Canada’s military spending has increased by 100%, from $20 billion in 2014 to over $40 billion in 2024, or 1.4% of GDP. By 2032, Canada’s military spending will reach $82 billion, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. NATO is making Canadians poorer!
The Pan-Canadian Peace and Justice Network organized a protest on Saturday, November 23, as part of the Counter-Summit (in parallel with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly until November 25) in Montreal with the participation of local peace and social justice organizations.
The Network calls on the Canadian government to leave NATO and invest in improving the living conditions of Canadians instead of putting Canadians’ money into bombs and weapons!
What is NATO doing?
Also called the North Atlantic Alliance, NATO is a military group of 32 members – 30 European countries and 2 North American countries. NATO was created to respond to the Soviet threat against the West after the second world war with 12 states members. During the entire Cold War it did not have to intervene. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the USSR imploded in 1991. Russia was plunged into economic chaos and it was the end of the Cold War.
These upheavals marked the beginning of the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001), ten years of conflict, first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. In 1995, NATO engaged in the war and in its first major crisis management operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It intervened in Kosovo in 1999 and bombed Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in April of the same year.
In 2001, following the September 11 attacks, the Alliance put Article 5 into action for the first time in its history and engaged in a war on terror. In 2003, NATO took command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
Today, still more 20,000 troops participate in various missions. They operate in various conflicts around the world.
According to Arnaud Dubien* , director of the Franco-Russian Observatory and associate researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS): Relations between NATO and Russia, and more broadly, between Russia and the West, are deplorable. They are at their lowest level since the end of the USSR and even since the beginning of the 1980s, before Perestroika [“restructuring” in Russian, a period of reforms initiated by the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev].
“We are in a potentially dangerous situation because the geopolitical context is different,” said Dubien.
According to Dubien the causes of the conflict between Russia and the West are deep-rooted. The main one is probably that no one in Europe or the United States has ever known what place to give to post-Soviet Russia on the continent. Maybe with the Trump administration things will change.
The Kosovo crisis in 1999 is a major element in Russian perceptions of NATO. For the first time, the Alliance, which presents itself as defensive, used force outside the territory covered by Article 5 and, above all, without a UN mandate.
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- Source: TV5 France – interview with Arnaud Dubien, is the director of the Franco-Russian Observatory and associate researcher at IRIS