Funding Canada's War Pigs

 

The Liberal legacy will be entwined with supporting more war. And the NDP as well.

I remember years ago hearing a discussion on the news about how it was unreasonable to expect Canada to reach its 2% spending commitment for NATO. It would never happen. With a GDP of $2.138 trillion, NATO’s 2% commitment would mean that Canada’s military spending should be just over $47.7 billion dollars; almost double what we currently spend on the entire Department of National Defense.

But then, as NATO became more important (as Russia became more threatening to The West and Western Democracy and Western Values and to You and Me Personally), NATO spending became more important.

It wasn’t simply a Russian invasion that made war more popular in Canada. There has been a concerted effort made by the military to play up its dismal state. If Russia’s attack on Ukraine represented a direct attack on Canada, then Canada needs to have firepower to fight against the attack. A crumbling military just won’t do. Here’s how journalist David Pugliese describes their campaign: “Military officers, along with retired generals and think-tanks and analysts partially funded by National Defence and the arms industry, have been promoting an image of a Canadian Forces on the verge of collapse. The communications strategy, defence insiders acknowledged, was to push such a message of significant decline to force the Liberals into pumping more money into the military.”

Fast forward to 2024 - the strategy worked. The Liberals promised $8 billion in new funding and $73 billion in spending commitments over the next 20 years, propped up by the NDP.  (more...)

Funding Canada's War Pigs