PBI-Canada to observe the Shut Down CANSEC mobilization in Ottawa, May 28
Photo from protest against CANSEC 2024.
Peace Brigades International-Canada will be observing the Shut Down CANSEC mobilization against the CANSEC arms show this coming Wednesday May 28 starting at 7 am at the EY Centre in Ottawa.
Information about Shut Down CANSEC can be found on Instagram here.
CANSEC is an annual arms show organized by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI).
Photo: The Ottawa Police Service at the entrance to the CADSI building during a May Day march that called for CANSEC to be shut down, May 1, 2025.
The more than 700 members of CADSI include transnational corporations such as Amazon Web Services, Inc., BAE Systems, Bell Textron Canada Ltd. The Boeing Company, Cisco Systems Canada, Colt Canada Corporation, Elbit Systems Ltd., General Dynamics-OTS-Canada, L3 Harris Technologies, Leonardo DRS, Lockheed Martin Canada, Microsoft Canada, Rheinmetall Canada Inc., and RTX (formerly Raytheon).
All of these companies are implicated in the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) list of Companies Profiting from the Gaza Genocide.
Universities supporting CADSI
CADSI members also include Algonquin College, Dalhousie University, Durham College, Fanshawe College, Georgian College, Lakehead University, Nova Scotia Community College, Ontario Tech University – ACE, Queen’s University, Saskatchewan Polytechnic, Université de Sherbrooke, University of British Columbia, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, University of Toronto, and University of Waterloo.
In April 2024, CBC News reported: “Some of McGill’s investments that have drawn the ire of students and others for years, well before the latest Israel-Hamas war, include Lockheed Martin, a weapons manufacturer with direct ties to the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and Safran, a French air defence company.” The Montreal Gazette further specified these companies: “Lockheed Martin, in which McGill has invested just under $520,000, as well as Thales SA ($1.3 million) and Safran ($1.5 million), all defence contractors.”
Students who set up encampments last year to call on universities to divest from genocide in Palestine were in many instances criminalized.
CADSI Board members
Their Board of Directors also include representatives of Stelia North America (that builds the shims that help open and close the weapons bay doors of F-35 fighter jets implicated in the genocide in Gaza), General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada (that build armoured vehicles sold to Saudi Arabia), and Logistik Unicorp.
CANSEC sponsors implicated in genocide
The sponsors of CANSEC 2025 include AWS, Boeing, Cisco, Google Cloud, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, and RTX, again all companies implicated in the AFSC list of companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza.
Crown corporation facilitates weapons sales
The Ottawa-based government agency Canadian Commercial Corporation is also a member of CADSI and is present at CANSEC.
Project Ploughshares has explained: “The Canadian Commercial Corporation (CCC) is a Crown corporation that supports the Canadian private sector in winning export contracts with foreign governments. Its biggest portfolio is defence and aerospace and its biggest customer, in most years, is the US Department of Defense (DOD).”
In May 2018, the National Post reported: “The Canadian Commercial Corporation acknowledges it conducts no follow-up to ensure exported Canadian-built equipment isn’t being used to abuse human rights. …The CCC confirmed this in its email, saying it ‘merely provides contracting assistance to Canadian exporters’ and that it is those companies who are legally bound by the terms of the export permit issued by the Canadian government.”
The CCC office at 350 Albert Street, Suite 1100, in Ottawa.
50+ international delegations at CANSEC
CADSI highlights that CANSEC brings together “280+ defence, security & emerging tech exhibitors”, “50+ local and national media”, “37+ MPs, Senators and Cabinet Ministers” and “50+ International delegations”.
While Global Affairs Canada does not publish a list of these international delegations, we have determined that Argentina, Bahrain, Chile, Equatorial Guinea, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Kuwait, Mexico, Oman, Peru, the Philippines, Qatar, United States, the United Arab Emirates have all attended CANSEC.
Unlike Global Affairs Canada, UK Defence and Security Exports does publish a list of the “Countries, territories, and organisations invited by UK Defence and Security Exports (UK DSE), on behalf of His Majesty’s Government (HMG), to attend DSEI 2023” along with an asterisk that indicates the countries that did attend.
In September 2021, Dan Sabbagh of The Guardian reported that: “Six nations listed by the Foreign Office as ‘human rights priority countries’ have been invited by the British government to send delegations to Europe’s biggest arms fair, which begins in London’s Docklands on [September 14, 2021].”
Peru at CANSEC despite violations against HRDs
As just one example of the countries at CANSEC, Amnesty International noted in April 2025 that in Peru: “Investigations continued into deaths during protests in 2022 and 2023 [where security forces responded to protests with excessive use of force, especially in regions with largely Indigenous populations]. …Human rights defenders remained at risk, particularly Indigenous leaders, and protection mechanisms were lacking.”
Still from CADSI video promoting CANSEC 2023.
Photo: Placard at protest against CANSEC 2023 that says: “Canada No Arms Sales to Peru”.
NOMADESC: “We Colombians do not want more weapons”
On June 1, 2022, the PBI-Colombia accompanied human rights organization Association for Research and Social Action (Nomadesc) tweeted: “We Colombians do not want more weapons, no more massacres, no more disappearances, no more threats, no more fear. #StopTheGenocide. We demand truth, justice and guarantees of non-repetition. Don’t send us any more weapons. That has made them accomplices of Barbarism.”
