PM panned for ignoring Nobel Prize winner
Anti-nuclear weapons group to receive award
OTTAWA • The latest winners of the Nobel Peace Prize are urging Justin Trudeau to take on an international leadership role, but they haven’t even gotten a congrats.
This is “astonishing,” according to New Democrat foreign affairs critic Hélène Laverdière.
Canada abstained from joining nuclear disarmament talks that in July resulted in a draft ban treaty being adopted by 122 countries, though nuclear powers themselves — including the United States, upon which Canada heavily relies — turned a blind eye.
In December, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons is set to accept a Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts towards that goal, alongside Canadian campaigner Setsuko Thurlow, an Order of Canada recipient who survived the 1945 atomic bomb in Hiroshima when she was 13 years old.
“The Liberals cannot continue to pretend they believe in nuclear disarmament so long as they stay outside of this treaty, and they cannot pretend to celebrate Canadian achievement on the international stage so long as they do not congratulate ICAN on their Nobel Peace Prize,” Laverdière said in a statement.
Thurlow said in an ICAN release she’s “dismayed and heartbroken” at the prime minister’s apparent dismissal of the treaty.
In June, as New Democrats were trying to rally support around the nuclear talks, the prime minister defended his government’s decision not to sit at the nuclear disarmament table by qualifying the negotiations as “sort of useless.”
“There can be all sorts of people talking about nuclear disarmament, but if they do not actually have nuclear arms, it is sort of useless to have them around, talking,” Trudeau said during question period. “It is wellmeaning, as the NDP often are, but we are actually taking real, tangible, concrete steps that are going to make a difference in moving towards a nuclear-free world.”
“Such callous language to describe the prohibition of the most horrific weapons humankind has ever known,” responded Thurlow in the statement. “The prime minister seems to wilfully ignore the fact that the majority of Canadians want a world without nuclear weapons.”