I'm sorry. The clerk warned me that this would happen.
We also have a significant arms industry in this country, and arms exports contribute to the Canadian economy, and that is fair enough.
The problem is that some of the main markets for our arms and arms systems are autocratic, or at least not fully democratic countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and so a lot of careful monitoring and tough decision-making are needed to ensure that we fulfill the two goals of promoting the Canadian economy and fulfilling our obligations under international law.
The problem in Canada is that we've given the same department the responsibility of doing those two important tasks—promoting arms exports, and protecting human rights and international peace and security. That department is Global Affairs Canada.
I feel a great deal of sympathy for the civil servants who have to implement those competing goals within that one department. It's an almost impossible task. As a result of that, they end up making decisions that don't fulfill either task fully, and they fail, in particular, as far as my main concern goes in the fulsome application of the Arms Trade Treaty. They fell short in their recommendations for implementing legislation. Thanks to this committee and its colleagues in the Senate the resulting improvements in that draft legislation have brought us closer to full implementation.
In terms of the actual implementation, they also make mistakes. They interpret the implementing legislation very narrowly. For instance, they're telling you that there is not a diversion when we're talking about these Wescam targeting systems for drones, because they regard the Wescam targeting system as simply a component and not the weapon system itself. That's a very narrow interpretation when, in fact, the targeting system is the eyes of the machine. It is the central component in making these drones operative and effective, but they are trying to tell you that, no, they're not actually the weapon system. They are just a part like a widget on a larger machine.
They are also looking at circumstances in a very narrow temporal and geographic scope. A narrow sliver of northern Syria is the focus of granting an exemption to a suspension of licences when these drones could operate for half a day, and can fly thousands of kilometres. A drone that's on a mission protecting civilians in northern Syria might then be diverted by the operators to fulfill a different mission just 100 kilometres away in northern Iraq. They are looking at narrow geographic and temporal scope; thinking about these drones, and their operations, and these targeting systems in terms of a month, or maybe a year; and not realizing that the operators or the assistants will be operating them for a decade or more.
We have all these kinds of problems that arise. As a result of this, we're missing out on the big picture. We're selling weapons to countries that are engaged in adventurism abroad, maybe engaged in human rights violations, maybe doing so for decades into the future; and we're not thinking about patterns. We're not thinking about whether this is a good idea. We're focused on the narrow here and now because of this competing set of goals that the civil servants face.
I have some ideas as to how we might solve that.
Thank you.