Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Canada”
In the fall of 2014, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Operation IMPACT, Canada’s military contribution to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. Approaching its sixth anniversary, Operation IMPACT is Canada’s most significant military operation since the war in Afghanistan.
The most recently released federal records indicates that Canada transferred over $2-billion CAD in military exports to customers around the world in 2018. Left unpublished are the vast military exports to Canada’s closest trading partner, the United States. For years, Canada’s arms exports to the United States have been largely exempt from federal reporting protocols. Such exemptions persist despite Canada’s …
The Right Honourable Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, P.C., M.P. Prime Minister of Canada 80 Wellington Street Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A2 14 May 2020 Re: Final Report – Review of Export Permits to Saudi Arabia Dear Prime Minister Trudeau, The undersigned, representing a cross-section of Canadian civil society organizations focused on arms controls, human rights, and international security, are writing in …
The Iran nuclear deal has long been derided by U.S. President Donald Trump, whose actions have already jeopardized some of the concrete security dividends of the hard-won agreement. But his latest move constitutes a clear affront to international law that must be rejected, especially by countries like Canada that express strong support for a rules-based multilateral order. A flexible view …
On April 10, GAC issued an official statement in support of a global ceasefire, in response to the high-profile appeal on March 23 by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The day before, however, it had announced that it was lifting a moratorium on arms-export permits to Saudi Arabia, one of the worst violators of human and women’s rights on the planet.
Disarmament and arms control have not featured prominently, if at all, in mandate letters to Canada’s foreign ministers in many years. But at the end of 2019, Canadian Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne was given a new mandate to “advance international efforts to ban the development and use of fully autonomous weapons systems.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has long wanted to get Canada back on the UN Security Council, where it last had a seat in 2000. For Trudeau, such a return would signal Canada’s “renewed commitment to international peace and security.”
Canada is certainly capable of promoting global norms, with a federal government commitment to fund AI research, an active AI community, and a rapidly developing tech sector. Expert help is available from leading AI researchers in Canadian universities and industries. Research institutes and civil-society groups also have expertise on various applications of AI.
The question now is what happens next and how will the mandate be implemented when UN discussions on this issue resume in June. While fully autonomous weapons systems do not yet exist, experts agree that they soon will.
By Cesar Jaramillo Published in The Ploughshares Monitor Volume 40 Issue 3 Autumn 2019 Project Ploughshares works to create “a secure world without war, a just world at peace.” We focus on a few particular issues: the abolition of nuclear weapons, arms control, security in outer space, emerging military/security technologies, and the causes and effects of forced migration. The policies and …
