On Tuesday, February 13, a group of activists occupied the Ottawa office of the Canadian Office of Defense and Service Industries (CADSI), a private lobbying group representing over 300 companies in the weapons industry. The demonstrators delivered a letter to CADSI demanding that the group, which receives funds from the Canadian government, end its complicity in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people and stop helping sell weapons to Israel. They have also demanded that CANSEC, Canada’s largest arms dealer convention, be shut down. Hundreds rallied outside while protesters occupied the CADSI headquarters.
“The call to dismantle CADSI is a demand for accountability and a reminder that our collective struggle against oppression knows no borders. As labor activists, we reject Canada’s role in facilitating the arms trade fueling the genocide against Gazaouis as our public sector workers are either near or well below the poverty line. The fight to end Canadian complicity is a working class fight,” said Meral Aduli, of Labour for Palestine, a network of Canadian labor activists who stand in solidarity with Palestine.
The companies that CADSI represents include some of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Elbit Systems, the latter being the Israeli military’s primary provider of land-based equipment and drones. According to the organizers of the action, such as the Palestinian Youth Movement, the International League of People’s Struggle, and Labour for Palestine, the CANSEC trade show “is a facilitator and broker of war, conflict, and widespread killings of common people globally.”
“It hosts exhibitions of the world’s leading arms manufacturers and is visited by tens of thousands of attendees, including Canadian MPs, Senators, Ministers as well as dozens of international delegations, and representatives from Zionist settler colonial Israel,” the activists say.
“Our community refuses to remain silent and allow business to continue as usual while our Canadian government and violent war profiteers like CADSI fuel this genocide. We are here to demand an arms embargo on Israel and say NO to CANSEC,” said Sarah Abdul-Karim, a member of the Palestinian Youth Movement.