Canadian military exports puts HRDs at risk
On May 31, 2024, the day after last year’s CANSEC, Global Affairs Canada released its 2023 Exports of Military goods and technology report.
If one looks at the list of countries where Front Line Defenders documented the killing of human rights defenders in 2023/24, Canada exported military goods and technology to 10 countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Peru, Philippines, Thailand and Ukraine) where 232 HRDs were killed.
The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has also identified “630 attacks directly affecting an estimated 20,000 people” in 2023. The BHRRC further noted: “Over three quarters (78%) of these attacks were against people taking action to protect the climate, environmental and land rights.”
The police were implicated in 233 of the attacks, while the armed forces were implicated in an additional 42 attacks.
Of the 12 countries with the highest number of attacks against communities, Canada exported to 9 of those countries (including Brazil, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and the United States).
“Irresponsible arms transfers” by Canada
Last month, Amnesty International released their 410-page report The State of the World’s Human Rights. Reporting on Canada’s human rights record for 2024/25, Amnesty International highlighted (on page 120):
IRRESPONSIBLE ARMS TRANSFERS: “Canada continued to export arms and military equipment to countries despite lack of accountability for past violations and substantial risks that they could be used in serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Arms worth USD 6.4 million were exported to Saudi Arabia, representing 42% of the total of non-US military exports. Authorization of new export permits for transfers of military goods to Israel was reportedly paused in January, although no official ‘notice to exporters’ was issued and at least 180 export permits remained active.”
UN Guiding Principles, the Rome Statute apply to weapons companies
Under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, all companies, including those that produce “military goods”, must assess and address human rights risks and abuses arising in all aspects of their business, including how clients such as national armies and police forces use their weaponry and related services.
Citing Article 25 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Tayab Ali, director of the International Center of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), has stated: “Aiding, abetting and in any other way assisting in the commission of a war crime including ‘providing the means for its commission’ is a war crime.”
Additionally, Amnesty International has highlighted that the legal concepts of “corporate complicity” in and the “aiding and abetting” of international crimes could in the future apply to arms companies that continue supplying weapons in the knowledge that they may be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of human rights.
“Security assistance” from U.S. linked to extra-judicial killings
Both the Project Ploughshares peace research institute and the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries have stated that Canadian military exports to the United States are at least $1 billion a year, perhaps more.
In February 2023, Professor Patricia L. Sullivan at the Department of Public Policy, Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense, University of North Carolina, noted: “Between 2002 and 2019, US$300 billion in US security assistance flowed to foreign governments and at least one million foreign nationals received US military training.”
Professor Sullivan adds in her Sage Journals article: “Does American military aid increase the risk of civilian harm? …Until very recently, there have been few systematic attempts to evaluate the effects of security sector assistance. …The results of this study suggest [there] is strong evidence that ‘lethal’ aid—military equipment, weapons, military training, and combat assistance—increases extrajudicial killings by security forces in states without effective institutions to constrain executive authority.”
US military training and the murder of Berta Cáceres
In December 2021, The Guardian reported on the role of the West Point military academy in New York state and the “School of Americas”, a US Army program in Georgia founded in 1946 to train soldiers in Latin America.
That article highlights that Roberto David Castillo graduated from West Point in 2004: “A Honduran high court found him guilty as the joint perpetrator in the 2016 assassination of the indigenous activist Berta Cáceres, then one of Latin America’s most prominent environmental defenders.”
It also notes: “Latin American soldiers – more than a hundred of whom have been accused of human rights abuse at home. Among them were two of the other seven men convicted in 2019 of participating in Cáceres’s murder.”
The Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act
The “Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act”, sponsored by US Representative Johnson, Henry C. “Hank,” Jr. in 2021, seeks to address the issue of security assistance.
This legislation proposes: “To suspend United States security assistance with Honduras until such time as human rights violations by Honduran security forces cease and their perpetrators are brought to justice.”
It is possible that the export of Canadian “military goods” to the U.S. help construct the “security assistance” they send to Honduran security forces that the “Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act” is seeking to suspend.
Photo: Indigenous Lenca environmental defender Berta Cáceres was murdered in March 2016. The proposed Act to suspend security assistance to Honduras is named in her honour.
Military training and displacement in Guatemala
The Indigenous Q’eqchi’ community of Chicoyogüito in Guatemala was violently displaced from their ancestral lands so that an army base – then known as Military Zone 21 – could be established in the department of Alta Verapaz. More than 200 families were displaced from those lands on July 28, 1968, by the military.
After the displacement of the Q’eqchi’ community, the military base became a clandestine centre for illegal detention, torture, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearance, and rape committed from 1978 to 1990.
The military base that displaced his community was rebranded in 2004 as Creompaz, a training base for UN peacekeepers. Independent journalist Dawn Paley has written: “Regardless of the mass graves at the base, military and police training continues there, supported by countries like the US and Canada.”
Photo: Q’eqchi’ message painted at the entrance to the base: “This land is ours”.
Criminalization of protest
Legal observers will also be present at CANSEC this year to monitor police actions against the Shut Down CANSEC mobilization.
Photo: Police confront protests against CANSEC and the corporations profiting from repression and genocide.
CADSI video still: The Ottawa Police Service watches as arms dealers and officials enter the CANSEC arms show.
Updates
For updates and reports on May 28, the day of the Shut Down CANSEC mobilization, go to PBI-Canada on Bluesky, Instagram, X and Facebook.
Image from Shut Down CANSEC.
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