Cannon on what’s real and what’s hypothetical

At a news conference a few minutes ago, Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon declined to answer direct questions about Canada’s position on child soldiers on the grounds that the questions were hypothetical. But Cannon did declare that Canada is imposing tough sanctions against North Korea by curtailing economic ties.

But doesn’t he have it backwards? Canada is, in fact, a signatory to the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict, part of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, so the government’s stance on child soldiers—thrown into question, of course, by the Omar Khadr case—is a matter of real concern. Those economic links to North Korea, on the other hand,  are mostly hypothetical.