A defence think tank is urging Canada to ensure weapons known as laser dazzlers are safe before it takes steps to buy them.
"Military companies pitch these weapons as a safe alternative to guns, but in the absence of a testing process, and I stress this, we cannot be sure of their safety nor their compliance with Canada's national and international obligations," Anthony Salloum of the Rideau Institute said Monday at a news conference in Ottawa.
"You only have to look at the current controversy in Canada over the use of Tasers."
Laser dazzlers are intended to be used for crowd control and convoy protection. They work by disrupting the vision of those targeted.
Canada has used deadly force against Afghan civilians who have gotten too close to military convoys. An Afghan civilian died last Thursday in an incident involving a Canadian convoy.
There is an international treaty -- the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, Protocol IV of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons -- that Canada signed in 1995.
Groups like the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch speculate whether "dazzlers" are another way of marketing the banned blinding laser weapons.
In 2003, Canada signed a treaty that would require it to certify that any new conventional weapons system it acquires doesn't violate international laws.
Review process stalled
Salloum told CTV.ca that the federal government's overall weapons review process stalled about two years ago.
When media reports surfaced that the government is considering buying the weapon, "then it all made sense. The government probably didn't have confidence the laser weapons would survive a review if that process was in place," he said.
Alternatively, the government thought the weapons would survive review, but the process would take too long and it wanted to get the weapons to Afghanistan as soon as possible, Salloum said.
"So stall the process, buy the lasers and resume the process some time down the road."
Sarah Kavanagh, a Department of National Defence spokesperson, would neither confirm nor deny to CTV.ca that the military is considering purchasing dazzlers.
"The Department of National Defence always considers ways to protect our forces and reduce the potential of causing unintended harm to civilians," she said. "While we are aware of this technology, the Canadian Forces does not use laser warning devices."
Salloum said the weapons have had some testing elsewhere and there have been "mixed results."
There are questions about how well the conditions under which the tests have been conducted compare to those in actual conflict zones, he said.
India and China are two countries who are using the weapons and there are some reports the United States are using dazzlers in Iraq, he said.
Salloum noted that an Afghan civilian blinded by a dazzler weapon could still die in a car crash, rather than being shot by Canadian troops.
"They're just obvious questions that people are asking ... it makes it all the more incumbent on a country to get answers before it buys (the weapons)," he said.
