Mark Carney’s kowtowing to Donald Trump is embarrassing. This former hockey playing prime minister shouts “elbows up” then acts scared to skate into the corners to fight for pucks. This is demonstrated by his refusal to take even tiny measures to piss off his tough talking but weak ankles American opponent.
Like Carney I played high level hockey. In junior I regularly knocked over bigger defencemen and found small ways to agitate opponents into doing what was good for my team.
If I oversaw Team Canada today, I would send a clear message to the US power structure by immediately pausing joint military deployments. But, to do so one has to be willing to anger Trump and a military leadership that prizes its privileged position within the US war machine.
Canada has all sorts of ways to irritate the Americans by withdrawing military cooperation, if it truly wanted to.
Ten days ago, the Waterloo Region Record published a front-page article headlined “David Mazur, Canada’s man inside the U.S. Navy”. A Rear-Admiral, Mazur is soon to become vice-commander of the US Second Fleet, which patrols from the North Pole to the Caribbean. “I’m not there to represent Canada, I’m actually there as an American officer,” he told the paper. “So, I almost have to turn off the Canadian part of my brain, and I have to adopt American policy and procedure and understand how they do things.”
The US Second Fleet blockaded Cuba in 1962 while playing a central role in the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic and 1983 invasion of Grenada.
Canadian soldiers are currently part of the large US-Australia led Exercise Talisman Sabre and they recently participated in another military exercise targeting China led by the US and Philippines. Canada has naval vessels sailing with US counterparts in many places. Through Operation ARTEMIS hundreds of Canadian personnel have been contributing to the Bahrain-based Combined Maritime Forces (CMF), a United States-led naval coalition of 44 member nations to monitor the region.
Canadian soldiers are also stationed at US bases elsewhere in the region. After Iran launched missiles at the Al Udeid base in Qatar in response to the US bombings, Carney told an interviewer Canadian soldiers were stationed in the kingdom alongside US forces. Canadian soldiers are also deployed as part of Operation PROTEUS, which the Department of National Defence describes as the “CAF [Canadian Armed Forces] role in the Office of the U.S. Security Coordinator to build security capacity in the Palestinian Authority” to oversee Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. There is also Operation FOUNDATION, which is the “CAF role in United States Central Command Headquarters, United States Air Forces Central Headquarters, and Combined Maritime Forces Headquarters.”
Currently, Canada’s armed forces function largely as an appendage of the US Empire’s quest for global domination. Despite Trump’s economic attacks and annexation threats, the Canadian Forces continue to assist their US counterparts internationally.
The public would be supportive of withdrawing our military cooperation. Sixty percent of Canadians view the US as a threat while another recent poll found that 70% expressed a negative emotion when asked about the US.
If I succeed in my bid to lead the NDP I’ll channel public hostility to the US towards ending Canadian support for US military policy. In the lead-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq I helped establish Block the Empire, which organized a blockade of the US consulate in Montreal. More recently, I was detained for seeking to challenge the US ambassador to Canada and was among a small group who forced US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to make a quick retreat from Montreal’s famed Jean Talon market later in 2022. Presumably due to this activism, US border agents stopped me from flying through New York enroute to Uganda 18 months ago.
With Donald Trump in power, the NDP needs a leader willing to challenge the “Ugly American”. But the frontrunner for party leader doesn’t appear to have ever publicly employed the term “US empire”. A Google search for Heather McPherson and “US empire” didn’t elicit a single mention. From China to Ukraine, Iran to Haiti, McPherson has followed Washington’s line during her four years as NDP foreign affairs critic.
Six months after becoming foreign critic McPherson attended the Trilateral Commission. Established by David Rockefeller in 1973, the Trilateral Commission is an elite talk shop heavily influenced by the CIA.
Historically, some in the NDP have been willing to stand up to the US. In 1987, reports CBC, Svend Robinson “led some NDP members in heckling U.S. President Ronald Reagan during a speech to Parliament.”
The NDP needs a former hockey playing leader that’s actually willing to skate into the corners and take the puck away from the goons of the US empire.
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