Evidence of meeting #70 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was afghanistan.
A recording is available from Parliament.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Maninder Sidhu Liberal Brampton East, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for being with us here today.
I have a question for Mr. Gallagher.
Mr. Gallagher, in your opening, you briefly mentioned improvements that could be made to our sanctions regime. Now that we have a bit more time to delve into this, what are some of your suggested improvements or changes to Canada's sanctions regime and to its respective legislation that you would suggest to our committee here today?
12:45 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
I would again look back at means to enforce the current controls that we have. We know there are Canadian companies, or companies with Canadian connections, that are openly busting sanctions. Any effective export control regime would find every means possible to interrupt those violations of sanctions.
Again, I will point to brokering as a potential means to do this. This is a new control measure within Canada's tool set. We honestly do not have a very good understanding of how this works. We've followed up with Canadian officials more than once. We've even brought up the name of the company mentioned in my opening statement, and we still fail to get a comprehensive understanding of how Canadian brokering controls work currently and of why they wouldn't work for those companies that we know are actively busting sanctions by providing arms to countries under embargo.
I would say to look at pouring resources into the tools that we already have to upscale their effectiveness. I would say to look at other states parties to multilateral treaties like the ATT and other arms control treaties, such as the Wassenaar Arrangement, to find best practices in applying the regulations that we already have. We accede to these treaties for a reason. The reason we acceded to the Arms Trade Treaty was to interrupt the human rights violations posed by the international arms trade.
We should look to make the tools at our disposal as effective as they could be.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Maninder Sidhu Liberal Brampton East, ON
Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Mr. Nazary, do you have anything to add to this?
12:45 p.m.
Head of Foreign Relations, National Resistance Front of Afghanistan
I do not have a specific answer to this. Thank you.
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
Maninder Sidhu Liberal Brampton East, ON
No worries. Thank you.
You spoke briefly about Afghanistan and the humanitarian situation that's happening there. I know we are working with humanitarian multilateral organizations to ensure that we're able to provide assistance. Education in Afghanistan, that's something I'm hearing a lot about from constituents and other Canadians. The Taliban regime there is preventing women from getting an education.
Do you have any thoughts on this and on what Canada can do to help?
12:45 p.m.
Head of Foreign Relations, National Resistance Front of Afghanistan
As I've mentioned before, I believe that better mechanisms should be adopted by the international community when it comes to supporting the civil society in Afghanistan.
Since you raised this matter, strengthening education, especially clandestine education for girls and women, has to be done in a very clever way to support and strengthen as much as possible those organizations that are providing such education for Afghan girls and women
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
12:45 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ali Ehsassi
I'm afraid you're out of time, Mr. Sidhu.
We will next go to Mr. Garon.
You have two minutes.
12:50 p.m.
Bloc
Jean-Denis Garon Bloc Mirabel, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This is for you, Mr. Gallagher.
From an international relations standpoint, Canada has like-minded partners that have developed tailored sanctions regimes for particular issues—weapons of mass destruction and cybersecurity, for instance. Those partners have additional triggers under their legislation that is equivalent to Canada’s Special Economic Measures Act.
In a world where quick action is often needed and unforeseen circumstances arise, are the triggers under Canada’s sanctions legislation broad and flexible enough for us to meet our foreign policy objectives quickly?
12:50 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
I would say yes, when there is the political will to do so....
Very quickly following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Canada announced a position. As far as I understand, this wasn't legislated. This wasn't a regulation, but a new position that Canadian officials were going to immediately stop the further issuance of export permits for any controlled goods to Russia and actually revoke existing permits. That is essentially as far, typically, as our officials will go as it relates to export controls. This happened in a matter of days, I would say.
When something happens, there certainly are mechanisms to stop the future provision of weapons and to cancel permits that allow any weapons exports that have been approved.
Other examples where this has happened would be Belarus in 2019, as well as Turkey in 2019 and further in 2021.
12:50 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Ali Ehsassi
I'm afraid you're out of time. It's been over two minutes.
It's over to you, Mr. Green. You have two minutes.
12:50 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
Mr. Gallagher, in its May 2023 report on Canada's autonomous sanctions, the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade called for more consistency in Canada's application of sanctions in response to human rights violations.
Would you agree that Canada has imposed autonomous sanctions in response to human rights violations inconsistently? If so, which countries do you think have so far evaded appropriate sanctions?
12:50 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
Certainly sanctions are necessary in many of the instances where Canada has leveraged them. In other instances, Canada has failed to leverage sanctions and has continued to provide a huge amount of weapon systems to countries that are known to misuse them. The prime example here would be Saudi Arabia, which continues to be the second-largest consumer of Canadian weapons, only behind the United States.
Using the term “sanctions” broadly there, I think a sanction on the provision of weapons to Saudi Arabia is necessary, as continued exports is a breach of the Arms Trade Treaty and EIPA. That's speaking broadly on sanctions. There are certainly other states—
12:50 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
Another would be the UAE. Certainly the UAE has been shown to have a callous disregard for the protection of human life throughout its bombing campaign in Yemen.
The newest annual report on military exports was tabled last week on May 31, so we have all the new data on Canada's annual exports in military goods for last year. There is a list of countries, certainly, that we should stop exports to.
12:50 p.m.
NDP
Matthew Green NDP Hamilton Centre, ON
For my last question, should Russia be added to Canada's area control list?
12:55 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
That list is a mechanism whereby a state is listed and everything that goes to that country can only be sold, basically, with an export permit. There's certainly merit in that idea, if we wanted to look at stopping the provision of anything to Russia. This is quite a blanket approach.
The only country that's currently on the area control list is North Korea. The area control list has not been updated since Belarus was taken off of it a number of years ago.
It's certainly a mechanism that could have merit in stopping the provision of weapons—things like dual-use goods that might sneak under the rug, and also commercial, off-the-shelf items that should be listed as dual-use but are not for whatever reason.
12:55 p.m.
Liberal
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Thank you, Chair.
Mr. Gallagher, I'm very concerned about the phenomenon whereby big international companies such as McKinsey & Company do work for western militaries. They develop knowledge about structures and organizations. They also then work for the militaries of hostile powers.
In these cases, we're not talking about the transfer of weapons or technology. We're talking about the subtle ways in which know-how is developed and then used to facilitate learning and greater effectiveness by actors that are abusing human rights and contrary to our values.
Do you have thoughts on how the government or sanctions regimes could address this more intangible transfer of knowledge?
12:55 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
We might refer to it as "knowledge transfer", and this is actually a permanent activity. Training would come under knowledge transfer. Any sort of conversations that you and I would have would be knowledge transfer, as well as things like the transfer of intellectual property.
That is certainly controlled—
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
To jump in on that, though, we're not talking about explicit transfer of information.
McKinsey would say that they're protecting their clients' proprietary information; they're not transferring patents or anything like that. However, I think it's clear that they are learning practices in terms of how to work in a certain space and then they are applying that learning in other places.
Would or could that still qualify as a controlled activity, or do you think it would fall outside of the scope of current understanding?
12:55 p.m.
Researcher, Project Ploughshares
It would have to be for a military end use. I am not familiar enough with the company to give an informed answer on that in particular.
Certainly if it's for military end use, then yes, it should be deemed controlled—absolutely.
12:55 p.m.
Conservative
Garnett Genuis Conservative Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB
Okay. I think that's very interesting.
To go back to Mr. Nazary, you spoke about a scenario in which we could see a Taliban collapse essentially opening up space for an alternative democratic government to take power.
That's very interesting.
Do you have thoughts on a prospective timeline for that? How can targeted sanctions accelerate that prospect of effective Taliban collapse?