Canada

On November 21, Mark Carney landed in Abu Dhabi, becoming the first Canadian leader in more than 40 years to visit the capital of the United Arab Emirates. Ottawa portrayed the trip as a move toward trade diversification—a strategy cast as urgent after Donald Trump’s tariffs and threats against Canadian sovereignty—but the visit also brought Canada into direct contact with a Gulf power implicated in some of the world’s deadliest conflicts.

Not only did the official talks in Abu Dhabi deliberately bypass any mention of the UAE’s funding of war crimes and possibly genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, but the subsequent media coverage in Canada also conspicuously failed to address the Canadian government’s own entanglement and complicity in these atrocities.