Despite Justin Trudeau’s promise to support a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems, Canadian companies continue to profit from exporting software or components for killer robots. There is still no domestic regulation around the manufacture of these technologies, and little in the way of public debate around their development and export.

In face of the seasonal waves of coup attempts that have most recently swept up Belarus and Mali, Canada’s Liberal government has proven selective in its statements of support for popular uprisings. After months of protests, a military coup on August 18 deposed Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta, who stepped into power following Mali’s infamous 2012 coup.

Canada is now faced with an opportunity to take real initiative on defining the scope of arms control around an emerging technology that is on the verge of being adopted into wider military use, and falling out of human control. To do so, it will be necessary to show independence from an unscrupulous ally that is besieged by its own manifest destiny.

This is the first article in a three-part series on Canada’s historical reluctance to ratify the United Nations’ Optional Protocol with the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). Despite being one of the early champions of this international law that exists to prevent torture in civilian and military detention centres, Canada has still not officially adopted the agreement.

Without sufficient protections for Canadian data through the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, we should be demanding accountability from the federal government around domestic privacy protections, and looking critically at the profit-driven AI-based programs that are increasingly supplanting human judgement in every sphere of life.

The shrill panic of new Cold War rhetoric is a big business, after all, and clearly companies like Datametrex are finding the moment ripe to capitalize on the appetite for broadening Canadian state censorship. So what is to be made of the effect of such blacklisting and smear campaigns on democratic debate in Canada?

Across Canada, the coronavirus crisis has accelerated the adoption of surveillance technologies—from systems that allow citizens to report neighbours who violate COVID safety precautions to contact-tracing through phones. But while these technologies are only beginning to be normalized among the public, they have been more commonly deployed among our most vulnerable communities.

Canada’s policy of providing Ukraine military aid has been disproportionately shaped by both Ukrainian far-right nationalism and the domestic right-wing lobby in Canada. The far-right in Ukraine holds a degree of military power and a corresponding threat of violence that surpasses that of other comparable European ultranationalist organizations.

As the coronavirus hit Québec in mid-March, detainees at Laval IHC held a hunger strike to appeal to the public and authorities to take action on their living conditions. The hunger strike ultimately brought attention not only to the conditions during the COVID-19 outbreak, but it has shown that the present crisis has exacerbated the unfair conditions that have long been the reality for many.

The popular argument that lithium is necessary to transition vehicles away from fossil fuels usually doesn’t go deeper to critique the influence of Western companies in those countries with substantial lithium deposits. For two decades, mineral prospecting in Mongolia has gone hand-in-hand with neoliberal policy intervention, and the looming lithium boom signals that this will only intensify.