On April 12, Canadian global affairs minister Marc Garneau announced the cancellation of export permits for material used in Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drone systems. The government found “credible evidence” that the Turkish state was redirecting the drone systems to Azerbaijan without Canada’s permission.

Wescam, the company that produced these high-tech attack drones, is based in Burlington, Ontario. The Canadian firm is a subsidiary of the US company L3Harris. Marc Garneau justified the ban by stating that the use of the drones “was not consistent with Canadian foreign policy, nor end-use assurances given by Turkey.”

This change in government policy was welcome, but it came too late for the six thousand people who lost their lives in Azerbaijan’s offensive against Armenia during the forty-four-day Nagorno-Karabakh War last year. Canadian technology was implicated in many of these deaths.