“The Banality of Evil” and Canada's Clandestine Military Industrial Complex
- Sylphia Basak
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
by Sylphia Basak for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics
Editor's Note:
The following article reflects the views & analysis of the author. As with all opinion and essay submissions, the piece has been edited for clarity and reviewed carefully for factual accuracy, but the interpretations & arguments are the author’s own. The 44 North publishes an array of perspectives & voices to encourage and ensure thoughtful engagement with complex social, political, historical, and cultural issues.
"Those who wish to dismantle Canada’s systemic complicity in the neocolonial world order must first understand the intricacies of how we uphold it. Especially as American fascism continues to socially, politically, and literally encroach on this side of the border."
Ahead of the FIFA World Cup, Toronto officials have unveiled a new $12.5-million police command centre—the ‘centrepiece’ of the city’s security plans for the FIFA World Cup (CBC). Other ornamentations of this new city arrangement ahead of the World Cup include a counter-terrorism unit, stationed with semi-automatic rifles at ‘key locations,’ though they don’t point to any specific ‘threat’ spurring this new wave of enforcement.
Most controversially, there have been reports and public concern around possible Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers patrolling Toronto during the World Cup, despite an official motion by Mayor Olivia Chow and the Toronto City Council to keep ICE out of the city. It has been stated that officers will not be armed, however, many local government members and police accountability & immigration justice organizations are (rightfully) sounding the alarm given ICE’s record of enacting violence towards civilians, amid a stark uptick in fatalities and imprisonments.
Many Canadians remain unaware that ICE, through Homeland Security Investigations, lists offices in five Canadian cities—Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver—operating out of U.S. embassy or consular locations. While ICE says their officers do not carry firearms or conduct arrests in Canada, their presence has raised serious concern among immigration justice advocates and elected officials. The Canadian government has done little to condemn the American administration’s use of ICE, amid documented allegations of abuse, including pregnancies of women and children in ICE detention centres , wrongful detentions, and excessive force and deaths in and out of custody, including the well-publicized deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti and Keith Porter Jr. According to several reports, Canadian banks and pension funds, including the Canada Pension Plan (CPP), the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and Desjardins have poured up to $35 billion into ICE contractors (COOP Media NB). Canadian collusion with ICE trickles down to even their armored trucks, an entire fleet of which have been manufactured by Canadian security transport company, Roshel, based in Brampton, Ontario, who have also invested in manufacturing armoured trucks for the Israeli government.
Hannah Arendt’s concept of “The Banality of Evil,” was written about Adolf Eichmann, who participated in the January 1942 Wannsee Conference where the implementation of the genocidal Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned. Eichmann was also responsible for the logistics involved in the mass deportation of millions of Jews to Nazi ghettos and extermination camps across German-occupied Europe. Despite the horrific, deep-seated systemic violence of Eichmann’s crimes, in observing him, Arendt describes a type of villainy not necessarily born entirely out of malice or sadism, but out of apathy toward others and a hyper-individualist need for power and status. A key point made by Arendt was that this was not a particularly exceptional type of evil; one would only have to convince themselves that they’re doing right by themselves and perhaps their fellow countrymen, to excuse atrocities committed under their leadership.
Hannah Arendt was, throughout her life, a Zionist to varying degrees. And I understand the irony in using a framework created by her to understand the psyche of those complicit in Israel’s genocide of Gaza—especially since the trial she uses as a case study takes place on occupied Palestinian territory. In her later years, including post WWII, she became critical of evolving Zionism, arguing against collaboration with imperial powers, and that the implementation of a Jewish-only state would cause unnecessary conflict in the West Asian region. Though I disagree deeply with much of her rhetoric in this regard, I feel hers is an appropriate and timely lens through which to look at the Canadian weapons industry and even at Arendt herself. As a reader, however. take her words (and mine) with a grain of salt.
But, there’s an argument to be had that this school of thought—which plagued Eichmann and his subordinates—captures something within the core ethos of Canadian politics, and perhaps explains our government’s willingness to continually partake in an increasingly fascist system alongside its more abrasive front-facing figures.
Despite Canada’s global reputation for placidity, in addition to this country’s lengthy history of mass violence toward our Indigenous people and ethnic minorities who immigrated here, Canada has also made extensive contributions to the military industrial complex of Western nations.
“Canada is certainly almost always ranked in the top 15 by volume of sales but that [ranking] is actually problematic for a number of reasons. One reason is that a number of groups that measure these things only count complete weapons systems, for example the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI. A lot of what Canada produces is in the form of components or subsystems. Also, there tends to be an undervaluing of Canada’s involvement in the trade because nobody has any idea of the volume of our trade with the United States.”
