Canadians, a moderate people by repute, too often have immoderate views of what we can do in the world, fluctuating between pretension and denigration. We see ourselves either as and or and cowards. There is a little of all these qualities in a delusion into which I fear we are falling. We have some international reputation for hypocrisy, which isn't entirely deserved. However, if we do not look more shrewdly at some of our most honoured principles, we may come to earn this reputation.John W Holmes, 1969'In January 1968, Canadians were living in a land of contradictions. For many of its citizens, Canada was an altruistic middle power, the smallest of the large powers, saints and crusaders in the cause of the just and the weak, for whom everything seemed possible. In apparent confirmation of this exalted status, the country had once again become a member of the United Nations security council, having acceded for the third time to that body a year earlier. Expo '67 had come and gone, and the country was enjoying the hangover of a summer of limitless possibilities spent celebrating its centennial. Pierre Elliott Trudeau was a few short weeks away from becoming the new leader of the Liberal party of Canada and prime minister of the country, swept to power on a wave of youth and optimism. Despite those heady days, Trudeau, like Holmes, openly expressed the view that Canadians should not exaggerate [their] influence upon the course of world events.2 In many respects, it was an immoderate time, and Holmes's observation about the growing tendency of Canadians to adopt immoderate views, the first of these expressed in a conviction about the unquestionably positive nature of their influence on the world stage (often framed as distinct from the less positive influence of the United States), was profoundly reflective of this period.Despite, and perhaps because of, this euphoria of celebration and self-congratulation, however, the outlines of a malaise were simultaneously growing clearer. Charles de Gaulle's Vive le Quebec libre speech in Montreal in late July 1967 had underscored fundamental anxieties about the longer-term viability of the Canadian political project, and had added public fuel (and international recognition) to the aspirations of Quebec's separatistes. In other quarters, Canadians were beginning to express concern about their country's level of economic, cultural, and even political, dependence upon its southern neighbour, particularly as the neighbour's foreign policy and domestic strife seemed discordant with Canadian values. The day after Holmes's remarks touching on Canada's immoderate views, North Vietnam and South Vietnamese communists launched the Tet offensive, escalating both the Vietnam War and the United States' engagement in it - as well as Canadian unease with US policy. While Holmes deplored the Canadian tendency to find satisfaction in evidence of American sin and error (as many Canadians did over the US intervention in Vietnam), he similarly expressed frustration with those who argued that Canada needed to sacrifice all our private views to support our champion.3 Rumblings of discontent about the consequences of a too-close relationship were being heard. The Watkins report, recommending strict regulation of foreign investment into Canada, was soon to be released, precipitating the adoption of a number of short-lived economic nationalist policies designed to diversify Canada's economy away from its seemingly overwhelming dependence upon the United States. For Holmes, these concerns translated at times into equally immoderate views denigrating Canada's influence on world events, defining Canadians as fools and cowards incapable of expressing, much less projecting, a true sense of national purpose: a country for whom little seemed possible.Holmes, of course, goes on to warn us that immoderation can begin to look like hypocrisy on the world stage and that the way out of this state of affairs is to reflect self-critically upon the principles underscoring Canadian foreign policy. …