Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it a lot. He was a proud feminist and he wanted his government's policies to reflect that. So in 2017, he introduced something called the feminist international assistance policy, which applied a feminist lens to Canada's foreign policy and international development. Current Prime Minister Mark Carney recently made headlines after he was asked whether Canada still applies that same lens. Here's part of his answer.

>> Yes, we have that aspect to our foreign policy. Um, but I wouldn't describe our foreign policy as feminist foreign policy.

So, if Canada doesn't have a feminist foreign policy, what kind does it have? What will a carne doctrine look like? And how does global human rights factor into all of this?

Then, Canada and India have had a strained relationship for years. But that all seems to be changing. Mark Carney invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 in June where they had a meeting and then they met again at the G20 summit. Modi has now invited Carney to visit India in 2026 and they have agreed after 15 years to resume comprehensive trade talks. So what could a new bilateral relationship look like and what are the chances it'll last? Welcome to the rundown.

Back in October, Prime Minister Carney identified his top priority.

>> My number one focus is to put Canadians back in control by building here at home and building new partnerships abroad so that we're not reliant on the United States.

He's definitely building new partnerships like a billion-dollar critical mineral agreement with the United Arab Emirates, a country accused of supporting a paramilitary force in Sudan that has killed thousands of civilians. Can Prime Minister Carney prioritize economic concerns while still backing international human rights? What kind of trade-offs will Canada have to make to chase more global trade? I got insight from Shannon Gormley, foreign affairs journalist and Toronto Star contributor, and Akos Maharaj, ambassador at large for the global organization of parliamentarians against corruption and senior fellow at the monk school of global affairs.

I got insight from Shannon Gormley, foreign affairs journalist and Toronto Star contributor, and Akos Maharaj, ambassador at large for the global organization of parliamentarians against corruption and senior fellow at the monk school of global affairs.

>> Shannon Akos, welcome to the program. How are you guys doing?

>> Very well, thank you.

>> Thank you for having us.

>> Shannon, we're going to start with you. At the recent G20 summit, uh, Prime Minister Mark Carney created some buzz when he said that Canada no longer has a feminist foreign policy. What do you think of that?

>> We are living in right now the most dangerous moment since the Second World War. So, our neighbor is the most powerful country on earth and it has been threatening to annex us as well as various allies. Um, we have a hot war in Europe as well as a hybrid war um throughout all of Europe. Um, and meanwhile to our north, we're having to worry about the Arctic. Um, that question was posed to the prime minister in this context of extreme and critical danger. And so he didn't say that he was pursuing an anti-feminist foreign policy. He said that part of his foreign policy is feminist, but that that's not what defines his foreign policy. And my reading of it is that at this moment in history, it would be strange for a political leader to say that feminism was his overarching concern in the world.

>> Now, Akos, some would say that this was maybe perhaps a way for Prime Minister Carney to distinguish himself uh from Trudeau. Fair to say? I suspect that's at least part of the case.

I suspect that's at least part of the case. He does feel a need to distance himself from an unpopular predecessor, especially since that predecessor was a member a leader of his own political party. But in addition to that, I think that one of the downsides to Justin Trudeau's tenure in foreign policy was often a perception, a justified perception in my view, that there were little connect, there was little connection between his words and his deeds.

The term feminist foreign policy was first coined by Sweden in 2014, the year before Trudeau was elected and they embraced it with both hands. It made a real difference to how they acted on the world stage, including, for example, discontinuing the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia when it was revealed that Saudi Arabia was using those arms to commit war crimes in Yemen and to oppress women in their own society. When Justin Trudeau took hold of that phrase, he actually increased the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia to the point where Saudi Arabia is now the second largest purchaser of Canadian weapons after the United States.

When Sweden jettisoned its feminist for foreign policy in 2022, the prime minister did not say this, but members of his party, the moderate party did. They raised Justin Trudeau in saying that he had degraded the term, that it had become little more than a branding exercise with no connection to real world foreign policy.

