TORONTO - While fundamentalists can use religion to create cultural divisions and breed extremism, Tony Blair is calling on world leaders to "get faith in action" and unleash shared moral values as a force for peace and positive change.
"Religious values can inform globalization and make it more humane," Blair said Thursday at a fundraising dinner for the Women's College Hospital in Toronto.
The call to action comes as Blair, a former Anglican who converted to Catholicism earlier this year, launches his Faith Foundation in New York on Friday, a new project aiming to build bridges between religions through dialogue and humanitarian work.
"Show (religion) doing something good" and it can be a powerful force, said the former British prime minister, who added communities in Africa beset by malaria could be better served through faith-based outreach.
At turns introspective and humorous, Blair also spoke about global forces, like the emerging economies of China and India, and the need for western democracies to react to an inevitable eastward shift of political and economic power.
"A strong relationship (with China) is essential," Blair, adding that Beijing plans to build more power stations in the next few years than all of Europe has since the Second World War.
"All the time, the world is changing so rapidly -- anyone who stands still gets left behind."
Monumental shifts are also playing out at home, and Blair said governments in Europe and North America shouldn't shy away from "big reforms" and finding new ways of providing social services such as health care and education.
For example, he pointed to public-private partnerships as a way to deliver consumer-based health care at a time when "monolithic public services" have become expensive and unwieldy.
Rather than an abandonment of our principles, though, Blair said adapting is "a way of making our way of life relevant."
Blair should know.
He brought Britain's Labour party back into power after years in the political wilderness by abandoning many of it founding principles.
Blair also reformed, sometimes painfully, Britain's health care system during his decade at 10 Downing St.
While Blair's tenure as prime minister was marked by a controversial decision to send British troops into Iraq, he now works as a Middle East peace envoy, navigating the disparate political goals of the Europe, the United Nations, Russia and the U.S.
"I've got an interesting line of accountability," he told a crowd of several hundred who paid $750-per-plate for the evening.
But if anyone can walk the political tightrope, it's Blair.
He presided over the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, which essentially ended years of hostilities between the British government and the Irish Republican Army.
"It was definitely one of those things people thought couldn't be done," said Blair, adding a solution also exists for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"It's either a two-state solution or a one state solution, in which case, it's going to be a big fight," he said, adding leaders should work for the latter.
"Without a solution between Israel and Palestine, there won't be peace in the world, so we'd better get it done."
