He was eager to hand over to  Omar Khadr, the Muslim who killed one American soldier, Christopher Speer, and blinded another, Layne Morris, the quite unnecessary sum of eight million dollars, for having spent ten years imprisoned at Guantanamo (some might well think that a short sentence for a murderer).

Indeed, Trudeau handed over the money with such unseemly haste that the families of Speer and Morris, who had won civil judgments against Khadr in Utah, had no time to try to block the payment. Although he talks a lot about human rights, Trudeau has been noticeably silent about human rights in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive regimes in the world, possibly because he doesn’t want to do anything to endanger a multi-billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

So it has been fascinating to see the Saudi reaction to just one tweet by Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s Foreign Minister, after the Saudi government jailed several women’s rights activists, including the sister of Raif Badawi, a human rights activist now in a Saudi prison.  Here was the tweet:  “Very alarmed to learn that Samar Badawi, Raif Badawi’s sister, has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Canada stands together with the Badawi family in this difficult time, and we continue to strongly call for the release of both Raif and Samar Badawi.”

The Saudi government erupted in fury. On August 5, the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced it would expel the Canadian Ambassador, recalled its own ambassador in Ottawa, and declared it would freeze all new trade and investments because of Canada’s “interference in the Kingdom’s domestic affairs.”

A few days later, Saudi Arabia announced the suspension of state airline flights to Canada and the withdrawal from Canadian universities of all Saudi students, some 16,000 in all. Hundreds of millions of dollars that Canadian colleges and universities were expecting are now not going to arrive. Saudi patients in Canada were told to seek treatment elsewhere. This was all the result of a single tweet.