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It’s unambiguously plain what’s going on here, and it has nothing to do with anything Canada has said or done. The kingdom’s recently elevated Mohammad bin Salman, a chubby 32-year-old war criminal with a taste for fine art, French mansions and luxury yachts, is pushing his ample weight around. He wants to make an example of Canada.

The Saudis have sent troops into Bahrain, sponsored proxy jihadists in Syria, and bullied Qatar into almost total regional isolation

In his previous post as defence minister, Bin Salman launched a barbaric bombing campaign in Yemen that has resulted in the deaths of at least 15,000 people and has left half the population of that desperately poor country at the brink of famine. The war is ongoing. The Saudis have sent troops into Bahrain, sponsored proxy jihadists in Syria, and bullied Qatar into almost total regional isolation. Bin Salman has lately engaged in an elaborately managed public-relations campaign for himself, swanning around with European and American celebrity one-percenters and taking credit for what few recent crumbs Saudi Arabia’s courageous women’s rights champions have managed to procure from the Saudi “royal family” table — like the right to drive cars.

Canada is getting in the way of all that effort, and Freeland is quite right to assert that Canada will not be intimidated by the Saud family’s fuse-blowing: the eviction of Ambassador Dennis Horak, the freezing all new bilateral trade and investment, ordering the 15,000-or-so Saudi students in Canada to enrol in schools elsewhere, suspending flights to and from Toronto, and so on. “We are always going to speak up for human rights. We’re always going to speak up for women’s rights. And that is not going to change,” Freeland said. This is all to the good. This, however, is totally self-defeating: “Canadians expect our foreign policy to be driven by and to embody Canadian values, and that is how we intend to continue our foreign policy.”