Myanmar: miracle fabric, or Southeast Asian nation? Actually, lately we've gone back to calling it Burma, which is what the former British colony was called before the State Law and Order Restoration Council, as the military regime styles itself, took over. (That was ten years ago: law and order has been a long time restoring.) That sort of mild cartographic controversy more or less sums up the world's response to the druglords in Rangoon, and the thuggish tactics they have used to keep their grip on power, including the massacre of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in 1988. Not that a taste for blood particularly distinguishes the Burmese government from some of its neighbours, including those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations trade group, to which it has just been admitted. But then there has been precious little in the way of a sustained international response to those outrages, either.

Now all of a sudden comes Canada's Foreign Affairs minister, Lloyd Axworthy, of all people, promising to impose economic sanctions on Burma, of all places, and immediately all sorts of questions arise. Why now? Why Burma? Why us? This is a country, after all, with which Canada exchanges a grand total of $16-million in trade every year. Why not blockade Antarctica, while we're at it? Or if we found it so repugnant to trade even that little bit with Rangoon, why wait until just this moment to shut the gates?

A clue might be found in the minister's travel itinerary. The Burma announcement came exactly one day before Axworthy's visit to Indonesia, a country with which Canada continues to maintain vigorous trade relations, notwithstanding its annexation of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor in 1975. By some accounts, as many as one-third of the population of East Timor have been slaughtered by Indonesian troops since then. Yet not only does Canada trade with Indonesia, but Axworthy himself, we now learn, last year endorsed $32-million in military exports to the dictatorship.

Perhaps the minister's conscience was bothering him.

Sanction is a curious word, inasmuch as it can mean both approval and condemnation. A glance at Canada's foreign policy record under this government likewise reveals a curiously dualistic approach to trade and human rights. In addition to dallying with the Suharto mob in Indonesia, for example, we are among the most eager suitors of the butchers of Beijing. It is, admittedly, a crowded field. The government argues with some justification that Canada can have little influence alone against the Chinese colossus, at the cost of potentially billions of dollars in trade opportunities.

Yet if that is so, then what is the rationale for refusing to join in sanctions against Fidel Castro's odious regime in Cuba, indeed for leading the international end-run around the four-decades-old blockade maintained by the United States? Sanctions, it is true, tend to be ineffective unless absolute.

But Cuba is no China: it could easily be isolated. If the United States' moral example is not enough to bring the Europeans onside, Canada's very likely would be.

Or if, as it says, the government prefers a policy of what the Reagan administration used to call "constructive engagement" in these matters, then why does the same not also apply to Nigeria, where Canada was among the first to demand sanctions after the execution of the poet Ken Saro-Wiwa?

Or, indeed, to Burma?

Hypocrisy, to be sure, only counts as half a mortal sin. Conservatives used to work themselves into a lather at the the western world's singling out of South Africa for sanctions, when nearly every other country on the continent treated its citizens as bad or worse, and often with no less racist imperatives.

Yet just because a thing is hypocrital does not make it wrong: if we do not right every wrong in the world, does that mean we should not right any?

What marks Canada's approach out for condemnation is not that it is inconsistent, but that it is opportunistic. When to impose sanctions and when not will always be a matter that mixes pragmatism with principle: what counts is what works, not what feels good. But the Chretien government's foreign policy seems motivated by neither so much as the dictates of expedience: in Burma, to burnish the minister's human-rights credentials; in Cuba, to annoy the Americans; in China, to make lots of money.

Once, in the days of the Cold War, this sort of double standard might have been put down to blinkered ideology or sentimental delusion. Today, Canada's foreign policy cannot aspire even to that moral standing.