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She came to Parliament from a position with Reuters, in which she spent millions, took two years and her project was ultimately abandoned.

Auditioning for the job presently held by our PM, she decided to virtue signal for domestic consumption without regard for its predictable impact.

The slightest familiarity with Arab cultural traditions would have also informed Freeland that tweeting a demand that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman free activists is itself a sign of disrespect and that her demand for immediate change would, in the Saudi climate, beget precisely what occurred. MBS is notoriously hypersensitive, especially to perceived interference in his domestic affairs by outsiders. One need only look at his short-term house arrest of Lebanon’s PM Saad Hariri, or his actions respecting Quatar and Yemen. Any knowledgeable player would be aware that, after already pushing through the farthest-reaching civil liberty domestic reforms in decades, he was contending with domestic criticism for already going too far, not only from the other Crown princes still in power but from those princes who were detained under his watch.

Freeland should not have been entrusted with the critical NAFTA brief, particularly after word seeped out that she was not liked by her U.S. counterpart. Trudeau did not make her task easy

And her blundering approach to foreign affairs resulted in Canada becoming a bystander to the U.S.-Mexico NAFTA negotiations, from which she was deliberately excluded, when Trump’s instincts and domestic pressure would have had our NAFTA agreement sewn up long ago. Given our historic advantages relative to Mexico, Canada’s treaty with the U.S. should have been negotiated first if they were not negotiated together. Canada’s bargaining power is now dramatically reduced, and the deal we will end up with will likely be a worse one; Trump tweeted he would not make a deal with Canada unless it measurably improved the U.S. position relative to NAFTA.