Canadian Complicity in Saudi Brutality
The first of two pieces looking at authoritarianism the West has supported all along
A note before we start…
Two weeks ago, I wanted to write on a new documentary about Saudi Arabia for Tough Times Tuesday, but an election snuck up on us and took centre-stage. This week, I started that piece on Tuesday, but background details quickly took me well out of “current events” territory, and into a longer mess of Western complicity in Saudi Arabian human rights violations.
Rewind Wednesday is thus a better home for what I want to say below, while Thorough Thursday will continue this conversation with a deeper dive into the discourse raised by Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia.
What was especially frustrating for me while working on these pieces, though, was being reminded of a battle of conscience that Canadians were fighting a decade ago—something many US and other international readers might not even know we struggled with long before the Western world’s current run of complicity in Middle Eastern violence. Quite frankly, it’s been disheartening to sit with so many reminders of how often citizens have tried and failed to combat corporate and other special interests, which will run rough-shod over any chance at human thriving every time.
I do not want to write “hopium” or “copium” during tough times, but I also don’t want to add to all the online outrage bait, which similarly serves interests other than our own. We need to be pragmatically cynical, and careful with how we direct any optimism (see: my piece on eco-nihilism last week). So this two-parter took longer to finish, because I was too angry at first to do justice to the theme succinctly. However, if I’ve done my job, this piece and the next should now inform readers enough about our egregious status quo to be constructive: to help us look for opportunities to do more in our own circles, and to carve out more ethical behaviours where we can.
We’re not going to “fix” this world.
And yet, there is still value in looking at all the ways in which it is broken. At the very least, we can learn to save ourselves from further despair and shock when systems broken by design continue to let us down. And with all that extra energy we once used for dismay? Well, maybe, just maybe, we can pour our efforts into what little agency we do have, to make communities more resiliently humane right where we are.
So thanks for sitting with how cruel our world is, if you do.
May our anger fuel constructive action where it can.
Part 1: Canadian Complicity in Saudi Brutality
In 2013, a group of non-governmental agencies was pretty pissed off with Canada. The Control Arms Coalition had managed the small miracle of getting even the United States, along with over 90 other countries, to sign the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), but Canada wasn’t budging. Its Conservative Party-led federal government, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, was pulling the excuse that signing this treaty, which establishes standards for transparency, accountability, and responsibility in the arms trade on the global stage, would impact domestic gun owners too much.
(I know, you’d think that would be more of a US concern.)
The European Union called on Canada to sign as well, as this country’s refusal was a clear stain on the record of a state often trying to present itself as a peace-maker on the world stage. Still, Canada was unmoved. At the time, its government preferred to join countries like North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia in staying out of the ATT.
And we got a good idea as to why, the following year. In 2014, Canada pulled off its largest-ever arms contract, worth $15 billion CAD, to produce armoured vehicles for Saudi Arabia. At the time, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was well-known for its suppression of human rights, including for women, migrants, and anyone expressing dissent online. In March 2015, this oil giant with a population of then around 32 million led a nine-state coalition in airstrikes on Yemen, where Saudi involvement in the civil war was widely seen as a proxy war with Iran, staged around a body of Houthi rebels who’d reacted most immediately to the Yemeni president’s attempts to draft a constitution with federal redistricting that would diminish Houthi representation.
Yemen is a complex situation on many accords, but what isn’t complex is the toll of war for civilians, as the Saudi-led coalition killed thousands of noncombatants, devastated healthcare and other civilian infrastructure, and exacerbated an existing humanitarian nightmare from famine and cholera. In the coming years, international watchers would highlight multiple war crimes pertaining to a failure to distinguish between civilian and military targets, on land and by sea. In March 2017, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported the deaths of at least 4,773 civilians over the previous two years, many from unlawful Saudi-coalition strikes, along with some by Houthi-Saleh forces. By 2020, five years into the war, at least 3,153 children had been verified among tens of thousands of civilian dead and injured from direct conflict, with another 131,000 dead from “indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure”.
(And if you need a moment to grieve how shocking those numbers once were—“rookie numbers” compared to recent death rates in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East—please take it. Saudi Arabia’s Yemen operation launched a year after the last major Israeli campaign in Gaza, which yielded 2,251 Palestinian dead—1,462 civilians, including 551 children and 299 women—along with 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians, one child, in 50 days of hostilities that predominantly involved airstrikes. That same year, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported a 24% rise in civilian casualties and 34% rise in child civilian casualties from that US theatre of war, with 1,564 civilians dying between January and June, 295 of them children.)
