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It was also a big deal that rookie Ahmed Hussen was named Canada’s Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, and not just for the uplifting optics of it — Hussen arrived in Canada as a Somali refugee when he was 16. Hussen was already a talented human rights lawyer and a skilled community advocate when he was elected last October and he should be a competent minister on a tough file, so it’s all to the good. And you don’t have to be especially “progressive” to take some pride in knowing that women now outnumber men in Trudeau’s cabinet 15 to 14.

But it was just as big a deal that the warhorse Hussen is replacing, John McCallum, was shuttled forward to serve as Canada’s new ambassador to China in a sparkle of mirror-ball lights, as though the 1989 Tiananmen massacre never happened, and as though disco was not dead. As though the reformist Chinese Communist Party boss Zhao Ziyang had never been locked up and purged. As though Xi Jinping was not a paranoid megalomaniac who has now reversed every trace of China’s furtive democratic progress and placed the whole country on permanent lockdown.

What was striking about the tone Trudeau struck, with his upbeat reference to the “opportunities and challenges” presented by Trump’s imminent inauguration and his vague reference to some “shifting global context,” was the way he inadvertently invited notice of how very alone we Canadians are in the world, all of a sudden.

Last week, Freeland put a positively cheery spin on Canada’s isolation, telling an audience at the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations that Canada is uniquely averse to the current global retreats into trade protectionism and xenophobia. “Out of all industrialized countries, Canada is the only one to go up against this tendency,” she said. “The complexity of the international situation presents enormous possibilities for Canada. I believe we are the best-placed country in the world to emerge from this complexity.”