October 2007: Canada's arms sales tripled/new map of the world according to Americans www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/10/29/military-exports.html Canada's military exports soar as numbers go unreported: CBC investigation Last Updated: Monday, October 29, 2007 | 8:22 AM ET Canada's military exports have more than tripled over the past seven years, a CBC News investigation has learned. Over the past seven years, Canada has exported $3.6 billion in military goods. Canada now exports more arms and military goods than it imports.... The surge in exports has made Canada the sixth-biggest supplier of military goods to the world, according to the most recent report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service. The last time the government tabled its annual report to Parliament in 2002, it showed that military exports had climbed to $678 million from $23 million in 1997.... Low transparency on arms control The government's silence is troubling at a time when the defence industry is growing so rapidly, said Janice Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. "In its public foreign policy, Canada calls for transparency on this issue," Stein told CBC News. "It has supported an arms register, yet our own government hasn't released good, reliable data about who it's exporting to." A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade blamed the four-year silence on "technical glitches" in a new online export reporting system.... The prolonged silence by Ottawa has now become an international embarrassment, said Ken Epps of Project Ploughshares, an arms control watchdog and peace group founded by the Canadian Council of Churches. Epps cited a recent report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based monitoring group, which dropped Canada's transparency rating on arms controls to just above that of Iran.... Military shipments to U.S. go untracked Tim Page, president of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, insisted that the more than 500 companies currently making defence and security products in Canada aren't responsible for the silence.... But the federal government couldn't release figures on military exports to Canada's biggest buyer, the United States, even if it wanted to. Ottawa doesn't track those sales. In fact, most military exports to the U.S. don't even need government permits because of a defence agreement signed by Ottawa and Washington in the 1940s. The agreement leaves a huge loophole in Canada's arms controls, Stein said.... CBC News repeatedly asked for in-depth interviews with International Trade Minister David Emerson and Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, the two cabinet ministers responsible for overseeing the tracking of military sales and approving export permits. But those requests were denied. And for a full year, requests for background briefings by export control officials were also turned down. (More details: www.cbc.ca/news/background/arming-the-world/)