For Connie, I don't think for him or for any other political actor, we should put great weight on his words. We should put weight on his deeds. both for Trudeau and Carney. The question isn't how they describe their foreign policy, it's what they actually do, and that remains to be seen.

>> All right. Well, the United Arab Emirates has been heavily criticized for its role in the ongoing civil war in Sudan, uh, where thousands have been killed. Canada just signed a billion dollar deal. Uh, what are your thoughts on that?

>> We should be doing business with dictatorships and author authoritarian states only to the extent to which we can limit their influence on us. And that is a difficult trick to pull off. So take Germany for example. Germany thought that it could do business with Russia and said, "Okay, sure, Russia is not a liberal boy scout, but it's a reliable business partner." Lo and behold, Russia invades Ukraine and Germany is not in a very good position to fight back because it's nursed a dependent relationship with Russia. And so we have to ask ourselves, can we do business with countries without becoming dependent on states that in a way that our economic survival and our political survival isn't going to be at stake?

>> Let's use the UAE as an example. Should Canada be cozying up with uh non-democracies?

>> The hard reality is that we have little choice. We are an export-based economy. There are about 200 countries in the world, perhaps as few as 35 of them are full democracies. The rest are some combination of flawed democracies or outright dictatorships. But the fact that we are selling goods and services to a country doesn't mean that we should be selling out our values.

With the UA, the UAE, their involvement in Sudan is perhaps not that well known in Canada, but to put into context, that conflict has killed between 150,000 to 400,000 people. There are 25 million people being affected by famine. About 4 million of them are children. It is set to turn into far and away the most grotesque conflict of the 21st century. The UAE has its fingerprints all over that genocide. As Canadians, we have to exercise great caution. And I'm less concerned about the fact that Mark Carney wants to sign business deals with them than I am by the fact that he said nothing about the UAE's involvement in the genocide when he visited them. We don't have to bite our tongues when dealing with dictatorships and indeed speaking out is the only way that we can keep our economy and keep our souls.

>> Get your thoughts on that. Yeah,

>> it may be that we have little choice but to do some business with dictatorships. I agree with that. I don't think there's any question of that. But we do have to ask what kind of business we're doing with them. So, are we going to be selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, for instance? Um, or are we going to be giving over parts of our vital infrastructure? Are we allowing them to vest invest in transportation? You know, what what are the risks of doing business with them in terms of AI? Those are questions that we have to ask as well.

>> And I think it's particularly vexed with the UAE in that what Carney wants isn't a market to export goods and services. It's quite a small country. He wants access to their sovereign wealth fund, which is about $2 trillion. But the UAE has been explicit in saying that when they invest from their wealth fund, they don't just expect an economic return on investment. They expect a political return on investment.

And it's telling that, for example, that when the United States's Secretary of State raised the question of the UAE's complicity in the genocide in Sudan, he didn't mention their name. He talked about what they did, but would not mention the country's name. They have bought fear of the UAE from the Secretary of State for the United States.

>> As Canada being a on the global scale a middle power, some critics have said that uh virtue signaling is not is an irrational strategy when we talk about uh foreign policy for Canada. What do you think about that?

>> Virtue signaling is virtue signaling if it's words without being connected to deeds. And I would say that that it's that is that always damages a country's reputation and its standing. But sometimes that term is also used to say that we should not speak out at all. And I I absolutely disagree with that. The people who often say that Canada should not speak out on the abuses by countries such as the UAE or Saudi Arabia usually use two arguments. The first is that we are too small and too weak to make a difference. And the second is that by doing so we might damage our economic interests. But those two arguments are mutually exclusive.

