Saudi sale guts Canada’s ‘principles’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2015 (3817 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It has always struck me as needlessly risky for the Harper Conservatives to harp about their “principled” foreign policy. I’m not even sure what it means — except for its presumably broad focus on human rights.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of where the Conservative government has been less than principled in its international posture.

Take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s support for the brutal Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt (during the 2011 Arab Awakening), the unabashed courting of rights-abusing China and the repressive military government in Myanmar, and its unstinting backing of Israel.

One of the more controversial decisions has been the recent pushing of arms sales to the sheikdom of Saudi Arabia. In a highly secretive 2014 deal, Ottawa agreed to approve the sale, through the Canadian Commercial Corp., of hundreds of light armoured vehicles (LAV 6.0s) made by General Dynamics Land Systems based in London, Ont.

Clearly, no right-thinking person could view Saudi Arabia’s human rights record as anything other than abhorrent. How can we forget Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was lashed 50 times in March for criticizing Islam (and whose family has sought refuge in Canada).

Amnesty International says the government in Riyadh has restricted freedom of expression, association and assembly, arrested and imprisoned numerous critics, and flagrantly discriminated against women.

Additionally, it has regularly invoked the death penalty, ranking among the top three worst in the world, and conducted dozens of public executions often by beheadings — 90 so far in 2015, which equals the total for all of 2014. Human Rights Watch also reported in early May that Saudi airstrikes on Yemen involved the use of banned cluster munitions.

It is worth noting here that previous sales of Canadian LAVs to the Saudi National Guard (SANG) have been used to protect the Saudi royal family from its domestic critics.

We should also remember it was Canadian-built LAVs and the SANG that entered Bahrain in 2011 and operated jointly with the Bahrainis to wound and kill innocent protesters.

So what about Canada’s strict export-control provisions to prevent arms sales to states with poor human rights records? And why won’t Ottawa say how this Saudi deal meets Canada’s comprehensive export-control regime?

Under cabinet guidelines, Canada is required to monitor closely the export of military goods to countries “where governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens.”

Foreign Affairs is also supposed to ensure, especially after the March 2011 Bahraini incident, that “there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population.”

Moreover, why has the department failed to undertake an assessment of Saudi Arabia’s human rights situation for the years 2013 and 2014? It does Foreign Affairs no good to hide behind platitudes and falsehoods or to seek to disarm critics by claiming that export permit applications are confidential for proprietary reasons.

It’s no secret that when John Baird was foreign affairs minister he wanted Canadian foreign policy and even our development assistance programs to be driven exclusively by trade and investment interests. Any talk of human rights concerns, then, would be quickly trumped by Canadian commercial considerations.

As the LAV 6.0 sale to Saudi Arabia clearly shows, economic considerations take precedence over the well-being of Saudi citizens. That’s why government officials in Ottawa are emphasizing the commercial benefits to Canada — namely, a $15-billion multi-year contract, the continuation of 3,000 manufacturing jobs in Ontario, and the creation of employment for hundreds of Canadian subcontractors.

One can only conclude, though, that the Conservatives’ use of “principled” to describe its foreign policy is completely devoid of any meaning. It is basically invoked to create the appearance of doing the right thing, all the while doing the exact opposite.

Indeed, a country with a truly principled foreign policy would keep as far away from the Saudis as possible.

(Let’s recall that there is credible evidence that the Wahhabi Saudis are now bankrolling the Sunni Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria.)

They simply can’t be trusted to use Canada’s LAV 6.0s for purely military purposes, and not for cracking down on domestic dissent.

There is a line in Michael Harris’s polemical book, Party of One, that is particularly appropriate to this situation. He quotes former Reform party leader Preston Manning as saying: “Words don’t mean much to Stephen.”

This is all just another reminder that human rights considerations are not really a top priority for the Harper government. At the end of the day, money talks, not matters of principle.

 

Peter McKenna is a political science professor at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.