Most leftish Canadians understand that US troops stationed in hundreds of bases around the world is a projection of power and a key element of an empire trying to dominate the world. Yet many of the same people seem to think sending Canadian troops halfway across the globe is “defensive”. Is there any threshold at which the NDP will question the resources and troops deployed to fight Russia?
Two thousand Canadian troops are currently participating in the largest ever NATO exercise on Latvia’s border with Russia. A total of 3,000 soldiers and 1,000 pieces of military equipment are part of Resolute Reforger that began October 26 and is scheduled to end November 8. For the first time the entire Canadian-led Multinational Brigade Latvia has moved from its base in the western part of the country to mere kilometers from Belarusian and Russian territory.
An imbedded CTV reporter was with Canadian troops in Daugavpils, which is 30 km from the border of Belarus and 50 km from Russia. In that city and elsewhere in eastern Latvia, Russian is the dominant language and many Russian-speaking Latvians see NATO as a belligerent force. A Canadian soldier remarked on divided local opinion telling CTV,“some have shouted insults at us”.
Despite local perceptions and the 7,000-kilometre distance from Ottawa, some have framed the exercise as “defensive”. “Canadian soldiers in defensive battle-ready position near the Russian border”, noted a CTV headline while a widely circulated social media meme blared, “Canadian-led NATO brigade deploys near Russian border in major defensive exercise”.
Canada’s mission in Latvia has become steadily more belligerent over the past decade. According to a May Defense News article, “The Canada-led NATO brigade in Latvia has moved beyond its original ‘tripwire’ deterrence posture and is now focused on mounting a credible defense of the Baltic country bordering Russia, according to its commander, Col. Kris Reeves. Reeves said the shift towards what he described as ‘tactical credibility’ has meant establishing forward locations and stationing troops near Latvia’s eastern border, in the terrain where they would actually fight in the event of a conflict.”
The size of the force has also grown sharply. When Operation REASSURANCE was launched in 2017, 540 Canadian troops were deployed to Latvia. Four months ago Mark Carney announced that the number of “persistently deployed personnel” in Latvia would rise from 2200 to 2,600 as Operation REASSURANCE was extended until 2031.
With about 2,200 military personnel stationed in a country of 1.8 million, there are nearly as many Canadian troops on a per capita basis in Latvia as there are in Canada!
Yet there’s little (no?) questioning of the mission in the dominant media or Parliament. Ditto for Ottawa spending tens of billions of dollars on the proxy war with Russia.
With barely a peep of opposition, Carney announced another $778 million for Ukraine last week. Since February 2022 Canada has pumped $28 billion into the proxy war.
According to a report last week, Brampton based Roshel has delivered nearly 3,000 Senator armoured vehicles to Ukraine over the past four years. At $600 000 apiece that’s $1.8 billion in sales for a firm that was only founded in 2016.
But Roshel is small winner of this war. Last week Washington approved a US $2.1 billion Patriot missile sale to Ukraine. Largely produced by US arms giant Lockheed Martin, the EU, Canada and others will pay for the missiles. Lockheed Martin has made billions of dollars off a war that’s partly the outgrowth of their long-term expansion strategy.
During the 1990s, Lockheed and other major US arms dealers lobbied aggressively to expand NATO eastward. In 1996 Lockheed Martin’s Vice President for Strategy and Planning, Bruce L. Jackson, founded and presided over the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, which succeeded in convincing various political actors to back enlargement. With NATO guidelines requiring new members to modernize their (Soviet-era) militaries to ensure interoperability, Lockheed saw alliance enlargement as a means of creating new markets.
Today Lockheed is a leading sponsor of the NATO Association of Canada. Roshel also partners with the NATO Association of Canada (Roshel founder and CEO Roman Shimonov is also a member of board of the Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce).
Lockheed’s NATO sales strategy has, of course, been disastrous for Ukrainians. Having lost nearly half its population since 1991, the country is caught between a belligerent military alliance using it as a cudgel against a geopolitical competitor and a large neighbour prepared to turn it into a rump state rather than allow it to become a threat.
Inside Ukraine the push towards NATO has bolstered highly unsavoury forces. As part of turning Ukraine into a cudgel against Russia, we’ve empowered the haters and those most willing to fight.
A grim outgrowth of this policy was on display Monday in the small village of Petropavlivska Borshchahivka just outside of Kyiv. Masked members of the neo-Nazi Azov unit of the National Guard beat protesters, including a 14-year-old boy, trying to save men from a secret detention centre for conscripts and deserters. Instead of targeting those behind the secret prison, the authorities have arrested those who exposed the unauthorized facility.
As I’ve detailed, Canada has long trained and assisted the neo-Nazi Azov and other far right forces that dominate the security apparatus in Ukraine. In response to the recent revelations The Maple editor Alex Cosh posted, “Canada hosted a meeting with Azov representatives at the Canadian embassy in Kyiv last year. They had what one Azov representative called a ‘friendly and open dialogue.’ In September, the Mark Carney government announced it would be providing direct support to the Ukrainian National Guard, which Azov is part of, in addition to the tens of billions of dollars in existing military aid to Ukraine.”
A month ago, several peace groups hosted a press conference on Parliament Hill and instigated a parliamentary petition calling for an audit of the $26 billion that’s been sent to Ukraine. It’s been largely ignored.
Will the NDP raise the matter when Canadian spending on the proxy war with Russia tops $30 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion?
Or will the NDP question the deployment to Latvia if it reaches 3,000 troops? 5,000?
If Operation REASSURANCE is extended to 2035? 2050?
Or is there no threshold short of open war with Russia?
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