Top 10 Times Plausible Deniability Was Canada’s Actual Foreign Policy

Introduction — “The Nicest War Criminal You Know”

We’re Canada.
The world’s moral support animal. A country that smells like cedar and guilt. We show up late, apologize twice, and leave before the shooting starts — or right after we’ve quietly handed out the ammo. Our brand is politeness weaponized. Export-grade courtesy. An emotional support empire for bigger, uglier ones.

They call us peacekeepers. They call us neutral. But we’ve been laundering complicity through bureaucracy for decades. Plausible deniability isn’t a side effect of our foreign policy — it is the interface. We don’t pull triggers; we fund feasibility studies. We don’t stage coups; we help design the ballots. We don’t torture anyone — we just train the guys who do, draft the SOPs, then hold a gender equity seminar six months later so we can write it off in the ESG report.

We don’t wear the blood. That’s the trick. We just host it. Keep it on ice. Give it a five-year sunset clause and a press release that says “deeply concerned.”

Every country needs an errand boy — the middle manager of empire. That’s us. We answer the phones. We take the meetings. We write the talking points so the real bastards can walk out clean.
And when someone, somewhere, tries to tally the damage?
We’re already on a plane. Window seat. Socks on. Watching the fires from 35,000 feet.

So this is a list. Ten times we did exactly that. Ten times we helped break the world, just nicely.

🔟 Export Development Canada’s Shady Loans: A Crown Corporation with Blood on the Ledger

Export Development Canada doesn’t look like the kind of organization you’d put on a watchlist. It looks like the kind of office where someone forgets their lunch in the fridge every Thursday and the biggest controversy is toner theft. But underneath that sterile façade is one of the most effective tools in Canada’s foreign policy arsenal — a publicly funded instrument for risk-insulated profit and global plausible deniability.

EDC’s stated mission is to support Canadian businesses abroad. What that actually means is de-risking investments in volatile, ethically compromised markets so our extractive industries and arms dealers can go where DFAIT doesn’t dare tread. This isn’t diplomacy. It’s state-backed capitalism with a Kevlar vest.

Case Study: SNC-Lavalin in Angola

In the mid-2000s, EDC extended hundreds of millions of dollars in support to SNC-Lavalin — Canada’s most corruption-addicted engineering firm — for infrastructure and dam projects in Angola. These contracts were awarded under a regime notorious for kleptocracy and repression, where wealth from oil and diamond revenues enriched a narrow elite while the rest of the population remained in crushing poverty.

The projects were sold as “development.” But what EDC enabled was a laundering mechanism: Canadian public money guaranteed private profits in a country with zero safeguards for local accountability. Even as SNC-Lavalin was under investigation by the World Bank and the RCMP for foreign bribery in other jurisdictions, EDC kept the tap open.

The same model has been deployed in Colombia, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and more — all under the soothing rubric of “market expansion.”

EDC doesn’t pull triggers. It just lays down the runway. It gives companies like General Dynamics a soft landing to sell light armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia, or helps Bombardier dump aerospace parts into regimes under arms embargoes — technically “civilian-use” exports, practically weaponized profit.

And when questioned, they point to the distance:
“We don’t monitor end-use.”
“We don’t get involved in politics.”
“We’re just here to support Canadian businesses.”

That’s the game. Hide the complicity under ledgers and language. Finance the wreckage with public funds. Then walk away with clean hands, a thicker portfolio, and an annual report that mentions “ESG” thirteen times.

This isn’t development. It’s quiet empire-building with an Ottawa stamp and a quarterly bonus.

9️⃣ Colombia: Counterinsurgency with a Canadian Accent

Canada doesn’t do coups. We do capacity building. We don’t do death squads. We do police reform training. And nowhere has that sleight of hand been more active — or more damning — than in Colombia, where we’ve spent the last two decades laundering violence through seminars, talking points, and polite funding envelopes stamped “democracy support.”