All the while, in Canada, citizens of conscience were calling upon their country to stop arming Saudi Arabia while it was carrying out this brutal campaign in Yemen. It was a significant talking point in our 2015 federal election, with Justin Trudeau promising to sign the ATT if elected—an act that seemed to require dismantling the rest of Canada’s military contract with the Saudis, as well.
But when Trudeau was elected, he discovered that this contract was difficult to break, and appealed to Canadians to understand that the country couldn’t risk disrupting economic norms by refusing to honour the contract anyway. A few years later, he explained his reasoning to a national news outlet, CBC, as such:
The contract signed by the previous government, by Stephen Harper, makes it very difficult to suspend or leave that contract. We are looking at a number of things, but it is a difficult contract. I actually can’t go into it, because part of the deal on this contract is not talking about this contract, and it’s one of the binds that we are left in because of the way that the contract was negotiated.
Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. What Canadian wouldn’t be delighted to find out that they couldn’t even be told why their state is unable to sever a manufacturing deal that makes their country complicit in any military violence done by another country?
In 2017, Canadian civic alarm deepened when a Globe & Mail report highlighted social media images of Canadian-made light armoured vehicles (LAVs) involved in Saudi actions against a Shia minority in the province of Qatif. This is going to become very important when we talk about Saudi Arabia’s grand projects in Part 2, because those forced evictions and massacres relate to some technical feats that Western media has been rushing to praise in advance of completion—but for now, what matters most is that these LAVs were not from the original arms deal with General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada; they were made by Terradyne Armored Vehicles, home of the GURKHA, near Toronto—a company that also sells to “discerning” civilians.
So how many other connections between Canadian manufacturers and authoritarian states might also exist? This was a core anxiety facing Canadian citizens in the coming years, as images emerged showing Canadian-made LAVs seized in Yemen, and even a Canadian-made sniper rifle ending up in Houthi hands. In 2016, Global Affairs Canada prepared a then-classified memo for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stéphane Dion, in which the following defense was made:
We are not aware of any reports linking violations of civil and political rights to the use of the proposed military-purposed exports. With respect to this specific export permit, based on the information provided, we do not believe that the proposed export would be used to violate human rights in Saudi Arabia. Canada has sold thousands of LAVs to Saudi Arabia since the 1990s, and, to the best of the Department’s knowledge, there have been no incidents where they have been used in the perpetration of human rights violations. Canada is one of many Western exporters of military goods to Saudi Arabia. To the best of the Department’s knowledge, the Government of Saudi Arabia does not have a record of serious violations of human rights of its citizens by use of such goods. Therefore we have no concerns with this export application.
And therein lies the challenge, doesn’t it? The weaselly difference between “arming an authoritarian state” and “arming an authoritarian state with arms we can directly trace to specific human rights violations” becomes a legal saving grace.
This past week, the US was reminded of its own military malfeasance in the form of yet another failed Department of Defense audit—the seventh in seven years—even though it promises that it will still make its 2028 deadline of figuring out where all of its $824 billion USD budget has been allocated. And yes, of course, the US also had its own defense contractors involved in the Saudis’ Yemen campaign! That same summer of Canadian concern over Terradyne vehicles, the US was embroiled in a bitter debate over the 45th president’s $510 million USD deal to sell “guided munitions” to Saudi Arabia, while also signing off on selling $12 billion in F-15 tactical fighter jets to Qatar, despite a Saudi-led boycott on the latter state.
Rest assured, though, USians: your country might make it hard for others to catch up, but your northern neighbour isn’t out of the race for “shady military dealings” yet!
Canada would enter the ATT in 2019, after passing relevant federal legislation, but the difference in obligations between Bill C-47 and the ATT gave the country wiggle-room not to end its existing arms deal with Saudi Arabia. By 2019, the war in Yemen and its surrounding humanitarian crisis had claimed over 17,000 civilian casualties and led to around 3 million displacements, along with an horrific uptick in gender-based violence, but 2020 would still find the United Nations calling on Canada to end arms export to Saudi Arabia, with Canadian shipments having doubled in the previous year. In 2023, more than 75% of Canadian arms shipments to countries outside the US had gone to a state with one of the worst human rights records globally. Along with the US, Britain, France, Iran, and Northern Ireland, Canada thus earned its place in a related UN report, as one of the parties “helping to perpetuate the conflict” in Yemen.
