling role, a la Spain in Iraq. ) What changed is that we went from a region where the insurgency was weak to one war it was strong.

Ignatieff employed his own focus group and poll driven talking points with regard to Afghanistan during the recent leadership debate and unlike Rae's Ignatieff’s went down like a Led Zeppelin. Incredibly Ignatieff  claimed that death of a Canadian soldier meant that if Canada did not vote to extend the mission her death would have been in vain and by implication that the mission had merit by virtue of her death. "I supported the extension of the mission because that very day a brave soldier from Shilo, Manitoba, gave her life,"  No one wants to die for a mistake, but it is incredible that Ignatieff would imply that a mission is validated if soldiers have died carrying it out. That was not the worst of it though. He went to say suggest that voting against an extension meant that one did not “support our troops”. "I couldn't in good conscience stand up in the House of Commons and not vote for the extension of a mission when our soldiers' lives were on the line."  Chantal Herbert rightly jumped all over him:

"Last month, Ignatieff was one of only two leadership candidates to support the Prime Minister's decision to extend the Afghan mission for two years beyond next February. Saturday, he said he felt he would have let the Canadian soldiers who had put their lives on the line in Afghanistan down if he had voted differently. The notion that support for our troops should mean support for the government's decisions on the deployment is one of Stephen Harper's most demagogic arguments. In a rebuttal to Ignatieff, Bob Rae was right to point it out."

Rae “I disagree quite profoundly with Michael [Ignatieff] on this issue," Rae said, adding that "it's most unfair" to suggest that "if you vote against the resolution you are not supportive of Canadian troops overseas."

Liberal Bloggers, even the pro war ones, made the same point as Hebert and Rae.

Calgary Grit   “For Iggy, he couldn't vote against the motion because Nicola Goddard had died that same day. That answer just blew my mind. Here we have a world famous intellectual who has written about international conflict his entire life and his answer was that we had to extend the mission because someone had died. If Ignatieff is going to name drop Trudeau twelve times in his opening statements, then he should at least follow the "reason over passion" mantra Pierre lived by.”

A Bcer in Toronto: “I was disappointed at Ignatieff's poor showing defending his Afghan vote on Saturday though. His saying he couldn't vote no because a soldier had died that day doesn't fly. He's a smart man and even in the limited time allotted he was capable, or should be capable, of making a far better argument than that. Because I do agree with his vote on that issue, and it was the right thing to do.”

Cerberus: “It is utterly asinine to say that supporting or opposing an extension of our mission is tantamount to supporting or opposing our troops.” Ted did not direct this comment towards Ignatieff but rather Stephen Harper. However as both held the same “asinine” view it is applies to both.

Just as bad Ignatieff has still not addressed the concerns many people have with the Afghan mission. Indeed, his arguments so far add up to little more than good intentions and moral obligation guarantees success. What is more, Ignatieff has not acknowledged that the same arguments he used to say that Canada was justified in staying out of Iraq can also be used against the Afghan mission. For one, polls suggest that the mission has no better than support of half the population and polls showed at the time of the May vote that most Canadians were opposed. Ignatieff said that support of the population was vital. For another, a terrorist attack, inspired by Canada's presence in Afghanistan, could spilt the country apart, especially if Quebec is the victim. Currently the Afghan mission is opposed by what 60% of Quebecers. If Quebecers die as a result of us being there, the separatists will use it as a reason why Quebecers need their own country with its own foreign policy. Given what has just transpired in Ontario and the fact that the accused were said to be motivated by Canada's role in Afghanistan, Ignatieff can not very well claim that chances of such an attack or not insignificant. Ignatieff claimed that a potential national unity crisis was reason enough for staying out of the Iraq war.

Travers: “In pursuing multicultural tolerance, Canada has been negligent in reinforcing essential, common-denominator values. Most of those are self-evident: human rights, the rule of law and the understanding that one person's freedom ends where another's begins.”
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServ er?pagename=thestar/Layou t/Article_Type1&" title="http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServ er?pagename=thestar/Layou t/Article_Type1&" target="_blank"http://www.thestar.com/NASApp...;c=Article&cid=114954 5411381&call_pageid=9 70599109774&col=Colum nist969907626423  

For Travers et al, we need to lay down a number of core principles for what it means to be Canadian. For Travers et al, ambiguity is a dangerous thing. Nothing is specifically ruled out and so everything is permitted. Such thinking is old world and is not suited to any country (basically any Western country) dependent on immigration for its very survival. Most Western nations have a fairly good sense of themselves, but far from being a strength such fixed notions of what it means to be French, German or Polish, for example have proved to be obstacles to integration. Canada has not had as nearly a difficult a time. One reason for this is that Canadian identity, as signified and legitimized by official multiculturalism, is not a fixed set of precepts, but rather a byproduct of existential engagement, bounded by certain legal framework to be sure, of peoples from all over the globe..  It has severed as an anticoagulant, preventing a crust from forming on top of the Canadian melting pot.  Canadian identity is, as it should be, a work in progress.  There is no Canadian dream as there is an American dream.  We are not limited that way.  We do not believe in passing down a script of what it means to be Canadian down from one generation to the next.  We leave it up to each generation to decide who they are through existential engagement. The process only allows a generation to do decide who they were by retrospectively looking back; for Canadians as for Hegel, the Owl of Minerva only flies at night.  For those who are still in the sunshine of their lives, they simply say want they know they are not, viz., Americans.

US foreign policy, both real and imagined, is the well spring of terrorism. Anyone who believes the Bush line about they attack the US because they hate their freedoms is an idiot.

Similarly anyone who believes Harper’s application of the Bush line to Canada is also an idiot. "We are a target because of who we are, and how we live, our society are diversity our values.” 

As with US, the major bone of contention Jihadists, both domestic and foreign, have with Canada is not our freedoms, but rather Canadian foreign policy. They do not like us being in Afghanistan. Needless to say, most of what they say about our motivations for being there and the conduct of our troops is patently false and often absurd. For example, I do not think for a second that Canadian troops are raping thousands of Afghani women, as the ideological ring leader of the Ontario terror group is alleged to have claimed. In fact, I am rather inclined to believe that they are preventing many more rapes than they are committing if they have committed any at all. The validity of what these nut bars claim is not the issue though. The issue is does Canada being in Afghanistan greatly increase the chances of Canada being the target of a terrorist attack. The answer is yes. Bin Laden has said we are an Al Qaeda target because we are there. However, much more important is the fact that the chances of the Canadian government, or any other Western government for that matter, being able to prevent groups of disaffected youths from within their own populations from adopting Jihadist ideology, or worse is hopelessly unlikely. In other words, whatever the merit of what these nut bars are saying, the chances that they will say it and find domestic coverts, who will act on what they say, is all but guaranteed. This is the part conservatives have gotten right. What conservatives are not saying though is that what this means is that we must assume that trying to install democracy at gun point in Muslim countries greatly increases the chances domestic terrorism.

Sometimes this risk will be worth it. However in the case of Afghanistan, for me and for many other Canadians this increased risk is intolerably high price to pay for involvement in a war that is costing us billions, is doomed to failure and in no way furthers our national interests.