Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly were in New York City this week for the United Nations General Assembly and its Summit of the Future, where leaders and diplomats tried to — in the words of the UN’s secretary-general — “bring multilateralism back from the brink.”
While in New York, Trudeau squeezed in a short meeting with outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio, who leaves office next week.
According to the Japanese readout, Kishida “recognized Canada’s contribution as the chair of CPTPP this year” and mentioned that “Japan has high hopes for Canada as the G7 chair next year.” The chat built on defence minister Bill Blair’s trip to Japan earlier this month.
Joly, fresh off meetings with foreign ministers from Indonesia and Nepal, is expected to deliver Canada’s national statement to the UNGA.
Beijing and Moscow: birds of a feather?
Kishida can’t indulge in an end-of-tenure vacation just yet: on Monday, a day after UN members put aside their differences to approve the ambitious ‘Pact for the Future,’ a Russian IL-38 patrol aircraft — flying over the northernmost part of Hokkaido — violated Japanese airspace on three separate occasions, leading Japanese jet fighters to fire flares at the aircraft.
It’s the first time Japan has deployed flares against another country’s aircraft since 1958, and the first incursion by a Russian military aircraft into Japanese airspace in five years. The same day, four Russian warships and four Chinese warships sailed through the Sea of Japan.
According to Japan’s military, between April 2023 and March 2024, Japanese fighters were scrambled 669 times to intercept foreign aircraft, three times the number of responses compared to two decades ago. Seventy per cent of those responses were launched to intercept Chinese aircraft.
Both Beijing and Moscow have ventured further than Hokkaido, however: on July 24, NORAD intercepted two Russian and two Chinese bombers roughly 320 kilometres off the coast of Alaska, the countries’ first joint flight into the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone.
Since 2022, Beijing and Moscow have conducted at least 20 joint military exercises together.
Trudeau meets, greets Yunus
While visiting the UN, Trudeau met with Bangladesh’s interim leader, Muhammad Yunus, who asked Trudeau to grant more visas to Bangladeshi students. In a meeting last month with Canada’s high commissioner to Bangladesh, Yunus said his government “needs Canadian support to boost economic growth.”
Liberal MP Chandra Arya made headlines last week when he rose in the House of Commons to register his “deep concerns about violence targeting religious minorities, including Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, in Bangladesh.”
Earlier this month, academics, lawyers, and civil society leaders in Canada — in response to the deaths of at least 600 people in Bangladesh in July and August — penned an open letter to Joly.
The signatories urged the minister to ask Yunus’s administration to “release of all those detained solely for exercising their right to peaceful protest” and help establish a UN investigation into recent alleged human rights violations in Bangladesh.
