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