Does Avi Lewis support NATO? Now is the time for leftists to ask his position on the belligerent military alliance.
On Monday BC NDP Premier David Eby said he wants a new NATO bank to be headquartered in Vancouver. A few weeks earlier former NDP MP and Toronto mayor Olivia Chow called for her city to host the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank, which is a multilateral institution focused on financing military projects for North Atlantic Treaty Organization members.
The NATO bank is part of ensuring members spend 5% of GDP on the military, which the alliance recently agreed to under pressure from Donald Trump. In the largest transfer of public resources into the military in 70 years, Canada looks set to spend as much as $1 trillion more over the next decade to meet NATO’s spending target.
Historically, NATO has been one of the most controversial issues facing the CCF/NDP. The divide between the party brass and members on the issue has been stark.
The CCF hierarchy backed the newly forming alliance from the beginning. In early 1949 the National Council of the party announced, “the CCF believes that Canada should support and join a North Atlantic security pact.” At its 1950 convention the party passed a resolution supporting NATO and, in coded reference to his aggressive response to its opponents, David Lewis writes, “the NATO issue did not disappear. It had to be dealt with at every subsequent convention, and always produced one of the most heated debates.” Army captain and party advisor Desmond Morton describes the battle over a compromise resolution on military alliances at the NDP’s founding convention in 1961. The motion to abandon NORAD, but stay in NATO, was “subjected to a bitter, emotional attack from the floor. As they had done in so many CCF conventions, [M.J.] Coldwell, [Tommy] Douglas and Lewis came to the microphones to hammer back the unilateralists.”
Party leaders did not only employ the power of persuasion. They also benefitted from the dominant ideological winds and the leadership employed the levers of power within the party. On one occasion, Coldwell threatened to resign as party leader if members did not support the treaty. When a group of Manitoba CCF members, including individuals elected to the provincial legislature, organized an anti-NATO group the provincial secretary blocked their access to the party’s mailing list. Federal MP and future party leader, Stanley Knowles also intervened to pressure the Manitoba CCF to punish prominent opponents of NATO and the provincial party expelled two former members of the Manitoba legislature for campaigning against the North Atlantic accord.
Officially a response to an aggressive Soviet Union, NATO was established to blunt the European left and extend North American/European power in light of the de-colonization taking place in Asia and the Middle East. NATO planners feared a weakening of self-confidence among western Europe’s elite and the widely held belief that communism was the wave of the future. During Italy’s 1948 elections Deputy Under-Secretary for External Affairs Escott Reid explained: “the whole game of the Russians is obviously to conquer without armed attack.” George Kennan, the top US government policy planner at the time of NATO’s formation, considered “the communist danger in its most threatening form as an internal problem that is of western society.”
The other major factor driving the creation of NATO was a desire to rule the world. For Canadian officials, the north Atlantic pact enabled European/North American dominance across the globe. As part of the 1949 NATO parliamentary debate external minister Lester Pearson said, “there is no better way of ensuring the security of the Pacific Ocean at this particular moment than by working out, between the great democratic powers, a security arrangement the effects of which will be felt all over the world, including the Pacific area.”
(Exactly how little NATO had to do with the Cold War is demonstrated by how the alliance has become more aggressive since the demise of the Soviet Union. In 1999 Canadian fighter jets dropped 530 bombs during NATO’s illegal 78-day bombing of Serbia while during the 2000s tens of thousands of Canadian troops fought in a NATO war in Afghanistan. In 2011 a Canadian general led NATO’s attack on Libya.)
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.”
Since the Soviet Union disbanded the NDP has become ever more aggressive in its backing of the alliance. During the first month of bombing the party backed the NATO war on Yugoslavia and voted for two House of Commons resolutions in favour of bombing Libya. Lewis’ main opponent in the NDP leadership race, Heather McPherson, is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Association who has spoken in favour of expanding the belligerent alliance.
The party brass remains deeply hostile to questioning NATO. The NDP’s unelected three person vetting committee has blocked two candidates promoting a platform calling for Canada to “Immediately withdraw from NATO, as it is an offensive imperialist military alliance.”
Hopefully, they won’t succeed in supressing a resolution to the upcoming NDP convention noting “be it resolved that the NDP advocates for Canada’s withdrawal from NATO.” Avi Lewis should be asked whether he will support members pushing for Canada to withdraw from NATO.
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