If, for example, what we say doesn't matter, then it wouldn't harm our economic interests. And if it might harm our economic interest, then it shows that what we say matters. I would argue that we do have to speak out and not just because we can make a difference in the international stage because it makes a difference to us as Canadians. Our country isn't defined by a common race or ethnicity or religion or language. It's defined by a set of social norms and political values. And when our government takes positions on the international stage, they're not just projecting our identity into the international arena. They're also holding up a mirror to ourselves as Canadians about who we are. It's one that shapes our social norms and has an influence on our social contract as a people. I don't want our government taking positions on the international stage that is either indifferent to the suffering of others or convinces us that as Canadians we ought to be indifferent to the suffering of others. Because if we don't give a damn about other human beings abroad, we probably aren't going to give a damn about other human beings in Canada and if we don't care about one another as Canadians, then we have no Canada.

>> Shannon, there's a fine balance that clearly needs to happen here. Is there a way for Canada to prioritize th those economic concerns while maintaining the international human rights?

>> Well, I I don't like the idea of making those two concerns mutually exclusive. I I think that our Canadian interests, following Canadian interests, protecting Canadian interests, I think that is more often than not aligned with our values because if we're if we can as much as possible do business with other like-minded democracies, then we're going to be protecting our long-term interests because authoritarian states right now are even when they're in competition with each other, they're more and more collaborating and working in concert with each other because they know that there is a risk when democracy is ascendant for their own people to look at themselves and say maybe we want to be free too. And so it's not in our long-term economic interests to be dependent on people or to have closer trade ties to people that don't want us to be politically safe that don't that don't have the same political interests.

Akash, what does that look like though when we're trying to balance those two or or as Shen said, maybe we don't look at it as two exclusive things?

>> I think that we should be preferentially trying to come to come to business arrangements with countries who share our values and our concept of the rule of law. And that's not just good ethics. It's also good business. The kind of country that is contemptuous of its own population's basic human rights is also likely to be contemptuous of questions like contract law, intellectual property, and a fair disposition of of commercial disputes.

But even as we try to cultivate deeper and and broader relationships with fellow democracies, we're always going to have some kind of relationships with authoritarian states. That is inevitable. Those relationships have to be made as shallow as possible. They have to be hedged in by agreements that to the greatest extent possible enforces the rule of law and they cannot be separated from our effort to create an international system that is based on the rule of law in the long I I agree with Shannon that authoritarian states have a political interest in seeing democracies fail

>> because if democracies prosper they're able to say to their population will say we want a democracy as well. If they're able to make the argument to their populations, democracies can't deliver the goods, then their populations are more likely to accept oppression. It's in our own interest to recognize that in the long term, we can't prosper in a world that is jailed.

>> Diversify, diversify, diversify. That's kind of been the words that have been used when we talk about foreign policy. You mentioned the US. I'm curious, is Canada struggling to diversify its foreign policy right now without the US?

Oh well, it is a very tall order for us to diversify historically, economically, culturally. We have such deeply embedded ties with the US that even though it is um critical that we try to diversify, that doesn't mean that it's easy um and it it we're only going to be able to do it to a certain extent. You know, the the US is a behemoth. Um, and it's so much easier for trade flows to go between the US and Canada than it is in other countries. But what what we can do is for instance start cooperating more with European allies for instance on the security front and we've started to make a few strides in that area already. Um, and I think that's where more of our focus can be. Um, so as much as we can, you know, bring in more actors hopefully that are like-minded democracies um into both of our our, you know, security arrangements and agreements as well as um forging more trade ties, but understand that that's not something that's that's easily turned around.

>> Oh gosh. is it it feels like as we're having these conversations, it feels like it's uh no pun intended, but foreign territory for for Canada to start looking at diversifying its partners.

>> You know, I'm reminded of the old open expression, when is the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When is the second best time to plant a tree? Right now, [clears throat] and we are in that position. We should have been diversifying our economy and our politics a long time ago. We did an inadequate job largely because the United States was viewed as a reliable partner. They're so large. They're so close. They're so wealthy. They are now no longer a reliable partner for for us.

