by Douglas Dollinger
I thought my friends in ROC DSA might appreciate a bit of an update on your northern neighbour. What follows deals with the astounding rise of militarism in Canada under the Liberal prime minister Mark Carney. My American friends – I am myself half-American – will doubtless note some similarities between the rhetorical approaches of the Canadian and American governments, despite recent disagreements between the two countries and a flurry of ill-tempered threats by the American president against Canada.
Mark Carney would have Canadians believe military spending is good for the economy. He is on track to move military spending from $70B this year (2026) to $150B in 2035, an astronomical increase. This, he has argued, will create all sorts of economic benefits for the Canadian people – a high rate of investment, good jobs, etc. He is dreaming. It has been amply documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University, among others, that military spending creates fewer jobs per dollar spent than spending on education or health. But Trump whispered 5% and Carney and the Liberal Party jumped. Not out of sheer sycophancy, although sometimes I do wonder; no, Carney jumped because he is a neoliberal: Health care and education are costs; military spending is an investment. The distinction is a subtle one, granted. In other words, like most conservatives, he believes big government is bad, unless it comes in the form of policing, national security, business subsidies, financial bail-outs, and war-making.
Like most conservatives, too, he committed the money without either campaigning on the increase or consulting Parliament. Of course, given that the opposition in Canada is the Conservative Party, which has never stopped whining about the cash-strapped military, Carney has faced almost no criticism from opposition leader Pierre Poilievre and his happy troupe of militarists. Interestingly, Carney recently announced the purchase of 12 submarines from Germany. These will be used, Canadian military analysts affirm, to “contain China” and protect the Canadian Arctic from Russians. Needless to say, however, it is the Americans who have actively challenged Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage for decades, as the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies has documented. This however can simply be forgotten.
With fresh water becoming a highly endangered resource in many parts of the United States, it is a safe bet that American politicians will not sit on their hands and watch the Southwest become uninhabitable. Who has a lot of fresh water? Canada. If Canadian defence planners are aware of this looming danger, they seldom mention it; indeed, given the close integration of the Canadian and American military, it might be a bit much to expect the Department of National Defence even to consider the possibility. In all, Mark Carney has made no bones about building a war industry in Canada, taking up a proposal from his well-heeled friends at the Business Council of Canada, longstanding advocates of bolstering military spending in Canada. And so military Keynesianism is in full march.
Carney’s record on Gaza, to address a related matter, would suggest he is only too happy to stand in the shadow of the American colossus, and so it is probable that the Canadian military will continue to serve as a kind of branch plant to the American military under the guise of NATO. Gaza is important here. If Canada cannot establish an independent stance on Gaza, it is difficult to conceive of its developing an independent stance on any critical geopolitical issue. Carney made the bold statement that Netanyahu would be arrested if he entered Canada, but just a few weeks back Netanyahu graced Canadian airspace and thus its territory with his august presence and Ottawa went dark. So much for the bold talk. It does not even seem clear that the Canadian government issued an objection, never mind scrambling the jets to force the Wing of Zion to alter its course.
Meanwhile, as NATO moves east, Canada will have little choice but to jump on the ”contain China” bandwagon – indeed it was the American president who called for the 5% increase in the Canadian defence budget. Ever the Canadian stalwart, Carney obliged without hesitation. Note the refusal here to dignify the frequent threats to Canadian sovereignty by the American president. These can be dismissed for the most part for what they are, the deranged ejaculations of a political distemper called the Republican Party, but the American threat to Canada is nevertheless real. Those who believe the United States will respectfully acquiesce to Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic need to study American history. A country that can steal almost half of Mexico can certainly steal portions of the Arctic. Nor should anyone be surprised if this theft comes with the usual rhetorical embroidery about national security, which has become for all practical purposes the modern American substitute for Manifest Destiny. Carney talks big but carries a tiny stick, more twig than stick. Israel, again, provides a pertinent illustration.
