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Then there’s education. There are 16,000 Saudi students in Canada – all paying foreign-student fees and putting $2 billion into the economy. There are 4,000 Canadian-trained doctors in Saudi Arabia.

Two publicly subsidized Ontario colleges – Niagara and Algonquin – have been operating male-only campuses in Saudi Arabia, a major source of embarrassment to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne, a former education minister and staunch feminist. A third, Centennial College, has an apprenticeship training contract in the Gulf country.

Meanwhile, InterHealth Canada, based in Toronto, signed lucrative contracts in 2012 and 2013 to develop and manage two health facilities with the King Saud University Endowment and Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Health. Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard, a doctor by training, co-founded the Dhahran Department of Neurosurgery, Saudi Arabia, where he worked from 1992 to 1996.

The deal signed with General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ont., to sell almost $15 billion in light-armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia accounted for 95 per cent of Canadian military exports in 2013-2014. It will add more than $1 billion to the tally every year for 14 years.

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Canadians caught in Saudi Arabia:

William Sampson and Nathalie Morin

Before Raif Badawi’s case caught the world’s attention, two Canadians found themselves on the wrong side of Saudi law, and their families asked the Canadian government to intervene.

William Sampson

William Sampson was a dual British-Canadian citizen who was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 2000 and charged with terrorism, espionage and murder. Sentenced to death by beheading, he spent two years and seven months in jail, where he was repeatedly tortured before being released and allowed to leave Saudi Arabia in August 2003. No evidence ever linked him to the car bombings that claimed the life of another expat. His confession was obtained under torture.

Photo by - / AFP

Though the Canadian government insisted it had used back channels and diplomacy to help secure his release, Sampson himself repeatedly criticized the Canadian government for never questioning his guilt, and always asking him about his prison conditions in front of his torturers.

Sampson said he repeatedly informed Canadian diplomats and doctors that he was being tortured, but to no avail. According to Amnesty International, Canadian officials never investigated the allegations of torture. Sampson died in Britain in 2012, at the age of 52.

Nathalie Morin

Quebecer Nathalie Morin was 21 when she went to live in Saudi Arabia in 2005 with her three-year-old son and his Saudi father, who had been a student at Concordia University. Since then, she has had three other children, but has been held in a sort of captivity in the kingdom, with first the father of her children and then the government refusing to issue the children passports so they can leave the country.

Montreal Gazette files

Morin’s mother, Johanne Durocher, launched a campaign in 2008 to draw attention to her daughter’s plight and force the federal government to intervene, but despite petitions and demonstrations, Morin is still stuck.

In 2013, when it appeared her husband had locked her in the house, with no food for the family, two prominent female Saudi activists went to bring her provisions and were subsequently arrested and charged with inciting a wife against her husband.

In 2014, Morin told La Presse that her husband had finally agreed to allow the children to leave as long as Canada gave him a visa so he could go with them. The Canadian government did so, but the Saudi government still did not issue passports.

“Her situation has improved, in the sense that she now receives an income directly from the Saudi government, or from charity in the street,” Durocher said in February, adding she longs to see her daughter and grandchildren.

Durocher has stopped campaigning for her daughter, however, fearing it could make things worse for Morin. But the Canadian government could do more, she said. She signed a petition for the release of Raif Badawi last year.

“But before they help a Saudi citizen,” she told the Montreal Gazette, “the government should be working harder for Canadian citizens, like Nathalie Morin and her four Canadian children.”

csolyom@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/csolyom