Breaking the faith
By Janice Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen, May 1, 2009
Trucks will roll into Lansdowne Park in three weeks, ready to unload their cargoes of shiny new products for the big trade show. The products, innovative marvels of fine engineering, will be displayed, demonstrated and (their manufacturers hope) bought.
Then, at an unknown point down the road in a place comfortably distant from Ottawa, some of these gadgets, gizmos and gleaming implements will be used to do precisely what they were designed to do. Some shiny new bit of high-tech efficiency, exhibited so effectively over two peaceful weekdays in May on a site by the quiet Rideau River to buyers strolling the aisles, morning coffees in hand — this shiny new purchase will help to shred flesh, blow off human limbs, wipe out innocent lives, create indescribable depths of grief and add to the world’s sum total of hatred.
CANSEC 2009, put on by the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), is the country’s largest trade show for items manufactured for “defence” and “security.” (The words have such a comforting motherhood-and-apple-pie blandness to them, don’t they? Nothing about them even hints at their potential to devastate innocent civilian lives.)
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Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade: CANSEC Opposition Campaign