Ottawa and other Canadian towns and cities should never be used for drone warfare testing. Yet from November 24 to 28 the Canadian military, RCMP, and American officials are planning to use downtown Ottawa to test the kinds of killer drones wreaking terror now in Gaza, Ukraine, Somalia, Lebanon and elsewhere. 

We demand that these drone warfare tests be stopped and not rescheduled. We call on the Government of Canada and Ottawa City Council to end this planning for war and devote public resources to peaceful means of conflict resolution.

 

 

According to the Ottawa Citizen (https://ottawacitizen.com/public-service/defence-watch/military-drones-tested-downtown-ottawa),  “There will be four types of test locations: Ground level, Mid-level balcony on a high-rise building, High-level balcony on a high-rise building, and Rooftop,” and "Small drones, particularly those known as first person view (FPV) aerial vehicles have transformed the modern battlefield. The systems, which can cost less than $500, are currently being widely used in the Russia-Ukraine war as well as in fighting in Gaza, Haiti, Lebanon and Syria.”

Drone warfare – especially its roles in carrying out extrajudicial executions and rendering vast areas unliveable – is one of the most dangerous military escalations of the 21st century. Data shows that drone attacks in conflict settings increased by an astonishing 4,000 percent between 2020 and 2024, and more than quadrupled from an estimated 4,525 attacks in 2023 to 19,704 in 2024.  (https://www.justsecurity.org/123474/drones-are-changing-how-wars-harm-civilians/

Dangers of Drone Warfare

The Carney government, in its proposed quadrupling of war spending and normalizing a garrison state mentality, is creating very dangerous precedents with such war testing that, in many respects, is testing our willingness to cooperate with the blatant militarization of our daily lives. 

 

 

Drone warfare has increased the danger to everyone’s personal safety and privacy, with drones now used to prevent refugees from seeding asylum, to aid police forces in repressing residents seeking an end to racial and economic injustice, and to extend the vast reach of imperial power, whereby individuals in Ottawa or Colorado bunkers can play with joy sticks maneuvering deadly drones thousands of kilometres away as they target and assassinate, an appalling practice which has become daily practice against farmers, wedding attendees, students, children, health care workers, and many others who, under the policies adopted by Barack Obama, ensured anyone murdered by drones was "presumed guilty" unless posthumously proven innocent.

The City of Ottawa should not be a testing zone for drone warfare or any other time of militarism. 

War is NOT a Game

War is not a game, yet the Canadian War Dept.’s program for drone warfare testing is called Counter UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) Sandbox tests, which have already been held at an open range at Canada’s traditional home of chemical and biological warfare testing, Canadian Forces Base Suffield in Alberta.

According to the  Ottawa Citizen, “Sixteen companies have signed up to demonstrate their detection technology in downtown Ottawa. The area to be defended is a square of city blocks, with office towers of varying sizes. DND said the intent of the tests will be to identify and track drones before they reach the perimeter of a specific area, as well as once they have breached the inside of that perimeter.

Each company participating in the Ottawa tests will be provided with up to $20,000 in funding. The War Dept. is also offering $1.75 million in monetary prizes for promising technologies."

 

 

Billions for Drones, not Homes

Canada plans to purchase billions of dollars worth of drones from companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza, including American and Israeli firms. Drone warfare sites will be at 14 Wing Greenwood, N.S., 19 Wing Comox, B.C. and Uplands, Ottawa (which will house a new $65. Million 6,000 square metres drone warfare facility).

Drone warfare violates international law on multiple levels and we have for decades now seen the brutal results of such violations.

Most recently, we have seen how drones adapted by the Israeli apartheid regime have been used to kill Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. The drones are operated manually by soldiers on the ground to bomb civilians – including children – to force them out of their homes or prevent them from returning to areas where Palestinians have been expelled.

They have used quadcopter drones as tools of psychological intimidation, surveillance, and direct killing, particularly in areas where civilians have sought refuge after being forcibly displaced from northern Gaza. This systematic pattern appears aimed at stripping away any sense of safety and turning displacement zones into death traps.

A Daily Terror

People in Gaza have lived with such terror for 15 years, with the buzz of such instruments of terror preventing a good night’s sleep and promoting an ever-present anxiety. 

The BBC reports that Dr. Nizam Mamode, from Brockenhurst, Hampshire, worked at Nasser hospital for a month and reporte don the impact of drones. "What I found particularly disturbing was that a bomb would drop, maybe on a crowded, tented area and then the drones would come down. The drones would come down and pick off civilians - children. We [were] operating on children who would say: 'I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me. That's clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act - persistent targeting of civilians day after day. The bullets that the drones fire are these small cuboid pellets and I fished a number of those out of the abdomen of small children. I think the youngest I operated on was a three-year-old. These pellets were in a way more destructive than bullets. With the drone pellets, what I found was they would go in and they would bounce around so they would cause multiple injuries.”

While sniper drones have been used to enter hospitals and assassinate patients and health care workers in Palestine, in Ukraine, drone warfare by both sides has had a devastating impact. Ukraine President  Zelenskyy unsurprisingly declared earlier this year that more than 100,000 components from US, UK and other suppliers were  found in Russian missiles and drones fired on Ukraine.

 

 

 

 

Area of Ukraine Unliveable Due to Drones

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine finds that “Russian armed forces have targeted civilians and a wide array of civilian objects using short-range drones in localities stretching over 300 kilometres along the right bank of the Dnipro River… such drone attacks in Kherson Province were widespread and systematic and amounted to crimes against humanity. The evidence now shows that similar drone attacks also target civilians and civilian objects in Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv Provinces.

These attacks have a devastating impact on the civilian population living in the affected areas. They have caused extensive damage and destruction, leaving entire localities unliveable. Essential services and shops have been unable to operate. The terror instilled in the population and the ensuing coercive environment have compelled thousands to flee. A woman who left Antonivka settlement, a particularly targeted locality, stated: ‘The buses stopped coming, the shops closed, drones were flying all around – before there were a few drones each day, but by then there were three, four, five drones every hour. It was not possible to go out.’”

Say NO to Drone Warfare Testing

Just as the answer to nuclear weapons is not to build more nuclear weapons, the metastasizing pandemic of drone warfare must be stopped, not increased in a deadly arms race. The City of Ottawa must reject drone warfare testing in its jurisdiction, and other Canadian cities should refuse to allow such war testing as well.