Greetings from BC!

Home has been very nice thus far. Lots of quality time with the families, seen a few familiar faces, the usual stuff. It's been a good way to get away from everything in Halifax that was starting to have a bad effect on my overall mindset, and when I'm back next week I'm hoping to have my batteries fully re-charged so that I can go into the homestretch for this final semester of grad school with a positive attitude. I've been brainstorming on a few ideas for papers and even the thesis, marking papers, and putting a lot of thought into my projects that will keep me occupied for the next three or four months. The time away has been beneficial for my spirit, and probably Tasha's too, so that's good for both of us. We've only had one chance encounter, which was someone that Tasha definitely did not want to see, and that made for another of our ultimately enjoyable and lengthy discussions. It's amazing how much I've learned from that young woman and continue to learn from and about her.

In addition to the personal stuff, I've also been keeping up with the political events in this country and around the world. There's a very interesting poll that came out today which demonstrates that Canadians are not all that interested in participating in events around the world, too. I'll just do the quick copy-paste here:
Do Canadians think Canada should be participating in the war on terrorism?
Yes: 48%
No: 43%
Don't know: 9%

To me, this is a little unnerving. It's also indicative of a general theory that the rest of the world had an initially powerful response to 9/11 and then went on with their lives (there's no shortage of Americans who would like to return to the world of September 10th as well; it's a nice idea but hardly one that is a recipe for victory). For Canadians specifically, it's also supporting evidence for a theory that Canadians simply no longer desire to pursue the Pearsonian values of the so-called "Golden Age" of Canadian foreign policy. This argument was brought up against Michael Ignatieff when he suggested that Canada should be involved in the Iraq war, and it appears that the viewpoint has taken a fairly firm hold on our public. It's not a secret that I'm a supporter of Canada taking a larger role in the world and working with our American allies to make the world safer for democracy, but apparently I'm only in a very slim plurality of folks in this country with that attitude. I think in large part the problem, which I perceive this to be, falls with the previous government and its pronounced anti-Americanism. It's had a trickle-down effect on almost anything that Canada does in the international scene; if the Americans are for it, there's a knee-jerk reaction that we should be against it. This is in spite of the fact that we've been named by Osama bin Laden as a target for al Qaeda operations. There is a sad amount of willingness in the Canadian government to allow there to exist a gradation of unacceptability for terrorist activities. As yet, the government has refused to fully sanction and prevent the spread of funds aimed towards Hizbollah and Hamas, funds which are then directed to killing civilians walking the streets in Israel. I'll quote David Frum and Richard Perle: "We won't get very far against the ideology of global jihad as long as we suggest that some terrorist jihads are acceptable forms of 'resistance' while others are not."
I'm hopeful that the new government will go a lot further than the previous one in explaining the terms of the environment in which we find ourselves. The same poll quoted above indicated that there was a large lack of ignorance as to exactly what Canada is doing in Afghanistan. The government needs to get the message out. I'm suggesting that Harper has to do the same thing that Bush has done occasionally: go on a tour to sell the message. You can't expect a wide amount of support from Canadians if our soldiers are dying and we don't know why. Talk about the successes: young women going to school to receive an education; the end of arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and murder for expressing dissent; steps taken towards eliminating Afghanistan's dependency on opium production and exports. This is not an easy conflict, building democracies never is. History is on our side; we've done this before. We can do it in places like Afghanistan. But it's going to be much more difficult to win the war at home if people don't know what we're doing abroad.