—Open Canada, ‘The Murky World of Canada’s Arms Manufacturing’
Despite the recent disintegration of free-trade between Canada and the U.S., this government appears to still engage in a frequent flow of imports and exports when it comes to military weapons. Canada’s main weapons export to the U.S. and subsequently any U.S. proxies, being parts for the F-35 fighter jet. However, several factories covertly include weapons parts in their inventory. And despite the Canadian government's official statements, these weapons parts still find their way to the assembly line of Israeli weapons, where they’re used to carry out genocide, as concluded by Amnesty International and testified by South Africa before the ICJ, as well as reflected in the ICJ's provisional measures.
The Arms Embargo Now coalition has published reports and evidence suggesting the government of Canada continue to have its hands in weapons manufacturing. Specifically, in facilitating the genocidal occupation of Gaza and the rest of Palestine, despite the Canadian government having claimed to ban all exports to Israel. Global Affairs Canada disputes several of those claims, calling them misleading, but the report has further intensified scrutiny of Canada's military-export regime and its loopholes.
In 2024, the Canadian Government announced it would no longer be selling weapons directly to Israel, Anita Anand, Foreign Affairs Minister is quoted as saying;
“Canada has drawn, and will continue to draw, a hard line: since January 2024, we have refused any new permits for controlled goods that could be used in Gaza. Not one has been approved…We went further by freezing all existing permits in 2024 that could have allowed military components to be used in Gaza, and those permits remain suspended today. The law is clear: no company may export controlled goods without a valid permit. We will not hesitate to ensure that those who violate this law face legal consequences that include fines, seizures and criminal prosecution. In other words, we will not allow Canadian-made weapons to fuel this conflict in any way.” After examining the report released on July 29, 2025, Global Affairs Canada officials have determined that a number of claims in the report are misleading and significantly misrepresent the facts…“Canada continues to deny any export permits for materials that could be used in Gaza…
We take any allegations of circumventing of Canada’s export regime very seriously and, if true, these would be accompanied by severe legal sanctions.”
However, the Arms Embargo report reveals several contradictions in statements made by members of the Canadian government, who have persistently denied their continued involvement in arms manufacturing.
According the report’s findings;
421,070 bullets were exported to Israel since the Gaza assault began, including one shipment in April 2025 alone containing 175,000 bullets;
Three shipments of cartridges from a General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems (GD-OTS) facility in Repentigny, Quebec, including one that occurred nine days after the then-Foreign Affairs Minister publicly pledged that Canada would block munitions exports from the same Quebec company to the Israeli military;
391 shipments including bullets, military equipment, weapons parts, aircraft components, and communication devices exported from Canada to Israel between October 2023 and June 2025, according to data from the Israeli Tax Authority (ITA)—representing only a portion of total exports;
Shipments from seven Canadian cities destined primarily for Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems and its subsidiaries, along with other Israeli defence firms including Elta Systems, WaldyTech, Snunit Aviation and NIRON Systems;
Around 100 international flights transporting Canadian components to Israel—64 of them commercial passenger flights where military cargo was loaded beneath civilian travelers on routes through Frankfurt, Paris, New York, Abu Dhabi, and New Delhi.
The data from the Israeli Tax Authority also shows that 175,000 “machine gun/handgun bullets for military use” were exported to Israel from Canada in April 2025. Since those bullets arrived, IDF soldiers and armed American mercenaries have shot and killed over a thousand Palestinians at food distribution centres.
According to Arms Embargo Canada, Global Affairs Canada (GAC) claimed to have suspended issuing any new export permits as of January 8, 2024. That August, GAC announced they had suspended around 30 existing permits, as well as having announced the discontinuation of new permits. However, this meant that shipments of arms to Israel were still allowed to proceed under the hundreds of previously approved permits. This allows for private companies the plausible deniability to create new contracts by selling crucial weapons parts. This loophole allowed Canadian companies to continue to profit from Israel’s genocide while the federal government misled Canadians into believing they were no longer arming Israel.
Officials then shifted their initial statement, claiming only “non-lethal” military goods are being approved for export to Israel. This extended to drone components, surveillance systems, and communications equipment. This loophole is the first of its kind, and contradicts the Arms Trade Treaty and the Export and Import Permit Act, which specifically require that officials do not approve arms transfers if they pose a substantial risk of being used in serious violations of international humanitarian law or other such abuses. According to an inquiry conducted by The Maple, GAC was also unclear on whether the suspension of weapons’ licenses applied to Israel’s other military campaigns in Lebanon, West Bank, Yemen, and Iran. When reached out to, they declined to comment.
Not only are the companies that manufacture these weapons parts existing on the outskirts of major Canadian cities, many other major Canadian banks and other conglomerates have until recently acted as major investors for Israel’s largest weapons manufacturing partner, Elbit.
