Prime Minister Stephen Harper and wife Laureen Harper visit Za’atri Refugee Camp in Jordan during his recent Middle East tour. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

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For the Harper government, high-blown rhetoric about religious freedom is just the pursuit of politics by other means.

When the Conservatives announced — during an election campaign, no less — that they would establish an Office of Religious Freedom, it was naturally met with scepticism: It certainly looked like a sop to the party’s social conservative Christian base.

Not at all, the government assured us. The idea was born of a deep-seated commitment to one of the most fundamental human rights.

Unsurprisingly, the government struggled to find someone credible to lead the new office, and was reportedly spurned by a number of people. It finally lit on the figure of Andrew Bennett, a Roman Catholic academic who taught the history of Christianity at an obscure Christian college that caters to students who have been home-schooled by their Christian parents.

The newly-minted Ambassador Bennett did the media rounds and did a plausible job of presenting himself as a guy who happens to have a strong particular personal faith, but believes profoundly in the centrality of religious freedom for everyone.

And who can quarrel with that? Religious freedom should be precious to all of us — even to those of little faith, like me. Historically, it was from religious freedom that the notion of freedom of conscience was born. And from that flowed all the other rights of free expression: a free press, free assembly and free speech.

So if your job were really to defend the religious rights of all people of faith, where would you put your energies? Well, that’s a little hard to say. But just for the sake of argument, let’s start with a list compiled by the U.S. Department of State. It points the finger at eight countries in particular for abuse of religious freedom: Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Uzbekistan.

There’s an obvious problem with this list, of course, from the Harper government’s point of view. The Chinese regime may once have been numbered among History’s Greatest Monsters by Conservatives, but China has the potential to be the Future’s Greatest Consumer of Bitumen.

Awkward.

Meanwhile, like many Western countries, we’re just trying to get diplomatic relations restarted with Burma these days — so when Buddhist mobs massacre Rohingya Muslims it’s just embarrassing.

The government informs us that Saudi Arabia ‘plays an important role in promoting regional peace and stability.’ This is a country where the religious police may run you off the road and kill you because they don’t like what you are playing on your car radio.

Iran is a different case, of course. It is the existential enemy of Israel, and so we hate her. The federal government’s webpage on relations with Iran is topped with a video and a quotation from the minister of Foreign Affairs, John Baird: “Our quarrel is not with the people of Iran, but instead with the regime that aims to silence their voices.”

How about Saudi Arabia, then, which has a voice-silencing problem too? It also was named and shamed on that State Department list, but it is a determined rival of Iran — which, in case you need reminding, we really, really don’t like.

The government’s webpage on Saudi Arabia informs us that it “plays an important role in promoting regional peace and stability.” This is a country where it is illegal to practice any religion other than the official Sunni faith, and the religious police may run you off the road and kill you because they don’t like what you are playing on your car radio.

So now, back to Ambassador Bennett and Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom. Do their activities map better with the list of actual persecutors of religious freedom around the world, or with the Harper government’s political priorities, domestic and foreign?

It’s OK. I’ll just wait here a moment while you guess …

Spend some time on his website and you can follow the ambassador’s peregrinations. There he is in Ukraine. Yes, Ukraine.

I am not saying that the unrest in Ukraine does not have implications for religious freedom. But it is primarily a political, cultural and perhaps a linguistic conflict.

There are, however, a lot of voters of Ukrainian heritage in Edmonton, Winnipeg and so on, which just might explain the office’s surprising interest.

And here’s an Ambassador Bennett selfie, tweeted from the Western Wall at the start of shabbat. Maybe he was there to assess Palestinian access to the Dome of the Rock just above the wall (not visible in photo). But he looks awfully happy.

Here’s Ambassador Bennett with Tony Blair. Blair waged two wars in the Muslim world with George Bush, who referred at one point to a “crusade” — which would have made the sophisticated Blair cringe, I am sure. Blair suppressed his own incipient Catholicism while prime minister of the UK, because in that job you help pick Anglican bishops. But he converted almost as soon as he was out of office. He now runs the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, presumably based on this complex expertise.

Stroll through the Office of Religious Freedom’s press releases and what you might conclude is that Christians are at greater risk around the world than followers of any other faith. About half the news releases highlighted by the office deal specifically with Christians.

Of those that don’t, many are concerned with the persecution of Baha’i and other religious minorities by Iran. Some releases seem to relate to the purely secular concerns of the Harper government, such as an attack on Israeli diplomats.

I could find only one expression of concern about religious minorities in China (in Tibet, actually). And one about Burma. I could find none about our friends in Saudi Arabia — who have contributed so much to the stability of the Middle East, as I am now informed.

I am not opposed to defending anyone’s freedom to worship. But spare us the platitudes about “universal human rights”.

This government cares primarily about the rights of its friends. Everyone else, not so much.

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton. His book Power Trap explores the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.