By World BEYOND War, June 11, 2025
On June 9, Canadian Prime Minister Carney made an appalling announcement. By committing to massively increase Canada’s military budget, adding $9+ billion overnight and more than doubling it over the next few years, he is giving an enormous gift to Trump, the weapons industry, and the whole military industrial complex. Millions will suffer and countless lives will be lost as a result of this announcement.
This is a promise of a war-filled future.
Just as building pipelines entrenches a future of oil extraction and climate crisis, the decision to ramp up Canada’s military budget, escalate a global arms race, and purchase new warships, fighter jets, and space missiles entrenches a commitment to wage war via these weapons systems for decades to come.
This is a promise of devastating austerity.
Carney is robbing the country of the resources needed to address the actual security threats facing people across Canada – climate change and ecological collapse, disease epidemics and public health emergencies, and poverty coupled with the ballooning costs of housing and food.
Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on outrageous, aggressive, and wildly overpriced weapons systems like the Golden Dome is a slap in the face to everyone in Canada struggling to get by or to imagine a life for their children in a country that sets new wildfire records nearly every year
If ever there was a time to separate the genuine threats to our security from the self-interested goals of Trump and the weapons industry, this is it.
Instead of a foreign policy based on ever-increasing militarization and warmongering in lockstep with the US, we must develop one based on diplomacy and peace building.
We’ve got our work cut out for us.
It’s time to build our power and cross-movement resistance to stop those who will use the anxiety of this political moment to drum up public support for the Canadian arms industry and increased military spending. It’s time to forge an international solidarity that stands with all people facing war and military violence. Let’s get to it.
4 Responses
NO! Peace is the answer, NOT WAR!
Guns?? Not butter or shelter? Or healthcare? You’ve got to be tone-deaf. May the Liberals collapse under an NDP landslide!
I feel like Canadians were duped: Canadians did NOT give Carney a mandate to fund more war; if Canadians had wanted this, they would have elected Pierre Poilievre.
I agree 💯 Jessica! Shame on the Liberals. I am so disappointed.