Ask anyone in Ottawa what we’re doing in Colombia and you’ll get the usual script: promoting stability, strengthening institutions, sharing Canadian values, mentoring peace. But follow the money, follow the uniforms, follow the shell casings, and a different story unfolds.

Case Study: Canadian Police Training During the 2021 Protests

In April and May 2021, mass protests erupted across Colombia. Millions took to the streets to reject President Iván Duque’s proposed tax reforms, police brutality, and economic inequality. The response from the state? Armoured vehicles, live fire, arbitrary detentions, and targeted killings. According to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the Colombian National Police (PNC) killed dozens, wounded hundreds, and disappeared others under the banner of “public order.”

So where does Canada come in?

We’d been training those police forces. Quietly, consistently, through Global Affairs Canada, the RCMP, and DFAIT-linked contractors. The program was marketed as a human rights and gender-sensitive policing initiative. In reality, we were providing the tactical backbone to a force the UN itself has said should be restructured due to systemic abuse. And during the 2021 crackdown, some of the exact units involved in violent suppression had been trained under Canadian programs.

When the headlines broke, Ottawa played dumb. We expressed concern. We offered to “listen.” But no aid was suspended. No training was paused. No one from Global Affairs lost their job. Because that’s the model: train them under the guise of peace, pretend you didn’t know what they’d do with it, and when the repression starts, point to the brochure that says “inclusivity.”

We even provided funding through the Anti-Crime Capacity Building Program, which helped arm Colombia’s judiciary and security forces with tools and tactics — all under the logic of fighting drug trafficking and corruption. But the war on drugs in Colombia is just a euphemism. The real war is against Indigenous organizers, labor leaders, students, and rural communities who get in the way of development. And we’re on the wrong side of it.

It’s not a one-off. It’s a system.

Canada trains. Colombia represses. We disassociate.

That’s our version of counterinsurgency.
One human rights seminar and one export credit at a time.

8️⃣ Rwanda (1994): Bureaucracy as Complicity

We like to remember Rwanda like it was someone else’s failure. The UN’s mess. A horror that unfolded “too fast” for anyone to do anything. We talk about it like a bad dream we weren’t responsible for — but we were there. We had boots on the ground. And we left.

We didn’t cause the genocide. We just made sure no one stopped it.

Case Study: General Roméo Dallaire and the Withdrawal Orders

In 1993, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire was deployed to lead UNAMIR — the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda. His mandate was vague, his rules restrictive, and his resources insufficient. But the real handcuffs weren’t in Kigali. They were in Ottawa and New York — a bureaucracy built to delay action until the graves were full.

In January 1994, Dallaire famously sent a cable — now called the “Genocide Fax” — warning that mass extermination was being planned. He requested permission to raid arms caches. He was ignored. When the killing started in April, he begged for reinforcements.

What did Canada do?

We obeyed the UN’s decision to downsize. We helped pull out most of the troops. While machetes turned churches into slaughterhouses, we ran logistics. We flew out white people. We filed reports. And when Dallaire refused to leave, we gave him radio silence and a stack of empty promises to sit on while 800,000 people were butchered in 100 days.

Canada didn’t stop the genocide because it was inconvenient. Because it meant risking political capital. Because we didn’t want to make the Americans mad. And because “peacekeeping” has always been our brand, not our burden.

Afterward, we polished the myth. We held conferences. Gave Dallaire a medal. Built curricula around “Never Again.” But it already had happened — while we were there. While we followed orders. While we stood down.

We love to say Rwanda was a failure of the international community.
But we were the international community.
And we watched it happen from the inside.

This wasn’t a failure.
It was a choice.

7️⃣ Libya (2011): Bombs, Briefings, and the Great Canadian Ghosting

For a brief moment in 2011, Canada was punching above its polite little weight class. We were flying sorties over Libya, dropping precision ordnance on airfields and anti-aircraft batteries, all under the radiant moral banner of Responsibility to Protect — R2P, the new branding package for justified intervention. We said it was about civilians. We said we’d learned from Rwanda. We said “never again.” Again.