Oh, but did anything else happen in the interim, that might have helped incentivize Canada to at least perform an interest in reducing its complicity in global violence?
Well, there was that pesky business in October 2018, when a hit squad of Saudi representatives attacked and strangled dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi to death…
Over the coming year, there would be waves of outrage over this state-driven hit, which the Saudi government would later admit was premeditated, while denying that Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and a person we’ll discuss more in Part 2, gave the kill order. MBS would himself say that he bore responsibility for the death, but only because it happened under his watch. He also vowed consequences for those found responsible for the killing, and five men were sentenced to death, then “pardoned” by Khashoggi’s children, while three others received jail terms directly, in a secretive set of trials strongly criticized by the UN.
Three Saudi operatives were also identified as having received paramilitary training in the US, and because Khashoggi wrote in part for The Washington Post, details like these added to overall public outcry over this murder. For a little while, at least, there was a lot more civic pressure on state officials in the US, Canada, and other Western countries, to reckon with the messy web of political and economic alliances that allowed them to become so heavily enmeshed in Saudi corruption in the first place.
It certainly doesn’t seem to be a situation that most of us wanted, after all. In Canada, an October 2018 Angus Reid poll found that just 10% of Canadians were in favour of maintaining the arms deal with Saudi Arabia; and yet, the number of London, Ontario manufacturing jobs at risk was also considered too important to abandon the arrangement all at once. In 2020, the Canadian government again tried to reassure civilians there was “no substantial risk” of ethical compromise under its revamped export laws, but as Amnesty International pointed out in 2021, the government’s risk assessment carefully focused only on its obligations under Bill C-47, not the ATT.
As of 2023, according to a Ploughshares overview published in September 2024, Saudi Arabia is still the main driver of non-US military goods exports for Canada, but Canada has also transferred a record-breaking $1.238 billion in arms to countries other than the US and Saudi Arabia—though these numbers are muddled by the war in Ukraine, since aid through the Department of National Defense isn’t tallied the same way as other items in Global Affairs Canada’s Exports of military goods and technology report, and has to be estimated to account for wartime transparency gaps.
Another way of grasping this data, then—because it’s useful, when dealing with the fog of war, to look beyond raw reported figures, toward general trends—comes from cross-referencing the countries listed above with Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, which highlights countries ranked as “Partly Free” or “Not Free” based on political rights and civil liberties. I didn’t do this work, but Jacobin did in July, and from its analysis noted that, for 2023,
[t]he value of these problematic transfers ballooned to $1.544 billion, or 72 percent of Canada’s arms exports, when states labeled “Partly Free”—such as Kuwait, Thailand, and Morocco—were included. While Canada asserts that its arms control regime is marked by a “commitment to human rights around the world,” its weapons dealings clearly indicate otherwise.
Topping the list of autocrats receiving Canadian arms last year was Saudi Arabia, with approximately $904.6 million in military goods. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Saudi Arabia is currently the world’s second largest importer of weapons systems, with most originating in rich states in the Global North, including Canada. Although Saudi Arabia’s deep pockets mean good business for Western arms dealers, the Saudi monarchy remains one of the most repressive governments on the planet, with the third highest execution rate in the world and a codified system of discrimination against women.
So… huzzah, I guess? That Canada’s at least trying to become an equal-opportunity arms dealer to a wide range of authoritarian states?
But here’s where we’re going to leave off for today, before we get into the even deeper mess of global complicity—because all this talk of military support still somehow manages to be peripheral to a much more insidious way in which the West manufactures consent for its support of Saudi and other authoritarian violence.
The problem is, it’s almost too easy to look solely at military arrangements when talking about how a country might call itself “pro-democracy” while supporting horrific regimes elsewhere in the world.
Certainly, the state of our arms trade is concerning, but this only represents the tip of the iceberg. To really grasp how much our economies are tied into whitewashing human rights violations, both locally and globally, we have to look at a more “innocuous” site of complicity—and we will, in Part 2, with a discussion of some of the worst offences highlighted in ITV’s Kingdom Uncovered: Inside Saudi Arabia.
For now, though, the best we can do is cease to be shocked when our countries of birth or current residence lean on legalese to get around international attempts to limit and scale-down economies of violence.
We do have to keep fighting the evasion of best practices for international trade… but just think how much more energy we’ll have for those fights, if we can skip past the whole “shocked and appalled” phase to focus on next steps instead.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML