For Canada’s Liberal government, it was an embarrassment.

The Lima Group, a coalition of 14 countries (including Canada) had organized an international meeting in Peru’s capital this week to address the ongoing political crisis in Venezuela.

The first problem was that only 60 of the 100 countries invited to the affair showed up.

The second was that the Americans – who did show up in force — used the gathering as a venue to announce economic measures that most of the rest of the world (including Canada) finds odious.

Specifically, national security adviser John Bolton announced that the U.S. would punish any non-American company that dared to do business with Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuelan regime.

This is known as extraterritorial application of American law and it drives the rest of the world nuts.

When President Donald Trump announced in April that he was doing something similar to non-American firms operating in Cuba, the Canadian government complained long and hard.

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and her European Union counterpart issued a joint statement decrying the American action. “The European Union and Canada consider the extraterritorial application of Cuba-related measures contrary to international law,” the statement read.

They have reason to be equally worried about the Trump administration’s latest action against Venezuela. As the Associated Press reported this week, several big European companies, including the Spanish petroleum firm Repsol and Air France, could be hammered by the new sanctions. It’s not clear if any Canadian firms will be affected.

Still, this week’s events underscore the contradictions involved in Canada’s unusually aggressive approach to Maduro’s Venezuela. Canada’s Liberal government openly advocates for regime change in Caracas. To that end it was one of the first to officially recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate president.

Along with others in the Lima Group – with the notable exception of Mexico – Canada urged Venezuela’s military to mount a coup against Maduro. Eventually, a coup was tried. But it failed miserably.

Initially, in an effort to distance themselves from Latin America’s fraught history, the Lima Group countries tried to appear independent of the U.S.

Canada made much of the fact that the United States is not a Lima Group member. Freeland articulated her case for regime change in Canada’s favored small-l liberal language of democracy, human rights and respect for law.

Given Maduro’s record, she had much to work with. A recent United Nations report is harshly critical of his regime on all of these counts.

But in the end it became clear that this was a U.S. show. The Americans may not have been Lima Group members. But they attended all of its meetings. In Washington, hawks like Bolton took over the file. Trump announced punishing economic sanctions and threatened military action.

To Canada’s horror, Trump and Bolton brought Cuba into the mix – blaming Havana for alleged excesses committed by Maduro.

With that, regime change in Venezuela could no longer be portrayed as just a small-l liberal cause. It was visibly tied into America’s long-running obsession with Cuba.

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None of this has brought a solution to the Venezuelan crisis any closer. Indeed, the actions of both Washington and the Lima Group may have made the impasse more difficult.

Until now, the only glimmer of hope lay in negotiations between the Maduro and Guaido camps mediated by Norway – negotiations, incidentally, that the Lima Group opposed.

Four sessions have been held to date. A fifth was slated for late this week in Barbados. But now the Maduro government says that in light of America’s latest provocation, it won’t attend. Is this progress?

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