But this wasn’t peacekeeping. It was opportunistic demolition — and when the rubble settled, we vanished.

Case Study: Operation MOBILE and the Aftermath Nobody Talks About

Canada’s contribution to the NATO-led intervention in Libya was real. Under Operation MOBILE, we deployed CF-18 fighter jets, surveillance aircraft, and naval support. Canadian pilots dropped over 700 bombs between March and October 2011. We ran airstrikes out of Trapani, Italy and briefed Parliament like we were finally grown-ups in the global military club.

We even bragged about it. Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it a "textbook example" of humanitarian intervention. Defence Minister Peter MacKay said it showcased “Canada’s leadership on the world stage.” We even hosted the wrap party — a literal military flyover in downtown Ottawa, saluting ourselves for a job well done.

But here’s what we don’t talk about: what happened after.

Once Gaddafi was executed in the street with a bayonet, and the country collapsed into rival militias, slave markets, a power vacuum, and a migration crisis, Canada had already left the chat. No plan for reconstruction. No accountability for the chaos. No long-term civilian support. We helped topple a state, then ghosted the aftermath like a bad Tinder date with missiles.

We called it a victory for democracy. But what we actually did was destabilize an entire region so thoroughly that it turned into a launchpad for human trafficking, jihadist networks, and proxy wars. And when the international community asked who was going to help rebuild? We packed up our fighter jets and pretended our role had been limited, noble, and clean.

Libya didn’t need our bombs. It needed a plan.
And we gave it zero.

That’s the Canadian way in war:
Strike fast, brief well,
then disappear before the lights come on.

6️⃣ Saudi Arms Sales (2014–Now): Redacted for Freedom™

Let’s be blunt. You don’t get to call yourself a human rights leader while shipping armored vehicles to a country that dismembers journalists and bombs school buses. But that’s exactly what we’ve done — not in secret, not in the shadows, but in broad daylight with signatures, briefings, and a press strategy built entirely around plausible deniability and black Sharpies.

The Canadian state has mastered the art of the humanitarian arms deal. We slap maple leaves on the crates, whisper “contractual obligations,” and keep the cameras pointed anywhere but Yemen.

Case Study: General Dynamics Land Systems and the $14.8 Billion Deal

The crown jewel of Canadian complicity is the $14.8 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, signed in 2014, pushed through under Stephen Harper, and maintained — with full knowledge — by Justin Trudeau. It involves the export of light armoured vehicles (LAVs) built in London, Ontario by General Dynamics Land Systems-Canada.

These aren’t Jeeps. These are weaponized, turret-ready troop carriers, used by Saudi forces and their allies in the brutal war in Yemen — a war that’s killed over 377,000 people by UN estimates, many of them civilians. Canada’s LAVs have allegedly been used in both the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen and in domestic crackdowns against Shia minorities inside the Kingdom.

When this became public? Trudeau’s government didn’t halt the deal. They just redacted the details. Literally. Redacted the export permit reports. Redacted the human rights assessments. Claimed there was nothing they could do. That the contract was too binding, too far along, too expensive to cancel.

The real translation?
“We’d rather not piss off the arms lobby or lose Ontario jobs.”

And so, the shipments continued. Thousands of vehicles. Billions in profit. A paper trail soaked in irony.
While Canadian officials issued press releases about “feminist foreign policy,” our war wagons rolled through shattered Yemeni villages.

And let’s not forget: Trudeau once stood at a podium and called the sale a mistake — then greenlit the permits anyway.
We apologized. Then we reloaded.

Because in Canada, the only thing stronger than our moral backbone is our ability to contract it out.

This isn’t a weapons deal. It’s a public-private partnership in plausible deniability.

And business is booming.

