Direct action confronts Canada-Israel arms trade

 

Demonstrations across the country aim to spur critical discussion about Canada’s role in funding militarism abroad

Just after dawn on February 26, a group of approximately 40 activists blocked both driveway entrances to the Safran Electronics & Defense Canada Inc. facility located in the south-end of Peterborough. The company is a subsidiary of the Safran Group, a French multinational that manufactures defence-related equipment and components, and has contracts with the Israeli military to provide it with telemetry equipment and battlefield targeting technology.

For nearly two hours, peace activists held the picket, holding signs and chanting “Arms Embargo Now” and “Stop Arming Genocide.” They also engaged with workers alongside their vehicles by handing out leaflets to those who were turned away from entering the property.

Once police arrived, the action was converted to a soft picket. Eventually, the group dispersed when it was clear that the company’s management had heard their call.

The Peterborough protest is just one of many rolling blockades targeting arms manufacturers across Canada. In late-February in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, a group of nearly 200 labour unionists blockaded the entrances to TTM Technologies, a manufacturing facility that produces circuit boards for the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets. Just a few hours later, another facility was targeted, this time the local office of American weapons manufacturer RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) in Calgary. Over the next few days a total of seven facilities (located in Kitchener-Waterloo, Québec City, Burnaby, and Victoria) with links to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would have their activities disrupted as part of a nationwide effort to pressure the Canadian government to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

Urpi Pine, an Indigenous organizer who took part in the action in Peterborough, noted as she held the line: “If the government isn’t going to take action to prevent this ongoing genocide, then we are going to take matters into our own hands. The settler-colonial state of so-called Canada must stop the flow of weapons to Israel; we are morally and legally bound to do so.”  (more...)

Direct action confronts Canada-Israel arms trade