By David Sutherland
At the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in January, Prime Minister Mark Carney said aloud something which has long been quietly understood. After a preface of tired anti-communist tropes about poor shopkeepers “living within a lie,” Carney admitted that the vaunted “rules-based international order” was in fact a “useful fiction,” sidelined and circumvented by the powerful when convenient.
He called for a new vision of Canada acting within the world as a middle power, striving for cooperation with other middle powers to avoid subordination to the US and to practice real sovereignty rather than a vapid performance of it.
On February 28, the US empire and its ally Israel launched an unprovoked and illegal war on the Iranian people. This flagrant violation of international law and the UN Charter took place under the cover of “negotiations” between representatives of the Iranian government and the Trump White House. The negotiation ruse was used to allow time for imperialist forces to move into offensive positions.
In the first wave of attacks top Iranian government and military leadership were murdered, along with numerous civilian targets including the Saharan Tayyebeh elementary girls school in Minab, Hormozgan province. Since then, more than 13,000 strikes have been carried out against Iran by the US and Israel.
We all know that the Iran war and the countless wars, interventions and sanction campaigns that the US has conducted in West Asia were not intended to free people from tyranny, but to control the region’s vast resources and vital trade routes. The ultimate goal is to isolate and cause the collapse of the People’s Republic of China.
As Carney said, great powers circumvent the “rules-based international order” whenever it is convenient.
Initially, Ottawa provided diplomatic cover for US-Israeli strikes on Iran. Carney highlighted the need to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which the Islamic Republic has perpetually been on the verge of developing for the last thirty years. The prime minister later attempted to walk this support back as the scope of the invasion widened from one absurdity to another. But it showed how willing the Canadian government is to continue subordinating itself as a junior partner in US imperialism, no matter how many countries are leveled in its wake.
So much for a “third path.”
The second Trump administration has revealed the US as the dying beast that is, shambling towards its grave and flailing in desperate, violent spasms. Having sacrificed its domestic productive capacity in the pursuit of super-profits from the Global South, it has dropped all pretense of diplomacy in its pursuit of continued domination in the energy markets and the destructive lengths it will go to slow its imperial decline.
Canada has experienced this through tariffs and a series of threats against its already debatable sovereignty, with Trump referring to it as the “51st state.” The general public here was briefly galvanized against the US and its economic warfare, condensing what has always been US imperial aggression into the character of Donald Trump, but the economic plan proposed by the Carney government is merely a miniaturized copy of Trump’s America; austerity, cutting taxes for the wealthy and redirecting public funds towards military spending.
Canada has historically presented itself as the “envy” of the world. Democratically robust and socially conscious, culturally approachable and friendly, humble and dignified, technically and technologically sophisticated, but most importantly, the sober and more reasonable northern neighbours of the United States.
The truth is that Canada is guilty of almost every crime the US is, both domestically and internationally, just on a smaller scale. We are not culturally and technically sophisticated, or even meaningfully distinct from the United States. We have no independent foreign policy beyond mirroring US imperialism, with the occasional polite but toothless objection on the basis of imaginary rules and norms when the real rules and norms are war and exploitation.
Our economy consists primarily of digging and pumping stuff out of the ground to sell. We are five identical banks and one powerful grocery store all stacked on top of one another in a trench coat pretending to be a country. The glorious past of this country, and all the crimes involved in that colonial process, were based largely upon the European desire for fancy hats – we should entertain no illusions about what Canada was and is.
If we look to the future, there is a real possibility of Canada becoming a truly independent state, but it is not as the middle power that Mark Carney envisions.
Rather, it is one defined by respect for the socioeconomic rights of its peoples and the sovereignty of nations, both those within the country and without. It starts with decoupling from the US-led imperialist apparatus – including NATO, NORAD and The Five Eyes. It starts with no longer providing rhetorical support for the US-Israeli genocidal machine. It starts with redirecting Canada’s vast resources and wealth towards the benefit of its working people and real, material reconciliation for its crimes against Indigenous nations.
When we talk to working people, we must disabuse them of the notion that Canada is “nice.” We must not only collectively condemn the genocidal war machine and its drivers, but work to remove Canada’s participation all together. This is a position the Canadian Peace Congress has been firm on since its founding in 1949.
Peace can be a material force in this country and throughout the world, but only if we fight for it.
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