By Drew Garvie
There is a dangerous illusion being sold to progressive-minded people in Canada today: the idea that massively increasing the military budget is somehow a progressive cause, a necessary step to defend Canadian sovereignty against threats from the south.
This is the line being pushed by Prime Minister Mark Carney, and unfortunately, it is being echoed – albeit sometimes with hesitation – by figures within the NDP and the broader left. From a class perspective, this is not just wrong but a trap.
Take the words of Charlie Angus, the former NDP MP now touring Canada with a left-nationalist message. At the end of last year, after the government announced plans for a new militia, he wrote, “This is an unprecedented moment in our nation’s history. A people’s army is a nonviolent demonstration of resolve. By building networks of grassroots resistance, Canadians are showing our determination to defy the MAGA pressure. But should an increasingly erratic or desperate Donald Trump choose to cross the line, we need to be ready.”
On the surface this sounds like a principled grassroots defence against a bully. But what does it mean in practice? The idea that a citizen militia could resist the most powerful military in human history, a force with which our own military is deeply integrated, is simply out of touch with reality.
The Canadian Armed Forces share command structures, early warning systems and supply chains with the US military. A “people’s army” cannot be conjured within a state apparatus that is being streamlined for corporate profit and imperialist integration. At best, proposals like Angus’s provide political cover for the drive to a war economy by giving progressive-minded people a false sense that militarization can serve defensive ends.
Angus isn’t the only one. The contradictions in the House of Commons’ “left opposition” are hard to ignore. When Carney announced last June that Canada would raise military spending to 5 percent of GDP, interim NDP leader Don Davies expressed “extreme concern.” Yet the NDP’s objection was to the scale, not the principle. They had already supported meeting the 2 percent NATO target and to militarizing the Arctic, and during the election campaign proposed cancelling the F-35 contract only to build jets in Canada instead.
The NDP’s position reflects a desire to appear responsible on defence while trying to distinguish itself from the Liberals, but it ends up legitimizing the very logic of militarization. Last summer, when they objected to the military spending increase to 5 percent, the NDP stated they “reject any move toward joining an offensive war machine” – but this ignores that NATO is exactly that. It is the US-led offensive war machine, as seen in the bombing of Yugoslavia and Libya. Yet the NDP, like the Green Party and the Bloc, does not call for leaving NATO.
However, the main threat to working people right now is not in the loyal opposition in Ottawa but with the soon-to-be majority government. Mark Carney is the main marketeer of the bogus “militarization as a defence of sovereignty” theory. He campaigned on a vague nationalism in response to Trump’s threats, but in practice, this has translated into harsh austerity, privatization, deregulation and militarization.
Carney’s newly announced Defence Industrial Strategy tries to put a progressive veneer on this process, claiming it will add 125,000 jobs and featuring “buy Canadian” rhetoric. But this is exposed as a sham by the deep integration of Canadian and US military supply chains. More than 30 Canadian companies currently produce parts for the F-35 program. Magellan Aerospace manufactures the entire tail assembly for the F-35A at its Winnipeg factory. This means that even as Ottawa postures, public money flows to the US defence industry, locking us further into a US-dominated military complex.
The strategy’s goal of increasing defence exports by 50 percent reveals its real purpose: not defending Canada, but opening new markets for arms manufacturers.
You cannot square the circle of claiming to defend sovereignty while tripling the military budget to meet demands made by Donald Trump and deepen integration with NATO, which is under direct US military command. In his first Oval Office meeting, Carney himself thanked Trump for being “transformative” in pushing NATO members to increase defence spending.
The idea that we can build a defensive barrier against the US military, with money they demanded we spend and using equipment they control, is a fantasy. In reality, the Carney government is acting on behalf of the banks of Bay Street. This is all about shifting massive public funds to private arms manufacturers, creating far fewer jobs per dollar than investments in healthcare or education, and opening new markets for Canadian arms dealers.
It is true that Carney has also pursued new trade deals with China, Qatar and the UAE, as well as talks of a broader free trade zone with Europe and the Pacific. On the surface this looks like a turn toward genuine independence. But these moves should not be overstated. There has been no major rupture in the US-NATO camp. The transatlantic imperialist alliance remains intact and most of its member states have agreed to the largest militarization drive in generations.
The hypocrisy of Carney’s position goes deeper than just military procurement. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, he spoke grandly about the need for middle powers to uphold the UN Charter and defend the principle of sovereignty. Yet his government’s actions tell a different story.
When the United States launched its military attack on Venezuela in January, kidnapping President Maduro and murdering over 100 people, Carney’s response was not to condemn the aggression but to immediately reiterate Canada’s non-recognition of the elected government, providing political cover for the assault. When the US and Israel launched their bombing campaign against Iran, a flagrant act of aggression that has set the entire region ablaze, Carney issued a shameful statement of support, making Canada complicit in what will be regarded as one of the major war crimes of this decade.
On the surface this looks like rank hypocrisy. But it has a clear capitalist logic. Carney is not concerned with the sovereignty of working people in Canada to defend their democracy and living standards. He is concerned with the sovereignty of Canadian monopoly capital to make new deals with US corporate interests as well as corporate interests from other countries, while opening up markets and securing access to resources from underdeveloped countries that are overexploited by imperialism.
The austerity, deregulation and privatization agenda he is imposing at home serves the same corporate class that benefits from maintaining Canada’s place within the US-led imperialist alliance, even as US-imperialism becomes increasingly violent and erratic. It is working people that have everything to lose from war and austerity.
Real sovereignty for Canada cannot be built on the foundation of an imperialist war machine. It cannot be built by slashing healthcare, education and childcare to pay for the highest military spending since WWII, as the Carney government is doing with its deepest austerity drive since the 1990s. It cannot be built by a “Defence Industrial Strategy” that claims to create jobs but is really a plan to funnel public money to monopolies integrating us further into a US-dominated military complex.
So how do we actually strengthen Canadian sovereignty?
It begins with an independent foreign policy based on multilateral and mutually beneficial trade, not subservience to Washington. It means public ownership and democratic control over key economic sectors: energy, natural resources, banks, insurance, steel, auto and aerospace. This would help direct the economy toward social needs, not corporate profit.
It means funding science, publicly owned media and a democratic culture, rather than starving them.
True sovereignty requires an equal and voluntary partnership between nations within Canada – Indigenous nations, Quebec and Acadia – including respecting their rights to self-determination. A country that denies these fundamental rights cannot claim to be united against external threats.
And finally, real sovereignty means building a decent social safety net, robust public healthcare and education – a standard of living that stands in stark contrast to the United States – giving working people something worth defending. These are the demands that build genuine independence, not the fantasy of a “progressive” military build-up that only serves to tie us tighter to the declining, though increasingly violent, empire we are supposedly resisting.
[Photo: WILPF Canada]
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