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In his address to the 72nd UN General Assembly in September, Trudeau said nothing about the crisis in Yemen, or about China’s increasingly totalitarian thuggery.

On Boxing Day last year, human rights champion Chen Yunfei was dragged before a court on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” for organizing a memorial tribute to the victims of the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. On Christmas Day in 2009, Nobel peace prize laureate Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to 11 years for his part in composing a pro-democracy manifesto. Liu died last July of multiple organ failure due to a liver cancer prison authorities claimed they didn’t know about until just weeks before he succumbed.

A low point in Canada’s year on the “world stage” in 2017: At exactly the moment Liu died under heavy guard in a hospital in the northeast city of Shenyang, Gov.-Gen. David Johnston was hamming it up and smiling for the cameras while shaking hands with Xi Jinping at a formal dinner in Beijing. Another low point: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s obsequious pleadings for “free trade” favours during his visits in Beijing last month, tarted up in the usual pretty lies about “strengthening the middle class” and “regular, frank dialogue on human rights issues like good governance, freedom of speech, and the rule of law.” Upbraided for his impudence, Trudeau was sent on his way.

Another one: In his address to the 72nd UN General Assembly in September, Trudeau said nothing about the crisis in Yemen, or about China’s increasingly totalitarian thuggery and its perfection of artificial-intelligence thought control and its persecution of Uyghur Muslims, Christians, feminists and human rights lawyers, or about Myanmar’s bloody ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people. Instead, Trudeau enumerated Canada’s long and dismal history of trespasses upon the dignity and the rights of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. In another context, that would be all well and good. But the point of it at the UN General Assembly was to say nothing to cause any of the UN’s 193 voting member states to take offence and fail to cast a vote for Canada in the contest for a useless non-voting chair around the UN’s disgraced Security Council table for the 2021-22 term.