By Minaz Kerawala, Communications and Public Relations Advisor
Last week, a collective of leading Canadian NGOs wrote an urgent joint letter to the Hon. Anita Anand, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs.
The civil society organizations, including Development and Peace ― Caritas Canada (DPCC), all of which have programs and partnerships in Gaza, demanded that the minister “effectively suspend all transfers of Canadian military equipment to Israel, including closing all loopholes that allow U.S. weapons to transit through or benefit from Canadian supply chains as well as banning the transfer of surveillance and dual-use technologies.”
Minister of foreign affairs urged to “act promptly”
This was not the first civil society call for Canada to stop arming Israel. In February 2024, DPCC and its allies had asked the same of Anand’s predecessor, Mélanie Joly. That plea seemed to have been heeded within weeks when the House of Commons voted to “cease the further authorization and transfer of arms exports to Israel….” Months later, Joly had emphatically declared, “We will not have any form of arms or parts of arms be sent to Gaza, period.”
But that declaration may well have been a lie.
Last week, a damning report showed that Canada kept exporting military hardware to Israel despite the government’s misrepresentations to the contrary. Analyzing Israeli tax records and commercial shipping documents, it uncovered hundreds of shipments of military cargo, including 421,070 bullets.
It was this revelation that prompted us to remind Anand that “Canada is legally prohibited from authorizing the export of arms or related items where there is a substantial risk that they will be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law” and to impel her to “act promptly” to end Canada’s enabling of Israel’s “campaign of extermination against the Palestinian people.”
Since our letter was sent, Anand has issued a statement refuting the report. Her rebuttal, however, dwells on semantics and stops short of a categorical official undertaking that Canada does not export arms, arms components and military technology to Israel without caveats or exceptions. The minister’s “clarification” has also been convincingly debunked by the report’s authors.
The shameful “context of famine”
Our letter also underscored to Anand that over 100 organizations including DPCC had warned that Israel’s siege was starving the people of Gaza and that this had been officially confirmed by UN agencies.
Thankfully, the minister has recognized that “humanitarian needs have reached an unprecedented level” in Gaza. Faced with “ongoing restrictions imposed by the Israeli government,” Canada has airdropped nearly 10 tons of aid.
Welcoming the spirit of the initiative, DPCC and its allies exhorted Canada to press “Israel to fully open land crossings so aid can get to people at the scale needed to stop this famine.” Our contention that airdrops would “not stop more people from starving to death” has been borne out by the latest reports from Gaza.
Statehood under siege
The very day we wrote our joint letter to Anand it was reported that Israel had killed 60,138 Palestinians and injured 146,269 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. In addition to this deadly campaign, which even Israeli human rights organizations now deem a genocide, Israel has also killed some 1,000 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank over the last 21 months.
It was against this backdrop of chilling numbers and images of emaciated children that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that “Canada intends to recognize the State of Palestine at the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2025.”
DPCC welcomes this long-overdue announcement that Canada will join the moral majority of 147 of the 193 UN members that have recognized Palestine. We note with concern, however, that Canada’s “intention is predicated on the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to… hold general elections in 2026 in which Hamas can play no part, and to demilitarize the Palestinian state.”
We have asked the prime minister how he expects the Palestinian state to do this while it remains under the brutal, illegal and expanding occupation of Israel.
We commend the Government of Canada for finally moving in the right direction by delivering more aid to Gaza and resolving to recognize Palestinian statehood. But these moves will not amount to any more than empty gestures if Canada constrains them with impossible conditions, keeps arming Israel and imposes no sanction to compel Israel to lift its deadly siege of Gaza or cease its land-grabbing in the West Bank.
As asserted in our joint letter, continued Canadian inaction in this regard would constitute “a profound moral failure in our country’s history.”