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Few events in the world of Canadian defence policy bring out hand-wringing more than news that a Canadian company has successfully concluded a large arms deal with a foreign government, especially when that government is not deemed as pure as ours by the usual suspects. And that is just what happened very early in the year when the new federal government refused to block a sale concluded in early 2014 for $15 billion worth of Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs), built by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada, to the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
The uproar was immediate: how could the new “peace-loving” Liberal government allow such an agreement to go forward? Didn’t they know that the Saudi National Guard’s main purpose is to protect the Saudi royal family from its own people? Doesn’t Saudi Arabia have one of the worst human-rights records on the planet? To make matters worse, just days after the sale was confirmed by Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, the Saudis executed 47 people in one day, including a prominent Shiite cleric who was no friend of Riyadh.
Soon after succeeding the Harper Tories, the Liberals have been forced to face the fact that many international issues have only two sorts of solutions: bad and worse. During the election campaign the Liberals emphasized how their government, unlike Stephen Harper’s, would focus on international co-operation, United Nations peacekeeping and other positive contributions to world affairs. But then the real-world dilemma of the LAV sale to Saudi Arabia quickly interrupted the reverie.
Why? First of all, the Canadian defence industry employs more than 100,000 people in mostly high-tech, high-paying jobs that bring in some $12.6 billion dollars a year, according to the Canadian Association of Defence and Securities Industries. These are the very types of jobs this country needs in order to wean itself off its lopsided dependence on resource extraction. The very apparent woes of the Canadian economy today arise from our very weak manufacturing base. The more quality jobs, defence or otherwise, in Canada, the better. The Tories knew that. And the Liberals know it also.
Second, Saudi Arabia is not exactly a human-rights heaven, but it’s not Iran or North Korea or China, either. It most certainly should liberalize its society, but it has no ambitions outside its borders (save for its own defence against Iran), and it has been an ally of Canada for decades.
These are the very types of jobs
this country needs to wean itself
off its lopsided dependence
on resource extraction.
Third, we have seen the outcome of the so-called Arab Spring in other places in the Middle East—more extremism, more violence, more instability, more ISIS. It is an old cliché to say it, but if the Saudi royal family is toppled, who or what will replace them? ISIS? Quite simply, the maintenance of the current regime is in our interests. We should use whatever meagre influence we have in the region to push for greater rights for women, greater protection of minorities, etc., inside Saudi Arabia, but at the same time we should do what we can to maintain the current government in power. There is no Thomas Jefferson waiting in the wings in Riyadh.
The Liberals have tried to play the issue both ways. When asked during the election whether or not he would cancel the sale, Trudeau asserted that the vehicles being sold to Saudi Arabia were basically jeeps! When upholding the Tory decision after the election, the Liberals played “Who? Me?” in claiming that the sale was just between General Dynamics and Saudi Arabia, knowing perfectly well that not a bullet legally leaves this country without the approval of the Canadian government.
It’s hard to know how Canadians in general feel about the Canadian defence industry, but they ought to treasure it as one of the few pieces of the national economy—like the aerospace industry—that will help keep our economy from collapsing. The products of that industry are about equally divided between domestic and foreign sales. We need the money they generate and the brains they nurture, at least until human civilization beats its swords into ploughshares and its spears into pruning hooks.
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