But I think that there's there's an opportunity amidst the chaos. And that is that the [clears throat] convulsions of the Trump administration have revealed to us and indeed to the world the terrible position that we have placed ourselves in by allowing ourselves to become dependent on one country in the hopes that they would always reflect our values. Diversifying our politics doesn't just mean stronger diplomatic relationships and economic relationships. It also means stepping up to take responsibility for things like security and defense and not expecting that the United States will come to our rescue because the United States is not coming to our rescue.

>> Akos Shannon, we're going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it.

>> Thank you.

In September 2023, then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau rose in the House of Commons and delivered a statement that sent shock waves around the world.

>> Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen. The victim Hardep Singh Nar was a seek separatist involved with a Kalistan movement.

Trudeau's announcement sparked a diplomatic explosion, one that was further complicated by allegations that India had engaged in election interference here. The two countries became effectively estranged. At the recent G20, the prime ministers were all smiles as they agreed to resume trade talks. To get a sense of what these trade talks could mean for Canada and whether our history with India could get in the way, I spoke with Rohinton Madora, a professor of practice at McGill University and a distinguished fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation.

>> Rohinton, welcome to the program. How are you doing?

>> Thank you for having me. I'm doing well.

>> All right, let's talk with the most recent talks. Canada and India restarted trade talks at the recent G20 in South Africa. What would this trade deal include?

>> So, we don't know. But the one thing we do know is that these talks have a 15-year history of futility. They began as talks for a comprehensive economic partnership. In other words, going beyond trade. they were sort of downgraded to trade and at the G20 summit they've been upgraded again to comprehensive economic partnership which tells me that it will be about trade but more than trade. How much more we still don't know but typically a comprehensive economic partnership would include um work on investment technology perhaps people flows education exchanges. Uh it all depends on how we view the word comprehensive.

>> Is this a turning point? You talk about that 15 year history. Is this a turning point for these two countries when it comes to trade?

>> There have been many turning points that haven't turned. So, I'm not willing to sit down here with you and say this is the turning point, but a few things have changed. Presumably, both countries have learned lessons over the last 15 years of what worked and what didn't. Second, and of course, the big one, the geopolitics have changed

>> and both countries realize that the US centered world order is not quite what it used to be. That might be the imper imperative that these talks need for the two countries to take them seriously. But there's a butt here, Jan. And the butt is that neither country is an important trading partner of the other.

>> Interesting.

>> And so the incentive to make concessions to each other is low because then you have to make them much more important trade partners. And so there's always going to be a caution in the negotiations and a limit to the upside. Some people might be uh curious to hear you say that because India fourth largest economy. So why might it be surprising that they don't necessarily matter to each other?

>> It has been an underperforming trade relationship. Uh my colleague Dan Surriak uh has estimated that if the two countries actually traded based on their economic fundamentals, trade might be one and a half to two times as high. The fact that it isn't is a reflection of the constant um uh buffeting of the economic relationship of the fact that neither country has taken the other frankly seriously despite the rhetoric. Um the upside is there. I suspect there's more upside in other areas though.

>> All right. Well, let's talk about that upside. Where do you see the main opportunities here for collaboration?

>> I'd say the main opportunities would be on the investment side. Okay. Uh there is a lot of um green infrastructure and other kinds of infrastructure that India needs which requires both capital as well as uh technology and Canadian pension fund money in particular is known to be smart patient money exactly the kind that India needs. I think that has been a growth area and almost impervious by the way to some of these political trends we've seen.

>> And so that I suspect is the main one. Then of course there's areas like students which we know uh are subject to our immigration policies as well but I'd say investment on the one hand and within trade there's existing trade patterns which I don't think will deepen but there might be new areas that emerge. We don't know. It depends on the scope of the talks. Well, in terms of new areas, there's been u some buzz uh around artificial intelligence uh as a potential source for bilateral cooperation. Your thoughts?

>> Uh I'm puzzled by that one. Why actually

>> I'm puzzled by it for the reason that you know I I have a sense that the excitement over AI is often inversely proportional to understanding the reality. Okay. So to be able to trade something or to consider an economic asset, you have to own it. Um and to own it, the typical way that we measure that is patents.

