What would Foreign Affairs Minister Stockwell Day do?

You’d never know it from Canada’s federal election coverage, but here’s something rather more important than the cut of Stephen Harper’s new blue suit: If the Conservatives win, will Canada go on flexing its newfound muscles in the world, or will the country retreat back into a Yes-Sir orbit around the White House?

In recent years, against stiff American opposition, Canada has racked up a series of major diplomatic victories, in rapid succession: The Ottawa Landmines Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the emergence of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine at the United Nations, and most recently, the Convention on Cultural Diversity. You could probably add the Kyoto Accord to that list.

Canadian diplomatic activism is emerging as a key component in an entirely new architecture of global politics (I write at some some length on the subject in an essay just published here). At the risk of engaging in “smear and fear” tactics, what would become of all this under a Conservative government?