As Canada and Caribbean leaders end summit, Trudeau defends Haiti sanctions policy

Caribbean leaders and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrapped up a summit in Ottawa Thursday, saying they had found common ground in a number of areas, from security assistance for island-governments to support from Canada on global issues around climate change and financing, and attracting trade and investment.

“This was an outstanding opportunity to gather among friends and partners, to talk about the challenges that the world is facing, like climate change, like geopolitical instability, like the need for better flow of financing; to talk about the challenges the region is facing,” Trudeau said at a concluding press conference.

At their first-ever summit in Canada and with Trudeau, leaders of the 15-member Caribbean Community, known as CARICOM, spent two days discussing behind closed doors how to strengthen relations in order to create good jobs, make life more affordable, grow the middle class, fight climate change and keep people safe.

“We are holding the summit this week at a time of great turbulence,” Trudeau said. “The conflict in the Middle East is reverberating around the world; Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to rage on, conditions in Haiti remain heartbreaking, our citizens are living the devastating realities of climate crisis, whether that’s wild fires in Canada or hurricanes and rising sea levels across the Caribbean.”

As a result of these and other issues, Trudeau said, it’s important to strengthen the relationship with friends and like-minded partners, which Canada has done in launching its new strategic partnership with the Caribbean region.

“This is going to make our relationship stronger, and it’s going to help us work on our shared priorities,” Trudeau said.

During the summit Trudeau announced a new commitment with the Caribbean Development Bank of up to 58 million Canadian dollars to support renewable energy projects in the region and 6 million Canadian dollars through a Caribbean fund for renewable energy systems. He also announced that Canada would enhance coordination between the Canadian Armed Forces and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, known as CDEMA, to quickly react to natural disasters.

Canada also will expand a tariff program to give Caribbean countries duty-free access to the Canadian market.

“In many of our meetings we also talked about the issue of security in our region, especially in Haiti,” he said. “Since 2022, Canada has been committed to giving over 300 million [Canadian] dollars in international aid to address the Haitian crisis. We’ve also sanctioned 28 people and provided technical assistance to the Haitian police and will continue to be there to support the people of Haiti.”

Guyana President Irfaan Ali said leaders are pleased with the outcome of the summit, which focused on creating a framework to support investment and partnerships with the private sector and discussing policies that would support the aspirations of both Canada and CARICOM countries.

Also discussed, Ali said, said were food security, development financing, regional transport and logistics, energy security, and movement of people between Canada and CARICOM nations.

“This summit definitely built our trust, deepened out friendship and expanded out relationship,” he said.

While Canada and CARICOM countries have always enjoyed good relations, they started to develop even closer ties amid the ongoing crisis in Haiti as Trudeau pushed for more involvement by the region in helping the Caribbean nation address its political and security crisis. Trudeau was present on several calls with leaders before meeting with them face-to-face in February in The Bahamas where, despite U.S. pressure for Canada to lead an international intervention into Haiti, he announced instead more support for the Haitian police.

On Thursday, he continued to show his hesitancy over the idea of a mission to Haiti, despite a resolution earlier this month by the United Nations authorizing a deployment of a Multinational Security Support mission led by Kenya.

“Right now there is not even a consensus among the Haitian political class on whether or not someone should step in to stop people from being killed, murdered or raped in the streets of Port-au-Prince,” Trudeau said. “We have said the international community, including Canada and CARICOM, are there to help. But there has to be a willingness clearly expressed and articulated by the Haitian political class that this is the right thing.

“How they work out that consensus, how they establish it, will be very much something we are actively helping in and building that political consensus,” he added, referring to the CARICOM initiative involving three former prime ministers who have been trying to mediate a power-sharing agreement between Haiti Prime Minister Ariel Henry and members of the country’s political and civil society groups.

Trudeau said Canada is “working closely with CARICOM to ensure a process that would build the kind of political consensus necessary to go hand in hand with either intervention or support for the police or more humanitarian aid.”

So far, those efforts have not yielded any political agreement, with both sides blaming the other for the logjam.

Keith Rowley, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said there is a danger that “as we attempt to provide help for the Haitian people, that that help is not viewed as supporting a minority government arrangement.”

“There isn’t a single elected official in Haiti and as we look at the crisis and we advocate for an intervention of assistance, that that assistance be seen as coming from honest brokers and not in fact propping up what exists, in perpetuity,” Rowley said referring to Henry and his supporters. “That in itself poses a danger.”

Henry, who was tapped by President Jovenel Moise before his July 2021 assassination to serve as his seventh prime minister in four years, has said that he has no intentions of running in the next elections. Still, that has offered little comfort to his detractors who insist on a power-sharing agreement.

“We’ve got the U.N. resolution and we anticipate there will be some transitional arrangement to afford the intervention of the assistance that the people of Haiti so desperately need,” Rowley said.

This week’s summit was the first time since October that Canada did not announce new sanctions against Haitians, something Ottawa has done around every big event where Haiti was a focus. But during the press conference, Trudeau reiterated Canada’s 28 sanctions against Haitian individuals, several of whom are currently challenging the designation and have publicly questioned what evidence the country has of their alleged involvement with gangs.

Asked about how Canada has made its determination on who to blacklist, Trudeau defended the policy. Canada, he said, has been involved in Haiti for the last 30 years.

“Unfortunately, during these 30 years it has been impossible to solve the problem and the reality is, it’s not up to the international community to find a solution for Haiti,” Trudeau said. “Unfortunately, members of the elite in business, in government, in various wealthy families, oligarchs, for years, if not for decades, these people have been undermining the very stability of any progress, or any stability for the Haitian people.

“We won’t repeat the same mistakes,” he said. “Those who are responsible for this situation, for this present crisis, we have to put them in front of the international community to be accountable.”

This is why Canada has stepped up by blacklisting of those who it believes “are contributing to the current instability and horrific security situation that the Haitian people are suffering through right now,” he said.

“We have been putting pressure on the U.N., on the United States, on our European colleagues to meet us where we are with sanctions because we know that there are elites and oligarchs who are contributing to the instability and financing gangs and supporting this ongoing security and humanitarian crisis,” Trudeau said.

On Thursday, the U.N. Security Council, which so far has only sanctioned a powerful gang leader, unanimously approved a resolution renewing global sanctions on Haiti and continuing the work of a panel of experts charged with identifying targets for sanctions.