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 $1 billion 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 prioritise 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 Akaash Maharaj, ambassador at large for the Global Organisation of Parliamentarians Against Corruption and senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs.

Shannon, Akash, welcome to the program.

Thank you guys.

Doing very well.

Thank you for having us.

Shannon, I'm going to start with you at the recent G20 summit.

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're living in right now the most dangerous moment since the Second World War.

So our neighbour is the most powerful country on earth, and it has been threatening to annex us, as well as various allies.

We have a hot war in Europe, as well as a hybrid war throughout all of Europe.

And meanwhile, to our north, we're having to worry about the Arctic.

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, some would say that this was maybe, perhaps a way for Prime Minister Carney to distinguish himself from Trudeau.

Fair to say.

I suspect that's at least part of the case.

He does feel the 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 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 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 Carney. 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 criticised for its role in the ongoing civil war in Sudan, where thousands have been killed.

Canada just signed $1 billion deal.

What are your thoughts on that?

We should be doing business with dictatorships and 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?

Well, let's use the UAE as an example.

Should Canada be cosying up with non-democracies?

The hard reality is that we have little choice.

We are an export-based economy.

Perhaps as few as 35 of them are full democracies.

The rest are some combination of 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 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.

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, or are we going to be giving over parts of our vital infrastructure?

Are we allowing them to invest in transportation?

You know, 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' 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 virtue signalling is not is is an irrational strategy.

When we talk about foreign policy for Canada, what do you think about that?

Virtue signalling is virtue signalling.

If it's words without being connected to deeds. And I would say that that that is that always damages the 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 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.

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 interests, 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 on 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 about other human beings abroad, we probably aren't going to give a 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 prioritise those economic concerns while maintaining the international human rights?

Well, I don't like the idea of making those two concerns mutually exclusive.

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 as Shannon said, maybe we don't look at it as two exclusive things.

I think that we should be preferentially trying to 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 populations. Basic human rights is also likely to be contemptuous of questions like contract law, intellectual property and fair disposition of of commercial disputes.

But even as we try to cultivate deeper 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.

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.

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 critical that we try to diversify, that doesn't mean that it's easy.

And it we're only going to be able to do it to a certain extent.

You know, the US is a behemoth and it's so much easier for trade flows to go between the US and Canada than it is in other countries.

But 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.

And I think that's where more of our focus can be.

So as much as we can, you know, bring in more actors, hopefully, that are like-minded democracies into both of our our security arrangements and agreements, as well as forging more trade ties.

But understand that that's not something that's that's easily turned around.

Gosh, it feels like as we're having these conversations, it feels like it's no pun intended, but foreign territory for for Canada to start looking in, diversifying its partners.

You know, I'm reminded of the old Roman 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.

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 us.

But I think that there's there is an opportunity amidst the chaos, and that is that the the 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 defence, and not expecting that the United States will come to our rescue because the United States is not coming to our rescue.

All right.

We have about 30 seconds.

And I want to get a question to both of you.

For the foreign minister, Anita Anand.

If she was sitting across from you today, what's one thing that you would like her to prioritise?

I would like her to prioritise democracy in the world.

So.

And that means forging more diplomatic ties, as we've talked about with like minded democracies and where we can where democracies are struggling, such as in Georgia right now outside of Russia, shoring those up, because that will help us in the long term.

The more democracies there are, the stronger our own democracy is going to be.

Akash, you get the last word.

I think that Canada's most underused foreign policy asset is the fact that our population is so nationally diverse.

Our country has not had replacement level fertility since 1971.

So our population stability and its growth has been down entirely to immigration.

That means that we have a population that is disproportionately connected to and informed of things that are going on around the world and can be a way of projecting Canadian values into the world.

Many prime ministers and masses of foreign affairs have been loath to use that asset, in part because they're still operating under the fiction that the state has a monopoly on foreign affairs.

It does not.

And either our foreign policy leaders will make rational use of diaspora communities or diaspora politics will consume Canada's foreign policy.

Akash, Shannon, we're going to have to leave it there.

Thank you so much for your insights.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.