Despite the fact that just about all of the Jewish Holocaust experts in Israel have declared what is happening in Gaza a genocide, the Canadian government under Carney has not found its way to using the G-word, the best explanation for which is that it would ruffle American feathers, since it is the American government that has been cheerleading the genocide and otherwise supporting it without reserve. None of this can be mentioned: Canada must be a good partner and this means not stepping on the toes of the global hegemon. So much for Canadian independence and sovereignty. As the United States invades country after country – those foreign wars just keep happening for some inexplicable reason – Canada, hewing as always to the American line, courageously asserts that it is Iran that represents the source of international terrorism. Canadian officials utter such nonsense with a straight face. If knowledge is recollection, as Plato taught, then it becomes very hard not to see these individuals as heralds of an astonishing historical ignorance. Has Iraq been forgotten? What about Afghanistan? Vietnam? Nicaragua? Guatemala? Dominican Republic? Grenada? Panama? Libya? Laos? Cambodia? El Salvador? Yemen? Cuba? Haiti? Somalia? And now Iran. But no, you will not find a Canadian official in the government of Mark Carney with the courage to suggest, much less declare, that the United States has endorsed terror as a political instrument. The facts do not matter; they can be forgotten.
Only a particularly deep form of ideological blindness can fail to see the terror standing behind what some Americans call “endless wars”. It is also this form of blindness that leads someone like Madeleine Albright, former American Secretary of State, to say that 500,000 dead Iraqi children – the documented result of Western sanctions on Iraq – was a price worth paying to bring down Saddam Hussein, a dictator whom the American government was only too happy to support when he was killing Iranians with American-supplied munitions, including chemical weapons. Canada voiced no objection. It is of course simply too impolite to point out that the American government supported Saddam Hussein for years. It crosses the ideological line and violates the bounds of what is considered serious and responsible political discourse. Power does many things: One thing it does quite well is to establish the limits of permissible discussion. Its most effective weapons in this respect are the words “terror”, “terrorists”, and “terrorism”.
Three points should be noted here. First, the terrorist is always out there somewhere – in Iran, say, or Cuba, or China. Western nations, by contrast, never commit acts of terror. For instance, leveling Gaza, a small strip of land full of unarmed civilians, is not an act of terror, nor is Israel a terror state. The United States has been bombing Iran in what all acknowledge to be an illegal war, but no, it is simply the height of indecency to so much as suggest that the United States is practicing terror. Canada understands this and has not raised an eyebrow. Second, once a government has been dubbed a terrorist state, Western political leaders free themselves of any obligation to exercise diplomacy, since it is axiomatic that one cannot negotiate with terrorists. War becomes the one option left, which goes a long way toward explaining what otherwise remains a mystery to millions of Americans, the reality of endless wars. Third, once the label is attached to an official enemy, the military machinery of the West, and there is no greater in the world as Trump never tires of reminding us, can be brought to bear without moral scruples of any kind, and whatever horrors this produces – take a look at Gaza or Iraq for current examples – will be dismissed as a legitimate response to terror. Israel, remember, is only defending itself. In this regard, the West is always responding to terror but never committing it.
The West, after stripping much of the globe of its valuable resources, enslaving millions of its inhabitants, and otherwise subjugating foreign peoples to regimes of terrible violence, has never suffered, so our leaders would have us believe, from an obsession with terror, with terror more specifically as a means of domination and control. Colonialism was an act benevolence, of kindness towards our darker brothers and sisters. For instance, the death of millions in India under the British Empire was either simply a mistake – a kind of huge clerical error – or it was an act of legitimate self-defence against restless, petulant, and ungrateful natives. The ideological mainstream in which people like Trump and Carney excogitate has little or no room for such reflections on Western terror. Nor is any thought given to what such pervasive violence might say about what we call Western values, meaning here not our espoused but our actual values, the ones that motivate our behaviour.
Mark Carney wrote a book on values, so one might be tempted to think that he would be able to provide some useful guidance on what all of this might say about the values we hold dear; however, because he thinks inside the principal assumptions of the Washington consensus, he is as blind as a bat when it comes to identifying our actual values. There is thus little reason to expect any enlightenment from Mark Carney and the Liberal government of Canada. Canada once had a reputation – not altogether underserved – for its role as a peace keeper. Canada is now effectively Americanizing its approach to defence. Militarism has become the order of the day.