Demonstrated in the above charts, manufacturing and logistics companies such as Honeywell (Mississauga), Dishon (Vaughan), General Dynamics (Quebec) and Lockheed Martin, who have an HQ in Ottawa, ship key components of machinery directly to Elbit and other weapons companies based in Israel to form weapons of genocide with impunity.
New and developing military weapons are annually advertised and demonstrated at CANSEC, “Canada’s leading defense, security and emerging technology events”. This conference, which is partnered with the Canadian Department of National Defense, also has private sponsors which make up substantial portions of the Canadian economy, including Bell, BAE systems, Raytheon and the University of Toronto.
Comprehensive list of 2026 CANSEC sponsors.
These weapons, which are advertised as “battle-tested” in Palestine to both national and international clients, are then deployed at will to all other proxies of imperialism, from Gaza to Cuba to Sudan, to the Congo and back here on Turtle Island. Protestors of the convention have been subject to police brutality and persecution, despite it being a nonviolent action, with 12 arrested last year, including a citizen journalist.
Protestors are also said to be attending CANSEC this year which will be running from May 27-28.
Studies from Tracking (In)Justice and Carleton University further suggest that incidents of police brutality in Canada are on the rise.
The evidence suggests that contrary to Canada’s desired public image, this country more so acts as a transient stop—an intersection that links the imperial arms industry. And as intersected as these companies are, so too are the people who run them. Roshel, for example, the company that manufactures ICE trucks, is owned by Roman Shimonov, a Ukrainian immigrant who moved to Israel and worked in the “defense” sector.
As uncomfortable a truth it may be, the philosophy of banal evil used by many western politicians, including those in Canada, bears a haunting resemblance to the type of banal evil used in historic fascist organizations and in men like Adolf Eichmann. Though perhaps not enacted to its absolute extreme, nonetheless the type of “banal” evil described by Arendt is still complicit in the behaviours and actions of those who do gleefully express more extreme, genocidal intent. Too many even so-called liberals and progressives seem far too willing to toe the line, making peace with politicians who openly embrace fascist rhetoric and collude with genocidaires—so long as it benefits their career short-term. Our politicians have failed on even a base level to fully condemn the ongoing genocide Israel continues to perpetrate against Gaza, let alone impose full sanctions. Even as Israel expanded its genocidal campaign into the West Bank and Lebanon, even when Canadian citizens (foreign aid workers) were shot at and killed, and as more reports are coming out of Flotilla activists being tortured and assaulted by Israeli soldiers. And this is all despite the fact that support in Canada for the ongoing genocide is at an all time low and continues to decline.
Our politicians not only fail to condemn, but actively aid the US in its ceaseless determination to erode the quality of life (and earth itself) for citizens in the Global South, including their own countries in exchange for lobbyists acquiring land and resources. These reports and findings at their core expose the facade of polite Canadian Liberalism. ‘Canada’ remains one of colonialism’s primary beneficiaries through loopholes and plausible deniability. And it’s precisely this that allows the Canadian government to continue to impose colonial era policy onto the Indigenous population along with other minorities.
Those who wish to dismantle Canada’s systemic complicity in the neocolonial world order, must first understand the intricacies of how we uphold it. Especially as American fascism continues to socially, politically, and literally encroach on this side of the border. How will our communities mobilize to keep each other and visitors safe should ICE test their capacity on Canadian soil? What can we as locals do to educate others on the weapons industry in Canada and advocate for its dismantling?
When Adolf Eichmann stood trial (ironically, in Jerusalem), Hannah Arendt remarked that his demeanour, the manner with which he spoke of his involvement in the holocaust, and his architecture of some the worst war crimes seen in modern history, was that of a man describing a mundane weather event. He was not a man of the shadows, twirling a mustache and rubbing his hand with glee in delight as he sent masses of innocent people to certain death. He was a man who went to work and did his job and did it well. He only required a certain amount of cognitive dissonance to be able to justify carrying out the crimes he did. His case, and the terrifyingly similar rhetoric of our own politicians, holds up a mirror to Western citizens. It forces us to ask an ugly and uncomfortable question, one which we too often avoid—lest we face the reality of how we might align with some of the greatest most terrible war criminals of living memory;
What do I willfully ignore on a daily basis, to be able to enjoy my day, unencumbered by the realities of what we are complicit in?
What comfort am I willing to sacrifice, so others may live with basic rights and freedoms?
Sylphia Basak is a journalist/writer and activist who uses a variety of mediums to convey the story she wants to tell. Her work prioritizes a decolonial lens, and seeks to counteract and analyze Western media and culture as a way of highlighting the primary contradictions of the current political climate.
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