In December 2003, American Ambassador Paul Cellucci told reporters that he was “optimistic that we will soon have an agreement in principle on Canadian participation in missile defence.” At the time, Cellucci had every reason to be optimistic. With a new Prime Minister taking office that even the American media were calling “pro-American” and an official opposition that was even more obsequious toward the White House, there was no reason to think that Canada would not be a willing participant.

A year later, strong public opposition (ably represented in Parliament by the revitalized NDP and Bloc Quebecois contingents) has made Canadian complicity in the missile defence looking far less certain. Indeed, even though Paul Martin — who instinctively supports missile defence but doesn’t want to talk about it — succeeded in keeping the topic off the official agenda for last week’s Presidential visit, George Bush was worried enough about the future of one of his pet projects that he went ahead and talked about it anyway.

“I hope we’ll also move forward on ballistic missile defence co-operation to protect the next generation of Canadians and Americans from the threats we know will arise,” President Bush said in his speech in Halifax, after reportedly raising the issue privately with both Martin and opposition leaders Stephen Harper and Jack Layton (Layton was willing to talk candidly about his discussions with Bush and advisors Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice; Harper refused to do so). After a reporter asked Martin, whether he was finally ready to give a definitive yes, Martin indicated that his government “[still doesn’t] know what kind of project he’s talking about.”

Martin’s claim of naiveté is hardly convincing, but it is necessary if he is to continue to maintain his precarious public position astride the fence. By pretending that he doesn’t know whether missile defence would involve weapons in space, Martin thinks that he can continue to take steps to support the program (such as quietly agreeing to change the operating rules for NORAD to allow it to go ahead), while still arguing that his government is “opposed to the weaponization of space” (which is the Pavlovian response of Martin, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew and Defence Minister Bill Graham each time that Layton rings their bell in Question Period).

Their act is wearing a little thin. More and more evidence is coming to light that makes it clear that the proposed American missile defence program — while it may never actually work — will necessarily involve putting weapons in space. For example:

  • The U.S. Space Command’s “Vision for 2020” (released in 1998) notes that “The proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction requires an NMD. NMD will evolve into a mix of ground and space sensors and weapons.”
  • U.S. Air Force Undersecretary Peter Teets has recently called for the U.S. to dominate space. “Even though we have superiority in many aspects of space capability, we don’t have space dominance, and we don’t have space supremacy. The fact is, we need to reach for that goal. It is the ultimate high ground.”
  • A recently-leaked Pentagon document speaks of establishing “space superiority … to ensure freedom of action in space for the U.S. and its allies and, when directed, deny an adversary freedom of action in space.”
  • A Foreign Affairs news release points out that “long-range U.S. plans envision a layered approach to intercepting missiles [including space-based] laser platforms.”
  • The Department of National Defence cites a “significant risk [that the missile defence program would] reinforce trends toward the weaponization of space.”
  • The website for arms maker Lockheed Martin boasts that the company is building a Spaced-Based Laser system, which it aims to have completed by 2008. As Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells says, “When the customer’s unclear, ask the contractor. To whom, precisely, did Lockheed Martin expect to sell this?”
  • Georgiy Mamedov, Russia’s ambassador to Canada and its former chief arms-control negotiator says Canadians are “badly mistaken” if they believe that the program will not “inevitably” lead to weapons in space.

So, let there be no doubt that anyone who is truly opposed to the weaponization of space must therefore be opposed to participation in the U.S. plans missile defence. It’s not clear when or if the Liberals will ever admit this reality, but they have promised that — eventually — Parliament will get to vote on the issue. House Leader Tony Valeri says it will happen “once [discussions are] complete and there’s something to debate,” but Defence Minister Bill Graham says that “the vote would correctly take place after, in fact, an agreement has been signed.” Disturbingly, no one in the Liberal benches seems to believe that a vote should be held now — before the government continues with its closed-door negotiations. We’ll have to convince them to change their minds.

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Scott Piatkowski

Scott Piatkowski is a former columnist for rabble.ca. He wrote a weekly column for 13 years that appeared in the Waterloo Chronicle, the Woolwich Observer and ECHO Weekly. He has also written for Straight...