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Canadian Military Fattens While the NDP Leaders Fiddle
by Barry Weisleder
/ August 2006 of Socialist Action
More surprising than the federal Conservative
government’s $17.1 billion spending spree on transport planes, ships,
helicopters, and trucks for the military is the muted response of New
Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton and his caucus of MPs. On top of the
$17.1 billion for equipment, the government will spend a further $6.9
billion on maintenance and support contracts, plus money for new recruits.
Steve Staples, a military analyst with the Ottawa- based
Polaris Institute, says that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s plan will
raise military spending within five years to $21.5 billion a year—by far
the highest level of Canadian military spending since World War II. Does
anyone still believe that the military build-up is about hunting al-Qaeda?
The NDP leadership’s position on this profligacy seems
like an enigma, wrapped in a mystery. Or is it simply a case of
silent complicity?
As bourgeois budgets go, certain choices always come at
a high cost to social priorities. For example, the $3.2 billion price tag
for heavy-lift planes (awarded to U.S.
aerospace giant Boeing, without competition) could pay for the elimination
of post-secondary school tuition.
Other billions could go a long way towards training more
nurses and reducing waiting times for surgery in our grossly underfunded
public health-care system. Then there are urgent needs for social housing,
child care, aboriginal community services, green energy technologies ...
well, you get the picture.
The first recent whopping increase to the Canadian
military came in Paul Martin’s Liberal budget of June 2005. Jack Layton
called it an “NDP budget” because he extracted $4.6 billion in more money
for housing, pollution clean-up, education, and foreign aid—along with a
delay in corporate tax cuts. But Layton
didn’t put a dent in the Liberal boost in military spending to the tune of
$12.8 billion.
So, why should we expect even a murmur from the NDP
caucus now? Because the situation is getting worse, and working people,
including 100,000 members of
the labour-based party, and over 2 million NDP voters, find it increasingly
unacceptable.
While casualties mount in Afghanistan,
and Canadian forces step up their war in support of a regime of drug
dealers and war lords, NDP MPs argue in the House of Commons over how often
the flag should be lowered at government buildings to honour dead soldiers.
Instead of campaigning to bring the troops home now,
Jack Layton says, “This is the wrong military mission for Canada”.
By trying to turn the issue into a dispute about the ability of the
Canadian capitalist state to redeploy its forces to Darfur (in Sudan),
or another theatre of conflict where the Empire is losing control, Layton
sidesteps a principled antiwar position while fostering illusions in Ottawa’s
past policy.
The Canadian state was never a ‘peace-keeper’—except in
the morbid sense of delivering rebels to the eternal peace of an early
grave.
Canada
is a colonial settler state built on the decimation and dispossession of
aboriginal peoples, the conquest of Quebecois and Acadians, and the
squashing of two Metis rebellions, culminating in the hanging of their
leader Louis Riel. In the 20th century the War Measures Act was employed
three times, primarily to quell dissent and nationalist aspirations in Quebec.
As the junior partner of U.S.
imperialism, the Canadian state went to war in Korea
to halt socialist transformation in Asia.
It helped to launch a United Nations military force that used the 1956 Suez
Crisis to punish Egypt
for nationalizing the Canal, and to consolidate the expansionist Israeli
colonial settler state on Palestinian land.
Ottawa went with UN forces into the Belgian Congo in
1960, where UN troops helped to isolate the new anti-colonial,
democratically-elected government, leading to the capture and assassination
of radical nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba by the Belgian-backed Colonel
(and future dictator) Joseph Mobutu.
Canada
served with dishonour on the infamous International Control Commission,
which covered up U.S.
cease-fire violations in Vietnam,
and did surveillance for the U.S.
during its terror bombing of the North.
Faced with a deadlocked UN Security Council, Canada
went with NATO, the cold war relic, to wage war in Yugoslavia
in 1999 to hasten the break-up of the former workers’ state and the
privatization of its economy. In 2004, Ottawa
helped to arrange the overthrow of the democratically elected government of
Jean-Bertrand Aristide and joined the continuing brutal foreign occupation
of Haiti.
