Canada: SEMA Belarus Regulations amendment (SOR/2022-167) — luxury, weapons-production and advanced-technology goods export ban

Mechanism

SOR/2022-167 was registered and came into force on 25 June 2022 as an amendment to the Special Economic Measures (Belarus) Regulations (SOR/2006-276), Canada's principal Belarus-sanctions instrument, cited by the regulation as a response to "Belarus's support to the Russian Federation's violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine." It inserted three new schedules:

• Schedule 3 (advanced technologies): export ban on quantum computers, advanced

manufacturing equipment, cryogenic systems and related components.

• Schedule 4 (luxury goods): Part 1 bans export of luxury alcohol, tobacco, textiles,

jewellery, artwork and select machinery to Belarus; Part 2 bans import of luxury goods (seafood, caviar, alcoholic beverages, diamonds) from Belarus.

• Schedule 5 (weapons-manufacturing goods): export ban on raw materials (tungsten, boron,

tellurium, aluminium, titanium, tantalum, bismuth, rhenium, niobium), engines, industrial machinery, motor vehicles, aircraft, maritime vessels and analytical/medical equipment.

The same instrument added 13 Belarusian government and military officials and 2 state entities to the Schedule 1 designated-persons/entities asset-freeze list, outside this action's scope. Global Trade Alert logs the announced/implemented date as 27 June 2022, two days after the Gazette registration date — treated here as a publication-lag artefact of the secondary source, not a separate legal event.

Severity basis

The regulatory impact analysis statement discloses 2021 Canada-Belarus trade baselines: weapons-manufacturing-goods exports "just over CDN$ 2 million," luxury-goods exports "just over CDN$ 44,000," luxury-goods imports "just over CDN$ 430,000," and advanced-technology exports "just over CDN$ 13,000." These are disclosed trade-value baselines, not a tariff/quota/coverage-share figure, so no magnitude: block is emitted; severity 2 reflects a bilateral trade base in the low single-digit millions CAD, an order of magnitude smaller than the parallel Russia-directed SOR/2022-102 (CAD 95 million weapons-goods exports, already filed as 2022-05-18-canada-sema-russia-sor-2022-102-luxury-weapons-goods-export-ban).

Downstream implications

• Belarus-domiciled suppliers of tungsten, aluminium or titanium inputs lose direct access to

Canadian buyers; volumes are small but the schedule mirrors the broader Western weapons-goods control list also applied to Russia.

• Adds to the pattern of parallel Russia/Belarus sanctions instruments Canada has issued

roughly monthly since March 2022 (see SOR/2022-49, SOR/2022-98, SOR/2022-102).

Open questions

• Whether Canada re-uses the Schedule 5 weapons-goods list verbatim in later Belarus

amendments, or expands it independently of the Russia-directed schedule.