Foreign Affairs committee  Sure. The issue this is trying to address is actors who are actively trying to skirt Canadian controls, right? Canadian regulations are comparatively quite tight, so if an actor who we wouldn't want to export to needs a certain type of weapon, they could go to a country that doesn't have the same level of export controls that Canada has.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, it's my pleasure. One of our recommendations was for the Government of Canada to review how effective its implementation of brokering controls is. Brokering controls were implemented into the Export and Import Permits Act in 2018. That happened after Canada acceded to the Arms Trade Treaty, or the ATT—or due to that, I should say.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for the invitation to present here today. My name is Kelsey Gallagher, and I am a researcher with Project Ploughshares, where I focus on Canadian military exports and the international arms trade. My intervention today will focus on transparency and regulatory gaps facing Canada's export of dual-use technologies and military goods.

Foreign Affairs committee  My colleagues are welcome to jump in here. An end-user certificate is implied to be the assurance. At the that there is perceived to be some risk, that could be mitigated by further assurances, verbal or written, whereby you go to the end-user—the consignee—and say that you want to be certain these won't be diverted, misused or so forth.

Foreign Affairs committee  The way it works with diversion is that on the export permit, a consignee is listed alongside an end-user. These can sometimes be the same entity, for instance, the Turkish military or the Turkish air force. In the case of the permits you're referring to, the consignee was Baykar and the end-user was Turkey or some stripe of the Turkish security forces.

Foreign Affairs committee  This could certainly be viewed as a loophole. We see this with other Canadian products, namely Pratt & Whitney Canada engines. The end-user is viewed as the company that's putting it into an airplane; therefore, the end-user would be viewed as Switzerland, which has a stellar human rights record.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, our assessment was that the cancellation covered 29 permits—that's what's been reported—and the permits covered two companies, the first being Wescam. The second company, to my knowledge, has not been named. Past that, many other weapons continue to be exported to Turkey. Some examples would be industrial goods for the production of bullets, and rocket motors for drones—which we don't have a lot of information on—and satellite parts produced by MDA in Canada.

Foreign Affairs committee  Our interpretation was in concerned any of the those permits related to Wescam or that second company's products going to Turkey. It could be narrower, but that wasn't our reading.

Foreign Affairs committee  If I may, I would just add that I believe past witnesses have brought this up, but, yes, building on what Canada has now, a good addition would be some regime of post-shipment verification. Other countries that have done this recently, I believe, are Germany and Switzerland, and they have found their arms being misused, including small arms, which frequently fall victim to diversion.

Foreign Affairs committee  That claim was made in light of the nearly 1,000 pages of documents that have been published via this committee. With regard to the exemptions to the original suspension of October 2019, from those documents we can see that the export permits, in particular for the Wescam sensors but also for other Canadian weapons, were almost universally granted.

Foreign Affairs committee  Overall, from the number of conversations going back and forth from Turkish to Canadian officials, arguing for the freeing up of these permits, including several memos to the Minister of Foreign Affairs , it was clear that a case was being made by Turkish officials to free up these permits.

Foreign Affairs committee  I could probably speak to that. Tracking Canadian arms exports usually starts with government data, as it did in the case of Turkey. We saw that for annual exports to Turkey, there was really kind of a crescendo, starting with a trending up in 2016, and then we read between the lines in the kind of data that was being reported by Global Affairs Canada in the annual report on military exports.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Cesar. Thank you for having us today. Canada's recent cancellation of export permits for Wescam surveillance and targeting sensors to Turkey is a very positive move, consistent with domestic and international obligations, and it sets a concrete precedent applicable to other problematic arms deals.

Foreign Affairs committee  Diversion isn't necessarily super uncommon, and it has negative impacts. The proliferation of weapons obviously has negative impacts and is a fuel for conflict. However, other countries, allies of Canada, have gone above and beyond to try to stem the threat of diversion. We've seen some positive examples of how to do this in other state parties to the ATT.

Foreign Affairs committee  Just to add to that, I would agree. This is a case-by-case basis, but it is exported as a weapon and it certainly is a weapon. Once again, just to touch on a point I made earlier, this technology is critical for the recipient to be able to launch modern air strikes. Without these, the drones that Turkey was using in Libya, in Nagorno-Karabakh, in Syria and in Iraq, would be incapable of launching modern air strikes as we know them.