(Apologies for not posting. I had laptop meltdown.)

One of the things that has struck me most about the recent election campaign is how...insular it is. Aside from a brief discussion of military procurement, and a smattering of sniping about Harper's supposed support for the Iraq war not one party has discussed actual foreign policy.

Which is both sad, and not at all surprising.

Because big things are happening in the world, and Canadians don't really seem to care about them at all. Or rather, they care in an abstract fashion. Because these world events seem to have no relationship with our daily lives. With the exception of recent immigrants, we seem to view foreign affairs purely through the lens of how Canada "matters" on the world stage. Afghanistan only matters in any because we actually have troops there.

Discussion on the Iraq war, while vitriolic, is also detached. Our opinions are philosophical - we know they don't matter. Canadians have an opinion on George Bush, but they mostly hate him because he is "stupid", and because of knee-jerk reactions to the Iraq war. We are secure in our opinions, because our opinions have no consequences.

This struck me again while reading the transcript of Robert Kaplan's discussion with Hugh Hewitt. On China, for example, Canadians are bizarrely optimistic. All we seem to see are the trade issues. How can we sell to China, will China hurt our competitive advantage etc. There is no discussion of China an entity - no analysis of the threat an emerging China poses on the world power stage.

Which seems insanely short-sighted, given China's emphasis on establishing themselves as a Great Power, in every possible way.

Yet we criticize the Americans for being insular, for being unsophisticated. Kaplan also made a great comment (which Jay Currie also noted), regarding the so-called red-neck middle Americans.

One of the things you see in Iraq, you see all these soldiers, Marines, private contractors, and they're all from the South, the greater South, the Mid-West, the Great Plains. And they all e-mail their families every single night about what's going on. And so people in other parts of the country are far more cosmopolitan and sophisticated about what's going on in Iraq now, than people on the two coasts of California and New York.

Having spent time in the last few years travelling to so-called "Red State" places, I can confirm that in, say, your average manufacturing facility, a good proportion of the employees have a close relative serving in the US military, and they get these email updates. A connector assembler in Springfield MO knows a great deal about the situation on the ground in Baghdad - more than the average New York sophisticate, and far, far more than nearly all Canadians.

But I would add that the problem is not one of geography, but of class. In New York for example, I spent a lot of time with the blue-collar guys working at AirTrain at JFK. They all had relatives in the NYPD, the FDNY, the military, or all of those services. 9/11 came up every day, and not in an abstract fashion. There at a facility of the Port Authority (which owned the Twin Towers), the idea of a terrorist attack is not abstract. Union guys who slept through my classes took bomb detection training very seriously indeed. They could have incredibly detailed and knowledgeable discussions over lunch on the situation in Iraq. They knew as much about Iraq as they did about Hip-Hop, which is to say, a great deal. More than me, and I read a lot.

The answer of course, is that these guys saw events in Iraq and Afghanistan as having direct and real impact on their lives. They cared because it was personal.

For Canadians, events in such far away lands aren't personal at all. We focus our intellectual power instead on issues that matter to us, such as health care and day care.

Which is maybe why foreign policy is not even on the radar this election season.

(Cross-posted to Gin and Tonic.)