Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is following in his father’s footsteps by engaging in a new relationship with China.

And much like his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Justin is perfectly willing to look the other way when it comes to China’s dark history and its serious human rights abuses.

Earlier this year, Trudeau met with the Chinese Ambassador and was presented with a photo of his father, Pierre meeting Chairman Mao Zedong.

Mao led the Communist Party of China and ruled with an iron fist from 1949 until his death in 1976. Communism kills, and Mao was a ruthless killer responsible for more deaths than Stalin and Lenin combined. Historians estimate that during his tenure, Mao left a death toll of between 45 and 75 million people. His regime killed more people than any other in human history.

And yet, Pierre Trudeau and Mao Zedong were chummy. Trudeau Sr. forged a friendship with the brutal dictator, and Canada and China have had a diplomatic relationship ever since.

When Justin arrived in Beijing this week, he presented the Chinese government with a Norman Bethune medallion, according to his Instagram page,which was “made in the same run as one presented by my father here in 1973.”

Most Canadians have never heard of Norman Bethune, but in China, he’s considered a national hero. Bethune was a Canadian surgeon and inventor. He was also a devout Marxist and a propagandist for communism. After becoming disillusioned while practicing medicine in Canada, Bethune first moved to Spain to fight for communism in the Spanish civil war, then he moved to China in 1938.

There, he joined the communist guerilla forces and served as battlefield surgeon.

Bethune met Mao, and the two became friends. They exchanged letters until Bethune’s accidental death in 1939. Mao considered Bethune a martyr and a role model for international communism. He wrote a propaganda essay called “In Memory of Norman,” which became mandatory reading for all school children in China. Hence why Norman Bethune is a household name.

In the early 1970s, Pierre Trudeau realized that Bethune was a cherished communist icon in China, and used the man’s Canadian heritage as a way to earn favour with Mao. It was sly diplomacy, and Pierre was a savvy operator.

But now, 45 years later, Canadian politicians – both Liberal and Conservative – still play this silly song and dance of pretending that Bethune was an important and admirable Canadian.

Bethune was no hero. He betrayed Canadian values. He essentially defected from Canada to fight for a foreign army.

As Toronto Sun founder, the late Peter Worthington, wrote in 2012, “Bethune was not in China to help humanity, but to help Mao’s communist army. It was not sick people he tended, but wounded communist soldiers.”

We shouldn’t confuse Bethune’s actions with the false legacy created by Mao.

No one realistically expected Justin Trudeau to arrive in China and call them out for human rights violations. Nobody expected him to raise issues like arbitrary arrests, persecution of religious minorities, forced abortions or alleged organ harvesting.

No one expected him to take issue with China’s expansion into the South China Sea, taking over islands that belong to the Philippines, or its aggressive attempts to destabilize the US dollar.

But Trudeau, at the very least, could stop pretending to revere a man who left Canada to help a communist regime that committed unspeakable atrocities.