Focus our study

It's not a stereotype, it's factual information. I am not saying we are a lowly middle-power or anything that undermines Canada's contribution to peace-keeping, in fact it was as a result of Lester Pearson that the term peace-keeping came into prominence during the Suez crisis and Pearson even received a Nobel Peace Price for his efforts. But we have to face reality, do we have the resources to compete with the rest of the countries you have mentioned? Even though we are involved in the strategic areas of Afghanistan, more than 80% of the costs for the peace-keeping mission in Afghanistan is paid for by the US. This begs the question, even if we have the resources, are we willing to contribute? For example, Harper's plan to assert Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic resulted in the Canada First Defense Plan - extremely impressive plans but there is not enough investment that is being made till now to strongly assert our sovereignty in the Arctic due to a lack of resources and funds. Just think about this for a second, if Canada is truly a up and coming country like you have mentioned over the next 50-100 years, we would not have embarrassingly lost out to Portugal in the UN vote for a seat on the UN Security Council last November. I think ideally we need to focus on what we can expect in the near future and not in the next 50-100 years when we don't even know what is going to happen tomorrow.