How about we stop pretending Prime Minister Mark Carney’s foreign policy has anything to do with his famous Davos speech that Canada’s path would be a “principled and pragmatic” alliance of like-minded middle powers?

It’s one thing to make a deal with the European Union, whatever he and EU President Ursula von der Leyen want to call it.

But Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and, for gawd’s sake, Turkey, are now our “principled” partners ?

C’mon. Let’s not kid the troops.

As alarming, our Liberal government has resumed its long-standing adoration of Beijing’s dictators – briefly derailed, at least publicly, by the foreign interference inquiry , which the previous Liberal government didn’t want to hold – but now back on full throttle as Canada trades one hegemon – the U.S. – for another – China.

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PM attempting to rehabilitate world’s worst dictatorships

Carney isn’t just signing trade deals with some of the world’s worst dictatorships. Every time he does, he’s attempting to rehabilitate them.

He suggests by selective omission – despite their various histories of genocide, torture, false imprisonment, extrajudicial killings, mass executions, occupations, accommodation of terrorism, censorship and suppression of human rights – that underneath it all, they share common values with us.

Hardly anyone even asks anymore if Carney raises these issues in his meetings with their leaders, and even when they do, he comes up with another meaningless word salad to avoid publicly offending his hosts.

It’s certainly not mentioned in any of his official prime ministerial statements announcing Canada’s new economic, strategic and, heaven help us, security partnerships with them.

In his Davos speech at the World Economic Forum in January, Carney pontificated that the world’s “middle powers” like Canada, “have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.”

Ironic enough that he said it at the WEF – an annual meeting in the Swiss Alps of the world global political and corporate elites, who, in Carney’s own words, created the “dangerous and divided world … as it is, not as we wish it to be.”

As Terry Glavin recently wrote in his “The Real Story” substack:

“Does Canada’s road to a new and better world really need to run through China, Qatar and Turkey? …

“Mark Carney … wants to have it both ways. That’s what his Davis ‘Middle Powers’ formula has come to …

“Carney’s decision to include Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey with the Qatari royal family and Xi Jinping’s China among Canada’s new ‘strategic partnerships’ is making a bad turn even worse. It’s exactly the kind of foreign and trade policy promiscuity that greased the skids for democracy’s global retreat over the past quarter of a century. It’s what produced Trumpism in the first place …

“Is it really that smart to add Turkey to Canada’s already-compromised supply chains? – why is Canada helping Erdogan realize his dream of transforming the Turkish republic into a semi-Islamist police state?

“Just as Carney was leaving Istanbul … thousands of journalists were protesting Erdogan’s ruthless suppression of independent media and opposition voices.”

To say nothing of the fact that in a morally compromised world, Turkey is a member of NATO.

“We aim to be both principled and pragmatic,” Carney claimed in his Davos speech, which he said means:

“Acting consistently, applying the same standards to allies and rivals.”

‘Living with a lie’

That’s a bizarre claim given that Carney and his foreign minister constantly condemn Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank since 1967, but are silent on the modern world’s longest occupation – of Tibet by China since 1950 – or Turkey’s occupation of northern Cyprus since 1974.

“When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window,” Carney said in his Davos speech, meaning that doing so is “living within a lie,” which is exactly what Carney’s foreign policy is doing.

In the real word, Canada’s foreign policy is not his claimed “new approach” but what it has always been – condemning certain hegemons (currently Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin) while accommodating others (Chinese President Xi Jinping) in the interests of trade.

If, as Carney claimed in his Davos speech, “the power of the less powerful starts with honesty,” then at least be honest about that.

As Glavin rightly observes:

“It’s a strikingly odd thing that the mass adulation of Prime Minister Mark Carney that has become a singularly weird feature of Canadian politics is as much an American thing as anything else …. They’re besotted, and I get it. They’ll cheer for anybody who can dare stand up to the deranged American president and get away with it.”

lgoldstein@postmedia.com