The Tyee wants to add $100 billion to Canada’s annual war spending. It’s the logical conclusion of the ‘progressive’ publication suppressing perspectives that contradict Washington’s geopolitical outlook.
Thursday, Tyee contributing editor Crawford Kilian’s “The Case for Boosting Canada’s Military Spending” was published, which called for reaching NATO’s expected goal of spending 5% of GDP on the military. That would require adding about $100 billion a year more to a ‘defence’ budget that’s more than doubled over the past decade to $60 billion annually.
For a sense of the size of this increase, the Globe and Mail noted that Marc Carney’s recent $9-billion-a-year boost to military spending “is more than half the value of the Canada Social Transfer to the provinces to support education and social assistance. It is more than the federal government spends on research and development.”
In 2021 Canada doubled its international climate financing to impoverished countries with $5.3 billion over five years while the first year of the national pharmacare plan cost $3.5 billion (it’s supposed to reach $15.3 billion by 2027). For its part, the Coalition for Healthy School Food says a national school lunch program would cost about $2.7 billion a year.
Simply reaching NATO’s current 2% of GDP on the military — as Carney announced ten days ago — is likely to spur cuts to social programs. There’s no realistic scenario in which Canada could spend 5% of GDP on the military without massive cuts to social entitlements. But, concludes Kilian, “If Carney can boost military spending to five per cent or higher by 2030, he will have achieved a great deal — and hopefully helped deter future Russian aggression that would require four or five times that much spending.”
But Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and NATO already spends multiple times more on its armed forces than that country.
Russia also doesn’t pose a military threat to Canada. Notwithstanding the scaremongering, Canadian Arctic specialists have long joked that any Russia invasion by the north would end up being a massive search-and-rescue operation. In fact, a look at the map suggests Canada is the geopolitical aggressor. For eight years Canada has lead a NATO force on Russia’s border in Latvia, which now includes four thousand troops. NATO has international forces all along Russia’s western border.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal and brutal but it’s the US/Canada/NATO bloc that’s been the geopolitical aggressor. Canada pushed to expand NATO eastward, which former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien recently noted was a central factor in the war. In 2014 Ottawa joined the US in helping overthrow elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in large part because he supported neutrality for the country. Concurrently, Washington has dismantled arms control measures that heighten nuclear tensions.
All this is well documented, but the Tyee suppresses it. Soon after the Russian invasion my father, who worked with its publisher David Beers at the Vancouver Sun, submitted a commentary questioning the simplistic narrative of the war. Beers refused to publish it. Ten days before the February 2022 invasion I wrote a detailed response to a Tyee piece calling for Canada to ratchet up tensions by arming Ukraine, which they also refused to publish. Beers wrote, “we have a story from a different writer in the works that makes some of your same points.” To the best of my knowledge no article appeared on their site.
The Tyee has solely echoed the dominant media’s caricatural criticism of Russia and its invasion. It even published a commentary promoting the conspiracy theory that Russia was responsible for the Covid trucker “freedom convoy”.
(Beyond Russia, The Tyee’s coverage of Canadian foreign policy broadly aligns with the dominant imperial worldview. In the lead-up to NATO’s 2011 bombing they published “Libya Resolution a Huge Human Rights Milestone: Three reasons why the UN, with Canadian support, yesterday made history on behalf of humanity.” Libya has yet to recover from NATO’s bombing campaign. The Tyee’s coverage of China has often also been dreadful. In April Kilian published “My Case for Conscription in Canada I’m not in love with the idea. But as a former draftee, I think we need it back.”)
The Tyee largely enforces a narrow Washington/NATO centric outlook on international affairs and suppresses information contradicting this narrative. Now they are following the logical conclusion of this worldview by arguing for Canada to massively expand military spending to reach an outrageous (Donald Trump imposed) NATO target even if it requires slashing social programs and ignoring the climate crisis.
Support Yves’ work. Donate Now.
