Canadian Arms are Terrorizing Yemen
A quick glance at the government of Canada’s official list of 2018 military exports reveals how staggeringly central the Harper and Trudeau governments have been in funding authoritarian regimes globally. With significant exports to Bahrain, Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, Canada made over $1.45 billion in 2018 arms deals.
Most notable of these contributions has been to the Saudi government. Several years ago, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper negotiated the notorious $15 billion Saudi Light Armoured Vehicles (LAV) trade deal. Under the present Liberal government, weapons exports to Saudi Arabia were eventually rolled back to roughly $1 billion by the 2018 fiscal year. But that sum still accounted for 62% of Canada’s sales of military goods and technology outside of the US.
In December 2018, a deal of $13 billion in armoured vehicles was approved by the Trudeau administration, which, though under international pressure to suspend, Canada has no plan to abandon. While Trudeau claimed he was looking to back out of the deal, in September 2019, Canada officially joined the Arms Trade Treaty, which helped uphold the export of LAVs to the Saudi government. Meanwhile, Norway, Germany, Finland, and others have completely stopped all weapons exports to the regime.
The international trend to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia is chiefly due to its invasion of Yemen, which resulted in what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war has put 24 million people, nearly 80% of its population, in need of protection, assistance, and food, as violence and famine blanket the country. Publicly-posted images and videos show that many Saudi arms currently deployed in Yemen were made in Canada.
Nevertheless, The Liberal and Conservative hand in Saudi Arabia’s invasion is merely symptomatic of the West’s history in destabilizing Yemen and the Middle East at large. In 1839, Britain acquired Aden, a port city in Yemen, which it held as a colony until 1967. Acquiring Aden and its surroundings, an area representing two-thirds of present-day Yemen, gave the British access to the African and Arabian coasts, offering British ships a space to refuel mid-voyage. Seized through brutal military force, the colony became another dot in the history of British imperialism; like many other colonies, the Aden Protectorate eventually collapsed. Rebels took control of the government, establishing South Yemen, which, pursuing stability, became a Marxist socialist republic in support the Soviet Union. Devastated by civil war in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of communism, South Yemen joined North Yemen to form present-day Yemen in 1990, a unification which initiated another civil war. 180 years after its initial occupation, Yemen is still riddled by the effects of Western intervention. Reflecting on this history necessitates the re-evaluation of Canada’s involvement in the region, as delivering arms to the conflict are reminiscent of earlier British vices.
As Canada’s federal election approaches, voters need to reconsider Canada’s role in weaponizing regimes abroad. Voting for the Liberal or Conservative parties, who both have helped questionable regimes in achieving their goals, upholds a legacy of colonialism, whose ghost lives on in the economy of the Canadian arms trade.