Prime Minister Mark Carney touches down in Ankara on Wednesday for a four-day bilateral visit — the first by a Canadian prime minister in the history of the relationship — signalling a calculated bet that economic opportunity with Turkey’s 87-million-strong market outweighs the diplomatic discomfort of embracing a NATO ally sliding deeper into competitive autocracy.
The trip crystallises Carney’s doctrine of “values-based realism,” a phrase that has already drawn sharp elbows from foreign policy scholars who argue the “values” half of the equation is doing precious little heavy lifting. As one senior official in the Privy Council Office put it to me last week: “We’re not in the business of saving souls. We’re in the business of selling CANDU reactors.”
The Bilateral First
No Canadian prime minister has ever made a standalone journey to Turkey. Previous encounters unfolded on the sidelines of NATO summits or G20 gatherings — brief pull-asides, scripted handshakes, the theatre of multilateralism. Carney’s decision to break that pattern speaks volumes about where Ankara sits on Ottawa’s recalibrated priority map.
Turkey’s economy, the world’s sixteenth largest, has been growing in Canada’s direction for fifteen years. The trajectory, however, has largely favoured Ankara. Turkish Ambassador Can Dizdar, a seasoned operator in Ottawa’s diplomatic circuit, puts it bluntly: “The sky is the limit.” His confidence is not misplaced. Turkey plans to add twenty gigawatts of nuclear capacity by 2050. Canada wants to supply the reactors, the critical minerals to fuel them, and the liquefied natural gas to bridge the transition.
Trade Ambitions and Nuclear Dreams
The commercial wish list is expansive. Beyond nuclear, Ottawa sees openings in drone technology, aerospace, naval systems, shipbuilding components, munitions production and armoured vehicles. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranks Turkey as the eleventh largest arms exporter globally for the 2021–2025 period. That statistic alone makes defence officials in Ottawa sit up straighter.
Negotiations on a free-trade agreement launched in July. The Armenian National Committee of Canada is watching closely. Sevag Belian, a national board member, warns that “values-based realism must not become a convenient justification for compromising fundamental principles in pursuit of economic or strategic interests.” Filmmaker Atom Egoyan goes further, arguing that Canadian-made technology must never reach a NATO ally that redirects it toward the “eradication of Armenian presence on historic lands” — a reference to Azerbaijan’s 2020 offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, enabled in part by Turkish drones equipped with Canadian optical systems.
The Arms Embargo Ghost
That drone episode haunts the relationship. Canada imposed a near-total arms embargo in 2019 after Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria. The embargo tightened in 2020 when Turkish drones, fitted with Canadian-made Wescam targeting cameras, were redeployed to support Azerbaijan against Armenian forces. Ankara cried betrayal. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused Ottawa of violating “the alliance spirit.”
The freeze thawed only in early 2024, during NATO talks over Sweden’s accession. Dizdar remains unrepentant: “Bringing such a restriction to a NATO ally was unacceptable, and it created a huge backlash and really debilitated the atmosphere of confidence. And now we are trying to leave this behind and look ahead.”
Values vs Realism
The human rights ledger complicates the forward view. In September, Turkish police raided LGBTQ and HIV advocacy groups across five cities, detaining dozens under the banner of protecting “children and family values.” Ketty Nivyabandi, Secretary-General of Amnesty International Canada, calls it “just the latest amongst a series of ongoing attacks, not just on the rights of LGBTQI people, but also on dissenting voices.”
That same month, a court sentenced comedian Deniz Göktaş to nineteen months for insulting the president — a conviction the ambassador dismisses as exceptional. “Many, many comedians are busy in their stand-up shows and so on, and none of those have any problems.” In early July, authorities seized opposition broadcaster Halk TV mid-broadcast, installing a government trustee under the guise of a corruption probe. Critics call it a silencing operation. Dizdar calls it rule of law.
University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau, a sharp observer of Canadian foreign policy, doesn’t mince words: “We know and understand well that Erdoğan is not governing democratically. Turkey is now, at best, a competitive autocracy.” He argues Carney’s approach is simply realism, full stop. “I’m not sure where the values fit in that.” Juneau notes that Justin Trudeau would likely have tweeted condemnation — “but it would have no impact on LGBTQ rights in Turkey and would only damage the prospects of deepening trade and relations with Ankara. The reality is that Canada, on its own, does not have any influence at all on how Erdoğan governs.”
That calculation — influence nil, leverage conditional — is the cold logic driving the motorcade toward the presidential palace.
Why it Matters
Carney’s Ankara visit is the clearest signal yet that Ottawa has abandoned the performative moralism of the Trudeau era for a transactional diplomacy that treats human rights as a negotiating variable rather than a precondition. If the strategy yields CANDU contracts, critical mineral supply chains, and a functional defence-industrial partnership with a NATO ally that controls the Bosporus, the Prime Minister will claim vindication. But the precedent is set: Canada will now do business with competitive autocracies without demanding they pretend to be democracies first. The question is not whether this works commercially — it likely will. The question is whether a middle power that trades principles for market access retains any principled influence at all.
