Political party election platforms are not a good place to formulate foreign policy. But ever since the 2015 election, the Liberal Party has tied itself in knots over its vow to restore Canada as a leading practitioner of peacekeeping.
What the Liberals only seemed to have discovered when they returned to power was that, in an era of stateless terrorism, contemporary "peacekeeping" is no longer as simple as supervising a ceasefire line, in the tradition of former prime minister Lester Pearson. They quickly rebranded "peacekeeping" as "peace support operations," and included in it the possibility of Canadians serving as ground troops in trouble spots.
The Trudeau government then set about looking for a suitably troubled nation, and the unstable African country of Mali kept coming up.
This was partly because the French military has a lead role in MINUSMA, the UN "stabilization mission" in Mali, and it wants a fellow French-speaking nation to help out.
Observers immediately pointed out that any such mission needs an exit strategy, but that there wasn't a clear one from the Mali conflict, which is now approaching its fourth year. Ottawa dithered on the idea, at the same time as it refused to acknowledge it was considering Mali in the first place.
Last Friday, the Liberal government finally acknowledged that Mali is indeed a candidate for Canada's first peace-support mission, the one that Ottawa has been thinking about for months, and the country that most people expect to be chosen for the role.
That is progress. It would be even better, though, if the Trudeau government were to be honest with itself and admit that going into Mali would be a terrible idea.
Supporting peace implies that there is peace to be supported. But Mali and similarly troubled countries are really in complex civil wars. Canadian military personnel might find themselves in terrain they are untrained for, fighting child soldiers.
In terms of Canadian experience, it would be more like the Afghanistan War than the nostalgic ideal of Pearsonian peacekeeping. That is definitely not what the Liberals promised in the election, and they shouldn't pretend otherwise.