Canadian Foreign Minister
Maxime Bernier

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An article in today’s Toronto-based Globe and Mail uses the occasion of the recent visit of Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier to Washington to see his U.S. counterpart, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as an opportunity to comment on disagreements between the two countries on defense trade and export controls. As reported previously on this blog, a major bone of contention between the U.S. and Canada is over Canada’s legal prohibition against nationality-based discrimination and the U.S. refusal to permit transfer of defense technology to Canadians who are dual-nationals of countries subject to U.S. arms embargo, such as China and Syria.

According to the article:

[Canadian] officials have said recently that a solution is not imminent, although they insist they want a deal. And Public Works Minister Michael Fortier, who met U.S. procurement officials in Washington last week and is now the designated point man in negotiations with Washington, won’t discuss the status of the file. Nor did he meet anyone at the State Department, which administers the contentious U.S. export controls.

The article posits two reasons that an agreement over this issue with Canada languishes while the United States has entered into agreements with the United Kingdom and Australia which would ease transfer of technical data to individuals and entities in those countries. First, the article quotes a Virginia-based “trade consultant” who said that

Canada doesn’t have a deal yet because it’s resisting concessions made by the British and the Australians. She pointed out that both those countries agreed to aggressively prosecute violators of the technology-sharing deals, most notably by applying domestic Official Secrets laws.

The second reason cited by the article is this:

Unlike the Aussies and the Brits, Canada buys relatively little of what U.S. military suppliers produce.

I’m not entirely convinced that these are reasons that the U.S. and Canada can’t see eye to eye over the dual national issue. The U.S.-U.K. Defense Trade Cooperation Treaty leaves open the criteria for determining what companies will be within the approved “community” of companies eligible for transfers with export licenses. It would not be surprising if those criteria require agreements by such companies not to transfer defense technologies to dual-nationals of countries subject to an arms embargo. If that’s the case, Canada can’t expect different treatment of dual nationals even if it increases its defense spending in the U.S. or agrees to cover re-exports of non-classified technical data under Canadian laws relating to official secrets or classified data.

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