KINSELLA: Mark Carney unafraid to cozy up to dirty dictators

Prime minister spent time with Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman

Published Jul 11, 2026  •  4 minute read

This handout photo taken and released by the Turkish presidential press service shows Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) welcoming Prime Minister Mark Carney at the Presidential Complex in Ankara ahead of the 36th NATO Heads of State and Government Summit, Tuesday, July 7, 2026. Photo by TURKISH PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE / Handout / AFP /Getty Images

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

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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, he spent time with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 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.

NATO leaders received the highly unusual gift of a revolver and six bullets. Photo by SAUL LOEB /AFP

Gifted revolver from Turkey’s leader

In a parting gesture that was suffused with symbolism, Erdogan 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 to hold onto the gun, unlike, say, Dirty Harry.

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

But 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.

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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.

Trip also included stop in Saudi Arabia

The latest stop on Carney’s Human Rights Abuser World Tour was Saudi Arabia, just days ago. Here are some of the things that Saudi Arabia does:

• It hands out lengthy prison sentences, or the death penalty, for social media posts about human rights

• It executes hundreds of people, annually, including minors

• It discriminates against women, and regularly imprisons women who are courageous enough to advocate for basic freedoms

• It keeps thousands of migrant workers ensnared in its kafala servitude system, which is often likened to slavery for its abuses and forced labour practices

• It kills critics — as it did in 2018 with Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered and dismembered by Saudi agents in the aforementioned Turkey

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And, notably, 9/11. There were 19 killers involved in the terror attack of Sept. 11, 2001. They slaughtered 2,977 people, 24 of them Canadians. Eleven of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Families of the victims are suing Saudi Arabia’s government, still. They allege that Saudi government employees and charities provided crucial material support to the 9/11 terrorists.

And, yet, there again was our prime minister, hanging out with another repressive regime.

Met with Mohammed bin Salman

It was the first such visit to Saudi Arabia by a Canadian leader in nearly 30 years. While there, Carney even met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who personally ordered Khashoggi’s murder, American intelligence agencies allege.

All of this — Carney’s dalliances with the ruling gangsters in Turkey, China and Saudi Arabia — is morally wrong. It is the opposite of what a Canadian prime minister should be doing. And it is a repudiation of decades of Canadian human rights policy under successive prime ministers.

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Ask Lloyd Axworthy, the legendary former Foreign Affairs Minister and a Liberal. He knows. This writer served on Axworthy’s foreign affairs advisory group in Opposition in the early 1990s (alongside Jean Chretien’s principal secretary Edward S. Goldenberg, who passed away recently). I knew Axworthy to be fearless and principled, and resolutely committed to protecting human rights, here and abroad.

Said Axworthy about Carney’s willingness to play footsie with abusers of human rights: “[Carney] keeps wanting to say he’s erasing the Trudeau legacy. Well, it’s not just Justin Trudeau’s legacy — he’s erasing a legacy that goes back a lot of years for a lot of Liberals. I mean, I was a Liberal since I was 17, and I’m finding what he’s doing to be quite disturbing.”

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   LILLEY: If Mark Carney can avoid lecturing Saudi Arabia, why not Donald Trump?

Does Mark Carney care? Apparently not, but he should.

Sooner or later, one of his newfound friends is going to do something very, very bad — because they always do.

And, at that point — per Dr. King — Mark Carney will be complicit.

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