In the wake of the collapse of the Oslo Accord and the
election of Hamas, Ottawa cut off aid to
the Palestinian Authority and gives silent consent to the bombardment and
invasion of Gaza
by the heavily U.S.-subsidized Zionist military machine.
While the performance of the Canadian state is today
more overtly aggressive, reflecting the bravado of the Harper Conservatives
and a shift in Bay Street’s priorities, it is not out of step with its
legacy, nor with the interests of Canadian big business.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives publication
CCPA Monitor, in its June 2006 edition, reports: “Canada
is the seventh largest arms producer in the world, with annual sales of its
ten largest contractors in the $2.3 billion range. Most are sub-contractors
to the U.S. military,
making Canada directly
complicit in America’s
wars. A Canadian company, for example, manufactures the bullets used by U.S.
soldiers in Iraq.”
In the same edition of the CCPA Monitor, Richard Sanders
of the Coalition Against the Arms Trade points out: “About 100 Canadian
companies have been identified as sellers and exporters of parts and
services for major weapons systems used by the U.S.
in Iraq.
The U.S. has hundreds
of Canadian ‘Stryker’ vehicles in Iraq,
light-armoured vehicles built in London,
Ontario, by General Dynamics
Canada, which also has contracts with the Pentagon to service and repair
these vehicles.”
The benefits to the Canadian corporate elite do not
derive exclusively from direct military production, but include the profits
made by Canadian banks, mining firm,s and
manufacturers in countries dominated by the Empire that the Canadian state
helps to sustain. For example, Montreal-based Gildan Activewear, the
biggest producer of T-shirts in North America, operates notorious
sweatshops in low-wage Haiti
under the shadow of the Canada-France-U.S.-Brazil-led UN occupation.
SNC Lavalin built the Canadian embassy, provided bullets
for the occupying forces, and has been awarded a lucrative contract to
construct an additional highway out of the capital, Port Au Prince, to
better transport the Haitian elite – while the vast majority of Haitians do
without potable water and electricity.
When the NDP in Parliament has addressed foreign policy,
it was often Alexa McDonough, NDP International Affairs Critic, calling for
more RCMP to go to Haiti, putting equal blame on Palestinians for the
conflict with the garrison state that imprisons their people, and asking
the Canadian military to “resume peacekeeping” in Afghanistan.
Based on reports from across the country, delegates to
the 22nd Federal Convention of the NDP, Sept. 8-10 in Quebec
City, will be ready with tough questions and eager
for alternative policies. At
NDP constituency association, affiliated-union, and
youth-club meetings in recent weeks, rank-and-file members have discussed
and endorsed numerous resolutions circulated by the Socialist Caucus, the
organized left wing movement within the party.
The resolutions include demands that the NDP actively
campaign for immediate removal of Canadian soldiers, sailors, and police
from Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, and Haiti; for the Right of Return for
all Palestinian refugees, for an end to the occupation and the apartheid
wall, for restoration of aid to the Palestinian Authority and for a boycott
of Israel; for solidarity with Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia and opposition
to any U.S.-backed intervention; and for fair and democratic trade—along
the lines of the Bolivarian Trade Alternative (ALBA)—to replace the global
corporate agenda identified with the North America Free Trade Agreement.
NDP socialists argue that the illusion of a possible
‘independent’ capitalist foreign policy for Canada, and a ‘peace-keeping’
role that never existed, serve only as cover for imperialist rule by more
liberal means. Such a policy misleads New Democrats, and misrepresents the
interests of working people at home and abroad.
The alternative to all that is anti-militarism and
anti-imperialism. It is an alternative is driven by a vision of a
cooperative commonwealth, a socialist democracy that puts people before
profits, a perspective that is animated by internationalism, ecology and
human solidarity. And that is a vision truly worth fighting
for.
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