Canada's military exports have soared in the past decade, a CBC News investigation has found, yet the federal government has not released an annual report on exports of arms and high tech military goods for four years.

Faced with a lack of information from Ottawa, CBC News did its own analysis, by constructing a database from figures kept by the Canada Border Services Agency.

CBC News found that military exports rose 3.5 times between 2000 and 2006. And according to the most recent report by the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Canada was the sixth biggest supplier of arms to the world in 2006.

The government's last annual report to Parliament, for 2002, showed that military exports had climbed to $678 million from $304 million in 1997 - more than doubling in five years. And that figure doesn't include sales to the United States, Canada's biggest customer.

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While the CBC News analysis doesn't capture total exports, it reveals the scale of growth of Canada's military export industry. Over the past seven years, Canada has exported $3.6 billion dollars in military goods. Canada now exports more arms and military goods than it imports.

During this period, the United States was Canada's biggest customer, with $2 billion in sales. Saudi Arabia took second place, at $527 million. Iraq bought $17 million dollars in military arms. And Canada sold arms and military products to more than 80 countries, including Egypt and China.

Calls for transparency

Critics say the government's silence is troubling at a time when the defence industry is growing so rapidly.

"We have not had data in four years — that is surprising to the point of astonishment," Janice Stein, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, told CBC News.

"In its public foreign policy, Canada calls for transparency on this issue. It has supported an arms register, yet our own government hasn't released good, reliable data about who it's exporting to."

A spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade blamed the delay on "technical glitches" due to a new online reporting system for companies that export military goods.

Ken Epps, of the arms control watchdog group Project Ploughshares, scoffed at that response. He's been asking about the missing annual reports since Paul Martin was prime minister.

"It seems that each time there's another question about why the report hasn't come out, there is another excuse," Epps said. "So it's now getting to the point that it's not really credible what the real reasons are for the delay".

An 'international embarrassment'

The situation has become an international embarrassment for Canada, Epps said.

The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey recently dropped Canada's transparency rating because the reports aren't being released. "Canada's rating is 11 on the scale out of 20 this year, and the rating for Iran is 10.5. What does that say to you?" Epps said.

Officials in the defence industry have no answers as to why the government is so far behind in releasing information about Canada's military exports.

"Beats me," said Jeff MacLeod, the general manager of Colt Canada, which manufactures semi-automatic firearms and grenade launchers in Kitchener, Ont. "We report annually to both the Canadian government and the U.S. State Department, so it must be an internal issue with Foreign Affairs."

More than 500 companies are now making defence and security products across the country, according to Tim Page, president of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries. The list of products is extensive, including night vision goggles, ammunition, rockets, missile components, sensors for unmanned aerial vehicles and armoured vehicles.

"The Canadian defence industry is one of those parts of the economy that people love not to think about too much," Page said. "And when they think about it, they think mostly about the stuff that goes bang in the night, whereas our industry now represents about 70,000 technology-based jobs in over 177 federal ridings across the country."

'Loophole' in the controls

Canadians shouldn't worry about military equipment falling into the wrong hands, Page said. "Canada is a global leader in how it manages its export of defence matériel," he said.

Arms control experts say that, in general, Canada has some of the best arms controls in the world, but there are loopholes that the government has known about for years.

"We've noted that there are a number of examples on a regular basis every year that Canada has exported to countries where there are persistent human rights violations," Epps said. "Examples include Colombia, Saudi Arabia, China and others, as well as countries that are at war, involved in hostilities. So we are concerned that Canada isn't meeting its own criteria when it's approving arms exports."

There are also concerns that sales to the United States aren't tracked and that most Canadian-made military goods cross the border without requiring export permits, owing to an agreement between the two countries signed in the 1940s.

"I think there's a huge loophole in the export controls," said Stein, of the University of Toronto. "The export licensing requirements for what we sell to the United States are so minimal that it is possible that if some of that equipment moves to third parties, we would never know."

CBC News repeatedly asked for in-depth interviews with International Trade Minister David Emerson and Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier, the two cabinet ministers responsible for overseeing the tracking of military sales and approving export permits. But those requests were denied. And for a full year, requests for background briefings by export control officials were also turned down.

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