5️⃣ Northern Quebec: NORAD’s Cold Silence

Welcome to the polite occupation.
No soldiers. No boots. Just antenna arrays, radar domes, and the kind of defense “cooperation” that makes sovereignty optional. Canada’s far north — especially across Northern Quebec — isn’t just tundra. It’s infrastructure. It’s eyes in the sky. And it’s quietly owned by NORAD, operated with a handshake, and built on a foundation of Inuit exclusion and federal opacity.

Case Study: Canadian North Warning System & Inuit Consent Bypass

In the shadow of the Cold War, and again post-9/11, Canada and the United States deepened their NORAD integration by building out the North Warning System (NWS) — a string of long-range radar installations stretching across the Arctic. Many of these systems sit on Cree and Inuit land in Northern Quebec and Nunavut, and were constructed or upgraded with little to no consultation.

Ottawa claimed partnership. In reality, we provided the territory and the plausible deniability. The Americans built out continental missile surveillance, while Canada got to pretend we were in charge of the sandbox.

The NWS has been quietly upgraded, with billions in funding announced since 2021 to modernize it — to track hypersonics, detect over-the-pole threats, and give NORAD its new “Over-the-Horizon Radar” capability. All done under the language of binational defense. Translation: Canadian sovereignty via subcontract.

What’s missing from the picture?
Inuit consultation. Inuit data sovereignty. Inuit consent.
Reports from ITK (Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami) and the Makivik Corporation have highlighted decades of top-down militarization, toxic waste from abandoned DEW Line sites, and strategic infrastructure built with no impact assessments or long-term community benefit.

Canada talks a big game about reconciliation.
But when it comes to defense? We hand over the Arctic to the existential threat embodied by the United States like a shared timeshare agreement and hope no one notices the American badge on the equipment.

Our role is to call it cooperation.
To say the word “sovereignty” while leasing out the surveillance grid to Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
To tell Parliament it’s defense modernization — not quiet integration into a missile shield we don’t control.

This isn’t diplomacy. It’s slow-burn annexation by agreement.
We didn’t lose the north.
We surrendered it.

4️⃣ Afghanistan Detainee Transfers (2006–2011): Canada’s Torture Pipeline

This one isn’t abstract. This one has names, scars, and documented injuries.
It’s not about weapons, or strategy, or radar systems. It’s about human beings we detained, interrogated, and handed over to Afghan authorities fully aware they’d be beaten, electrocuted, and possibly killed.

And we did it anyway. Then we denied it. Then we buried it. Then we called it national security.

Case Study: The Afghan Detainee Scandal and the Black Site Next Door

Between 2006 and 2011, Canadian Forces operating in Kandahar were detaining suspected insurgents and transferring them to Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) facilities — widely known to be torture chambers masquerading as counterterrorism centers. Canada signed agreements that were supposed to ensure humane treatment. What we really signed was a plausible deniability clause.

The Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and multiple Canadian military police officers raised red flags as early as 2006. But under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the government actively suppressed documents, stonewalled Parliament, and invoked national security laws to prevent oversight. Diplomat Richard Colvin, who testified in 2009, stated bluntly that every single detainee we handed over was likely tortured.

Instead of accountability, we got obfuscation.
Instead of justice, we got redacted pages and broken careers.

The scandal even triggered an attempt at a parliamentary contempt motion — one of the few in Canadian history — when the Harper government refused to hand over unredacted documents to a committee investigating the transfers. The documents were eventually reviewed behind closed doors, under supervision, with no public transparency. The official record remains fractured and incomplete.

And through it all? No charges. No resignations. No apology.
The message was clear:
“We didn’t beat them. We just arranged the meeting.”

This wasn’t an accident.
It was policy, designed to keep Canadian hands clean while someone else did the bruising.
We outsourced the torture and then airbrushed ourselves out of the photo.

And the kicker?
We were running ads back home about "supporting our troops."
The same troops writing classified memos about screams from the cells next door.

If Rwanda was what we ignored,
Afghanistan is what we enabled.

