Article content continued

Principles now are driving relations between Canada and a country that had excellent potential to help Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with his quest to make Canadian companies less reliant on the United States.

Late last week, Freeland, and then her department, tweeted statements of disappointment over the imprisonment of advocates for women’s rights by Saudi authorities.

There was no reason to pay any attention to those tweets. Canada has little, if any, influence in the Middle East, and those are the sorts of comments democratic countries direct at their less-democratic trading partners all the time.

Except countries such as Saudi Arabia are becoming more sensitive to scolding from abroad. The kingdom responded to Freeland’s tweet in shocking fashion, expelling the Canadian ambassador and freezing “all new business” with Canada.

“Any further step from the Canadian side in that direction will be considered as acknowledgment of our right to interfere in Canadian domestic affairs,” the Saudi foreign ministry said in a statement. “Canada and all other nations need to know that they can’t claim to be more concerned than the kingdom over its own citizens.”

All this should be a reminder that politics now represent one of the biggest threats to the global economy.

The trade wars get most of the attention, but the issue is bigger than that. Before the financial crisis, a democratic world order seemed possible. Now, emerging powers are looking to different role models. China’s brand of state-sponsored capitalism has a track record of generating wealth, and Beijing’s see-no-evil approach to international investment offers an alternative to Western money that comes with strings attached.