Canadian military corporations are profiting from the war in Ukraine. That fact needs more attention.
The Canadian government has committed $1.8 billion of “military assistance donations” to the Ukrainian government, since just February 2022. The money benefits “defence contractors” in Canada and around the world.
Today, military industries are normalized. Corporate leaders far away from Ukraine’s frontlines happily boost profit margins with conflict-oriented equipment.
Take General Dynamics Land Systems – their Canadian branch received $165 million from the Canadian government for a light-armoured vehicle fleet produced in London, Ontario, to go to Ukraine. That sum is just for this one contract.
The full amount for these 39 light-armoured vehicles was totally covered by public funds. That money could have instead gone to education or healthcare.
Lack of attention from Canadian public
Until today, there has never been a meaningful public debate on the ways that major amounts of Canadian funding, used for military equipment, heightens militarization in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Certainly, there has never been a referendum or democratic vote centered on the Canadian government sending billions to fuel war in Ukraine. It is fair to say there has been a general lack of meaningful conversation around public and foreign policy on this issue.
It is also critical to question the positive language that the media uses to report Canadian military support for Ukraine, as with official government statements.
For example, let us question the use of the term “defence” in CBC reports on the role of “Canada’s defence manufacturers” in producing equipment for the militarized frontlines in Ukraine.
The same goes for the controversial CANSEC, Canada’s global “defence and security” trade show held every year in Ottawa. There, military contractors gather behind police lines and within a conference environment shaped by active press censorship.
Community groups have long protested the trade show for promoting war crimes, profiteering, and the violent oppression of countries like Palestine, the Phillipines, and Peru.
NATO feeds military-industrial complex
Today, military contractors, like those who gather at CANSEC, get a financial boost from NATO’s eastward expansion, driven by the EU and the US in the wake of the Cold War. Canada is part of this process of entrenching NATO expansion and the militarization in eastern Europe, within countries like Latvia.
It is critical to look at both how the military-industrial complex, in Canada and internationally, benefits from NATO pushing eastward. It is critical to look at how all leading Canadian politicians, from both the Conservatives to the Liberals, now with support from the NDP, have actively oriented defence policy to push for heightened militarization.
That means recognizing how NATO expansionism was also a critical part of the political process that triggered the war in Ukraine – this is in no way a justification for the Russian invasion. However, as a NATO member, Canada owes some responsibility for creating the context that sparked it.
Anti-war resistance needed
War is not progressive. The Liberal government’s support for deepening the militarization of conflict in Ukraine is only helping to extend a situation on the ground that has largely become a military stalemate.
Countless Russian and Ukrainian people, often working in improvised military policy contexts, are needlessly dying on the war’s entrenched frontlines, which are going nowhere. It has caused deep suffering and displacement for millions of people in Ukraine, a reality that has been well documented by Human Rights Watch. It has damaged Ukraine’s natural environment at an extraordinary scale.
In the spring, I coordinated a global radio broadcast that attempted to creatively explore a political space that both acknowledges and denounces Russian war crimes in Ukraine, while also being opposed to NATO expansionism and entrenching militarization as a policy direction in Ukraine and beyond.
This project, which you can listen to here, featured both original music and activist voices, broadcasting on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal, Radio AlHara in Palestine, Radio Kapital in Warsaw, Poland and the online Montreal station n10.as.
Today it is critical to challenge double standards for the Canadian government’s silence on human rights abuses in Palestine, while we see the vocal mobilization of human rights rhetoric around Russian war crimes in Ukraine as a justification for heightened militarization.
The Canadian government is politically manipulating the situation in Ukraine to allow for the conditions that see military industries benefiting from war, in the billions. This is totally wrong and unjust.
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