>> My colleague Jim Hinton has done the numbers on this extremely carefully. And what they suggest at no surprises, but the AI game is dominated and by dominated I mean 80 to 90% of the patents in AI are controlled by US and China.

There's about six countries of which Canada is one. So those UK, South Korea, Japan, uh Germany who then vy for that remaining 10% and Canada's actually at the bottom of that list.

>> We lose more patents than we make to other countries because we don't have the large multinationals that can valorize them. India isn't even a player in that game. It is not in the list I just mentioned and it has a very impressive digital stack as you might know. Um digital ID, financial inclusion, health, justice, but it's largely open-source-based.

So you've got a country that does not see AI as a purely commercial asset and one that's a lagard in commercializing. And I don't see how we're going to build an economic relationship on something that isn't even uh an asset for either. There might be academic exchanges. And as an academic, I'm never against those,

>> but I don't think you need an economic agreement for academics to exchange.

>> Noted. All right. You mentioned a number of countries out uh already. Outside of these bilateral issues, might there be a greater opportunity for both countries to work on perhaps a multilateral trilateral um in terms of the what we're seeing right now in terms of a shift in global order?

>> I believe that's the other growth area. It is outside bilateral. Some of us have been saying for years that the G20 is the forum that allows Canada to diversify its foreign policy thinking and actions.

um as with China, but that's a separate story. Canada and India have an interest in a stable and different global order. We now have a chance to play that role and everything seems to be up for grabs. Um debt, finance, development, trade, technology. This is a good time for Canada and India to join forces with other countries. They have already Australia

>> and Australia. We've we've seen an example of that just recently in which we design experiments among ourselves perhaps that can then be multilateralized or promote big ideas at the multilateral level.

>> Both countries have been accused India and Canada of each other of trying to undermine uh their national security. India has accused Canada of enabling the Palestine movement here. Canada has accused India of foreign interference. With all of that history and the history that you've talked about, will this impede trade relations?

>> Historically, it has. And I would never rule out the fact that events will will get in the way, so to speak. I I don't mean to dismiss the importance of these issues you've raised, but that they would sort of get in the way of the economic relationship. Um

there's two areas where I'd be looking out for some for a bump. Uh certainly the the trial of the suspects in the nijar murder and the ongoing election interference work. The fact that so many high level Canada India contacts have happened suggests to me that perhaps these issues have come up and there's some kind of onant

>> that you know let's now compartmentalize but just because we think it will be compartmentalized doesn't mean it will a lot depends on what kinds of credible evidence become public and how publics in each country react to it. So, I'm not going to rule it out because the history suggests that these are things that always seem to matter in a comprehensive relationship.

>> To what extent are these renewed trade talks a reflection of shared values between two countries versus a sort of shaped by geopolitical necessity, i.e., US President Donald Trump's policies?

>> A bit of both. I I think there's no question that um both countries realize that the US is not the partner and player it used to be. I don't think we'd be these two our two countries would be where they are were it not for that geopolitical development. this said there has always been an undercurrent in Canadian foreign policy to seek out like-minded and there's a long and actually happy history of you know Trudeau's senior being enamored by the non-align movement and and his uh admiration of the NU Gandhi family there have been moments Paul Martin

championing the expansion of the G7 to include India in the G20 because of his high regard and vice versa for Prime Minister Man Mahorse Man Singh a former finance minister himself. So there is that warmth and that warmth comes from shared values but shared values have to be backed up by action and that's where the two countries haven't been able to get it together.

>> All right. With that being said, if you had one piece of advice uh for the foreign minister, what would that be?

>> I'd say don't forget the long view. That's not the same as saying take the long view so you don't do anything in the short run. But don't forget the long view and don't let events always get in the way of the long view. Of course, they have to be dealt with. But Canada, India have a partnership that has not been fully exploited. Start exploiting it.

>> All right, Roenton, we are going to leave it there. Thank you so much for your insights. Really appreciate it.

>> My pleasure.

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