3️⃣ Haiti (2004–Present): Peacekeeping with a Baton

This isn’t about peace. This is about regime control, optics management, and boots on the ground in someone else’s house. Haiti is what happens when a bunch of so-called democracies decide a poor Black country has become “unmanageable.” Canada didn’t lead the coup — we just brought the zip ties, the riot shields, and the ready-made press releases.

Case Study: The Ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Canada’s Role

In February 2004, Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced out of office and flown into exile. He called it a U.S.-backed kidnapping. Washington called it “resignation.” And Ottawa? We kept our mouths shut and helped mop up the mess.

Canada had already been preparing. In 2003, we co-hosted the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti, a closed-door meeting with U.S., French, and Latin American diplomats — with zero Haitian representation. The agenda? “Post-Aristide planning.” Translation: what to do when the next democratically elected leader proved too inconvenient for foreign investors, NGOs, and multinational mining interests.

When the coup dropped, Canada deployed over 500 RCMP officers and soldiers under Operation Halo, contributing to the UN stabilization mission (MINUSTAH) that moved in to “restore order.” But order meant repression. And stabilization meant targeting the Lavalas movement — Aristide’s support base, made up of the urban poor, trade unions, and grassroots organizers.

UN forces — including Canadians — were implicated in violent raids, mass arrests without trial, and lethal force in slums like Cité Soleil. The mission, intended to prevent civil war, became a tool for neutralizing democratic resistance.

Canada’s official line was humanitarian: we were “helping with elections” and “training local police.” But the reality was counterinsurgency in a broken democracy. And when the RCMP and DFAIT helped build the new Haitian National Police, they were engineering a security force loyal to post-coup power, not the Haitian people.

Meanwhile, Canadian mining companies quietly expanded operations in Haiti’s interior. Human rights groups and UN rapporteurs sounded alarms. Ottawa issued statements. Nothing changed.

Canada keeps saying it wants a “stable Haiti.”
But our definition of stability has always been top-down, investor-friendly, and post-democratic.

We didn’t bring the tanks.
We just helped make sure they pointed the right way.

2️⃣ Wet’suwet’en Surveillance & Policing: Counterinsurgency in a Feathered Glove

This is where the mask slips. No passport stamps. No UN briefings. Just RCMP, CSIS, private security, helicopters, rifles, drones — all deployed against unarmed Indigenous land defenders on their own unceded territory, for the sake of a pipeline.

You want to know what 21st-century colonialism looks like? It wears a tactical vest, files wiretap warrants, and calls you an “extremist” for defending a river.

Case Study: The Coastal GasLink Conflict and the Invasion of Wet’suwet’en Land

The Coastal GasLink pipeline is a $6.6 billion project designed to carry fracked natural gas from northeastern B.C. to a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal in Kitimat. It cuts through Wet’suwet’en territory — land that was never ceded through treaty and has been affirmed in Canadian courts (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 1997) as falling under hereditary governance, not elected band councils.

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs refused consent.
The province of British Columbia and the federal government pretended that band council approval under the Indian Act was sufficient. That was the loophole.

What followed was a multi-year domestic counterinsurgency campaign.

In 2019 and 2020, the RCMP deployed heavily armed tactical units to dismantle camps along the Morice River. Officers carried assault rifles, deployed snipers, and forcibly removed land defenders, including Elders and matriarchs, from their own territory. Dozens of arrests. Journalists detained. Access blocked. All in service of a private corporate project, backed by the state.

RCMP internal documents, obtained via access to information, confirmed they were prepared to use lethal force.
CSIS and the Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET) monitored resistance, labeling Indigenous land defense movements as potential national security threats.

Let that sink in.

Canada’s national security infrastructure was pointed at unarmed people defending their own land — while politicians in Ottawa mouthed phrases about “reconciliation,” “climate leadership,” and “dialogue.”

And just like every other file on this list, plausible deniability oozes through every official statement.
“Policing is a provincial matter.”
“The RCMP operates independently.”
“We respect the rule of law.”

