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It’s worth remembering at this point who is still languishing in the prisons of Saudi Arabia. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and her department sent out tweets criticizing the kingdom over its detention of women’s rights activists two and a half months ago, and two and a half months is an eternity in a news cycle with the attention span of a flea. Those women are still imprisoned, a fact that’s been forgotten in the current, completely justified outrage over the horrifying killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Ms. Freeland was brave and prescient to make a public stand for women’s rights activist Samar Badawi and others tossed into prison just for their beliefs. It wasn’t like she had a lot of company on the international stage, and she was pilloried for being a showboat, for playing a self-righteous political game, for damaging relations with a trading partner. What people didn’t want to acknowledge is that our government, which has proudly pledged to a feminist foreign policy, was putting its money where its mouth was for once.

The Saudis reacted with fury, cancelling Canadian wheat imports and new trade investment, and recalling many of the students who were living here. (And yes, there is great hypocrisy in the government continuing to sell military vehicles to Saudi Arabia while condemning its human-rights abuses, but we’ll get to that.)

The killing of Mr. Khashoggi changed everything. And no, there is no definitive proof yet that the journalist is dead, only mounting and credible evidence that he was tortured and murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by Saudi government agents, while his fiancée waited for him outside. The gruesome slaying of a well-connected, high-profile journalist has caught the world’s attention in a way that the misery of millions of starving Yemenis, trapped in a war waged by a Saudi-led coalition, did not. Or the imprisonment of a group of women’s rights activists.

There are probably nine of these women in jail, according to Human Rights Watch, including well-known activists such as Ms. Badawi and Loujain al-Hathloul, a graduate of the University of British Columbia. The exact number is hard to come by, because the Saudi government is not exactly broadcasting their whereabouts, or their health status. Their families are worried about speaking out, afraid of repercussions against the women and their relatives. It’s not known what conditions the women are being kept in, or if they have legal representation.

In an interview last month on CNN, exiled Saudi activist Manal al-Sharif said she’d been asked to remove the women’s names from her social-media feeds at the request of their families. Ms. al-Sharif was one of the women who incurred the government’s wrath by driving her own car, which she documents in her memoir Daring to Drive (“There can be no modern Saudi kingdom,” she writes, “as long as women are still ruled by men”).

Ms. al-Sharif was jailed and persecuted before the driving ban on women was lifted earlier this year. But the jailing of the feminist activists proved that the reforms were just token acts, she told CNN: “It tells you something, that these reforms were not meant to be toward empowering women.”

The decision to allow women to drive was seen as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s package of modern reforms, Western feminists celebrated. Car companies celebrated. What wasn’t noticed in all the celebrations, is that Saudi women who campaigned against the kingdom’s oppressive system of male guardianship were being thrown in prison, often under the guise of being foreign agents.

In a bid to draw attention to the detentions, Human Rights Watch tried to enlist car manufacturers to speak out publicly on behalf of the women they’d been so eager to embrace, and whose car-buying dollars they’d sought. It did not go well. “There was a very conspicuous silence from car companies,” Michael Page, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in an interview. “They were totally silent once Saudi authorities were rounding up these female activists.” There was also a conspicuous silence from Western governments, apart from Canada. (The Canadian government tweets specifically mentioned Ms. Badawi, whose brother Raif is also imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Badawi’s wife is a Canadian citizen, and she lives in Canada with their children.)

Of course, many of those governments were silent because, like Canada, they have lucrative arms contracts with the Saudi kingdom. Canada’s $15-billion deal to export light-armoured military vehicles has always looked bad, increasingly so with reporting that the LAVs might be used to put down uprisings in the country’s eastern area, or in the war in Yemen.

Human-rights activists have long pointed out the yawning gap between our country’s brave words and less brave actions. But the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, coupled with the rising death toll in Yemen – where half the population is facing starvation due to the continuing war – could be a real opportunity for Western governments to restrict arms sales, press for peace in Yemen or call for the release of women who are unjustly imprisoned.

As Mr. Page said, “Everyone’s afraid of the Saudis' position in oil markets and because of their economic power and largesse. But if what’s happening is something we think is dangerous in terms of global norms and threatens us more broadly, then countries like Canada need to start making the links between all these things.’’

Unfortunately, it looks like business as usual in Ottawa. The Canadian government was “very troubled” by the disappearance of Mr. Khashoggi, Ms. Freeland said earlier this week, but had no plans to cancel the arms contract with Saudi Arabia. “When it comes to existing contracts, our government believes strongly that Canada’s word has to matter. “

But Canada’s other words matter, too – the ones in support of a group of women who’ve largely been forgotten by the world. If this terrible moment can have any positive outcome, it should be our loud, continued fight for their freedom.

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