Canada in the World
Foreign and Defence Policy
 

March 8 2005
Counterbias.com
Mel Hurtig, O.C. LL.D
 

Our recent record in foreign aid is appallingly bad. When Paul Martin became finance minister in 1993, Canada stood fifth in the world in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP. Today, we’ve sunk all the way down to thirteenth place in a list of eighteen OECD donor countries, and our aid-to-GDP ratio is less than half of what it was thirty years ago. While Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden had already met and exceeded the commonly agreed to Pearsonian objective of 0.7% of GDP in 2003, the same year Canada’s aid was at 0.24%, only half the average for rich developed countries. While the Chrétien and Martin governments announced plans to increase aid, it will be years before our assistance begins to be even half that of many more generous countries, some of whom are already up to almost one per cent of GDP, a level that is now over three to four times Canada’s contributions.

We should be ashamed of our record in this respect.

I agree with those who believe we needed some increase in our defence budgets, but I quite disagree with the DND-funded academics, and others, who insist on massive increases in military spending. As for the business community, I find it incredibly ironic that those who insist we spend many billions more on defence are very often exactly the same people who insist on large tax cuts, and who consistently exaggerate the tax-to-GDP ratio of Canadians compared to other developed countries. (We’re now down in fifteenth place in a list of the top twenty developed nations, and well below the OECD and EU averages).

Yes, we should increase the numbers in our armed forces, and accelerate our plans to add full-time troops. We should provide our troops with better equipment and we should invest in heavy-lift aircraft to transport our soldiers and their equipment.

In increasing our military budgets, potential humanitarian protection and peacekeeping priorities should be at the forefront of our planning.

Yes, we need to take steps to improve maritime security relating to our own ports and to the potential dangers to the U.S. of sea-launched cruise missiles. We should accelerate our work on over-the- horizon radar to help track foreign vessels approaching North America, and of course we will need the aircraft and the ships to
investigate and counter potential problems on all three coasts.

The Canadian Arctic and the Northwest Passage should be among the top priorities in our defence and foreign policy planning. Rather than wasting so much time and energy debating the nonsensical and dangerous American missile plans, we should be concentrating on our own multi-dimensional potential problems in the North.

In all of this, several important things must be kept in mind.

First, any new increased military spending must not come at the expense of health care, education, child poverty, child care or other social spending. Federal program spending as a percentage of GDP is already close to a fifty-year low. Moreover, poll after poll, year after year after year, make it undeniably clear that increased military spending, while generally supported, is usually well down the list of priorities for the strong majority of Canadians.

To over-simplify, will it be more MRIs, more doctors, and lower tuition fees, or will it be more bombs and more guns.

I have mentioned some things that I believe Canada should do. Here are some things we should not do.

We should not become further involved in any way with American so-called BMD plans. (What a disgrace that Pierre Pettigrew encourages Canadian companies to become involved. What colossal, disgusting hypocrisy!) I have spelled out all the reasons in detail in my last book, and briefly in my Commons Committee testimony.

We should not further integrate our military with the U.S. military if we aspire to continue as a separate country, and not as an American colony. Canadians and
Americans priorities in the past have often been very different and we can expect that to be the case in the future as well.

While one of our top priorities should be to ensure that terrorist attacks against the U.S. are not launched from Canada (a much more logical and important goal than
participation in the folly of the U.S. BMD plans) we should ignore foolish suggestions such as the call for common Canadian-U.S. refugee and immigration policies. Surely it is worth remembering that the September 11 attacks were the results of failed American intelligence and immigration policies not Canadian policies. No Canadian flight training school would have been so colossally stupid as to agree to train non-residents to fly, even though they were uninterested in learning how to take off or land a plane!

Now to my main point.

In defence of Canada, our main priority should be to see that our children, our grandchildren, our families, our homes, and our country are not obliterated in a
nuclear war.

Who says that is a possibility and an increasingly ominous danger? A large and increasing number of widely-respected experts, including Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA (“Never was the danger as great as today. An atomic war draws nearer…”), the mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba (“We stand on the brink of
hyper-proliferation…and the unspeakable violence and misery that will follow.”), our respected Canadian Ambassador to Moscow, Christopher Westdal” (“We’re now in a race with catastrophe…threats to our very survival…the truth is alarming.”) and a long list of others including Peggy Mason and Douglas Roche, and
Dr. Bruce Blair of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, Norm Chomsky of MIT, and the brilliant Dr. John Steinbruner of the Center for International Security
Studies in Maryland, and our distinguished Nobel Prize winner, Dr. John Polanyi.

