NDP members want taxes spent on human welfare not war

The NDP should be echoing leftists elsewhere challenging a belligerent military alliance spurring major cuts to social programs. Instead, the top brass wants a leading NATO advocate as party leader.

It’s widely known the NDP leadership prefers Heather McPherson as the new leader. But McPherson is one of only two NDP MPs on Canada’s NATO Parliamentary Association, which promotes an alliance that has attacked Libya, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.

McPherson has repeatedly expressed support for NATO and its aggressive policies in eastern Europe, which spurred a proxy war that alliance supporters now use to justify boosting military spending. A year before Russia’s illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine McPherson said: “The NDP will continue to strongly support Ukraine’s bid to join the MAP [NATO Membership Action Plan] program and we have and will continue to push the government to advocate for this with our NATO allies. That Prime Minister Trudeau and [Foreign Affairs] Minister [Marc] Garneau have been unwilling to explicitly state their support for Ukraine’s bid and their failure to adequately support the bid via advocacy efforts and multi-lateral diplomacy is very disturbing.” In fact, in 2014 Canada helped overthrow an elected Ukrainian government opposed to joining NATO and soon after began training the country’s troops to make them interoperable with the alliance.In April 2021 McPherson told Ukrainian Canadian paper New Pathway, “the NDP would expand both the scope of Operation Unifier and number of CAF [Canadian armed forces] personnel within the program.”

Since Moscow’s illegal invasion McPherson has doubled down on her war mongering towards a conflict that’s used to justify boosting military spending. She called on Ottawa to “support Ukraine’s future membership in NATO”, which is an invitation to endless, even nuclear, war.

As former Prime Minister Jean Chretien admitted recently, NATO expansion provoked Russia to invade. When the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the ‘defensive’ alliance became more aggressive, violating its promises not to expand one inch eastward. Its aggressiveness spurred conflict, which the alliance has cynically used to promote greater militarism.

Now, Canada looks set to spend an additional $1 trillion over the next decade to meet NATO’s target of 5% of GDP on ‘defence’. According to a La Presse calculation, that will amount to $4,700 annually for every Canadian by 2035. Offering some historical context University of Ottawa professor Paul Robinson noted that Canada “spent on average 1.9 percent of GDP on defence in the period 1975-1984. Yet now we have promised to spend five percent – more than two and half times what we spent at the height of the Cold War. It is hard to see how this makes sense.”

Today Russia is, of course, far weaker than during the Cold War. Three years into its war in Ukraine the country of 150 million spends far less on its military than the US or European NATO members Germany and UK together.

Already Mark Carney’s NATO commitments are setting the stage for massive cuts to social programs. Challenging these cuts ought to be one of the top priorities of any social democratic party. But McPherson isn’t willing to. “In reaction to Mark Carney’s new NATO defence spending pledge to hit 5 per cent of GDP by 2035, NDP critic for Defence Heather McPherson issued the following statement …New Democrats recognize that Canadian Armed Forces personnel and infrastructure were underfunded by successive Liberal and Conservative governments, and there is a need to increase investment in these services.” There was no hint of criticism of NATO in her statement.

Conversely, the leftist parties in Slovenia recently forced the government to hold a referendum over NATO membership. In an upcoming consultative vote Slovenians will be asked to choose between increasing military spending or leaving NATO. Similarly, leftist French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon wants the country to withdraw from NATO and so does former British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Why isn’t the NDP willing to question membership in the belligerent military alliance?

Before the recent NATO summit where Mark Carney committed to the Donald Trump mandated 5% of GDP target, I asked interim leader Don Davies if there was a threshold at which the NDP would start calling for Canada to withdraw from the alliance. He demurred. If it’s not 5% of GDP how about 7% or 10%?

At a time when the defensive argument for the alliance was stronger than today the NDP officially called for withdrawing from NATO. In 1969 NDP members voted for a resolution calling on Ottawa to withdraw from the alliance. But the party leadership partly reversed that position in a 1987 “security” policy stating: “We have taken those things that have been associated with NDP foreign policy in the past, like withdrawal from NATO, and have placed them in a framework. Many of the concepts have long been in the minds of the NDP but have never before been articulated. This policy expresses the kind of world we are working toward with such policies as pulling out of NATO.”

There are still many members who want to withdraw from the alliance. The party’s Socialist Caucus promotes withdrawal and at the party’s 2021 convention a resolution was submitted calling on the NDP to “actively campaign to get Canada out of NATO” and “remove the NATO nuclear ring around Russian borders.” It was never debated.

The NDP has a history of suppressing critics of NATO. The party brass may seek to block my bid to lead the party to avoid debating NATO. But as part of my campaign, I’m seeking to draw together all Canadians who prefer to spend public resources on human welfare than a belligerent military alliance.

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