The disappearance of Canada.

Bill Reilly of Fox Television News noted recently that Canada used to be a Roman Catholic country. "But they gave that all up," he said. "And now they're ... a nothing country."

Which reminded me of a lunch I attended here in London recently to which a group of journalists had been invited. Although from disparate publications and news agencies, we had one thing in common--each of us covers Canada from the UK or Europe, a unique vantage point.

Though there was much disagreement over various issues, the one point we agreed upon was this: Canada has all but disappeared from the world scene. Ditto for its once legendary reputation as a nation that can constructively influence and mediate international disputes.

As for why this has happened, no one seemed to know though all were convinced the nation's conversion to secularism had nothing to do with it. Except me. Nevertheless, we were unanimous in our view that Canada is now officially nowhere on the geopolitical scene. There was also a consensus that Canadians living in Canada seem aware of their new image--or lack of it--on the world stage, and still assume that country's near-Boy-Scout image of years past remains intact. It does not.

The good news is that Prime Minister Paul Martin is showing signs that he is aware of this new reality. His recent call for a summit on the UN--which in recent years has lost all credibility as a moral force, the food-for-oil scandal being the last straw--is an example. But his choice may prove to be a poor one, a misbegotten attempt to resuscitate a body on life support, wasted by corruption, though most of the world remains in denial over how far gone this once august body really is.

As well-intended as these efforts may be, however, they appear doomed to fail for this reason: any nation that opts out of its natural geopolitical role, for whatever reason, cannot resume its former role without making a new commitment and new sacrifices. The fourth story of a building cannot be built directly over the first floor.

The Canadian government's presumption that it can still trade on spent political capital earned through two world wars, Korea and UN peacekeeping, contradicts a crucial geopolitical maxim, first articulated in the late 1930s by the esteemed Yale law professor Dr. Nicholas Spykeman: "Those nations which renounce the power struggle and deliberately choose impotence will cease to influence international relations for evil or good."

The fact is that Canada's once impressive influence, earned by heroic sacrifices during the last century, was built on moral capital based on the core Christian belief that Canadians are their brothers' keepers and that evil must actively be opposed. But over the past forty years that founding faith has been replaced by a rival faith in socialism and in moral relativism, where good and evil are viewed as a matter of personal interpretation.

The result is that Canada has become essentially an economy rather than a coherent nation, with self-interested provinces eternally squabbling over money while deeply uninterested in each other. Canada has also become a country with a metastasising government and virtually no understanding that being "nice" and "tolerant" are tickets to nowhere that no amount of flag waving will put right. Hard words, I know. But true.

It is also true that the only way Canada can restore itself to true nationhood is to renounce its socialistic, relativistic religion, which is currently anaesthetising its citizens, and return to the Christian faith on which it was founded.

In November, the Ontario government was urging Muslim parents not to remove their children from classes that discuss same-sex families. The response came after Muslim parents asked that their children be excluded from anti-homophobia education at a downtown Toronto school. The parents were upset that their children were shown videos during classes that depicted the feelings of children taunted at school because their parents are homosexuals. The Muslim parents complained that the classes infringed on their religious beliefs.

In response, the Toronto District School Board rejected the parents' request, saying that allowing some students to be excluded from the class would violate the rights of classmates with same-sex parents. "It's important that all our children have the opportunity to learn about those things that distinguish one of us from the other, and that they learn to respect those differences," said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty.

Education Minister Gerard Kennedy echoed McGuinty's remarks: "Our public schools are there to engender respect, respect for people of different faiths and different sexual orientations." He said he didn't think "there's any harm done to parents who find their children exposed to ideas that are different than the ones they teach at home."

Say what? Can somebody please explain to me how the "right" (right to what? to not be offended?) of the child of a gay parent trumps the "rights" of parents who don't want their children exposed to behaviour they believe to be immoral? How can such opposing world views ever be reconciled? That's what I mean by "incoherent."

But what can you expect from a nation that has abandoned absolutes of right and wrong in favour of "tolerance"? In such a nation, coherence is impossible, confusion is rampant and stupidity leaks from every crack. As John Fitzsimmons put it so eloquently in Restoring All Things: A Guide to Catholic Action, his 1938 classic treatise on the role of the Catholic in society: "The breaking societies of the West cannot be renewed by political and economic panaceas. It is a moral sickness from which the body of society suffers, and it will not be cured by local plasters upon local symptoms. Politics, economics, are phases of human behaviour; but human behaviour is inevitably determined by the values which men hold, by their sense of right and wrong."

Though Fitzsimmons was referring to the clouds of war gathering over Europe, his words are just as relevant today: "The social crisis and its economic and political manifestations are effects of wrong values, of the long, confusion between right and wrong. It is the task of Catholic Action to restore in men the values of Christ, the meaning of Christ: to set society right by setting right the men who compose society."

Paula Adamick is a professional journalist. She writes from London, England, where she she publishes the monthly, Canada Post.