Canada says it blocked 43 attempts to sell military goods to China last year

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The Canadian government, which has faced increased warnings about the danger of transferring defence technology to China, blocked 43 attempts last year to sell military goods to Chinese customers, a new report shows.

The department of Global Affair’s 2020 Report on Exports of Military Goods from Canada shows Ottawa denied 28 applications for export permits to China and 15 applications for Hong Kong, which is also Chinese territory.

In most of these cases, the federal government said it blocked the transfers of military goods for reasons “consistent with Canada’s foreign policy and defence interests.”

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In total, Ottawa rejected 58 applications to export military goods worldwide in 2020, a significant rise from previous years. Since 2016 when Ottawa began disclosing statistics on permit denials, there have been fewer than 10 permit denials reported each year. Nearly 75 per cent of the instances in which Canada blocked military exports in 2020 were for applications to ship this equipment to China.

The federal government, which shrouds its military exports approval process in secrecy, did not identify precisely what military goods it blocked from shipping to China. It only revealed the particular category. In more than 90 per cent of the cases, it was Category 1-6, which includes goods that can be put to civilian or military use, such as acoustical underwater listening systems, sonars, lasers, gravity meters (necessary for missile launches), radar and imaging equipment.

Also denied were attempts to ship a combat vehicle and guns to Hong Kong.

Retired vice-admiral Mark Norman said China would be interested in obtaining acoustic equipment to help identify ships and submarines.

Of particular interest would be sophisticated “signal processing algorithms” in the acoustic gear that was probably developed with one of Canada’s allies, he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. Every ship or submarine has a specific sound signature that acoustics equipment can identify from even thousands of miles away.

“Sounds propagate in the water. We are talking thousands of miles, potentially, because sounds travel. So it’s the ability to process that sound and to distinguish whether that is a whale or is that a vessel, and if it is a vessel, what type is it and what is it doing,” Mr. Norman said.

China has been trying for years to scoop up various types of signal processing software for its military but also for its national intelligence agencies, he said.

“That is why it is important to protect that kind of knowledge,” he said. “It is entirely possible, in fact it is quite likely, that some of the technology has been developed with some of our closet partners because we tend to share some of those more intimate secrets as it relates to acoustic signal processing.”

Toronto trade lawyer Cyndee Todgham Cherniak, an expert in export controls, said she expects Canada to be increasingly aggressive in blocking sales to authoritarian regimes in the years ahead or stopping sales to countries under fire for committing human-rights violations. “I think you’re going to see much, much more in the future,” she said. “The world is changing right now and our focus on export controls is changing as well.”

She said she would not be surprised if these rejected exports include cases where someone was trying to route, or transship, technology manufactured in the United States through Canada to China.

Ms. Todgham Cherniak also said it’s likely many of the stopped shipments include gear that Canada was worried would be used to repress groups such as the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China that has been subject to mass detention and targeted by population-reduction measures.

“I would not be surprised if a large number of these transactions involve acoustic equipment, monitoring gear, telecom equipment where there was a concern by the government of Canada that the end user was going to use the technology to breach the human rights of individuals in China.”

Another explanation is that Canada has determined some of the goods earmarked for shipment to China were ultimately destined for North Korea.

The 2020 report indicated that Saudi Arabia is once again the top destination other than the United States for Canadian military exports. This is because of a $14-billion deal brokered by the Canadian government to ship armoured combat vehicles to the desert kingdom, which has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Canada shipped $1.3-billion of military goods to Saudi Arabia in 2020, the report said.

The report also revealed that Canada shipped more than $48-million of military goods to Turkey despite an embargo against new military exports to this NATO ally that began in 2019. Ottawa said at the time that it would be very reluctant to grant new export permits for arms to Turkey after a military incursion by Turkish forces into northern Syria. But such decisions normally do not affect already-granted export permits, which may cover shipments for several years.

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