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With the Liberals in power, that help ground to a halt, even as the Kurds were waging a costly fight against ISIL’s strongholds in the area. Trudeau immediately halted Canada’s bombing campaign in Syria. And while special forces had been training Kurdish fighters in Erbil, the Trudeau government put a halt to that mission in 2018 and diverted the resources towards the central Iraqi government in Baghdad.

Photo by Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press

North Eastern Arms, an Ontario-based rifle manufacturer, was one of the bigger exporters to the Kurds.

“We, under the Conservatives, shipped about 2,000 rifles over there,” said Jeff Hussey, former president of the company, which has since been acquired by a larger defence contractor.

Hussey said the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq subsequently placed orders for 18,000 more rifles. But the new Liberal government required they get approval from both Kurdistan and Iraq — which he did. Hussey supplied to the National Post proof that both Erbil and Baghdad signed off on the deal, but he said that didn’t sway Ottawa. “They basically slow played us.”

In this case, and others, the Canadian government hasn’t explicitly denied the request for export permits, but it hasn’t approved them either.

A representative from a second arms company that had done business with the Iraqi Kurdish government confirmed similar problems with their export permits.