Image via X screenshot
By Michael Laxer
In a deeply cynical move, Manitoba NDP premier Wab Kinew is calling for Canada to fast track the US and NATO warmongering demands that Canada spend at least two per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on its war budget. He is making this call not primarily due to his support for the military per se, but because he thinks that Canada's "failure" to meet this commitment is harming its relations and therefore trade prospects with the United States.
Instead of the present commitment to reach this target by 2032, Kinew wants it to be met within four years.
On July 16, on the last day of the Canadian premiers' annual summer meeting, Kinew said to reporters, "I want Canadians to see this as a national security thing. It's an investment in the Canadian Armed Forces, but I encourage Canadians to think about this also as an investment in trade.
If we're not meeting our responsibility to our NATO allies, it is going to have an impact on [the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement] renewal. It is gonna have an impact on the relationship."
He stated further that "I am concerned that if we don't hit that two per cent target within the next four years ... it is going to become a trade issue, it is going to become a trade irritant."
As Manitoba Marxist political commentator and criminologist Helmut-Harry Loewen said in a social media post, this is an utterly "disgraceful but unsurprising statement from the darling of Canada's 'compatible left'. Wab Kinew's pro-imperialist militarism is consistent with his law-and-order authoritarianism, police fetishism, and carceralist policies."
Canadian workers are facing a serious housing and cost-of-living crisis, as well as the reality that many social programs and necessities are chronically underfunded, but that does not deter politicians like Kinew and members of the business community from demanding more money for war.
The Communist Party of Canada noted, while calling instead for a reduction in military spending:
The world is rapidly militarizing with global military spending growing by 20% over the last decade. The United States, as it’s economic power is declining in several places around the world, is leading this trend towards militarism and war with an annual war budget now approaching a trillion dollars, accounting for 39% of the total global military spending.
Canada’s military spending reached $36.7 billion last year, with the 2% of GDP commitment to NATO demanding that Canada spend $70 billion by 2032. This would mean doubling Canada’s current defence spending, which has already risen by 40% in less than 10 years, and which doesn’t include the $70 billion to buy and service 88 fighter jets, the $300 billion tagged to buy and service 15 warships, or the unknown billions to be spent on the planned purchase of new submarines. Or the more than $10 billion spent for the Ukraine war.
NATO cannot reasonably be seen as a defensive alliance and anyone on Canada's left -- which the NDP allegedly is even in Manitoba -- should be absolutely calling for the government to not only not meet this GDP target ever, but also to reduce war funding and leave NATO altogether instead.
Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK quite rightly called out the alliance after its recent summit in Washington:
NATO is now a military behemoth with partners far beyond the North Atlantic that encircle the globe from Colombia to Mongolia to Australia. It has proven to be an aggressive alliance that initiates and escalates wars without international consensus, exacerbates global instability, and prioritizes arms deals over humanitarian needs. NATO provides a cover for the U.S. to place nuclear weapons in five European nations, bringing us closer to nuclear war in violation of both the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. NATO is endangering us all in a desperate attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony in what is now a multipolar world.
NATO’s 75th anniversary is an opportune time to take stock of NATO’s outdated world view and violations of international law. NATO should be laid to rest so we can revitalize and democratize the proper venue for dealing with global conflicts: the United Nations.
The hawkish, dangerous imperialist pandering of faux progressive politicians like Kinew should be denounced and Canadians need to begin mobilizing to force politicians to follow a path of peace that would see countless millions being squandered on the machinery of death be spent instead on meeting essential human needs.
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