Canada Recognizes Palestine, Allows Taiwan to Be Sidelined: A Tale of Two Standards in Ottawa’s Foreign Policy

Op/Ed: Carney’s recognition of Palestine contrasts with silence on Taiwan’s inclusion at ICAO, exposing a foreign policy shaped by diaspora politics and Beijing’s leverage.

OTTAWA — Taipei’s top diplomats in Ottawa — backed by two Parliamentarians — warned that Taiwan’s exclusion from the United Nations’ International Civil Aviation Organization undermines global safety standards and rewards Beijing’s political bullying, despite the island’s role as a major aviation hub.

The appeal, ironically, came a day after Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Ottawa’s recognition, ahead of a UN assembly, of an ill-defined Palestinian state — a designation made without defined borders, a recognized government, or resolution of Hamas’s ongoing hostage crisis. Conservative MP Michelle Lantsman equated the move to succumbing to pressure from Islamic groups in Canada and rewarding Hamas terrorism. By contrast, in Ottawa today, lawmakers Michael Cooper and Judy Sgro raised Taiwan’s case for inclusion in ICAO, the United Nations’ aviation safety body, from a government with arguably far stronger credentials for statehood than Palestine.

Last week in the House of Commons, ahead of the ICAO Assembly underway in Montreal this week, Cooper accused the UN agency of “bending to Beijing’s bullying,” warning that shutting out the world’s eleventh-largest aviation market “creates a dangerous gap that undermines global aviation safety.” Sgro, a Liberal MP and co-chair of the Canada–Taiwan Parliamentary Friendship Group, added that Taiwan manages the busy and strategically vital Taipei Flight Information Region, and its absence “contradicts the spirit of the Chicago Convention” that created ICAO.

In a press gallery speech today, Taiwan’s ambassador to Canada, Harry Tseng, warned that Beijing’s escalating military drills and unilateral aviation maneuvers are turning skies over the Taiwan Strait into a global security hazard. He recalled August 2022, when China launched 11 ballistic missiles around Taiwan, four of them flying directly over the island, and declared seven temporary danger zones that disrupted more than a dozen international routes. In just four days, international flights through the Taipei Flight Information Region plunged by 90 percent, Tseng said, forcing hundreds of planes to reroute at enormous cost. “We must not allow political maneuvers to take precedence over aviation safety,” he told reporters.

Tseng pointed to an ongoing pattern of unilateral Chinese actions, from activating new flight paths without consultation to staging large-scale military drills that, he said, “deliberately disregard” Taiwan’s recognized aviation authority.

Conservative MP Michael Cooper called the United Nations exclusion of Taiwan from ICAO “nothing short of reckless,” making “a mockery of ICAO’s mission.”

Cooper said that as the host country for the ICAO assembly, Canada carries an added responsibility to support Taiwan, and he criticized Prime Minister Mark Carney’s silence, arguing Carney is “placating Beijing’s dictatorship.”

“It’s disappointing that we have seen silence on the part of the government, and I think over the past number of years, we have seen a policy of the Government of Canada that has too often bended to Beijing,” Cooper said.

The exclusion at ICAO mirrors Taiwan’s experience at the World Health Organization, where its government argued that being locked out during the early days of COVID-19 led to significant harms. WHO officials relied on faulty reports from Beijing and delayed confirmation of the outbreak’s origins in Wuhan, leaving Taipei cut off from critical information despite its own early warnings. In both cases, Taiwan’s absence reflects structural limits imposed by the United Nations after 1971, when the General Assembly transferred China’s seat to the People’s Republic of China. As a UN specialized agency headquartered in Montreal, ICAO fell in line with UN membership rules, giving Beijing enduring leverage to bar Taiwan.

There have been moments of exception. In 2013, ICAO Council President Roberto Kobeh González extended a personal invitation to Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration to attend the 38th Assembly as “Chinese Taipei,” a modest opening welcomed by the United States and European Union. But that door closed in 2016, after the election of President Tsai Ing-wen. Without Beijing’s approval, Taiwan was denied entry to the 39th Assembly, a reversal widely understood as punishment for Taipei’s refusal to endorse the so-called 1992 Consensus on “One China.”

The tensions grew in 2020, when ICAO officials blocked North American analysts and congressional staffers on Twitter who mentioned Taiwan’s exclusion. The episode, dubbed “Twittergate,” drew condemnation from the U.S. State Department and became a symbol of Beijing’s influence over UN agencies.

The pattern continues today. In Washington last week, Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz called on ICAO to recognize Taiwan at the Assembly, warning that failure to do so “emboldens China and harms” global standards.

The stakes in Ottawa are immediate: ICAO delegates are meeting just down the highway in Montreal, with China seated as a full member while Taiwan remains excluded.

After making his remarks, Ambassador Tseng told The Bureau that his office will travel to Montreal, where it plans to meet with representatives from about 20 nations outside ICAO’s official proceedings to press Taipei’s case for inclusion.

G7 statements in recent years have consistently endorsed Taiwan’s “meaningful participation” in international institutions, from WHO to ICAO. Yet Ottawa’s decision to hastily recognize Palestine while offering only tepid support for Taiwan’s international status exposes a troubling inconsistency in Canadian foreign policy — driven, plausibly, by foreign pressure and the calculus of diaspora vote banks.