Canada’s Bourgeois Media is Complicit in Keeping Trudeau’s Dirty Weapons-to-Israel Secret
Informed Leftist
February 28, 2024
5-min read
Summary: An analysis by Informed Leftist found that, in the 10 days following the revelation that the Trudeau government covertly approved $28.5 million in weapons exports to Israel since October 2023 as per an access to information request obtained by The Maple, Canada’s bourgeois press carried out a media blackout on this revelation.
On February 10, 2024, the independent news outlet The Maple revealed, as per an access to information (ATIP) request, that the Trudeau government covertly authorized at least $28.5 million in military exports to Israel since October.
In the 10-day window following this bombshell finding (February 10 to 20), an analysis by Informed Leftist found that zero articles were published about it in Canada’s bourgeois English-language news outlets, defined as the online news outlets of CBC, CTV, Global News, the National Post, the Toronto Star, the Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Vancouver Sun and the Montreal Gazette.
During this window, a few MPs repeated The Maple’s finding at least three times. On the 12th, the New Democratic Party (NDP) cited the independent outlet when it released a statement calling for the further release of documents on Canadian military exports to Israel. That same day, MP Heather McPherson questioned the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly in the House of Commons on the topic. Finally, party leader Jagmeet Singh did the same on the 14th when he challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That same day in Parliament, Green MP Mike Morrice mentioned the finding as well.
Such noise on such a red-hot topic should be deemed newsworthy by the press, particularly since it would imply that the Liberal government lied about its export permits. Yet only two of the news outlets reviewed in this analysis made mention of it, and only sparingly at that.
Global News posted a video of the brief exchange between McPherson and Joly on the same day it happened. In it, the NDP MP cites the $28.5-million figure in the House of Commons without mention of The Maple’s investigation. Minister Joly then promptly responds, “I have not received and therefore have not approved any export permits of weapons to Israel since October 7, 2023, and any permits issued since October 7 were essentially non-lethal equipment permits.” This contradicts the ATIP document. As Alex Cosh explains in The Maple:
The newly issued [since October 7] permits include four worth a combined total of $1.7 million that authorize the sale of, among other items, goods under an export category that includes “bombs, torpedoes, rockets, missiles, other explosive devices and charges and related equipment and accessories, and specially designed components.”
GAC has repeatedly insisted that all of Canada’s military exports to Israel since October 7 have been for “non-lethal” goods, a term with no legal definition and that arms-monitoring experts say can refer to components of deadly weapons.
During the first two months of Israel’s war on Gaza, GAC issued permits worth a total of $18.4 million that covered military items categorized as “electronic equipment.”
A further $9.2 million worth of permits included “‘Aircraft,’ ‘lighter-than-air vehicles,’ ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ [...] aero-engines and ‘aircraft’ equipment, related equipment, and components.” $859,000 worth of permits covered items that included “ground vehicles and components,” and $7.3 million worth of permits covered “fire control, and related alerting and warning equipment.”
Global News apparently took Joly at her word, and did not look into the source of the $28.5-million figure mentioned by McPherson; or it did, and found the stunning revelation that the Canadian government is lying about its authorization of military exports to be unnewsworthy.
Even more dishonest is a February 16 National Post article by Tristin Hopper, in which he claims that “Canada does not provide military assistance to Israel.” The journalist explicitly mentions the NDP’s recent criticism, only to outright misrepresent it:
The closest Canada comes to “arming” Israel — and the one figure on which both the NDP and anti-Israel demonstrators are basing their claim — is that Israel is one of the more than 60 countries who are authorized to buy “military exports” from Canadian companies.
Global Affairs publishes an annual tally of military goods exported to foreign countries. In 2022 — the most recent year covered by the report — Israel purchased $21,329,783.93 of “military goods and technology” from Canadian firms.
Not once does the National Post mention the $28.5-million figure or the ATIP request obtained by The Maple, which were actually mentioned by the NDP. And neither do the remaining bourgeois news outlets that I reviewed.
All it would take is a simple Google search with the keywords “Canada weapons 28.5 Israel,” or any similar variant. In fact, this is likely how the large French-Canadian news outlet Lapresse—despite a language barrier—found The Maple’s bombshell article. It’s unclear whether the author, Mélanie Marquis, overcame the daunting task of a Google search after having heard the NDP’s criticisms (she does cover Parliament after all), or if she found the article herself while monitoring relevant news on occupied Palestine. In any case, she should be applauded for having the bare-minimum level of journalistic integrity required for reporting on it.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the English-language bourgeois press. What should be a national scandal has turned into deafening silence.
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