Imagine you run a medium-sized trading country whose biggest customer has become erratic, and you need new friends. Some of the available friends, unfortunately, jail journalists. What do you say when you sign the paperwork? Mark Carney’s answer, delivered at the end of his trip to Turkey, where he signed a strategic partnership with President Recep Erdogan’s government, is a doctrine he calls “values-based realism,” which he has now helpfully translated into plain English: “Engagement in those partnerships does not mean approval,” the prime minister told reporters on Friday. “There are very few countries in this world that have the standards of Canada.”
The timing makes the doctrine carry some weight. As Murray Brewster reports for CBC News, human rights groups have long criticized Erdogan’s government, and this month it executed several high-profile operations to systematically silence opposition voices, suppress independent journalism, and restrict marginalized groups. The Prime Minister’s Office said Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand raised human rights with her Turkish counterpart in meetings on Thursday. Whether Carney himself raised the issue with Erdogan, he would not say. “My approach on these issues is I have direct conversations with leaders,” he said. “I find those conversations are more effective when they’re direct and open and not then reported out in detail, but we have raised these issues.”
Which is a genuinely interesting claim about diplomacy — private pressure works better than public pressure — that happens to be unfalsifiable in exactly the way a politician would want it to be. You cannot verify that the direct conversation happened, only that its results, if any, were adequately discreet too.
The reason for the trip, and for the doctrine, is arithmetic. Carney wants Canada less dependent on the American market, and the diversification push that began with Europe and the Indo-Pacific now extends to partners with what CBC politely calls questionable human rights records — Turkey with its new three-year trade and defence plan, and Saudi Arabia before it. On Friday, Carney met business leaders in Istanbul after the political talks in Ankara, and one of the deals in play is Canadian nuclear technology: he said there are now “good chances” that the Canadian engineering firm AtkinsRealis will be picked to partner on the two power plants Turkey is planning as it chases its climate goals.
So the arrangement is roughly: Ankara gets reactors and a strategic partnership; Canada gets a market that isn’t Michigan; and the crackdown gets a phone call the outside world is asked to take on faith. Everyone involved is an adult, and this is what the word “realism” is for.
Carney was, if anything, blunter about the other awkward file of the trip. On Thursday the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa released a fact sheet officially accusing Canadian leaders of meddling in the upcoming Nov. 3 midterm elections. “There is no merit to these claims, so I’ll call it out that way,” Carney said. “I’m disappointed that their envoy sees that as his role to make these suggestions.” He added that Canada has a deep diplomatic presence in the United States and extensive contact with American companies and citizens, and that “as a country Canada is very, very careful to not be seen to interfere in the democratic process.”
It is a tidy inversion of the week’s logic, when you lay them side by side. With Turkey, where the criticism is documented, engagement does not mean approval. With Washington, where the accusation is new, disappointment is stated in full, on the record, with no concern that directness might be counterproductive. Standards are easy to discuss in private and easy to defend in public; the hard part is the ones in between.