AMERICA celebrated with CANADA the election of +Justin Trudeau as PM last year. We hoped his election foretold the election of +Senator Bernie Sanders as our president in 2016 , now it seems Canada has elected their own Obama, full of promises, inspiring hope, much better than the neocon conservatives lead by harper but a disappointment. There is no excuse for the Trudeau government not canceling the Canadian government's weapons deal with saudi arabia. Canada has often been seen as an advocate for human rights, damn the diplomatic niceties. But the ghost of the harper administration still hasn't been exercised from the foreign ministry in Ottawa, the greed of Canada's military-industrial complex still has a tight grip on Parliament and the Canadian mainstream media save Toronto's +The Globe and Mail . This from +The Real News Network / TRNN.....
Trudeau Pledge Tracker: Trudeau Ignores Executions and Proceeds with Saudi Arms Deal
Published on Jan 8, 2016
Dimitri
Lascaris says Minister of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Dion met with Adel
Al Jubeir, Saudi Arabia's Minister of Foreign Affairs and considered him
an important ally days before the executions were carried out
Bio
Dimitri Lascaris is a partner with the Canadian law firm of Siskinds, where he heads the firm's securities class actions practice. Before joining Siskinds, he practiced securities law in the New York and Paris offices of a major Wall Street law firm. Last year, he was named by Canadian Business magazine as one of the 50 most influential business people in Canada, and was described by the magazine as "the fiercest advocate for shareholder rights" in Canada. He is currently prosecuting numerous securities class actions in Canada, including the Sino-Forest class action, in which his clients just negotiated the largest auditor settlement in Canadian history: a $117 million settlement with the accounting firm Ernst & Young.Transcript
SHARMINI PERIES, EXEC. PRODUCER, TRNN: Welcome to the Real News Network. I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.A
$15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia signed under the Harper
government has come under fire, since the Saudi government executed 47
people on January 2. The deal includes hundreds of combat vehicles, and
will reportedly include training on Canadian soil. Despite growing and
mounting protests, Foreign Minister Stephane Dion says that the Trudeau
government will not reconsider the deal. This news comes as the Iranians
say that the Saudis have bombed their embassy in Yemen, as well as
reports that Saudis have bombed a center for the blind in the Yemeni
capital of Sana'a. Human Rights Watch says Saudis have used cluster
bombs in residential areas, and so far the death toll is 2,800 people
from this conflict, according to the UN commissioner for human rights.To
discuss all of this we are joined by Dimitri Lascaris. Dimitri is a
Canadian lawyer, called to the bar in Ontario, and he's on the board of
the Real News Network. Thank you so much for joining us, Dimitri.DIMITRI LASCARIS: Thank you, Sharmini.PERIES:
So, Dimitri, this particular move and the defense of this deal by
Stephane Dion is all counter to what they promised during the election
campaign. Your thoughts?LASCARIS: Sure. And you know,
they, they came to power after almost ten years of a government that had
established new lows repeatedly for Canada's standing in the world. For
example, in its unqualified support of Israel, even through the attack
on Gaza in 2014 that killed almost 500 children. In its bombastic
approach to dealing with Russia. In its obstructionism on climate
change. The government of Canada had really suffered badly under the
Conservative government in terms of its international standing. And it
was widely thought that that's one reason why it was deprived a seat on
the Security Council when the opportunity arose.So with
that as the background, Justin Trudeau, the new prime minister, and his
party the Liberal Party promised to return to what they regarded as
Canada's high standing in the world through a principled approach to
foreign policy. That was the promise. The contract you mentioned is
generating reportedly 3,000 jobs in a city called London, Ontario, where
I happen to spend most of my time. A city of about 400,000 people. And
in that city, of course, because of the--it has an elevated unemployment
rate relative to the national average. It's been hit hard by the loss
of manufacturing jobs over recent years. So in that city the criticism,
not particularly surprisingly, of this deal has been very muted. And a
number of people have even come out and supported it.But
outside of the country, where the economic benefits of this deal are
nonexistent, people are paying closer attention to the behavior of the
Saudis recently, and they're extremely troubled, and rightly so, about
what they see, for reasons that you articulated. And for other reasons,
including their apparent support for Islamic, violent Islamic extremists
in the Syrian conflict.Now, all of this sort of has put a
laser focus, the Saudi file has put a laser focus on the promise of
principled foreign policy because--.PERIES: Now,
even--Dimitri, I saw that even the Globe and Mail has taken a position
against this deal, given what has happened recently in Saudi Arabia. So
the resistance isn't just coming from a few, it's now become popular
discourse.LASCARIS: I think that's correct. It's now
entered the mainstream media. And it's going to be very--the mainstream,
not just media, but mainstream public discussion about Canada's foreign