They all have one urgently important concern in common. They all believe that recent and current American actions are leading to the breakdown of vitally important, long-standing bilateral and multilateral arms control agreements, leading to an accelerating proliferating and exceedingly dangerous arms race, leading to the development of new weapons of mass destruction and the means for their delivery, and leading to the ever-increasing possibility of an apocalyptic, catastrophic nuclear war.

What should Canada be doing to counter the dangers of a nuclear holocaust?

First, we should step up our efforts to successfully work with other countries in New York in May to see that the 188-nation Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty is strengthened. Unfortunately, it now appears that the U.S. intends to severely weaken this vitally important agreement.

Secondly, we should make disarmament and the abolition of all weapons of mass destruction the top priority in our defence and foreign policies.

Third, we should host a well-planned multilateral conference to employ “the Ottawa process” to produce a certain-to-be widely supported treaty prohibiting all weapons in space, and similarly a new treaty prohibiting the unsupervised sale and distribution of all fissile materials.

Next, we should work with other nations to counter the Pentagon’s potentially disastrous desire to resume nuclear testing, and their plans to develop new nuclear
weapons.

We should also work to strengthen the Geneva Conventions and the International Criminal Court and we should join with other countries to put pressure on the United States to stop blocking an effective Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

As well, we should tell Washington that Canada will join with scores of other countries around the world to lead a revitalized campaign for disarmament and for the destruction of all nuclear weapons. We should ask Americans to live up to their undertaking, at the 2000 Review Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty, where they provided an “Unequivocal undertaking to accomplish the total elimination of nuclear weapons.” We should forcefully tell the Americans that they made a terrible mistake walking away from the ABM treaty.

In all of these matters Canada can show leadership, as we have in the past, leadership that will have the strong support of almost all countries in the world.

And in all of these matters we should remember that the best interests of our country are inevitably to be found in multilateral environments, not when we become locked into straightjacketing bilateral agreements that diminish our ability to play a greater and more respected role in the world.

From my book, The Vanishing Country:

Shouldn’t we be promoting multilateralism in the United Nations and in other world bodies, instead of attaching ourselves too closely to American unilateralism and aggression? Canada had a much-admired role as a middle power in the past; we should make our goal to re-establish ourselves as the middle power with no colonial baggage, no record of aggression, no long list of enemies, a country that promotes human rights and international agreements to promote disarmament and peace, helping the afflicted, and doing the best job we can to join with other countries to work towards the reduction of world poverty.

Wouldn’t we Canadians be much better off, and wouldn’t many people around the world be much better off, if we refocused our activities on peacekeeping and humanitarian assistance? Would this be not only a wonderful way to help other people and also a way to help enhance our own security?

From Rushing to Armageddon:

Is there a surefire way for we Canadians to build a surefire defence to make us safer, including safer from terrorism? There is. And it has nothing to do with the aggressive militarism of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon, and it certainly has nothing to do with the NMD schemes. We should make a much greater effort to feed starving children and to contribute to their health.

It seems to me that the choice for Canada is clear. Do we continue our decades-long policies of working for peace, for disarmament, and for binding multilateral
agreements to de-escalate the dangers of nuclear war, or do we hitch our destiny to aggressive American unilateralism, to their policy of abandoning multilateral
treaties and dismissing arms control and developing even more weapons of mass destruction and turning space into a violent military and nuclear frontier.

(The previous text was a slightly-edited excerpt of a recent Mel Hurtig speech/presentation.)


NOTES:

One recent poll showed that 68% of Canadians want our military relations with the U.S. to be either more distant or the same as they are now. (CRIC).

U.S. “defence” spending is currently 8½ that of China and 7 times Russia’s.

All potential U.S. enemies combined spend less than one quarter as much on their militaries as the U.S.

Military spending by “high-income” countries is greater than ten times their official development assistance.

70% of Canadians say George W. Bush's policies make the world less safe (Ekos).

73% of Canadians support spending more on health care, 63% on other social programs and 30% support more military spending (CRIC)

78% of Canadians believe that U.S. foreign policy is indicative of the behaviour of a “rogue state” and 81% support increased health care and education spending over more military spending (Dominion Institute)

84% of Canadians say Canada made the right decision in not joining the U.S. war in Iraq (Ipsos Reid)

54% of Canadians say the United States is acting like a bully with the rest of the world. (Ekos)

U.S. Senator Tom Daschle described putting weapons in space as “the single dumbest thing I have heard so far from this administration…it would be a disaster…It only invites other countries to so the same thing.” Noam Chomsky warns that “The weaponization of space is a threat to our very survival…maybe the end of the human
species.”

Former publisher Mel Hurtig is founder of the Council of Canadians, and author of Rushing To Armageddon.

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