Chinese President Xi Jinping, left, and Prime Minister Mark Carney, in Gyeongju last month.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Irwin Cotler remembers as justice minister taking part in a meeting with a delegation from China. Paul Martin was prime minister at the time, and the meeting was carried on without a certain topic coming up. Mr. Cotler passed Mr. Martin a note: “Paul, what about human rights?”
Mr. Cotler, the international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, says the prime minister eventually raised human rights in that meeting, and the same should be done in the future as Canada re-engages with China.
Human-rights observers and experts say that as the Canadian government focuses on diversifying trade and business, they’re not hearing much from Ottawa about rights issues.
With unpredictability and hostility in the United States, the Canadian government is seeking new relationships and has signalled an openness to engage with countries that it has criticized in the past.
Last week, Prime Minister Mark Carney met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in South Korea and accepted his invitation to visit China, calling it a “turning point” in the relationship between the two countries. In June, he invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to the Group of Seven meeting in Alberta. Earlier this week, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Investment and a delegation of officials travelled to Ottawa.
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Mr. Cotler, who has had a long-standing involvement with China and Saudi Arabia because he represents political prisoners in both countries, says he’s in favour of what Mr. Carney and others have called a “strategic partnership” with China. But he says that engagement “doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to their human-rights violations.”
“If China feels we’re giving them a pass on these human-rights violations, when I think they would expect us to bring it up, then we have even weakened our overall strategic engagement.”
Mr. Carney was thrust into office, in large part, to manage the U.S.-Canada relationship, with economics at the centre, Mr. Cotler said. However, he doesn’t think there’s been a “full strategic appreciation of what foreign-policy leadership should entail, including on human-rights matters. I’m hoping that will happen.”
Former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy, chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council, said that, in the past, maintaining Canada’s reputation as a country committed to human rights had given it a lot of clout.
Saudi Investment Minister Khalid al-Falih in Riyadh in 2023.FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP/Getty Images
“But I think that we’ve kind of lost that understanding that soft power, human rights, those things which are kind of on the shelf right now were actually really important tools in enhancing Canada’s position and its ability to negotiate and its ability to be listened to.”
Mr. Axworthy said he’s not suggesting that there is no human-rights commitment, but that the government isn’t doing much to show it’s still committed to those principles.
“I really think that you can be careful what you say, you don’t have to get engaged in kind of screaming from the rooftops. … I would like to see us acknowledging a little bit more that the contagion that Trump is spreading around the world is something that really has to be countered, and we have to work with other countries to do it.”
Dennis Horak served as Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 2018 until Chrystia Freeland fired off a tweet, criticizing the Saudis for arresting rights activists, which wound up getting him expelled from the country. Saudi Arabia halted trade and investment with Canada, and the diplomatic row lasted for five years, when in 2023, Ottawa and Riyadh said they were restoring the relationship.
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Mr. Horak views the G7 invitation and the Investment Minister’s visit as positive developments. He said confining Canada’s economic interactions, trade and investment to a shrinking pool of liberal democracies isn’t in the country’s interest.
“There are a lot of countries out there that are not liberal democracies that provide real opportunities for Canada to prosper and to attract investment and for new export markets to diversify our trade, which is something we should be doing regardless of who’s in the White House,” he said. “But certainly, with the current occupant, it’s an absolute necessity.”
Mr. Horak said engagement can give you access, which in turn gives you opportunity for influence. Some avenues for change may be quiet and behind the scenes, and they won’t get likes on X.
Ketty Nivyabandi, the secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada’s English division, said the federal government has been busy on trade and she’s not seeing a strong enough emphasis on human rights.
Ketty Nivyabandi, the secretary-general of Amnesty International Canada’s English division, says Ottawa has been busy on trade and she isn't seeing enough emphasis on human rights.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
“A focus on trade without a strong focus on human rights will lead us to a much more dangerous world, and what’s missing in the conversation right now on Canada expanding relationships with these other countries is how will Canada ensure that human rights remain a priority moving forward?”
She said as Ottawa enters into new trade relationships, it must be guided by human-rights principles to ensure trade efforts aren’t happening at the expense of people in those countries or in Canada.
With the pressure the United States has placed on Canada, she said, she’s concerned about the speed in which things are happening.
“Are human rights still a priority in this new trade era that we’re entering? That is certainly a conversation we haven’t heard, and these assurances have not yet been made.”
“It’s not clear whether Canada will be a leader in the protection of human rights,” she added. “We’re hearing very clearly that Canada wants to be a new economic force and power, a much more diverse trade partner, but nothing on the protection of the rights of the most vulnerable. And that is concerning.”
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Alex Neve, professor of international human-rights law at the University of Ottawa, agrees.
He said hoping and assuming that deepening a trading relationship will improve human rights has been shown not to work.
“We need a policy and strategy in place that’s ensuring that we’ve thought about, what are the risks on the human-rights front? Because we want to make sure that we’re not going to be pursuing any kind of trade opportunities, that at their worst, might actually be contributing to or benefiting from human-rights violations.”
Mr. Neve said that at a time when the government’s focus is on trade, we’re not hearing much from Ottawa about serious human-rights concerns in a number of countries with which it’s engaging.
“I think that should be of great concern for all Canadians.”