policy on human rights. I haven't seen this level of concern since the
deal was announced in the Canadian public. And I think that that is
related to the atrocities that this government, this Saudi autocracy, is
reportedly committing throughout the region.The execution
of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr seems to have struck a particularly sensitive
chord, because by all accounts he was a peaceful critic. There's
certainly no evidence, none that has been adduced by the Saudi
government or anybody else, that he was advocating violence. He was
criticizing the brutal regime, and particularly its treatment of the
Shiite minority in the country, with complete justification. He had
already reportedly suffered torture at the hands of the government. And
he was, frankly, murdered in cold blood by the Saudi autocracy.And
what was particularly troublesome for the Canadian government in this
regard, and this is something that the Globe and Mail--and as far as I
can see, no other corporate media outlet has touched on--is that the new
foreign minister, Stephane Dion, reportedly a man of unshakable
convictions, met with the Saudi foreign minister in Ottawa days before
the execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. On December 16, the Foreign
Affairs Ministry, headed by Stephane Dion, issued a press release in
which it announced that the Saudi foreign minister would be meeting with
Dion in Ottawa on the 17th of December. In it the Department of Foreign
Affairs went to great lengths to characterize Saudi Arabia as an
important ally, and as a partner in the fight against terrorism, as a
source of stability in global oil supplies. It was very much a
praiseworthy press release. And there was a little throwaway sentence in
there that the Foreign Minister Stephane Dion was going to raise the
issue of human rights with his Saudi counterpart.And you
see this language all the time when Western governments are dealing with
unsavory proxies, that they're going to raise issues of human rights.
And as far as I can tell, that's become a code for we're going to
pretend to be caring about human rights in our dealings with this
particular proxy or ally. So what happened after the meeting? We don't
know what happened in the meeting other than that press release.
Presumably Stephane Dion did raise the issue of human rights. That's
what he said he was going to do. And then two weeks later we hear that a
peaceful critic of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, has been murdered
in cold blood.The government of Canada did not react
immediately on the news of the execution of the Sheikh. A number of days
went by. There were very critical reports of the Saudi government in
the Canadian press. And then it came out with a press release a few days
ago in which it decried--that's the word it used--it decried the
execution of the sheikh, and said it was particularly concerned about
the fact that this was potentially going to generate instability in the
region. A region that is already on fire with deadly conflicts.Now,
the government said also in that press release that it was going to
continue to raise the issue of human rights with the Saudi government.
But if that were even remotely remotely effectual, then why didn't the
raising of the issue of human rights on December 17 by Stephane Dion
impede or deter the Saudi government from executing Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr?
It clearly had no effect whatsoever. And of course, reports came out
after the 17th also of this incident you mentioned, the bombing of a
center for the blind in Yemen. There's absolutely no indication that the
Canadian government's purported efforts to raise the issue of human
rights with the Saudi regime, or the efforts of any other Western
government to do so, is having any kind of moderating effect on the
Saudi government. And at the end of the day, all that's going to matter
to that government, if anything, is going to be meaningful economic and
military repercussions. It's within that context that a
couple of days ago Stephane Dion, the man of purportedly, the foreign
minister with purportedly unshakable convictions, went on the CBC and
announced that he was going to allow the arms contract to remain in
place. And as the Globe and Mail noted, these are not purely defensive
weapons. There are automatic weapons mounted on these armored vehicles.
And even if they were purely defensive, they are being used to protect a
military force and security forces that are engaged in atrocities
throughout the Middle East.PERIES: And there's evidence
that they have used some of this weaponry that they're acquiring both
from the United States and now from Canada against their own people that
are protesting some of what's going on.LASCARIS: Sure.
And not only that, but they sent a column of armored personnel carriers,
or vehicles like this, into Bahrain during the Arab Spring back in 2011
and brutally put down, with the assistance of a minority Sunni monarchy
in Bahrain. Bahrain brutally put down an uprising by the majority Shia
population. So there is no, there's no way to put a kind face on this
arms deal. It is an absolute abomination. You could hardly find a worse
government in the world to which to sell these arms, and they can be
used in an offensive capacity, not purely a defensive capacity.PERIES:
And the only justification that is available is that it's creating jobs
in the community, or in--what other defense is there?LASCARIS
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