Mark Carney's very, very bad friends

Our Prime Ministerial frequent flyer was on the road again, this week. One wonders if he leafed through Dr. Martin Luther King’s first book on the plane.

There’s a memorable passage in it: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting is really cooperating with it.”

As such, the places Mark Carney visits are interesting. At the NATO Summit, Mark Carney spent time with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdogan has crushed the free press, systematically undermined Turkey’s judiciary, gone after his political opponents, and violated human rights with relish. He calls Judaism a “genocidal, occupying, expansionist” ideology. He is generally regarded as a monster.

In a parting gesture that was suffused with symbolism, Erdoğan gave Carney a gift of an engraved .357 magnum Colt Python revolver, which is a restricted weapon in Canada. Unless he is appropriately licensed, Carney is not permitted not to hold onto the Magnum, unlike, say, Dirty Harry.

Carney is demonstrating that he is unafraid to cozy up to dirty dictators like Erdoğan, however.

Another recent stop on Carney’s world tour was China. China, as is well-known, is another unambiguous abuser of human rights. In China, Uyghurs, Muslims, Tibetans, and dissidents - as seen most vividly in Tiananmen Square - regularly face forced labour, mass detentions, religious persecution and brutal political and cultural assimilation. China also, it should be noted, illegally imprisoned two innocent Canadian men, and interfered in our elections in 2019 and 2021.

Notwithstanding that, there was our Prime Minister, in convivial meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Carney’s own Privy Council Office said the Prime Minister did not “proactively” - that is to say, at all - raise human rights concerns with Xi. “Topics of human rights and foreign interference were not brought up proactively by the Canadian Prime Minister,” PCO initially admitted, before speedily recanting.

Whether he said anything or not, Carney’s mere presence in China said plenty, and the Liberal leader was making no apologies, anyway. His visit to China was “historic and productive,” he said, defiant. The students in Tiananmen Square, in the unlikely event they are still alive, would probably disagree.

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