I would like to announce my candidacy for Minister of Foreign Affairs.
While I am honored to work as BCC's deputy, I'm ready to do a bit more for the region.

Goals:
a. Recruit more ambassadors so that not so many people have to shoulder the responsibility for multiple regions (if they don’t want to)

b. Get involved more in our embassies (participate in more threads, introduce games, etc.) Increased participation can lead to recruitment, stronger flows of information from regions in which we have embassies, and recruitment (in feeder regions, once people see how likeable we are, I know people will want to join our region).

c. Seek out democratic regions with which we could establish important social and strategic relationships.

Wish:
I’d like the name Canada to appear on surveys like the one Bamada (Allied States of EuroIslanders) shared with us for most influential regions. While this is a wish I have for the ministry, I’m not sure how to accomplish that goal, which means I will need feedback from the region to help accomplish that.

I look forward to the questions and comments. I also look forward to the discussion with FCW, Phil Jackson & MTony that will lead to what our region next needs to do.

You forgot to mention that you have been creating the ambassador report for some time. And a very job you are doing with it.

I will be going out of town tomorrow morning and won't be back until Sunday evening. Any questions or comments, I will respond either to them tonight or when I return.

BTW - great job filling in for BCC when she was out. :clap:

Yup!! You did a great job!!!

I have no conflicts of interest.

The influential regions and individuals were almost if not entirely drawn from the defender and invader commonities. Are you proposing that we should begin to participate in that area of the game, or do we retain the Hudson Bay doctrine?

I would propose that we retain the Hudson Bay doctrine. I think, however, that it is important to have diplomatic relationships with these regions. Although our region is not involved with region crashing, I think it is important to remember that we are a region and relations with other nations help us to understand what dangers we face, which I suspect is on of the reasons the MoFA is directed to work so closely with the MoD.

The exchange of ambassadors is important for more than defensive reasons, but I'm getting away from your original question.

I think a distinction needs to be made between having contacts and having formal relations. Currrently the Canadian Standards for Diplomatic Relations would require that any region we establish formal relations with be pro-democracy and share our values.

That was the key point, thanks for clearing that up.

Good luck with your campaign. Let the best person win!!! :)

I'm starting to think about ways in which the three goals can be accomplished, which is why I've edited my original post with letters (in goals).

I think that goal c. is going to involve looking at the list of regions and checking out forum activity and opening dialogues with leaders and ministers from other regions. Is suspect that this activity alone will be time consuming for me, but worthwhile in the communicative relationships (neither embassies nor alliances). There are lists in the jolt.forums, that I believe may be outdated, but I'm continuing to look for summaries (NSwiki is also an interesting source if it is accurate).

I'm starting to see a stratification of relationships (thanks for the idea hb) with other regions as:

Contact: Telegrams, occasional chat in NS forums, light particpation in other forums.
Embassy: Exchange of ambassadors, establishment of a space in each other's forums, and more particpation in forums.
Alliance: Mutual protection pact. Although I'm outlining this as a category, I believe that entering into alliances would be disadvantageous to Canada.

Simply being proactive in seeking the establishment of an embassy would be a significant improvement for our region. To make the task more manageable I would suggest starting with regions of a like size to ours (<1000 and > than 150).

Without doing the research, I would guess regions of that size with a similar pro-democracy outlook to ours would number around 10 or so.

I just recently reread the region's history. It turns out the first embassy we every had was with Africa. I wonder if anyone there remembers the relationship and if their region would qualify for an embassy today...

Turns out Africa is a fairly active region. Looks like we were their first international relationship also. However, they passed a law in 2003 against having alliances (sound familar ?). Except in their case they extended that to banning embassies as well. History of allies

In their forum, back in May, they did consider opening up relations with Europe. I think if we communicated how we handle embassies seperate from alliances they might be receptive to the idea of communications with us.