On Wednesday night, in the capital of that "shining city on the hill," Chrystia Freeland worried aloud about the fate of the free world.

In some way, small or large, that fate might be affected by what Freeland did on Thursday morning when, with American tariffs bearing down on the Canadian economy, she returned to the work of renegotiating NAFTA.

"Tonight, I would like to speak about a challenge that affects us all, and I believe worries us all," Freeland said Wednesday in Washington, DC, where she was accepting Foreign Policy magazine's award for 'diplomat of the year.' "And that is the weakening of the rules-based international order and the threat that resurgent authoritarianism poses to liberal democracy itself."...

This was excerpted from the 15 June 2018 edition of CBC News.