You write having a Canadian passport meant something looking just through your press passes. Just seeing the word Canada felt like there was some power to it. Do you think it holds the same sway. In some areas? It does.

Canada is still a respected country, though. I think it's fallen. It's still in the top ten of most respected countries, and that can really be very, very helpful for Canadians and Canada. And certainly the government's hoping it will be very helpful as it looks for new trading partners. But it doesn't have that same that same clout that it used to have when it was very big in peacekeeping, very big in foreign aid.

There was a period in the '80s. Canadians may be surprised by this now, but we were often referred to as the Samaritan state, the state that always wanted to be out there helping others. And that gave us a kind of a entrance over and over on the ground.

Even when I was working with the Americans, I could say, let's go the Canadian Embassy. I think they'll be able to get us in where the American Embassy couldn't, you know, because of various suspicions or what have you. So I had many reasons to really appreciate that Canadian clout before. I think we have wonderful people abroad. And I have to underscore that. I think our reporters that are abroad now are as good as any in history, and I think we still have some extremely good diplomats, but we have to rebuild the strength, you know, more better, more bureaus and more more logistical support all the way through.

I think other countries, from what I gather, you know, tend to feel that we, we, we own the podium in a kind of non-sports way, a non swaggering way, but in a kind of diplomatic, friendly way. And we sort of stepped down from that podium and were content to go for bronze again. You know, there was a time when Canadian Sports Canada was known as the bronze medal nation, right? Well, we're not anymore. We're up there often for gold and silvers and all that.

Well, the same way with in our journalism and our diplomacy and the rest of it, we really were did manage to get on the podium in the '80s and '90s through that period and then gave a lot of it up. So they think that for a period we lost focus. We seem to be a hard country to read. We didn't seem to have a coherent message quite often, or we would have a bumper sticker slogan as a message and people say, well, what does that mean, really? What are you actually going to give? What kind of people are you going to send abroad? How come you used to have, you know, 1200 peacekeepers in the world? Now you've got 25, right? I mean, at some stage it becomes almost a little bit laughable.

Now, having said that, I think there's a big change in the Canadian mood that I feel in the last year. And I think Canada Canadians want to get back and know they have to get back. I really think is very important. It's not just a wish to be well-liked. It's a wish to be influential again, to be able to be. At the signing of documents. Notice Canada wanted to fly into Egypt for the signing of the cease fire agreement over Gaza. It you know, our Prime Minister phoned up and said, I want to come to be there. I'm not sure we would have done that before. So I think there's much more of Canada taking a we're in centre stage again role. And I'm very impressed by the amount of media coverage Canada tends to get now in the last six months or so. Over that before.

I think I think, first of all, networks have to be guilted back into realising, you know, what you're doing is ridiculous. I mean, I'll give you one horrible example that Ethiopia fell back into a civil war in recent years for about three year period when it's estimated that somewhere between half a million and 600,000 people died. That's more people than died in Gaza and Ukraine combined, yet got almost no coverage in the media. Very, very little coverage except in maybe the British and Al Jazeera and English and the French gave it more coverage.

But basically we've turned we've just gone away from covering stories because they seem complex, more costly to go there. And how would you support a team in the field? We don't do front line coverage in wars like Ukraine anymore, because the insurance is so high, and so we were sort of backing off, covering a lot of areas of the world. We don't cover Latin America nearly as much as we were doing so 20 years ago. This needs to be explained more, but I think the networks have to be somewhat guilted back and guilt themselves back. And I'm hoping that this, this whole era we're going into now where Canada is really realising we're not just Canada, US in terms of importance, we're Canada and a lot of other countries that we better get to know about much more than we do and have been reporting on in recent years. And we're scandalously unaware, really. You know, the big picture in India or Indonesia, Latin America, Africa. I don't think there's a single Canadian broadcast correspondent in Africa at the moment, which is just crazy.

So that would help it. And then then putting the resources into the coverage, making the coverage good and interesting, which foreign news tends to be. And then at the base itself, you need experienced people able to interpret what's going on in a lesson. It's always a crisis mode.

I think that is a massive problem. I worried even back in 1984, all those years ago, that the images we were sending out, at what point would people just say, you know, I don't want to live with these kind of images, you know, I want a better peaceful images and I can't fault them, you know? I mean, there are certain times when I'm watching images of coverage from afar where I just I think I'll miss that tonight. I'll watch something else. It's understandable. It's human nature.

I don't know what. I don't know what the answer to that is, except to put more reporting and less of the image in, like, you know, I think longer stand ups by experienced reporters in the field that are less the vivid images, but more the verbal explanation, longer interviews with people who know what they's talking about. And there are so many of those, I mean, they're always good experts. Wherever you go in the world, those things can be more compelling at times than the endless images of problems.

And the other thing that I think is critically important. One lesson I learned in Ethiopia was of a very old Irish priest, came up to me in a feeding centre and said, you know, you media are just wonderful at coming into crises. You run in, you do three days of footage and then you fly away again and you don't come back and we have to stay on afterwards, of course. And the world gets an image that this was a hopeless country of hopeless people who never managed to get off their knees. And you create this wrong impression of complete devastation. You're not around to see people NEIGHBOURS come back together. Schools reopen, people form alliances and start helping each other. You miss that. So I went back to CBC and said, you know, he has a real point, and I think CBC's duty must be to go back and do recovery stories a great deal. And they did. Said they started to send me back almost every two years to Ethiopia, where I could focus on the kind of things that gave people encouragement to realise, you know, these horrible scenes you're seeing. They need not be the same scenes six months from now. If the world responds and the country is given a chance.

That's why, in a way, I have to say I'm rather old now. I look forward to seeing the rebuilding of Gaza, you know, not just because it's the most wrecked place I've ever seen on Earth, but it's a place that will show that people can, with the proper help, come back as they do come back from so many places.

Well, I think we have a ceasefire. We don't have a peace agreement. We have a ceasefire agreement. You could say it's a small step, but, you know, all peace treaties begin. Small people say, oh, well, it's only a small element. Well, you have to start somewhere. And that small element can become the key building block down the road. So I try to be hopeful because I've seen wonderful, hopeful stories. I don't want to give people the impression I've only seen misery in life. I've seen a lot of wonderful recovery and new beginnings life. And, you know, I think back even to my childhood as a young child with Europe recovering from the Second World War, people do recover.

So I think there's a lot of difficulty now to go on to the next phase, the intervention force. What's it going to be made of? Who's going to volunteer to go into that? How are you going to bring a Palestinian Authority into work with that intervention force? How are you going to get Hamas to disarm? How are you going to get the Israelis to fully pull back all these stage by stage things that that need a lot of push and pressure? And the good thing I feel what I think is essential is that finally, all the countries around are saying, that's it, we've had it. This has to stop.

And, you know, it was very interesting that session in Egypt when 20 leaders of nations got together, because I think that's going to be needed. Pressure can maintained on Israel, pressure maintained on Hamas as well, that you've got to disarm. You've got to leave government.

The image I always fall asleep to is the shelter people or myself coming to a warm shelter and my sound machine? I have rain outside so they're coming in from a scary situation, or a rainy situation or a turbulent situation, but they're finding peace and shelter inside.

And I think the fact that millions of people can be brought to peace, shelter and calm can be brought out of their own nightmares is something that kind of inspires me all the time to maintain an interest in the world. Otherwise I would have given up. But boy, I've seen a lot of evil people in my life, but also a lot of saints. A lot of magnificent, heroic people I write about. And that's what I like to fall asleep to, is that comforting image of there's a shelter in the world for everybody, right?