Canada got a tremendous boost during the unipolar moment after the Cold War ended. Our soft power, if I can use that term, travelled well, because it didn't encounter much resistance.
International institutions today have become arenas of great power and soft power competition. I tried to underscore that in my comments—how the Chinese are extending their influence in those institutions. Simply put, we have to invest in our hard power in response to the first question I got, but we also have to invest in our soft power. We need to get much smarter about it. It's not one or the other. It's both. It's driven by, as I said, geopolitical forces. Yes, we're a middle-sized power, but many countries still look to us for leadership, because there is a legacy there.
To come back to something Gordon said, our economic fortunes are in those parts of the world where we traditionally didn't play, the Indo-Pacific region being one of them. Those countries expect us to be an active partner, not just in the new and emerging institutions of the Indo-Pacific region but particularly in southeast Asia, where I'd say there are enormous opportunities for Canada. They're democracies we can work with, imperfect democracies but democracies nonetheless.
Indonesia is one where, at one point, we were one of its largest aid partners. It hasn't forgotten that, but we sure have. There's opportunity there, but we've got to up our game—hard power and soft power. That means investing in both at a time when Canadians don't want to invest in them. Part of political leadership is to say, as Gordon said, that the world really matters to us in our prosperity and our security.