For the past few weeks, internal and external pressures have been mounting for Canada to significantly increase its military spending in order to reach the minimum NATO threshold, set at 2% of GDP. Our safety and the preservation of our values would depend on it. Really ?
In Canada, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO), “nominal defense spending in Canada has increased by 67% between 2014 and 2021” and, as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), it has increased by 1.0 % to 1.4%. As the war in Ukraine brought its flood of new calls for increased military spending, a Léger poll, conducted April 8-10, 2022, revealed that only 34% of Canadians wanted increased military spending, nearly half deeming them sufficient and 18% too high. On June 9, 2022, the PBO estimated that military spending would reach $51 billion in 2026-2027, or 1.59% of GDP and that Canada would have to spend $75.3 billion more over 5 years to reach the 2% target!
Faced with public opinion unfavorable to such military spending and faced with a 2023 budget announcing few new concrete commitments, pressure from warmongers has recently increased significantly in favor of the 2%. On March 23, 2023, the entire editorial office of the Globe and Mail who called the government’s attitude on military issues indefensible. Then, on April 16, 2023, 62 former ministers, senators, ambassadors, chiefs of staff and other officials — most of them closely associated with the Conference of Defense Industries — published their critique entitled “National Security and Defense of the country in peril”.
Three days later, the washington post had his own salvo on the basis of a secret Pentagon document, according to which Prime Minister Trudeau had privately admitted to NATO that Canada would never achieve this 2% objective.
To defend ourselves?
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), global military spending hit a record high of US$2.24 trillion in 2022, up 19% since 2013, in real terms. As always, the United States leads with 39% of global spending, more than the sum of the spending of the dozen countries that follow it in the rankings, including China, in second place with 13% of global spending. . Does NATO, which accounts for 55% of global spending, really need to arm itself even more… to defend itself?
In the case of Canada, the replacement of its combat aircraft and its naval fleet — which serve much more to wage war against other countries than to protect us — is not enough to reach the 2%. What the United States — the prime contractors of NATO — want, in addition, is a Canadian army capable of larger and more numerous deployments, both on NATO’s eastern front and in the region. Indo-Pacific, than in Haiti, and elsewhere. Is this the defense of Canada?
Preserving US hegemony
Since the dissolution of the USSR 30 years ago, we have moved from a unipolar world dominated by the United States to a world of strategic competition between great powers. In this new context, the leitmotifs of security, democracy and a rules-based world order serve only to camouflage the great militarist mobilization of the Western bloc orchestrated by the United States to preserve its world hegemony, in the face of China. and, secondarily, against Russia or any country (Brazil, India, South Africa, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, etc.) that tries to play by rules other than their own.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine contributed greatly to this almost unconditional tightening of Western ranks around the United States. The neutrality of Sweden and Finland is over. Gone is also the European autonomist inclination of France and Germany. Along with this tightening of Western ranks, the partnership between China and Russia is also tightening.
In recent months, the consolidation of the Western bloc has also continued in the Indo-Pacific region. The United States has strengthened its defense agreements with Japan, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines. Japan will double its military spending by 2027. Australia has radically overhauled its defense policy to prepare for “potential threats arising from great power competition, including the prospect of conflict”…
Back in Canada…
Increasing Canada’s military spending to “fulfill our commitments to our NATO allies” will do nothing to guarantee public safety. This will only increase Canada’s ability to participate, under the leadership of the United States, in the destruction of other countries, as was the case in Iraq (1991), in Kosovo, in Afghanistan, in Iraq again , Libya and Syria.
But our country’s economic and political elites have long since made their bed: keeping maximum access to the US market and Canadian investment abroad under the umbrella of some 800 US military bases around the world, in exchange for the total subordination of Canadian foreign policy to that of the United States. The federal political parties, all carriers of this fundamental choice, are therefore now busy demonizing Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and competing in indignation over Chinese balloons in our skies, Chinese police stations and a donation to two universities and a foundation…
The militarist mobilization into which we are immersed is totally contrary to the goals we should be pursuing, in particular: ensuring the collective security of the peoples of the world, working to satisfy all of their basic needs and their emancipation, establishing an international order truly based on law and justice, fight global warming and eliminate nuclear weapons.