Meanwhile, Coastal GasLink hires private intelligence firms to monitor protestors. RCMP block access to journalists. Detainees are held for days. And Indigenous youth across the country are followed, profiled, and surveilled — all to secure a pipeline with no social license, running through stolen land.

This isn’t an anomaly. It’s a domestic doctrine.

A made-in-Canada version of counterinsurgency:
Corporate-aligned, federally backed, reconciliatory in tone, and militarized in practice.

We didn’t just break the treaties.
We skipped the treaties altogether.

1️⃣ Palestine: Abstention as Strategy

Canada doesn’t bomb Gaza. We don’t sell tanks to the IDF. We don’t vote “no” on every UN resolution condemning settlements.
We abstain.
We “urge restraint.” We “express concern.” We hold press conferences in front of maple-leaf flags while signing export waivers with the other hand.

This is how Canada supports military occupation without ever getting its boots dirty: we just refuse to stand in the way.

Case Study: Arms Transfers, Abstentions, and the Great Canadian Balancing Act

For decades, Canada has positioned itself as a “moderate” voice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that “moderation” is a mask — behind it is a consistent policy of economic, technological, and diplomatic support for Israeli military infrastructure, paired with abstentions on almost every international resolution calling for meaningful accountability.

Let’s be specific.

As of early 2024, Canada was still exporting military components to Israeli companies, including surveillance tech, dual-use sensors, and fire-control systems used in weapons platforms. Even as global scrutiny intensified after the 2023–24 Gaza offensive, Canada continued to approve permits — until the House of Commons passed a non-binding motion in March 2024 calling for a halt to future arms exports.

Trudeau’s government responded with a calibrated pivot:
“We have paused new permits.”
But that didn’t affect existing contracts — like the artillery propellant deal signed through a Crown corporation and routed to Israel via the U.S. Department of Defense in September 2024.

So we weren’t just complicit. We were cleverly indirect. We made sure that if you traced the parts, you’d need a map, a lawyer, and a burner phone.

Meanwhile, Canada has voted against or abstained from key UN resolutions condemning illegal settlements, the use of excessive force, and violations of international law in the Occupied Territories. We call for a “two-state solution” we’ve done nothing to materially support. We express “concern” while continuing to host Israeli military tech delegations at arms expos in Ottawa and Montreal.

The real policy is this:
Performative grief. Zero intervention.
We mourn the children. Then we abstain on the arms embargo.

Because that’s the point. Abstention is a policy. It’s a shield. It lets us walk away clean.
We didn’t pull the trigger.
We just made sure no one stopped it.

Conclusion — Canada, the Friendly State Actor With Bloodless Hands

We don’t start the wars.
We just keep them operational.

That’s the story. That’s the brand. We are not an empire — we are an enabler. A logistics partner for global instability, with great manners and terrible memory. We don’t kick in the doors. We just leave them unlocked.

Canada’s foreign policy isn’t built on strength. It’s built on plausible deniability and indirect violence. The kind that doesn’t make headlines, doesn’t raise eyebrows, doesn’t look bad in a PowerPoint deck. The kind that fits into budget lines and development frameworks, tucked neatly between “technical assistance” and “training initiatives.”

We don’t need tanks.
We have EDC-backed loan guarantees.
We don’t need black sites.
We have third-party transfers and buried reports.
We don’t need to rig elections.
We just train the police and fund the right side of the narrative.

This is what middle-power complicity looks like in the 21st century.
You won’t see the blood. But the trail runs straight back to Ottawa.

We’re not innocent. We’re not neutral. We are a soft-gloved, suit-wearing, policy-padded accomplice to empire. We speak human rights and send armoured vehicles. We mourn the victims and back the surveillance contracts. We fund the NGO while blocking the resolution.

Plausible deniability isn’t the cost of doing business.
It is the business.

Canada’s war crimes don’t come with dog tags.
They come with permits. With redactions. With press releases quoting the Charter.

And if no one’s asking the right questions?
We won’t be offering the answers.