Canada’s hundred-year accord with Ukraine is rooted in nearly two centuries of overt hostility to Russia.
In Calgary on Thursday Prime Minister Mark Carney and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “signed the 100 Year Partnership Declaration, setting out their intention to elevate the relationship between their countries into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership, and confirming their aligned nature.” As part of the announcement, Canada announced over a billion dollars in assistance including $350 million for critical air defence interceptors. Over the past four and a half years Canada has ploughed $26 billion into the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, which is more than Ottawa spent on its 13-year occupation of Afghanistan.
At the same time, Canada has an ever-increasing military presence on Russia’s border in Latvia. With the decade-old deployment now at around 2,500 personnel stationed in the country of 1.8 million, there are nearly as many Canadian troops on a per capita basis in Latvia as there are in Canada!
The troops in Latvia, arms shipments to Ukraine and the 100 Year Partnership reflect longstanding Canadian belligerence towards Russia. As part of its ties to the British empire, Ottawa has been in a state of near war with Russia for over a century and a half.
Much of the British garrison in Canada left for Crimea during the 1853-56 war and many Canadians also volunteered for British units fighting Russia. In “How the Crimean War of 1853 Helped Shape the Canada of Today,” historian C.P. Champion describes how the naval base on Vancouver Island was greatly expanded in response to the war. He also quotes historian John Castell Hopkins explaining that the Militia Act of 1855, which formed the basis for today’s army, was “a result of the feeling aroused by the Crimean War.”
Then a century ago, Canada invaded Russia. Between 1917 and 1920 six thousand Canadians fought there. In the summer of 1919, the British air force dropped diphenylchloroarsine against the Bolsheviks in Murmansk and Archangel. They fled in panic from a gas that caused uncontrollable coughing and individuals to vomit blood. About 600 Canadians fought in Murmansk and Archangel.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Ottawa worked to isolate Moscow. Canada opposed a treaty to guarantee Russia’s pre-World War I frontiers and for most of that period had no diplomatic relations with Moscow.
The Canadian/European elite’s pre-war dalliance with Adolf Hitler was largely because of his dislike of communism/Russia/Slavs. Hitler’s Mein Kampf was deeply anti-Slavic and he called for the destruction of Soviet Russia. In fact, one of Hitler’s aims at the start of the war was to expel or wipe out Slavs to make living space for German settlers.
At the end of World War II, the US dropped nuclear weapons on Japan partly as a threat to Moscow. Ottawa supported employing nukes and the subsequent “Cold War”.
Since the early 1990s Canada has steadily escalated its belligerence towards Russia. For 30 years it pushed NATO expansion eastward and funded pro-Western civil society organizations. It coordinated Western diplomatic support for the 2004 Orange Revolution and when Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010 Ottawa worked to undermine his presidency, directly assisting the 2014 Maidan coup. Subsequently, Canada instigated Operation Unifier to assist Ukrainian forces engaged in a civil war/low-level proxy fight with Russia, which Moscow greatly expanded four and a half years ago. Since then, Canada has ploughed in huge amounts of arms in a bid to weaken Russia.
While Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine violates international law and is condemnable, Russophobia in Canada is largely an outgrowth of the country’s relationship to the British and US Empires, which has viewed Russia as an imperial competitor.
Thursday’s 100 Year Partnership Declaration with Ukraine reflects the anti-Russian character of mainstream Canadian politics.
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