Canada is in the midst of a crucial review of its arms sales to Saudi Arabia after the press released a video of the Saudi Arabian National Guard using Canadian-built armored vehicles to suppress Shiite unrest in the kingdom. At stake is a $15 billion arms deal signed in 2014. How Canada responds could be a harbinger for the United States and the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia's key arms suppliers.

Canada has long supplied infantry fighting vehicles for the Saudi Arabian National Guard, the elite Praetorian Guard that defends the royal family from its enemies. Canadian regulations on arms exports stipulate that weapons supplied by Canada to other countries cannot be used against the buyers' civilian populations. Ottawa signed the $15 billion deal, one of its largest, to deliver a new generation of infantry fighting vehicles for the National Guard with the explicit assurance to the Canadian parliament that the weapons would not be used against civilians.

In 2011, King Abdullah had deployed the National Guard, equipped with an earlier generation of Canadian armor, to prop up the Khalifas, Bahrain's minority Sunni royal family, which faced a majority Shiite population demanding profound political changes that would have made the island kingdom the first democratic government in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudi intervention was the first instance of an Arab Spring rebellion being stymied and underscored the Saudi royal family's determination to lead the counterrevolution against reform in the Arab world.

Canada's conservative Canadian government at the time argued that the Saudi Arabian National Guard was not directly implicated in killing Bahraini civilians as the reform movement was crushed. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who took office in 2015, inherited the 2014 arms deal and the tensions over Saudi use of Canadian weapons.