Healthcare not warfare

Carney’s military spending plan will be a disaster for working people

 

At the recent NATO summit in The Hague, Prime minister, Mark Carney said that he would ensure Canadian defence spending would reach the threshold of 5 percent of GDP by 2035.  This comes after he already committed to the 2 percent he announced during the election campaign.

 

This was at the behest of Donald Trump who has said that other NATO countries are not pulling their weight in maintaining Western dominance globally. Carney was not alone. Most of the leaders present vowed to do the same.

 

This is a disaster, not just for Canada but for the world. History shows that global war is the most common outcome of mass militarization. It was a key driver - along with competition between states - that led to the first world war.

 

One cannot simply spend trillions on weapons that will not be used. It also makes the larger geopolitical conflict - manly rivalry between NATO and the Russia, China bloc - more deadly.

 

Cuts and austerity

 

And domestically, this process will come with severe consequences. Carney has told his ministers to find spending cuts to the tune of 7.5 percent by next year and up to 15 percent by 2028. These cuts will come from social programs, healthcare, housing and any other services that working people need.

 

These cuts are only the beginning. To meet the 5 percent goal will mean spending roughly $150 billion yearly on war. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report that estimates that there would need to be a 24 percent cut across the board in all other federal departments to meet this target.

 

The report’s author, David Macdonald said that “If the prime minister follows through on his election promise, Canada’s federal public service will undergo the worst spending cuts in modern history. That will inevitably diminish the quality of public services. Cuts at this level wouldn’t be ‘capping hiring,’ ‘finding efficiencies using AI’ or ‘not replacing retiring workers.’ For cuts this deep, it would require across-the-board job losses and major service reductions.”

 

Carney has surrounded himself with Liberal insiders from the Jean Chretien and Paul Martin years. That group was responsible for some of the most draconian cuts in Canadian history. Martin’s 1995 budget cut 18 percent of expenditures. Carney will cut much deeper and the result will be a massive loss in social wages for workers and increased privatization.

 

Once again, the demands of Donald Trump are now policy in Canada. This is explicitly counter to the “elbows up” nationalism that Carney ran on which promised an independent policy to protect us from the whims of the US president.

 

We, of course, oppose this nationalism and stand in favour of workers’ unity across borders. The attacks that Trump is leading on the working class in the US makes building this unity essential if we are going to collectively end the drive to militarism, austerity and global war.

 

Carney has been clear that his vision of defending Canada means only defending the rich. His plans for more money for war, more money for fossil fuel industries and housing speculators, and now extreme cuts to the public service will only make our lives worse. It’s our job to build the movements that will win alternatives to his “solutions” and help hasten his political demise.