The Toronto Globe and Mail reported on June 30 that Canada is joining a United Nations treaty aimed at regulating the arms trade, but the federal government still will not bring in measures that would make it more difficult to ship military goods to a country with a dismal human-rights record, such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria or China.
Those three countries ranked among the top 10 destinations for Canadian military goods in 2015, the newspaper reported.
The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a global effort to rein in the unregulated international arms trade and it obliges states to track arms exports and ensure they are not used to carry out human-rights abuses, including terrorism. It entered into force in 2014, but the former Conservative government balked at signing it, saying Canada’s export regime was already among the “strongest in the world” and citing concerns, dismissed by arms control experts, that it might affect firearm owners. More than 80 countries have already ratified the treaty and close to 50 more have signed but not yet ratified it.
Canada will officially accede to the treaty in 2017, the federal government announced, and, as part of this process, will formalize the screening system it has used to evaluate arms exports since 1986 and legally oblige the government to conduct the assessments.
Canadian officials were clear, however, that Ottawa believes it does not have to raise its standards, saying once again that Canada already has among the “strongest export controls in the world.”
Ottawa will also begin regulating the opaque business of arms brokering by Canadians. Federal officials currently don’t know how many Canadian brokers are operating or where they are based. Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion said he will consult with businesses and non-governmental organizations before producing that legislation.
The Canadian Commercial Corporation, the government’s defense export corporation, could be considered an arms broker because it arranges sales of military goods to foreign buyers. The Liberal government was not able to immediately answer whether the Canadian Commercial Corporation would be targeted by new regulations – measures that could affect its ability to market arms around the world.
A senior government official who was designated to answer questions on signing on to the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty, but only on the condition the official was not identified, said Ottawa believes it already has sufficient restrictions on arms exports.
““Canada already has some of the strongest export controls in the world which means that we already meet the vast majority of the obligations under the arms trade treaty,” the senior official said in a briefing.
““In a real sense, this treaty was designed to bring other countries—many of whom have no export control regimes in place—up to the high standards that Canada and our like-minded allies already apply through our robust export control regimes,” the official said.
