It would be a victory if we could get Avi Lewis to simply mimic important parts of Stephen Harper, Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney’s military policy.
When the last Conservative prime minister left office in 2015, Canadian military spending amounted to 1% of this country’s GDP. It’s now twice that (three times in actual dollars). Is it too much to ask a leftist NDP leader to commit to a GDP percentage no greater than the militarist Stephen Harper?
Instead of offering a spending benchmark or using Harper’s rate to highlight Carney’s extremism, Lewis has simply disagreed in broad strikes with the former banker’s spending. At the same time Lewis has repeatedly stated – including in a recent post criticizing Carney’s NATO war bank – “Canada needs a modern and well-equipped military.” If Harper had a “modern and well-equipped military” than 1% of GDP should be enough.
When Harper was PM the plan was to buy 65 F-35 fighter jets. Under Justin Trudeau that number was bumped up to 88 and now media reports suggest Carney might purchase as many as 140 new warplanes.
The NDP rejects Lockheed Martin’s F-35 but wants to purchase Sweden’s Gripen fighter jet. But they’ve failed to cite a number.
Is Lewis okay with buying 140 fighter jets, which Canada has used to bomb Iraq, Yugoslavia and Libya? Or will the NDP demand the government purchase no more than Harper’s 65 fighter jets?
Almost a week after Carney announced he was procuring German submarines Lewis has yet to publicly comment on the government spending a hundred billion dollars to acquire an aggressive new war fighting capacity. The Harper government was (correctly) ambivalent about spending lavishly on submarines, which Canada has only possessed intermittently over the past half century. Harper’s 2010 National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy (NSPS), a long-term plan to build Canada’s navy, ignored submarines and Harper subsequently kicked the submarine can down the road by deciding to fix the small number of old subs Canada had. A similar ambivalence towards expensive submarines would mark a step forward from Lewis’ current silence on vessels likely to be equipped with cruise missiles.
On the conflict driving Canada’s radical militarism, Lewis would do well by echoing former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. In a speech on the sidelines of last summer’s G7 summit in Alberta, Chrétien raised the importance of talking with Russia. He said, “It’s always good to talk, you can’t go on your high horse with any problem. We don’t talk to (the Russians) anymore.”
Verboten in official politics, Chrétien also mentioned what (largely) provoked the war. According to the Calgary Herald, “He said Putin made it clear his concern about NATO’s perceived encroachment on parts of the former Soviet Union. ‘(Putin said) that was too close for comfort… I discussed that for one-and-a-half hours.’”
The former prime minister’s insights are more consistent with defending social services than the NDP’s (aggressive) support for the NATO proxy war. Canada has already plowed $27 billion into the conflict and, more significantly, the NATO proxy war has been central to justifying increased military spending.
Alongside calling for diplomatic solutions to the horrible war in Ukraine and opposing further arms transfers, Lewis should follow former Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and call to remove all Canadian troops from Europe. Canada has 2,000 soldiers in Latvia as part of a nine-year-old NATO force and has 250 soldiers in Poland as part of an eleven-year-old mission that was previously in Ukraine. Through the 2015 Operation Unifier training mission in Ukraine Canada entered a low–level proxy war with Russia, which Moscow massively expanded in February 2022.
Both Unifier and the Latvia mission contributed to spurring the illegal Russian invasion. Having troops on Russia’s border escalated tensions with the world’s leading nuclear weapons power.
If Lewis doesn’t want a semi-permanent Canadian troop presence, he should call for the withdrawal of all Canadian forces from Europe. In doing so he can take inspiration from Conservative leader Brian Mulroney who removed all Canadian combat forces from Europe in the early 1990s.
It’s a sign of the militarist winds that a supposedly leftist NDP leader would appear like a peacenik by following Stephen Harper, Jean Chrétien and Brian Mulroney on important military matters.
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