Juno News - April 18, 2021


Canada halts sale of military tech to Turkey


Episode Stats

Length

4 minutes

Words per Minute

212.25072

Word Count

894

Sentence Count

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 so let's once again talk about the diplomatic toolbox and usually we've been talking about
00:00:10.600 two things that tended to be the economic age so that was either you know direct transfers to other
00:00:16.020 countries or maybe increasing of some bilateral trade trying to get canadian companies to invest
00:00:20.800 in other countries or we've been speaking about the political so it could be some votes at the
00:00:25.100 united nations it could be something at another international body could be some international
00:00:29.700 agreements you know the paris climate change accords or something else that we really are
00:00:33.460 hoping to get politically and that's how we really want to position ourselves but there's another one
00:00:37.620 that we don't really tend to talk about and that's possibly because canadians don't really see
00:00:41.200 ourselves in this way and that is actually uh arms and weapons exports now canada has an arms industry
00:00:47.640 we are selling a number of things to a number of different countries but this week canada canceled
00:00:52.760 arms export licenses to turkey for high-tech drone targeting systems now in order to export these
00:00:58.540 things you need a license you can't just obviously sell the obviously sell military equipment to
00:01:02.040 wherever you like so you need a license and the government does regular reviews of these licenses
00:01:05.840 now in a recent review they found what it called credible evidence that some of this canadian
00:01:11.020 technology actually made its way from turkey where the sales were to to the azerbaijani military
00:01:15.620 and that the azerbaijanis had used this against the armenians in the recent conflict in the
00:01:20.260 nagorno-karabakh region now this conflict itself is actually quite interesting because it's possibly one of the
00:01:25.360 most recent and largest scale examples of usage of drones between two symmetrical military forces
00:01:31.120 so symmetrical forces meaning two armies not you know army uh on one side versus uh maybe you know
00:01:36.260 insurgents or paramilitary force or terrorists what you know whatever you want to call them but two
00:01:39.900 direct armies in combat making use of drones and the footage online is actually quite scary to where
00:01:44.960 the technology has developed so you can check that out but the overarching question here is canada's
00:01:50.900 foreign policy and the follow-up from this decision and what is our plan going forward so the follow-up
00:01:56.500 from this decision could be quite interesting because turkey is a member of nato so they may
00:02:01.960 for example have recourse in nato they may be able to source these parts from another nato country
00:02:06.340 the canadian government may lose standing in nato because it suddenly refused to sell such equipment
00:02:13.260 to another nato ally while we are still selling a similar maybe equipment you know similar military
00:02:18.560 equipment to the saudis we're selling on lavs so armored vehicles uh so that may all have an effect
00:02:24.660 going forward overall i think the larger question is what do we see from our foreign policy and how
00:02:31.280 do we want to really engage with the world and this is sort of a theme that i've been bringing up
00:02:34.800 previously now the big focus has been for this government international bodies international
00:02:39.760 agreements so there was that big push to get the un security council seat there's also a number of
00:02:45.440 other things that don't fall into international aid when we're talking about helping other countries
00:02:49.600 that i've previously spoken about like operation impact helping the militaries of certain countries
00:02:54.000 and then there's again the direct arms exports are we going to allow canadian technology to be
00:02:58.560 exported to other countries and this is really the question for canadians where to view our foreign
00:03:04.080 policy and should we be thinking more about foreign policy and i i obviously think we should but you
00:03:08.880 know do you think we should i think canada has a very interesting and unique role that we can play
00:03:13.840 in some of these international conflicts international uh you know issues but if we're
00:03:18.320 not quite sure on where we're at what we're really after and you know what what our goals are as a
00:03:24.080 country what are our values as a country when it comes to the international arena i really think
00:03:28.400 it's going to be more difficult not only for us to get what we want done but for our allies to
00:03:32.560 really get a hold of where we're at and to really put faith that we will make the decision that they
00:03:36.960 are expecting us to make or maybe that you know canadians would expect our government to make so
00:03:40.400 overall that is the main issue and i really would encourage everyone to uh you know just look up
00:03:46.480 sort of the foreign affairs stuff and that's really what we're trying to do here what i'm trying to do
00:03:49.680 is bring you some of that foreign affairs news that you may not be getting in a really concise
00:03:53.600 manner now again if you do have any topics that you'd like me to cover i'd be happy to do some
00:03:57.360 research and bring you some of the latest information but on this one i hope you learned a lot about
00:04:02.640 what is going on and the fact that we actually do have an arms export industry so for true north i am sam
00:04:07.440 ashkenazi thank you so much for watching and have yourselves a great day