The worst of the worst:
The Qatari capital of Doha has been home to Hamas’s official political office since 2012. Turkey’s foreign minister hosted a Hamas delegation just two weeks ago, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has praised Hamas as a “group of liberators.”
Both Qatar and Turkey are autocracies. Qataris have been subject to the executive rule of a hereditary monarch ever since independence in 1971. Turkey is a relative newcomer to autocratic rule, thanks to an all-out crackdown on political opposition by Erdogan.
Both countries have problems with modern slavery. According to the keepers of the Global Slavery Index, Turkey has as many as 1.3 million individuals “living in modern slavery.” When Qatar hosted the World Cup in 2022, several rights organizations published reports alleging that venues had been constructed by migrant forced labour.
And the newest thing Qatar and Turkey now share in common is that in 2026 they both received their first bilateral visit from a sitting Canadian prime minister.
Mark Carney dropped in on Qatar in January and just wrapped up a three-day visit to Turkey over the weekend. In both instances, the Prime Minister’s Office cited the “historic” significance of Carney being the first of 24 Canadian prime ministers to make a dedicated visit. …
The rhetoric is similar in two other instances of Carney paying a rare visit to a notorious human rights abuser.
In July, Carney’s arrival in Saudi Arabia was trumpeted by his office “as the first visit to the country by a Canadian Prime Minister in 26 years.”
The earlier prime ministerial visit to Saudi Arabia, by Jean Chrétien in 2000, was part of a 12-day tour of the Middle East that included stops in Egypt, Syria and Israel.
And at the time of Carney’s visit, a Global Affairs travel warning for the country urged Canadians to “avoid non-essential travel,” and warned that their social media history could land them in a Saudi jail.
“Saudi nationals and foreigners have been sentenced to lengthy jail sentences for social media activities, including posts or simple ‘likes’. This included social media activity that took place outside Saudi Arabia and sometimes many years in the past,” it reads.
Nevertheless, in a joint statement with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Carney didn’t just speak of increasing trade, but of a “partnership … based on trust, friendship and a shared vision of confronting global challenges with pragmatic, swift and tangible cooperation.”
On the same foreign trip that included Qatar, Carney also paid a visit to Beijing, where he praised the People’s Republic of China as a partner in a “new world order.”
Trips to Beijing are more common for Canadian heads of government, but this was the first in nearly 10 years following a deep chill in Sino-Canadian relations brought about by allegations of Chinese interference in Canadian elections and Beijing’s arbitrary 1,000-day detention of Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig.
In a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang, Carney said “the world has changed much since that last visit and I believe the progress that we have made, and the partnership, sets us up well for the new world order.”
(Sidebar: a new world order, eh?)
A joint statement, meanwhile, would pledge closer “law enforcement cooperation” between Beijing and Canada.
The Liberals have never met a dictatorship they didn't like.
Also - Canadians don't really care about communism.
Caring interferes with more trivial matters:
I was at an embassy function recently and listened to speeches on what we must do with North Korea. There was talk of goodwill and engagement and warm, empty gestures. It upset me.
Canadians share a kind of naïvety about this world. We shrink from frank discussion of human rights for fear of hurting people’s feelings, and prefer sanitized talk about trade rather than prison camps.
For me, this is a bitter pill. I know how communists work. My family fled Vietnam in 1975 and has never returned.
We lived in Saigon. My father worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I followed in his footsteps and worked in the department. I was young then, fresh from school after graduating from the Sorbonne in Paris. My parents did not belong to any political party.
When my country fell in ‘75 I was working as a press attaché at the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok. To return home would have brought instant arrest. Communists hated diplomats second only to South Vietnamese army officers. I was stateless but managed to find my way to Canada.
I knew friends and colleagues who could not escape. They were not tortured right away. First they were instructed to report to a certain office, then they were sent to “re-education” camps to “retool” their thinking. Then they were imprisoned in chains.
Some survived. A few escaped. One colleague was tortured so badly he can barely walk to this day. Others hid in the villages and tried to erase their past. I lost contact with many of my friends after 1975.
Vietnam, China, North Korea, all have labour camps. All abuse human rights and rule of law. Perhaps these realities are too raw for Canadians. Instead we presume common interests and points of goodwill that do not really exist. These are not normal societies as you and I know them; normal gestures are pointless.
Governments promote trade with communist countries but there is no evidence this diminishes the power of police states or has ever closed a single prison camp. They fill their pockets with dollars and we fill our marketplace with goods made by cheap labour – 50¢ an hour compared $20 in Canada.
Trade is important but my interest is freedom. If we are going to do business with these countries, we have the opportunity to protest the conditions of their people. I know it’s delicate – I am a former diplomat – but it can be done effectively.
When I was in the company of diplomats at that embassy function in Ottawa I told them what I’ve now told you. We cannot be bullied by North Korea. We cannot be cajoled into giving them aid that will be confiscated by the Party or hectored into treating them as a functioning society.
Human rights must be a cornerstone of diplomacy, and Canada should never remain silent when others lose their freedoms.
Oh, but it is!
Canada has sunk into a swampy, enervating apathy that bars it from caring about the oppressed, the sick and disenfranchised.
Canadians mimic the very things authors in their dystopian tomes warned us about.
They won't go back.
And:
Cabinet’s decision to grant Chinese electric vehicle makers a 278,989-car import quota over five years marked “a new path,” says an internal Department of Foreign Affairs memo. The censored eight-page document made no mention of slave-made parts: “If we concede that electric vehicles required forced labour in their supply chain, will you put them on the list of products banned in Canada?”
The government is still expecting its friends on the Supreme Court to sanction its tyranny:
The Supreme Court yesterday served formal notice it will hear a last appeal from cabinet over the legality of emergency measures it used against peaceful Freedom Convoy protestors in 2022. Two lower courts determined cabinet’s actions including the freezing of demonstrators’ bank accounts were unlawful: “It captured people who simply wanted to join in the protest by standing on Parliament Hill carrying a placard.”
Grifter demands to use an iron fist, too:
Labour Minister Patty Hajdu would gain “ambiguous and dangerous” powers to quash legal strikes under cabinet’s bill C-39, union executives said yesterday. The bill would codify strike bans by executive order, a measure used by cabinet 10 times in two years: “This concept is ambiguous and dangerous.”
It's about censorship and not safety:
Federal Identity Minister Marc Miller says he would consider broadening the scope of the digital safety bill to include gaming platforms, in order to help protect children from predators who use them to target kids.
The bill will make social-media companies block users below the age of 16 from having accounts. The companies would be able to seek exemptions from the under-16 ban if they can convince a new digital safety regulator that they have sufficient safeguards to protect children.
Child protection advocates have raised concerns that platforms used by gamers, such as Roblox and Discord, where children and adults can communicate, are not covered by the digital safety bill and are being used for child exploitation.
In an interview Friday, Mr. Miller said he would “absolutely consider” making changes to the bill through regulations to make gaming platforms safer for children, and would listen to suggestions in committee.
The proposed under-16 ban follows a similar move in Australia, where experts say many children have found ways to get around it by migrating to smaller platforms, including Roblox, not covered by their law.
I doubt it:
There are 634 First Nations in Canada with a combined total of 1.1 million people. He just gave every First Nation $3.94 million. Or the equivalent of $2,272.72 per person. For emergency preparedness for climate change. I think I need to prepare for climate change emergencies too.
— Jeff Berube (@ABJeffBerube) October 27, 2026
